Маргарет Миллар - The Cannibal Heart

She raised her head and saw Luisa’s faint sneer, and the amused skeptical glances exchanged by her parents. Their disbelief astounded her, and when she spoke again her voice trembled with intensity:

“I’ll stay here and prove it. You just watch me!”

Ducking past her mother she leaped up on the planks and began stamping her feet and shouting challenges.

“Leave her alone,” Mark said. “She has to work out her own problems.”

When they reached the house again they could still hear Jessie’s faint scornful chant mingling with the rise and fall of the sea and the sighing of the cypress — I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascals.

Mark closed the windows of the living room so he couldn’t hear it. But it wouldn’t be shut out. It kept beating rhythmically inside his head and the pulse in his temple throbbed in time to it.

He glanced across the room at Evelyn, sitting, mute and placid as a china doll, in the wing chair by the window. For a moment he felt a savage resentment against her placidity; it ripped through his body and out again, like an electric current. It seemed to Mark that she lived entirely on and off the surface; her strongest emotions were affection, dislike, anger. She enjoyed weeping at movies, and she was always careful to bring her own handkerchief. It had been one of the little things about her that amused him when they were first married, and it still did, if he was in the right mood. But the right moods were becoming more infrequent.

“Did you ever sing that when you were a kid?” he said.

“I suppose. I can’t remember.”

“You must have been a funny kid. Did you ever have anything to say for yourself?”

“I’ll go up and get your sweater.”

“No, sit down. I don’t need it.”

“I hope we’re not going to quarrel,” Evelyn said.

“Why should we?”

“I don’t know, but it seems that every time Jessie has a problem, it always turns into our problem, into an argument between you and me.”

“I don’t feel like arguing,” Mark said. “Do you?”

“Then why start something?”

“I wasn’t,” she said patiently. “I was only pointing out what’s happened so often, so it wouldn’t happen again, so we’d be on guard.”

“It sounds more as if you meant en garde.”

“No.”

“You’re not jealous, are you?” Mark said. “There’s no one around here to be jealous of except Luisa, and she’s a little on the young side.”

“Don’t be silly. You know I’ve only been jealous once in my whole life.”

“By God,” he said bitterly. “You’d think I’d have lived that Patty business down by now.”

“Patty’s a ridiculous name for a woman her age. Patty. It sounds more like a cocker spaniel, or one of those hounds with awfully long ears.”

“A basset.”

“That’s it.” She crossed the room and put her arms around his neck and clung there. She was so small and light he barely felt her weight. “We mustn’t quarrel, darling!”

“We’re not quarreling.”

“Especially with that woman coming, and Jessie in one of her moods.”

He bent down and kissed her lightly on the forehead, but he felt that little surge of rebellion pass through him again. Whether there had been a quarrel or not, she had won.

He wanted suddenly, like Jessie, to stamp his feet and shout at the top of his lungs, I’m the king of the castle.

When her voice got tired Jessie sat down on the lid of the well and gently bit at the hangnail on her right thumb. The hangnail was the worst she’d ever had and she had an idea that she might leave it on to show to the visitor. Since Carmelita had partly charmed her wart away with funny noises and hot castor oil, Jessie had no physical distinction left except the hangnail.

Jessie took her thumb away from her mouth and examined the remains of the charmed wart on the joint of her forefinger. Though her parents said that no one could charm things away, Jessie could see the evidence for herself — the wart was nearly gone. She wondered how Carmelita got this awful power of diminishing things, and whether she could use it on animals or people, to turn whales into minnows, or Jessie herself into a storybook doll.

“I could charm things,” she whispered to herself. “Carmelita can teach me and when I go back to school I’ll charm everyone’s diseases.”

It was impossible to sit still on such an exhilarating thought. She jumped up laughing and spread her arms wide. It was wonderful to be herself, Jessie, powerful and unafraid, and with company coming. Dancing on her toes she started off down the path for home while the little lizards darted out of the way of her flying feet.

Just before she came to the curve in the path she stopped for breath, and it was then that she heard clearly, above all the other little noises in the woods, a new noise that she didn’t recognize.

She crouched down behind a boulder and listened. The rhythmic squeaking continued, and the harder she listened the more familiar it seemed. Yet it was oddly out of place. No one used the swing in the pepper tree except Jessie, herself, and, very rarely, Luisa; but the sound was now unmistakable, the crunch-squeak of rope against bark.

She called out, “Luisa?” and her voice sounded very high and thin, as if Carmelita had charmed most of it away.

There was no answer from Luisa. Jessie had expected none. Even if Luisa had heard her she knew Luisa wouldn’t answer anyway because she was mad. Luisa’s madness might last forever, and this thought made Jessie feel quite desperate and reckless. There was no use trying to appease Luisa, so she might as well do her best to scare her out of her skin.

Cautiously she approached the curve of the path, keeping close behind tree trunks and boulders, and crawling on her hands and knees when she had to cross an open space.

In spite of all her care she couldn’t prevent the leaves and twigs from crackling under her weight, and by the time she reached the place where she could see the swing, the squeaking noise had stopped. Crouched behind an oak tree, ready to pounce, she waited for the noise to begin again, so that she could catch Luisa unaware and dreaming.

She waited for a long time, until her one foot went to sleep and she had to wake it by slapping and pinching. When she finally gave up her vigil and stepped out from behind the tree she saw that there was no one on the swing at all, though it was still moving in the wind.

Furious at being tricked and missing her prey, she shouted feebly, “You’re a stinker! If you hide on me I’m going to tell!”

She saw then, moving through the trees like two giant gaudy birds, Mr. Roma in his plaid shirt and a woman who wore a yellow dress and had a blaze of dark red hair.

“It’s the little girl, Jessie,” Mr. Roma said. “She likes to make noises. It is good for her lungs.”

Mrs. Wakefield smiled faintly. Her eyes didn’t change but the lines around her mouth deepened. “It must be funny to have a child around again.”

“It is very lively.”

“Lively, yes.” She turned away, blinking. “They are nice people, are they?”

“Yes, I think so,” Mr. Roma said gently. “Mr. Banner is restless, he is lonely maybe, but not the lady or the little girl.”

Mrs. Wakefield paused beside an acacia tree and touched it with her hand as if it were an old friend. The acacia had never been pruned and its grey fringed leaves drooped to the earth. The yellow blossoms, like tiny balls of chenille, had browned and withered.

“Nearly everything has died but the trees,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “It pays to have deep roots.”

Kneeling down on the carpet of withered blossoms she began to brush them away with her hand.