The Sister (18 page)

Let me tell you—because there can’t be many people who’ve experienced it—it really is the most unusual feeling to hear your name prayed for in church, the rector asking for help from a God you don’t believe exists. If only they knew that I’m
right here,
listening from behind the laurel just beyond the graveyard. I briefly imagine that this is my funeral, that Win Readon, Alfie Tutt and Fred Matravers have somehow got better but I have died, and I’m watching them pay their last respects, Win, Alfie and Fred, who have never met me but had, apparently, been ill with me.

When the service is over the door opens and five dour elderly people file out after the rector. I was expecting the whole village to flood through in a harangue of noise, but there is no throng of shouting children, no Sunday bests, no hats. Vivien emerges deep in conversation with another elderly woman, and they walk along the path to the road. I’m about to leave my hiding spot, anxious to get back to the house before her, when I notice that she’s stopped. She says something quietly to her companion and turns back, walking purposefully and directly towards me, looking straight at me through the stiff, waxy leaves. How on earth did she know I was here? What do I say? She passes three rows of graves and I’m sure our eyes meet. I look down at the ants’ nest again, and at the
Maculinea
larva, hoping to look studious when she reaches me. But the seconds grow longer and she doesn’t arrive, and when I look up again I see she’s turned right and gone through the gap in the hedge to the graveyard extension, that bit of rectory garden expropriated by the surplus of dead, the bit where our own family is buried. I don’t visit the graves, so it hadn’t occurred to me before that that’s where Vivien is headed, and now it dawns on me that she’s probably not seen me after all. She doesn’t know I’m here squatting on my haunches.

Vivien’s just out of my view, but if she’s at the family graves, she must be standing very close to me, just the other side of the hedge to be precise—but a little behind and to the left. I shuffle back on the dry earth as quietly as possible and stop. I think I can hear her breathing. I rotate a fraction, still crouched, and find that as I peer through a small gap in the leaves, I’m looking at her back, less than five feet away.

Her tweed jacket, a loose weave of sludgy colors, is pulled taut over her shoulders as she hunches down at Maud’s grave. The small slit in the back of her mid-length skirt has opened and ridden up, showing me, through the sheer nylons, the raised purple veins, just like mine, on the backs of her knees. She stays like that for a while, displaying her veins to the laurel and me. I can’t see if she’s fingering the grass or if she’s reading the words on the headstone she designed—just Maud’s name and dates, no more, no other small clue about her for future generations. Death snatches so much substance. All of a sudden Maud became a label on a stone, the nuances of the individual no longer important—her thoughts and desires, her grievances and her passions, the wisdom, knowledge and understanding slowly assimilated throughout her life, all gone.

Vivien rises shakily to her feet and I glimpse a crumpled white handkerchief in her right hand as she steadies herself, leaning on her mother’s stone, almost embracing it. She moves to the next grave, Clive’s, and stands at his feet, reading the headstone she never saw placed, the one that the nuns at his retirement home chose for me. It’s half the size of Maud’s, made of imported, highly polished black granite, which they’d insisted was smarter and cheaper than the local stone. It reads
RIP
at the top, then simply
CLIVE STONE
underneath. They’d forgotten the two honorary doctorates, his fellowship of the Royal Society and all the other accolades he’d meticulously collected for his memorial throughout his life. Vivien stays at Clive’s feet long enough to read the three letters and two words, then leaves.

I am now expecting her to stop at the third family grave, the tiny one on Maud’s other side, a small rectangular plot bound by the spiky pieces of flint I’d watched Arthur put round it to mark the edges. Within the flint boundary you can still see, even now, a sharp swelling in the earth, the poignant little hump of a small body shape, as if he’d not even been given a box, as if he’d just been laid on the ground and covered with earth, which was patted down over him, the way children bury themselves on a beach. It looks as if the grave digger, quite understandably, reasoned that as such a small space was needed, it wasn’t worth taking away any of the soil. What soil came out would all go back in and eventually compress over time. As if nothing had ever gone into it at all. But this little knoll was rebelling: it had refused to pack down, to give back the soil its place, and it refused to look as if nothing had gone into the ground at all.

Arthur had designed the gray headstone himself, in the more expensive local stone. It was blatantly outsized for the grave it heralded. He’d had a pattern of zigzags cut all the way round the edge, with three rows of smaller zigzags carved decoratively round the front face to frame the letters, rather like a frieze you might find in a nursery. Engraved in beautifully curly writing he’d had written:

Samuel Morris

A Little Life No Less Loved

But, for all its decoration and the distinctive rise in the earth, I watch appalled as Vivien walks straight past it. She doesn’t even notice it. She knows it’s there somewhere, she must, she was told all those years ago, but she doesn’t pause to look. This isn’t a calculated reaction—there is no furtive glance or dismissive scan, not the snub she has just shown to Clive’s memorial. It is much worse. She’s forgotten about it, about him. She’s forgotten he’d ever been born.

V
IVIEN IS WALKING
quickly now towards the graveled church path and I need to get back to the house. Besides, I can feel it’s about to rain. The sky has darkened and a new crisp wind is pouring over the valley lip, offering to sweep out the sluggish heat from the bottom of its bowl. The wind is edged with a sharp and angry current and the season’s warmth is laced with a new chill. It’s my feeling entirely. An unexplained edge of anger and an unrecognizable chill creep through my body, and I’m ready when I hear the faint sonorous roar from far away, the grumbling beginnings of thunder rolling up the valley.

Thunder gets trapped in this valley as anger can get trapped in a person’s mind. It’ll get louder and louder and then fade away only to roll back again, and again, like a perpetual echo, building and fading, building and fading, as it rolls round the Bulburrow basin, unable to drag its weight out over the valley’s lip. When thunder gets trapped, it can last all night. When I was young I was terrified by it, but now I find it a comfort to have those old memories return, of my fear, the security of my bed, Maud’s soothing voice, Vivi climbing in beside me and entwining her fingers in mine.

With my foot I shift some loose earth over the ant-dependent grub to hide it from the birds. It might seem a hideous and ruthless creature now, but in time it will emerge transformed into a stunning iridescent blue butterfly, one of our rarest and most beautiful, and will be greatly admired as it shimmers in the sun with no knowledge or burden of guilt for its obscene past.

I trundle home besieged by the weather. A blackbird skitters along the ground in front of me and at intervals cocks its head, as if beckoning me on. How friendly it is, how trusting, I think, until it lets me come right up close behind it and I find it isn’t a blackbird at all but a crisp winter leaf, rolled up at the edges and pushed along by gusts of the new wind. Once I know it’s a leaf, I’m stunned that I’d seen it as anything else.

S
AMUEL
M
ORRIS DID
indeed have A Little Life. It was twenty-four long minutes. His birth had been protracted and painful, and both Vivi and Arthur were at the maternity hospital with me, as planned. Vivi clenched my hand and whispered encouragement in my ear, while Arthur paced the corridor outside, listening helplessly to the torment of labor.

The baby was purple when he finally slithered out with the cord wound too tightly round his neck. I glimpsed the shiny livid color, like that of a fresh bruise, as he was whisked off to a table by the window. Vivi froze with panic and stood with her back against the opposite wall, waiting for the baby to turn pink, so when the door was opened and Arthur ushered in, she ended up behind it and at first made no effort to come out or to close it. Arthur walked straight over to where the doctors had taken the baby and were thrusting what looked like straws into his mouth and nose. He watched as they tried to open his airways, pinched his toes, and finally put an oxygen mask over his tiny face. Arthur said that when he held his tiny hand, his little son saw him. He said he didn’t just look at him but he
saw him.
And Arthur said he looked wise. That was all he said, that the baby looked wise, and now, now that I’m walking home pursued by the roar of thunder, wise doesn’t seem good enough. I’m wishing he had remembered more, that he had said more. I wanted to see his face, Samuel’s face, I wanted to know what he really looked like, not that he looked wise, but what shape his tiny eyes were and if he had fat or thin lips, if he had worry wrinkles like some babies have, or sticky-out ears, or jet-black hair like Arthur’s own. At the time I’d just accepted wise as a description but it wasn’t enough. It didn’t tell me anything. If only I had seen for myself, if I’d had one little look. But then again, he wasn’t my baby. He was Vivi’s.

After fifteen minutes, the doctors took up the puce child and offered him to Arthur to hold, the oxygen mask still attached to his tiny features. I knew it wasn’t a good sign. Arthur cradled his baby and looked up towards Vivi.

“Do you want to hold him?” he said.

“You hold him,” she said quickly. She hadn’t moved away from the comfort of the wall and she looked terrified. Arthur then turned to me. I shook my head with exhaustion.

“Okay. So I’ll hold you,” Arthur said softly, in a singsong baby voice that I’d not known was within him, and he held him and looked at him and held him and looked at him and held him and looked at him, until well after the end of his life. The baby grew more and more purple but Arthur just smiled at him. He told me later he’d forgotten he was purple. He’d said that when you really looked at him, you didn’t see purple at all.

But I only saw purple. I only ever remember purple, and what I really want to see, what I really want to remember, is wise.

B
Y THE TIME
I reach the house April’s downpour is in full flow. Black rain lashes the earth violently, digging up the dry dirt, spitting and bouncing it about the drive so I’m wet through when I get to the safety of the porch. From here I watch the puddles form, fill and flood within seconds in front of the house, and a web of runaway canals are sketched and carved and deepened all over the driveway as fierce little heads of water push loose earth and leaves and stones out of their way to make channels that run over and spill into each other, feverish in their single-minded pursuit. I’m watching them combine into a central artery down the drive and push onwards to meet the runoff from the fields. Soon they’ll blend into a torrent and surf along the clay half-pipes beside the lane to join the turgid brook that bursts its banks whenever it rains.

As I make my way upstairs to change my sodden clothes, I can hear the floods on the roof above me, bouncing along the gutters and gullies that direct the rainwater through the vast landscape of the roof to the drainpipes in its corners. I change, then dry my hair as best I can, scraping it off my face and tying it in a bun. Vivien’s back in the house now, and I don’t want her to know I’ve been out.

“Ah, Ginny,” she shouts when she sees me coming down the stairs, “I’ve got a little surprise for you.”

“I’ve had a shower,” I say. I’m worried she’ll notice my wet hair. Yet she’s completely dry—she must have had a brolly.

“And I’ve brought you a surprise,” she says again, triumphantly. She’s ebullient, buoyed by the raw weather outside.

“What is it?”

She grabs my arm and leads me into the library as if an enormous birthday present awaits me there. Instead, an elderly woman is sitting on a wheel-back chair in the corner of the room, a glass of sherry in her hand. It’s a bit of a shock to see her, to see anyone, sitting in my house. The woman gets to her feet as we enter the room. I guess instantly who it is. I clasp the face of my wristwatch, twisting it in my fingers, trying to buy myself preparation time. Usually, for this sort of encounter, I would have required time to rehearse what to say, where to look and how to react. I’m so unused to meeting people these days. I’d like to flee and shut myself into my room upstairs, like a little girl. How could Vivien do this to me without warning? It’s not a new thing—she knows I’ve always avoided people. Even when I was younger, when I went to town and wanted a cup of tea I’d go to the hot drinks dispenser in the train station rather than the teashops on the high street. That way, it didn’t have to get personal.

“Ginny,” says Vivien, coming between us as if she were the umpire in a boxing ring. “I want you to meet Eileen.”

“Hello, Eileen,” I oblige, forcing myself to look up, to take in her small frame, her pure white hair, yellowing at the front, and the thick spectacles that magnify her eyes queerly. Between you and me, I’ve seen her many times before from my lookout, walking up or down the lane to church, waiting for the bus, posting a letter in the box in the rectory wall or visiting the woman at East Lodge on Tuesday afternoons. But she’s never seen me.

“Hello, Ginny,” she replies timidly, and it strikes me as peculiar that we’re meeting like this when we’ve been living less than half a mile from each other in a scantily populated countryside for a number of years now. Had we wanted to meet, we could easily have done so.

“Eileen lives in Willow Cottage, where her mum used to live,” Vivien says.

“I know,” I reply, and we spend a few moments sitting ourselves down in a sort of circular arrangement on three single chairs. I can see Eileen has begun feverishly to finger the glass in her hand, turning it round, searching for comfort in its golden charge. Vivien pours herself a drink, then offers one to me, but I don’t drink.