The Sister (13 page)

CHAPTER
13

The Ridge Walk

I
’
LL NEVER FORGET
the winter that followed, the same year Vivi brought Arthur to meet us for the first time. It came in quickly. I like winter. I like its contradictions: cold but cozy, sparse but beautiful, lifeless but not soulless. The fences were smoothed with ice, the ground white, crunchy. The trees shut themselves down, skeletons standing firm against the winds, and the ones that line the top of the ridge, exposed and bent like wizened old men, were said in these parts to bear the souls of the dead.

Inside the house winter had come too, for all of us, bleak and desperate, but here it was worse—soulless but not lifeless. Clive continued his feverish pursuit of small-world fame. Maud turned more often to the dark side, her rampages more and more extreme. And I was a wretched bridge between them and the world. I felt liable.

Maud didn’t go out anymore. She wouldn’t have been able to go through the necessary procedures to get herself ready. For the next few weeks and months, I took her phone calls, answered her letters and when anybody called, Maud was either very busy or fast asleep. Sometimes the villagers would quiz me about her and I’d feel the sweat gathering on my face as I lied, hoping they wouldn’t see through me. Mrs. Jefferson came up to the house on a number of occasions when she realized we’d stopped making it to church on Sundays, and asked if we needed any help. Each time, before she went, she tried to pin me with her small powerful eyes and told me that if ever I needed her she would always be there.

Maud’s drunken habits became stranger and less predictable. All of a sudden I’d find out about something she’d been up to for a while, things she’d done covertly so that I’d not known about them, like the time I discovered she’d been telephoning the operator. Apparently she’d insisted on interviewing him for various positions in the house or gardens, even though we weren’t looking for anyone in the house and we already had the Coleys for the garden. The operator got so irritated with her disturbing his work that he telephoned one morning and told me he was very happy in the telephone exchange and if we insisted on trying to reemploy him during his working hours he’d have to report us to his supervisor. From then on, I had to remember each evening to pull the telephone cable out of the wall, disconnecting the line into the house.

That winter everything deteriorated, along with Maud. We had the worst storms I could remember, and the cold and the wind and the wet had finally got underneath the vast slated roof on the north side. Clive wasn’t interested. He told me to board up the top two floors, Vera’s old rooms, of the north wing rather than investigate the leakage. The house was far too big for the three of us, anyhow, and Clive said it wasn’t worth maintaining a wing that would never be used again.

Then, late in January, Vivi let in a bit of warmth by coming to visit us, just for a day. She demanded a walk on the ridge. She and I saw walks in the way that most people regard teashops: the perfect environment in which to relax and chat. This walk and talk seemed more urgent than most. She rushed me out of the house, grabbing our coats and hats, and was halfway up the hill at the back, shouting for me to hurry, before I’d even started. There was something on her mind.

It was past midday and the low valley fog had only just lifted, unveiling a layer of soft white sherbet sprinkled on the fields and atop the bare hedges. The chill was ready to be burned off by a weak winter sun, low in the cloudless sky. It’s always been the perfect weather in which to admire this part of the country.

We’d reached the top, from where you could see three valleys meeting, rolling and falling, as they’d done for generations. I stopped for a moment, but Vivi went on ahead, following the path along the top of the ridge, drawing in the fresh icy air she missed in London. I stood admiring the village and the patchwork of bleached fields beyond, the solitary farms and homesteads, the hamlet of Saxton perched on the valley’s rim and the windy interlocking roads and pathways that bind all these places together, linking one life with the next, in a tangle of shared stories.

I was about to start off again, when I noticed a Fox Moth caterpillar rolled up into a tight black hairy ball and strapped with silk to the side of the fence, hibernating. It would be frozen solid, I mused, as hard as rock, probably too hard even for the birds to eat. It shuts down so spectacularly during hibernation that it’s unimaginable there’s life left somewhere deep within it, a tiny epicenter with a remnant pulse. But spring always works its magic, bringing it miraculously back to life. Even if it was frozen solid all winter, spring would revive it; if it were submerged in a pool all winter, it would survive; if it were submerged for five years rather than one, those restorative ingredients of its first spring would be able to return it to the world. What was it, I thought, that enabled it to adjourn life so effectively, and how is it that something as simple as the warmth of the sun can restore it, can get the tiny valves pumping once again, to shunt along its cold, stagnant blood? How is it that it can send an impulse to awaken the clusters of nerve cells in each segment of its body? If it doesn’t breathe all winter and if its neurons are inert and uncharged, is it theoretically dead? Is this, in fact, a resurrection? I marveled: all this inherent ingenuity, yet it doesn’t have the slightest idea that it’s doing any of it. Its nervous system is far too simple to
know,
to
think,
to be self-aware. It doesn’t even have a brain in the way you’d think of one—a single central command center. Instead it has a loose knot of tangled nerve cells—a ganglion—in each segment of its body, a sort of beaded string of early brains. People see the cleverness of nature and suppose it’s the cleverness of the animal itself but it was obvious to me that each and every segment of the animal isn’t
aware.
How much I’d hate to live totally unaware of myself, I thought. What would be the point of living, of existing, if you weren’t ever to know about it? I looked at the Fox Moth and pitied it, poor unconscious creature. But then, I supposed, at least it wouldn’t be disappointed. It would never find out.

I heard Vivi marching up behind me, breathing heavily. She had been far ahead so she must have turned round and come back.

“Ginny,” she said, “knock, knock.” She tapped my head gently. “You’re playing statues again,” she said in a childish singsong. I said nothing. I was still thinking: If you were born unaware, at least you’d be blissfully ignorant. It’s not as if you’re going to wake up one day and suddenly discover yourself.

“Ginny?” she said more seriously. “Ginny, you’re not moving.” I felt her put a hand on my shoulder. “Giiiinny?” she called, as if she were summoning me from a different floor of the house. Why’s she doing that? I thought. I’m right in front of her.

“Ginny!” firmly now, like a mother telling off a child, and she gave my shoulders a little shake.

I looked round at her.

“Oh, God, don’t
do
that, Ginny,” she said.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Your absence thing. You haven’t moved an inch for fifteen minutes.”

She was exaggerating, of course. “It’s not an absence thing, I was thinking.”

“I know, but it does seem like you’ve gone away sometimes. It really does,” Vivi said. “You need a back-in-twenty-minutes sign,” she joked lightly.

“I’m just concentrating.”

I have the best concentration of anyone I know. I can concentrate so hard that I block out everything around me. My family used to get completely flustered by it but it’s perhaps my only natural gift. It annoyed me when Vivi called it being absent. She would say she’d seen me stay as still as a statue for hours at a time but she always exaggerated. In fact I can only ever keep it up for a few minutes.

“I’ve got something to ask you, Ginny,” she said suddenly, as if it were another ploy to pull my attention back to her. “Are you there?” she asked annoyingly.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she continued. “I want to get married.” She said it quickly, almost as if it were a question.

I stopped, surprised. I’d already thought, over the last few months, that she might marry Arthur. It wasn’t what she said that came as a surprise, just that I hadn’t expected it right then, or that that would be the manner in which she’d say it.

“Oh, Vivi, that’s wonderful,” I said effusively. I tried my best to give her an uncustomary hug and sort of grabbed her around the middle.

“Oh, no, he hasn’t
asked
me, Ginny. We’ve just talked about it.”

I should have guessed she’d have found a complication. Vivi always managed to fill the simplest ideas with ambiguity. I should have trusted my instincts. Had she actually got engaged, telling me would have been a far more elaborate affair.

“But I can’t marry him,” she continued, squeezing her eyes shut. Only Vivi, I thought, could start you off assuming this was a happy event and, in moments, twist it into a sad one. Infuriating as it could sometimes be, her overflowing emotion was also part of her appeal, and I hated to see her sad. I could cope with pain and disappointment, but somehow Vivi wasn’t built to shoulder anguish. Her fragile body would crumble under its weight. She needed shielding. She should live free of suffering, and in return she’d give so much back in happiness and vibrancy and fun.

“I’m sorry, Vivi. I thought you were saying that you were getting married,” I said finally.

There was a long silence. A jay landed on a rusty tin barrel that had been discarded at the edge of the fence by the farmer. It hopped along to the end, jerking its head this way and that with robotic, watchful movements. I knew I wasn’t the most ideal comforter at times like this. I was a practical person, not well equipped to offer emotional support. I tried anyway. “So do you think he’ll ask you?” I asked cautiously.

“I suppose he has, sort of.”

“Well, that’s great, isn’t it?” I offered.

“But, Ginny, I don’t want to.”

I was certain that a moment ago she
had
wanted to. As always, with Vivi, I had to expect the unexpected. Often I saw no point in trying to understand her and the puzzles into which she tore her life. I watched the jay as it leaned down over the edge of the barrel, doubling back on itself to inspect the inside. Then it jumped to the ground and skirted warily round some fungus that foamed out from beneath, then hopped sideways and disappeared into the darkness within.

“Don’t you want to know why?” Vivi asked.

She’d buried her head in her jacket but I could hear a note of annoyance. “Why?”

“Why do you think, Virginia?” she barked confusingly. First she’d wanted me to ask a question, and then it was a stupid one.

“Because I can’t have children,” she continued. “I can’t have children so I can’t see the point of getting married. I mean, if you can’t have a family then it’s not a…It’s just not the life I’d want. I can’t think of anything more depressing than a childless marriage.”

She started to cry properly now and she looked fifteen again. I took her by the shoulders and supported her as she sat down on the icy grass, trying to pull her jacket under her bottom to protect it from the wet. Then I sat down next to her. Her not being able to have children wasn’t something we’d ever discussed properly. It had seemed such a small price for her life. I’d never felt any desire for them and had assumed she felt the same. I tried to take an authoritarian stance.

“Now Vivi, you might not be able to have children, but you’re alive, aren’t you? And you’ve found a man who loves you and that must be wonderful. You can’t have everything always,” I finished, just as Maud might have.

“Everything? I don’t want everything. I just want a child. I’ve always wanted a child,” she sobbed, “ever since I couldn’t have one.”

“Well, it’s not going to happen, Vivi, and that’s that. It’s pure biology,” I said. I didn’t want to make her any more upset but there was nothing else to say. It all seemed pretty miserably final to me. Poor Vivi, I thought. She’d be more stable with the security of marriage. She was the type who needed constant assurance that she was loved. “He loves you for you, Vivi, and not being able to have children is just part of you,” I said after some thought.

It stopped Vivi crying. “Rubbish. It’s not part of me at all, Ginny,” she rebuked me. “I wasn’t born unable to have children. It’s something I lost. It’s a part of me that’s missing, not the other way round.”

“I’m really truly sorry, Vivi,” I said, meaning it sincerely, and put my arm tightly round her. “You poor thing.” She sobbed loudly on my left shoulder. I was the stronger, self-sufficient sister and it was at times like this that Vivi really needed me.

When we’d been expelled from school Vivi and I had spent two hours crying in a lavatory cubicle in the kit room with Vivi’s best friend, Maisie (who’d apparently requested some bananas in the first place). We’d cried and cried, sobbing as if our lives had fallen apart, and Vivi scratched “Fuck Bananas” with her hair clip three times across the black and yellow harlequin floor tiles and declared she was an anarchist. But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t upset. I was just pretending. Instead I felt invigorated, revitalized and valuable. I was at the center of something with my sister. We were deep in it together. After a time I asked Maisie if she could leave us alone for five minutes because, I explained, she wasn’t in the same situation as us so she couldn’t fully understand what we were going through. Vivi had needed only me then, as she did now, and now, like then, my role as her elder sister suddenly felt crucial.

The jay finally hopped out of the barrel into the light, carrying a snail in its beak like a prize. Vivi looked up and stared at me. Her face had puffed up and—

“Will you have my baby?” she asked.

I laughed.

“No, I mean will you, you know, have my baby?”

CHAPTER
14

Vivien’s Day Out

V
IVIEN’S WALKED OUT
. She’s gone. She didn’t tell me where she was going or when she was coming back. She didn’t tell me she was going out at all. It’s all rather odd, don’t you think? It’s almost like she
sneaked
out, and if I hadn’t been watching her I’d never have known. I happened to be in my bathroom, from where I could see her dark outline pass back and forth across her bedroom window. Then I heard her go onto the landing and down the stairs, so I ventured out myself and, halfway down the stairs, I glimpsed the back of her long winter coat as she shut the front door behind her. I wanted to follow her but I knew that by the time I’d changed into warmer clothes, of course I wouldn’t know which way she’d gone, so instead I hurried back up the hall stairs to my lookout on the landing and peered close to the leaded window so that I could see which way she was headed. Perhaps, I thought, I could hurry from window to window and keep her in view. I was surprised. I thought she’d retrace one of our old walks; I thought she’d skirt the house and go up the ridge or down through the meadows to the copse. But she didn’t. Instead I’ve just seen her stride off boldly down the middle of the drive, headed for the village, straight into the arms of its whispering houses.

Here’s a strange old thing: I didn’t want Vivien to go, and as I watched her walking away I was desperate not to lose sight of her. The farther she went, the more I hoped she might suddenly turn round or go right and follow the brook, where I could see her from the house. But—and this is the unexpected part—now that she’s gone and I’ve finally lost sight of her, I’m not craving for her to turn back at all. To tell you the truth, the twisting anxiety that has wrung my stomach ever since her arrival has evaporated, and now I’m overtaken by a delightful sense of relief and freedom. It’s the same feeling I had when I watched Bobby driving away, the furniture and all that clutter disappearing down the drive in his van. I have respite from her being continually in the house, and a reprieve from my constant vigilance. I can wander about without worrying where she is, and what I should do or say if I come across her. I can shut a door and know it will stay shut. I can put my tea blends back in the right order in the kitchen cupboard and throw out the greasy butter paper she’s been saving in the fridge.

I walk downstairs into the hall, in part to exercise my newfound freedom but also to check she hasn’t left any doors open to the empty rooms. I don’t like them open. For me they’re not part of the house anymore. It’s like leaving the front door open. Luckily I find them closed, but it’s as I wander through into the kitchen that I notice that Vivien’s left her handbag on the counter by the Kenwood mixer. It’s a soft green leather one with heavy brass buckles and no zip or fixings so that, as it lies in a saggy pile, the top flops over, showing me through its wide-open mouth, the contents of its belly. A lipstick and a book of stamps peep out near the entrance and, as I come closer and lift up the edge, I see inside a messy world of receipts and slips and paper clips and safety pins, a nail file, the face of a wristwatch with the strap broken off…. I am distracted briefly by the inside lining, a thin loose material, unattached to the leather. It is light gray and evenly punctured with tight rows of pinprick holes. Its recurrent pattern mesmerizes me; I can see the dots as rows or as columns, or diagonals, triangles or squares, and then as shapes with depth, stretching away from me until I’ve lost perspective entirely. Eventually I have to reach out and touch it to feel how far away the material really is and bring me back from my wildly distorted visual field. It feels silky and, as I caress it, it shimmers in the light—like silk, but I know it can’t be silk because it catches on the rough dry skin at the tips of my fingers, sending a queer shiver down my back.

I lift the handbag and pour it out, its contents spinning and skating over the smooth Formica work top. I don’t know why I’m looking in here or what I think I might find. Perhaps an insight into the new grown-up Vivien or a clue as to why she’s returned. I collect up her things, one by one—three pens, her mobile phone, a bunch of keys (what for?), a pocket sized
London A–Z,
six loose bobby pins—and put them back into the bag, aware that she could come back at any moment. There’s a lipstick, a powder compact, a fold-up comb, a magnifying glass, three safety pins that I pause to look at (I’d like to add them to the eight I have on my bed to keep the top sheet from shifting against the blanket, but I wouldn’t dream of taking them).

I try to put everything back randomly, messily, as chaotic as I found it, but my natural disposition is to order things—it’s the scientist in me—and I find it terribly difficult to resist. Once or twice I look the other way, shove my hand into the bag and whiz it around to mess it up more than I am capable of doing deliberately. I envy her the bobby pins and it’s as I’m trying one out, sweeping some fringe hair into a parting, that I spot the gold brooch that must have skimmed to the far edge of the counter and come to rest under the shadow of the wall cupboard. It’s about the size of a small bird’s egg, a similar shape too, oval, but flattened. As I pick it up I see there are small colored stones encrusted in the gold on the front and, in the center, a large bloodred ruby. Its heaviness surprises me. I weigh it in my hands, rolling it over and over. On the back, under the big pin, one edge is beaded with tiny decorative gold hinges, and opposite these is a small catch. I ping the catch open with my nail and catch my breath. It’s an old photo, scratched and faded, of Vivi and Arthur gripping each other tightly. They are sitting on a low stone wall and Vivi is holding one hand splayed protectively across her rounded tummy. I peer more closely at the photo. There’s no doubt: Vivi looks pregnant. They appear to be a beautiful example of an adoring young couple, a new baby on the way to bond them into a family as well as to each other. I bring it closer to my eyes, trying to fill in the scratches and faded parts as best I can. Vivi is looking at Arthur. Her happiness is transparent. It makes me smile to see it, and she’s clinging to Arthur with her other hand as if she’s worried he might fall off the photograph. He is upright, stiff and sober-looking, and stares straight at the camera—a proud new parent perhaps? But I find it baffling. I can’t remember seeing this photo. I don’t know how on earth it could have been taken.

I snap the brooch shut and plop it into the green handbag. I decide to go to the landing, to my lookout, and wait for Vivien to come home, but I can’t get the image of her and Arthur out of my head. That young, spirited Vivien was the one I had clearly remembered for all these years, before she turned up again yesterday and started to replace it with the older, less recognizable version. But it’s seeing Arthur again that’s thrown me. I’ve never forgotten the snatched time we spent together, but over the years my memory must have distorted his appearance. I’ve been remembering a fully grown, self-assured man, as if his image had grown old with me, but I’m mistaken. Seeing that photo has made me realize that the only man I’ve ever been intimate with was little more than a boy.

I remember clearly the first time Arthur and I had sex.

N
INETEEN SIXTY
. An easy, breezy summer’s day, almost two and a half months after Vivi and Arthur were married, Arthur was sent to me by train to try to make Vivi a baby. I watched him alight from the far end of the nearside platform at Crewkerne station. It was only then, while he walked the length of the platform and I studied his long slim legs striding boldly towards me, hugged in corduroy, that I felt a small slight panic of reality: I was going to have sex with this man and his long slim legs. Arthur didn’t mention it—and neither did I—as he greeted me, or during the fifteen-minute car ride home from the station, or when we parked the car in the drive, or as he greeted my parents. We didn’t mention it while I showed him to the small burgundy spare room off a half landing in the west wing of the house, with its high single bed and pretty window overlooking the sunny silky meadows below. But, of course, all that time it was the only thing I was thinking about.

In 1960 people hadn’t started to admit freely that they couldn’t have children. The boom in fertility treatments, which changed all that, didn’t happen for another twenty years. If you were married and couldn’t have children, you either said you didn’t want them or you got them from somewhere else and often no one was ever the wiser. It was always a private affair, at times a dirty little secret. It wasn’t that surrogacy was a
bad
word; it wasn’t even a word yet, though up and down the country private agreements along those lines were being forged, as they had been for generations, among close family or friends.

I was never going to disappoint Vivi up there on the ridge that day, however much her suggestion had surprised me. It wasn’t so much that I’d decided, out of compassion, to give my sister the baby she so desperately wanted. I didn’t even consider turning her down. She’d made me feel so honored: Vivi had chosen
me
to be the mother of her baby. In the same way that I’d never have stopped her sharing my bed this morning, despite the intrusion and discomfort, I wasn’t going to turn down the chance of securing that everlasting kinship with Vivi by having her child.

Vivi was adamant that the surrogacy must be kept secret from everyone—apart from the three of us—so that there could be no possibility of the child stumbling across the truth of a lifelong lie and hating us for it, or of anyone else finding out for that matter. She said that having a secret from your child for their own good was one thing, but for a child to grow up amid a secret that everyone else knew was wrong and unkind.

Vivi especially didn’t want Maud and Clive to know yet. Of course, they knew she couldn’t have children but, for reasons I have never understood, she felt they’d be opposed to the idea.

“I said they
might
be against it,” she corrected me, as we huddled together in the cold on the ridge that day. “I don’t think they would necessarily,” she said quickly. “I don’t know what they’d think.”

She wanted us to get pregnant, before we let them in on the secret, in case they tried to stop us. She said at best they’d give us lots of opinions that would confuse us, and it should be for us, and us alone, to decide.

“I can make up my own mind, Vivi, and I’ve told you already that I’ll do it,” I assured her.

“Thank you, sweetie, I love you. You’re my best friend as well as my best sister,” she said in a pure rush of love that made me feel dizzy. “I just want it to be our secret to begin with, Ginny,” she said pleadingly. “We’ll tell them as soon as anything happens.”

“As soon as I get pregnant?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “When you’re pregnant they can’t put us off.” She laughed.

I decided it came down to the difference in how we viewed our parents: Vivi had always seen them as working against her, while I always thought of them as on my side. If I could tell them once I was pregnant, I couldn’t see how it would make much difference to do as Vivi wanted. So it was agreed.

“Promise, cross your heart and hope to die,” she’d said.

“I promise.” I’d sincerely crossed my heart with my right hand to secure the pact and seal our fate.

We were still up on that frozen ridge when she told me her entire stratagem. Ostensibly Arthur’s visits to Bulburrow would be on business—an idea for a new wholesale bakery to supply the area—although they’d happen to correspond with my monthly estrus. She’d got it all worked out, as always.

S
O THERE WE WERE
, Arthur and I, alone for the first time in my bedroom, which was farther down the landing and on the opposite side to my parents’ room. It was the afternoon, just before teatime. Maud and Clive were busy in other parts of the house.

The first thing Arthur said to me, almost formally, was, “Ginny, I need to know that you understand what you’re doing, that you know you’re giving the baby away. It will not be your baby. You will not be its mother. Vivien will. Are you sure you want to do that?” He said it so very s-l-o-w-l-y and c-l-e-a-r-l-y, as if I were an idiot.

“Yes,” I said, my single-size iron bed looming between us as an overwhelming symbol of the enforced intimacy of the very near future.

“But you need to think about it,” he said, rather puzzlingly.

I find it a struggle to understand the complexities of people I know best, let alone decipher those I don’t. Surely in giving him the answer I’d already thought about it. I’ve learned that it’s futile to challenge anyone about why they say what they say, or mean what they don’t say. Mostly I try to humor them, saying and doing what will please them most, and hope it all becomes clear later. So, on the other side of that bed, which was glowering up at us in the hope of unification, I tried to act like I was “thinking about it” for a few seconds, as if “thinking about it” was something you did rubbing your chin and gazing skyward, but what I was really thinking was how odd it was that I’d never discussed the surrogacy with Arthur directly, not once. I’d only ever talked about it with Vivi. Occasionally she alluded to Arthur’s opinion on this and that aspect of the arrangement, but mostly she talked about it furtively and covetously, as if it were only our secret, which made me almost forget that Arthur was involved at all. She’d talked about how we would watch the child grow and progress, how she would teach it about the city and I would teach it about the country, so that I’d come to regard it as Vivi’s and my baby, not his. I’d considered him an inert part of the process, a catalyst—necessary for the reaction to happen but remaining unchanged at the end.

So until that moment I’d never actually considered Arthur’s feelings. I wondered if this last-minute deliberation meant he wasn’t as keen as Vivi on the idea. Perhaps he was looking for a way out, but I didn’t know whether it was because of the baby or because it meant having to have sex with me. Then I said, as thoughtfully as I could feign, “It’s not my baby. I will not be its mother. I understand that.”