The Sister (17 page)

On Wednesday morning I got in the car and drove through the high-hedged lanes, up Bulburrow hill and down again to Crewkerne. I parked outside Gateway and walked the short distance to the cobbled square, where the town hall stood in the center with a huge bronze statue of the man who had founded the town’s first paper factory. According to the inscription, Titus Sorrell turned round Crewkerne’s ailing economy in the mid-nineteenth century. I’d arranged to meet Clive there, on the bench outside The George. When I sat down an elderly man joined me, planting himself at the opposite end. I looked at the clock tower. Eleven-thirty exactly. Titus surveyed his empire smugly while pigeons fought to perch on his shoulders, desecrating him front and back.

At 11:33 Clive arrived. He sat down next to me and we both looked ahead at Titus and his pigeons for a while. Finally he said, “I’ve been thinking that if you could find a way to tag other species radioactively you could make some great progress with migratory patterns. There’s been so little research in that area, Ginny. The society might like that.”

I didn’t reply. At that moment I didn’t care what the society might like and I could hardly believe that he could.

“Yup,” said the man at the end of the bench eagerly, and for a few seconds I thought, perhaps, that I’d walked into someone else’s conversation. The man and I exchanged a pleasant look. Perhaps he’d only worried it was
his
conversation because no one else had replied. I glanced at Clive, who stared distantly at the cobbled square and the statue. He seemed altogether older—a real
old man
—and something else had changed about him too. It was as if Maud’s death had shaken the character out of him, his enthusiasm for life and everything that made him who he was, turning him limp.

“What did Vivien say?” he asked after a while.

“I haven’t seen her. She won’t come to the house.”

There was a long silence.

“You’ll tell her I love her, won’t you?” he said at last, and, although that should have been a happy tribute, there was something too absolute and eternal about it, and I couldn’t help feeling a little sorrow spill from my heart.

Two men bailed out of The George, shouting at each other and scaring the pigeons to the safety of the clock tower. When they had passed, the bravest of the birds flew down to reclaim Titus’s head.

“I’m pregnant,” I said, in a moment of unnecessary candidness. It was true, but I wasn’t so much telling him because he should know it, but because I wanted to tell him something happy, or perhaps to shock him—anything, in fact, to get a recognizable reaction from him. All he said was, “Very good.”

“Congratulations,” followed the old man on the far end of the bench.

“Thank you,” I said to both of them.

After a short silence the other man said, “Are you eating broad beans?” I found it impossible to know if he was now talking to me, or to Clive, or to the pigeons we were all looking at, or to some imaginary person, and I didn’t know whether to reply or to ignore him. I ignored him.

“You must eat broad beans,” he ordered firmly, “if you don’t want a spastic.”

“Thank you,” I told him, now understanding it was directed at me, and that he must surely have lost his marbles.

“Every day,” he said.

“Every day,” I repeated.

“Then you won’t have a spastic. Nobody wants a spastic,” he observed finally. There was a silence.

The old man leaned forward on his stick in a posture suggesting that he’d had his say and now he was finished.

Clive looked at his watch.

“You’ll be all right,” he said, and again I thought it might have been to either of us. “Well, I must be going now. I have flower-pressing class in ten minutes.”

And he went.

W
HEN
I
GOT HOME
Arthur had let himself into the house. He was in the kitchen, waiting for me. It was lovely to see him and he gave me the first hug, a great big, long, silent one, that anyone had offered me since Maud’s death.

“I was worried about you on your own,” he said, letting me go.

“I’m fine. How’s Vivi?”

“Not good, I’m afraid. She says she’ll never come back.”

“Oh no.” I sighed, and felt the pain of my entire family crashing down round me. I wanted to find a way to bring them back, to hold them close.

“I think she feels it was…preventable,” he said.

I thought of the cold steep cellar steps and the darkness of the stairwell. I thought of how the two doors stood side by side, like twins—the same moldings, the same handles—but one with a deadly drop on the other side. I thought I was perhaps the only person who knew quite how drunk she would have been, how perfectly preventable it might have been,
had she not been drunk.

“She won’t even talk to me about it. All I know is that she’d been quarreling a lot with Maud.”

Had she? It must have been on the telephone because Vivi hadn’t been home for months.

“Didn’t you know?” he said, as if it was impossible for me not to.

“No. What was it about?”

He didn’t answer for a while.

“I think she was worried about everything,” he said vaguely. “You know how Vivi always worries about everything,” but I had no idea what sort of everything he meant.

Just then the phone rang. There was silence when I answered it and I knew it was her. “Vivi?” I asked. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Ginny, it’s me,” she said quietly.

I couldn’t tell if she was crying, or angry, or tired, or all of them, but I knew she wasn’t herself. “Are you okay?” I asked, wishing I hadn’t as soon as it was said.

For a while she didn’t answer. “Oh, wonderful,” she said sarcastically. “Is Arthur there?”

“Are you angry with me?” I said.

“Not especially.” She sighed. “I’m angry with everyone and everything.”

Well, that didn’t make any sense to me, and such a broad sphere of anger doesn’t naturally offer a starting point to help, so I didn’t try. I decided, as always, to come back to the practical issues. “When shall we have her funeral?”

“We’re having it next Friday,” she stated. “I’ve already arranged it with the rector.”

“And Clive? Does he know?”

“I have no idea, darling,” she said.

“I’ve just seen him,” I said. “He says to tell you he loves you—”

Vivi butted in. “I’d like to speak to Arthur, please. Has he arrived yet?”

I handed the phone to him and went into the back pantry to find some eggs to make a cake for tea. When I came back Arthur was staring disconsolately out the kitchen window at the gloomy day beyond, the phone call over. I was surprised how glad I was that he had come. I was usually happy with my own company—I’m extremely self-sufficient—but I was so much happier now that Arthur was there. I didn’t want him to leave. I studied his back for a moment, his thickly knitted navy polo-neck, the black curls at the back of his head, slightly bowed shoulders, and I thought how wonderful and thoughtful and interesting he was, and how comfortable and easy I felt with him. I cracked an egg against the side of the mixing bowl and he swung round, surprised that I was back in the room. I smiled into the bowl and imagined the baby growing inside me—our baby—and, I’m ashamed to admit, allowed myself to fall into a daydream that Arthur and I were married and we lived here with a houseful of children, as it had been when the evacuees were staying all that time ago.

I pulled myself out of it quickly. “How was she?” I asked.

“She and Clive have
completely
fallen out,” he said, glancing at me and widening his eyes.

That must have been why Clive was worried about her, I thought. My family was disintegrating before my eyes, despite my efforts to keep it together. I cracked three more eggs, one by one, against the side of the bowl. “It’s not the time to fall out, for goodness’ sake, not when Maud’s just died. She would have hated it. It’ll be something ridiculous. Was it about the will?” I asked.

“I don’t know, she won’t tell me, but she’s consumed by anger. I’ve never seen her like this before. She’s turned into a raging bull,” he said, clearly exasperated. “And I don’t know how to calm her down,” he added, staring out of the window onto the drive.

“Oh, Lord. She must be unhappy about something in the will or in Clive’s handing over the estate to us,” I reasoned, “but she ought to just tell me and then we might be able to sort it out, talk it through. I can’t be expected to guess what’s got to her. I’ve never been able to and she knows that better than anyone.”

“It’ll pass, I’m sure,” Arthur said optimistically. “It usually does with Vivi. But at the moment she’s refusing to go to the funeral if Clive’s there.”

“What? Of course he’ll be there!” I sat down heavily and resolved to talk to her about it the next time we spoke, try to patch things up between her and our father. Why was it that I was the only person who didn’t fall out with my family? I thought, as I added two cups of sugar and one of flour to the mixture.

“Does she still want a baby?” I asked, worried their plans might have changed.

“Oh, yes, she definitely still wants a baby,” he said, without hesitation.

“Oh, good, because I think she’s got one.”

“What?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“Really?” His face broke into a smile. “I’m going to be a daddy,” he said as he sidestepped a chair to embrace me. We stayed like that for a long while, long enough for it to feel as if the embrace was welcome for other reasons than the baby. It felt more like comfort than joy.

SUNDAY

CHAPTER
17

A Prayer

B
LOSSOM FALLS
like snow against the mottled sky, blizzarding my path until I reach the Tunnel Walk along our eastern boundary. Today is Sunday, the third day since Vivien came home, and I’m on my way to church. I’m not
going
to church because I don’t do that, but I’m on my way there to do…I don’t know what, take a look, try to crush my curiosity. Yesterday, after I missed Vivien leaving the house, I spent the entire afternoon waiting for her to return so when, at breakfast this morning, she announced that she was going to church, this time I couldn’t help but follow her.

Vivien walked down the drive, in the same way that she strode out boldly yesterday, right down the middle of it, in a tweed suit and black leather gloves, but I’m cutting down the path between the row of firs and the high fence, the Tunnel Walk down which I’d taken Arthur once. It’s strange, now I think of it, that I’d brought him this way when I hardly knew him. It’s a secret, childish route, but that didn’t cross my mind at the time. That must have been the last time I was here, but it hasn’t changed, and most probably not for a century. It’s ageless and, as I stand here, looking up into the woven branches above, I’m dizzied into any age I want. I can be a child again, hearing Vivi giggling farther down, urging me to hurry, or I can be a young woman collecting moss for the pupa cages, scouring the fence for the hairy gray chrysalis of a Vapourer, or searching for the holes of the Goat Moth caterpillar as it bores into the hard wood of the tree trunks. The path in the tunnel appears well worn, managed, even, compared to the rest of the wilderness our land has become, but it isn’t. It’s so starved of light that nothing grows here. It can’t get wild. Instead it is carpeted with layer upon layer of soft needles, year on year, so that the ground has become a mattress, thick and springy as I walk on it.

When I reach the brook at the other end, I see that the split weeping beech is no longer the bridge. Half of the tree stands alone and naked on this bank, and the other half, the half that had fallen over the water and given years of service to the villagers, has been removed. In its place is a flat man-made bridge, rows of neatly sawn wooden slats over which no balance is required. I remember Arthur poised precariously on the middle of the log, his arms outstretched, how it had made him think that growing up here would be fun.

Arthur visited me a lot back then, during my pregnancy, at least every other weekend and sometimes more to check that I was all right and because, I think, he loved his weekend escapes to the country. Vivi was thrilled about the baby and, although she couldn’t visit—she said she found it too painful to come to the house—she telephoned every other day.

My pregnancy filled a gap for all of us. After Maud’s death, it gave life a new meaning and, thankfully, seemed to lessen the storm raging inside Vivi. She did come to Maud’s funeral, even though I saw her glower at Clive at every opportunity. Clive didn’t notice. He didn’t notice anything or anyone and he didn’t hold back his tears. It was as if, without her, he had shrunk to a small part of himself, the oldest, least meaningful part, a case without its contents. I didn’t even get to speak to him. After the service he traipsed off to the bus stop to wait for the Belford bus to take him home to Paul Street, while Vivi raced off in her car back to London, neither going near each other or the house. If Maud had been around she’d have made Clive go to the little party Arthur helped me organize at Bulburrow Court. The entire village (and many from the surrounding villages too) filed in for what they instinctively realized was the last time, all talking somberly about the steep steps they would now be wary of in their own houses and being especially careful not to notice that Maud’s husband and younger daughter were not there.

The baby gave Vivi a different focus. When she phoned she quizzed me on how I was feeling and how my body was changing, not to empathize with me but because she said she wanted to try to live my pregnancy. She said she wanted to know every feeling and thought and craving and discomfort so she could understand exactly what it was like to be pregnant, and I spent hours trying to recall every detail for her as my tummy grew bigger. She started to wear the things that I wore and eat the things I said I’d eaten. She said she imagined there was a baby inside her, even though I tried to convince her that even I couldn’t imagine one inside me, that I didn’t think much about it at all, that I often forgot I was pregnant. But she shrugged that off as peculiar to me, rather than a natural state of pregnancy. Arthur told me that whenever he returned to London he was interrogated—How was I walking? When did I get indigestion? Had he felt it kick or wriggle? How swollen were my ankles?—and sometimes, he joked, he came back just to get away from the questions about his last visit.

Vivi and I saw each other twice during my pregnancy. Each time we arranged to meet at Branscombe, on the coast, where we spent a day on the cliffs walking to Beer and picnicking in little coves, and a night snuggled up in bed together at a B and B across from the pub. We were our only family now, the two of us and the bump between us. The only thing she talked about was the baby, as if our relationship was singly based on it. She told me what a wonderful aunt I would make and how, when the child was older, we’d take it on holiday to France together.

I tried to persuade Vivi to visit Clive at the Anchorage with me, but she wouldn’t. I saw him once a week during that first year, but he never got over Maud’s death. He remained distant and apathetic. All he wanted to talk about was the moth research, but he wasn’t even interested in that in his usual way. It’s difficult to explain how his interest had changed: he didn’t seem keen to pick at the details anymore—the experimental methods, the results or who wanted to publish them—only to know that I was carrying on, that I had got back up on my feet without him and had some projects going again.

At first he dictated to me exactly what research I should be doing and which grants to apply for and on my following visits he’d badger me about whether I’d done it or not. In the end it was easier to just say I had. I pretended to apply for the grants and then, naturally, I had to say I’d won some and was getting along with the research. I talked to him for hours about imaginary mothing expeditions, made-up methods of tagging specimens and plotting migratory patterns, the results of fabricated assays and numerous fictitious scientific papers. I made up stories of my success. It was the only thing he wanted to hear. It was as if he had to know that I’d made a success of it all by myself, that he wasn’t needed; that I could cope, I suppose. I have no idea why it preoccupied him so but I wasn’t going to deny him so I reeled off as much as I thought he wanted to hear, even though—at that time—I still hadn’t yet found the motivation to get back into it all. Sometimes Clive threw in a question that flummoxed me, but eventually he gave that up too. He wanted to live the rest of his life believing that he’d put me on the path to success, and I didn’t see why he shouldn’t.

It was several months since Maud had died—near the end of my pregnancy—when I first noticed that Clive was going batty. Our conversations must have sounded extraordinary to anyone who happened to overhear them. Nothing Clive said seemed to make much sense anymore, and I could tell him anything and he’d believe it. Shortly afterwards he was diagnosed with acute dementia. Clive had deteriorated so quickly and suddenly after Maud’s death, it was as if he’d already guessed his future mental state and booked himself into a suitable institution in advance.

I stopped visiting him. Sister Vincent, his supervisor, said she thought it best for both of us. Best to remember him how he’d been before his mind was too diseased to be recognizable, she’d said. And when Clive died five years later, she revealed to me that by the end he had been beleaguered by demons. I think, in a roundabout way, she was trying to make me feel better by suggesting his death had been an escape from a sick and troubled mind.

I
CROSS
the new slatted bridge—thankful it’s replaced the log—to the footpath that rambles beside the brook, past St. Bartholomew’s church. The edge, once wild with brambles and undergrowth, has been neatly shorn by newcomers, ignorant of the damage they do and the wildlife they endanger by taming their countryside.

I walk past the stone humpback bridge that takes the lane over to Hembury and towards the church. As I approach I can hear a collection of rasping voices, and although I cannot catch every word, I recognize the General Confession and join in the incantation in my head: “…We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts…”

St. Bartholomew’s graveyard is tiny, bound by the brook on one side and the church on the other. I stop several yards away, crouching as best I can behind a laurel hedge so that I will be well hidden when the congregation comes out. I wonder if Vivien is sitting in her favorite spot, next to St. Bartholomew’s toes. I wonder if she’ll remember that her name is scratched onto the sole of his left foot.

I hear the low drone of the rector’s voice and I fill in the words I can’t quite catch from recollections of a distant past when Maud would lead her family to church on Sundays, and afterwards invite everyone to Bulburrow for coffee. I can’t understand why the sounds of the service release a sadness in me. Perhaps they remind me of when I was part of a family. When Vivi and I heard the bells we’d rush upstairs, knowing we had twenty minutes to get ready—find some stockings, wash our faces, brush our hair. In the hall we’d meet Maud, heavily perfumed and doused in jewelry, and Clive in his gray suit, fraying at the elbows, his mind not on the matter at hand. Then we’d walk, like a picture-book family, one parent to one girl, hand in hand, down the drive, through the stone pillars without their gates, along the single lane of the hamlet of Bulburrow to the tiny church. And I’d spend the next hour staring up at the small windows in the eaves and wondering not how we should behave in the house of God, but why anyone thought there was a God at all.

“…that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous and sober life, to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.”

The church’s small, high windows meant that even on the brightest day it was always gloomy inside. When you were eventually let out into the world you were blinded by fresh air and sunshine, which left me with the distinct impression that the outside world was the more spiritual of the two places.

My eyes shift to a flurry of red ants on the compacted earth beside me, hurtling over one another in their eagerness to get to and from their nest, a hole at the base of a birch whip. Peering closer, I see they are workers heaving neatly cut pieces of leaf into their nest, but I can instantly sense there is something amiss, something I can’t quite put into words. They seem a little too frantic, even for ants, breaking rank a little too often, almost out of control in their frenetic rush to feed their offspring. They’ve lost their sense of order. I dig my finger partway into the nest’s entrance and scoop away the top and there, at the back of the enclave, writhes a huge pinkish-white larva, squirming in its ugly embryonic form. My hunch has been validated and I click my tongue in a conceited tut. For a moment I wish someone was here to witness my intuitive expertise. I might have a poor understanding of people, but I have an instinct for insects. This isn’t the ants’ larva but an impostor that has ambushed the gentle partnership between ant and tree, where normally the ants feed off the tree’s leaves while fertilizing it with their droppings. But they have been tricked by this bulbous parasite. It’s taken command of the nest, tapping into the ants’ chemical signaling system, instructing them to fatten it up for summer while it rests up lazily. They tend the great white larva without realizing it and, in a few weeks, not satisfied with a vegetarian diet, it will also help itself to the ants’ own neglected larvae. It will gorge itself to immobility, but when it needs to move to its next victim’s nest, it will simply direct the ants, like little robots, to pick it up and carry it.

All the while I am listening to the church service I am also studying the ants, whose furious activity takes on a different meaning when set to Christianity. I see the inequity of life, the immorality of nature. I consider a larval god controlling the fate of ant and tree, seen by the ants but unseen too, unrecognized for His actions. I hear part of an address about a deaf music teacher, I see the slavery of ants, the isolation of the teacher, the ignorance of an ant, the total domination of a larval god, the acceptance of workers, a tyrannical grub, the solitary teacher, unquestioning ant, a gluttonous writhing larva, a hymn…. It’s one of my favorites:

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

In light inaccessible hid from our eyes…

After the hymn I hear the rector bidding us to pray. Abstractedly I think of Vivien leaning forward so that her head is right next to St. Bartholomew. Perhaps it’s only now she’ll notice her name on his foot. Is it making her smile, I wonder, or is she embarrassed by it? Does it fill her with happy memories, as it does me, or sad ones? Last week I would have sworn I knew the answers, but now I am a lot less certain.

I’m not particularly attentive to the service. It’s become a background for my reflections on the saint’s effigy and my musings on the ants’ subjugation, but I register wafts of sentences that drift towards me, like hearing the comforting drone of a party downstairs while you’re dozing in bed.

“We pray for the poor throughout the world…in our own parish, the elderly, lonely, sick…in particular we ask you to remember…Win Readon, Alfie Tutt, Fred Matravers…Virginia Stone. We pray that you grant them the grace…”

Virginia Stone…?
I’ve been watching the industry of a single ant cutting a neat circle round itself on a leaf, and marveling that such a preprogrammed creature has the wit to move out of the circle before it’s detached from the rest of the plant, when I hear myself prayed for—or think I do. I can’t be sure. As I say, I wasn’t really concentrating, but I quickly recall the voice again in my mind and it seems clear, unmistakable:
Virginia Stone.
I’m astounded. Why on earth are they praying for me? I’m not sick or lonely. I can only think that Vivien has made an excuse for my absence in church.