Free The Sleeping Beauty by Elizabeth Taylor Page B

recognise her in the street. I was with her often when it happened. She once said that she felt like her own ghost, coming back, watching everyone she had known, and no one seeing her. She tried to laugh, but it was the only time she spoke of it. I dreaded her going out; and after a very little while she did not.’
    Vinny, glancing now at Rose’s photograph, saw the timid mouth, the rigid way of holding the head. She looked ready to be wounded for everybody, and full of the sensibility which had done her sister such disservice.
    ‘But she appears so high-spirited,’ he protested. He imagined her laughing (however appalled she had been, she had tried to laugh in her old way); but her little joke about being a ghost had gone astray. Rose had recoiled for her, presented her with little awkwardnesses, and had not allowed her to bring herself back from darkness and isolation. He could imagine the early opportunities going by, encounters prevented, friends warded off, until at last she was left with her own idleness and the society of a half-witted child.
    He put the photographs in their place. Unspoken words clashed between him and Rose, but nothing was said save their polite good-nights.
    In the morning, he awoke to the sound of sobbing. He seemed to swerve out of his dream, bringing the sound with him – a muffled, guttural crying which he could not understand. His mother would not have hesitated, and neither did he, but pulled on his dressing-gown and went to see what was wrong.
    It was early, and light was so far only a negation of darkness in which furniture stood forward menacingly as blocks of shadow. As he opened the door leading to the kitchen stairsEmily turned in surprise. She took a pace back, and as she did so, Philly tried to slip past her towards the garden-door. She wore only her nightgown and her hands and feet were blue. Her face was covered with tears and her lips drawn back on her chattering teeth. Vinny for a moment saw scarlet marks round her wrists before Emily grasped them again, held fast to the girl, who rocked and moaned, trying to lift her arms and dash them free. She made sudden butting movements with her head and, before Vinny could stop her, bent deftly and bit Emily’s hand. He took her shoulders and wrenched her away, shook her until she gasped; then, up against his strength, her own gave out, her eyelids sank and she began to weep. Holding her close and chafing her arm, he turned to Emily and took her hand which she had tried to hide behind her back. She was so cold that the teeth-marks were only beginning to redden. Blood sprang from them in bright beads. Tenderness for her, an extreme of feeling, tired him; but it was an exhaustion of the spirit only, and when he had wrapped Philly up in a blanket from his own bed he picked her up as if she were a small child and carried her easily.
    Emily went up the stairs ahead of him. She wore an old blue dressing-gown and her hair was spread over her shoulders. He watched, as if it were the most surprising and exotic revelation, her pink heels lifting from her slippers as she climbed the stairs. She held back the baize-covered door for him and followed him across the landing. Still no one stirred. The house stayed in the grip of silence. A wedge of threatening light lay in the well of the staircase, but the landing, with its rows of closed doors, was dark.
    Philly’s room was brighter: the windows wide open and the curtains drawn back. They could hear the sea, the tide in, right up on the rocks, tumbling into inlets and dragging back with a rattling of pebbles.
    ‘Here!’ Emily said, throwing open the bed-clothes ready for Philly. He put her down gently. Still wrapped in the blanket, she lay and shivered, her hands clasped tightly on her breast, the knees drawn up sharply. Saliva had run from the corner of her mouth as he carried her, and he wiped it away on an edge of the sheet.
    Emily stood back, watching him; but when he looked at her, she