The Sister (21 page)

“Do you think Clive knew?” I ask softly.

“What happened to Clive was different,” she says sharply, turning back to face me. “That was all his own doing. He deserved every demon he got and he knew it.”

I hadn’t meant to provoke another onslaught about Clive. “I think you’re taking your anger with him a bit far. Why don’t you just admit you had differences and accept them?” I say, very reasonably, I think.

“Oh, Ginny, it’s always so simple with you, isn’t it? Don’t you ever see that?” Vivien’s cup rattles on its saucer as her temper starts to simmer.

“I’m only trying to—”

“Well,” she cuts me off, “I’ve been trying
desperately,
” she says, putting the cup and saucer on the window seat beside her, “to help you see it, to help you understand things, to help you see for yourself that things aren’t so simple and sometimes they need to be questioned. I didn’t come home to tell you this, but I can’t hide the truth anymore. I can protect you from other people but not from the truth.”

There she goes again, talking in riddles. I never asked her to come home.

“The problem is,” she continues, “that you wouldn’t know the truth if it came and looked you in the eye. That was always your problem.”

I’m not listening to her rant because I don’t want to. I’m trying to work out what might have happened in Clive’s head, I mean at the molecular level, to lead to his dementia.

I flinch as Vivien clutches my shoulders near my neck and shakes me. “Ginny!” she shouts.

“What?” I say, startled out of my reverie.

“You’re not there. It’s so convenient for you to go off somewhere else and not listen, isn’t it? Don’t you want to know the truth?”

“What truth?”

“All of it. Everything.”

“Like what?” I raise my voice, exasperated with her.

She pauses for a moment, enjoying my full attention. “Like your own mother was murdered,” she says finally.

I watch her studying me. It’s as if she’s looking for the pain she may have inflicted. Then I laugh. I mean, what can you do? Actually, it’s a proper little giggle, as if she’s made a joke. And I can’t believe she’s not laughing too. I can’t believe she’s serious.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Vivien!” I sputter.

Then she does something most peculiar. She clenches her fists and stamps her right foot hard, three times in a row, as if she’s stamping on a scorpion and making sure she’s done the job properly. She looks like an eight-year-old having a tantrum.

“How can I make you just
try
to understand?” she shouts. “Once. Just think about it
once.
Look at me! Look at me!” She grabs either side of my face and directs it up to hers. “Do I look like I’m making it up?”

She doesn’t.

I tell her again, softly, “Vivien, she fell down the cellar steps. I was there. I saw her lying at the bottom. I promise you, it was an accident.”

“You’re wrong, Ginny. You saw it
wrong,
” she shouts.

“What on earth makes you think so?” I say quietly, flabbergasted.

“I just
know.
” For a moment she’s lost for words. “Most people just have that sort of intuition, Ginny.”

I’m not going to say it out loud because there’s no knowing what she’ll do, but I can tell you: Vivien’s gone completely doo-lally. You can’t have intuition sitting in London about someone being murdered in Dorset. You either have the facts or you don’t—I’m sure you’ll agree with me. Besides, I’m a scientist and I’m afraid I don’t work with intuition.

Vivien flops onto the cushions on the window seat, bringing her legs up to rest them on a stool in front of her.

“For a while I thought it was you who had done it,” she says, more calmly now, like the opening of a great story.

I’m astounded. I’m shocked. I’m mortified. “Me? Oh, for goodness’ sake, Vivien, you’ve gone bonkers,” I blurt out. But she ignores me and continues, in a calm, even tone, as if the story must go on whatever the audience’s reaction.

“I thought Clive and Dr. Moyse knew and were covering up for you.” She is looking at her legs stretched out on the stool in front of her as she speaks. I am standing a yard or so away, towering over her with my hands on my hips and, I’m sure, my jaw dropping. “Dr. Moyse had officially told the police not to interview you. He got a court injunction so they weren’t allowed to. He said you had some sort of disorder, that you were unstable.”

“Oh, Vivien, the things you think of! It’s absolute nonsense. It was nothing like that at all.”

“I know. I know,” she says, relenting. “I worked out later that you couldn’t have known anything about it or you would have told me.”

“Exactly,” I say indignantly.

“You would have told everyone.”

“Of course.” But even as the words form in my mouth I already feel the tightening of a trap.

“So then I realized it was Clive who’d pushed her and
you’d
been covering up for
him.
”

“
What?
Vivien, I’m afraid you’ve gone quite mad.” I’m more than a little irritated now. Why she has to keep throwing in ridiculous theories and casting all sorts of doubts over our beloved parents’ memories is beyond me. “Clive didn’t do it and I didn’t cover up anything for him,” I tell her firmly, but as I say it, I know my efforts to change her mind are in vain. “This has all been festering for years in your head, but can’t you see it’s nonsense?”

“You weren’t
aware
that you were covering up for him,” she trudges on. “You still aren’t aware of it. The police were banned from interviewing you, even though I kept telling them they had to.”

“Oh, rubbish, Vivien. Even if the police
had
talked to me I wouldn’t have told them anything differently. Maud fell down the stairs.”

I can’t take this any longer. She’s the one who doesn’t know what was going on. I look down at my watch and fiddle with its face with my thumb and forefinger, blocking out whatever Vivien is saying, trying to decide if this is it, if I have finally to tell her the secret I’d promised myself and Maud to keep from her for the rest of my life. Suddenly I can see how dangerous such secrets can be. You keep them to protect people, but in the end they are even more destructive. I took away the truth, so over the years Vivien has filled the void with ludicrous ideas. Surely the truth will stop her raving about Clive or me murdering Maud and put her mind at rest.

“Vivien,” I say, gathering my resolve, “I have to tell you something.” She doesn’t answer, but gets up, slides her footrest over, and sits on it beside me. She’s very quiet and I know she’s ready to listen. What I am about to tell her will be a shock, a revelation to her, and I close my eyes so that I don’t have to see it on her face, the disbelief, the anger, or whatever else it might cause.

I say it fast and plainly: “Your mother was an alcoholic. That’s why she thought it was the kitchen door. She used to get so drunk that she didn’t know what she was doing or where she was going.” I keep my eyes closed, waiting to hear what she will say or do. But she’s utterly silent. Then, after a long pause, I feel her hand on my arm, squeezing it gently, willing me to open my eyes. She looks sad, defeated, even, and for a moment I think she’s about to burst into tears, which, I admit, is not a reaction I was expecting. But what she says next is far worse.

“I know that,” she says simply. “That’s why he murdered her.”

T
HAT IS IT.

“Stop it, Vivien, just stop it!” I’m shouting. “You’ve spent your whole life ripping this family apart and you waltz back here and start doing it again, even when they’re all dead.”

“Me? Ripping the family apart? I spent my life trying to hold us together.”

It annoyed me that she could switch our roles like that. “That was me, Vivien. I was the only one trying to hold us together. You fell out with Maud and then you fell out with Clive, and then you didn’t speak to me for forty-seven years. How can you dare think you tried to hold us together?”

“I fell out with Maud because I was trying to stop her beating you.”

“You knew?” I’m incredulous.

“We all knew, Ginny. Arthur told me what she was doing, and that you were too ashamed to say anything. And it had taken Clive too long to face up to how bad it had got. He couldn’t bear it. None of us could, and we’d all agreed we had to stop her.”

I’m struck dumb.

“And I fell out with Clive because in the end the bastard went for the most convenient solution. He pushed her down those steps to stop her beating you. Because she nearly killed you, because she probably would have killed you. But he didn’t have the patience or the time to sort out her drinking. He discarded her as if she were a specimen he didn’t need anymore.”

The whole world is flying round my head. Nothing seems to add up. How does she suddenly know all these things I thought she never did? I have so many different reasons as to why this is nonsense, but they all want to be shouted at once. They won’t line up in order and wait their turn.

“But—But, Vivien, even Clive didn’t know how bad her drinking was,” I stammer.

She shakes her head.

“And,” she continues calmly, “I fell out with you because I couldn’t help thinking it was all your fault. I couldn’t help thinking you’d ruined my life,
all
our lives—whether you knew it or not. But I wasn’t allowed to think that. Oh, no. Clive never allowed us to think that. You were always above blame, exempt,” she says. “We couldn’t rock the boat. We weren’t allowed to upset your delicate equilibrium because you might not be able to cope with it. Too much emotional disturbance wouldn’t be good for you. You had to be made to feel as normal as possible to build your confidence. We could never make any mention of your…peculiarities. Well, I think it’s all rubbish. I don’t blame you, no, but I think they were wrong about you. I think you can handle a little truth. It’s about time you knew, so you can accept some of the responsibility for her death.”

Responsibility? Vivien’s either gone mad or she’s trying to make me think I’m mad. I’m amazed that she’s believed this for her entire life. Poor Vivien. I can’t move a muscle. My back is resting against the wall, my hands making fists, pale and bloodless. I can’t even blink. Instead my eyes focus on the thick air in front of them, following the floating black specks reflected from the retina that dart back and forth through my vision. I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to have to listen anymore. I start to run, run away from here, away from myself, down the tunnel with the ball of muddled words rattling behind me, gaining, faster and faster I run, pursued by questions and words and torment until I reach the door to that place in my head. I heave it open and skip behind it, just in time to shut out the thunderous ball of noise and squall and disarray behind me. I know that Vivien is still talking, but it doesn’t matter anymore because I’m not with her. I’m slamming the bolts on the door into their catches. Alone at last.

I
DON’T KNOW
how long it is before Vivien comes over and puts her arms round me.

“Sorry, darling,” she softens. “I’m sorry. I do understand that it isn’t easy for you to find all this out suddenly.”

She says it as if there is no dispute, that the facts are clear; it’s just a matter of me getting used to them, assimilating them. I want to scream my frustration right into her face. She’s completely and utterly misunderstanding my point of view: she has no evidence for anything she’s saying. I’m a scientist. I need hard evidence. It’s just as likely—more than likely—to have been fabricated during years of bitterness in her own head.

I walk away from her, tired, suddenly overcome by the need to sleep. Besides, I’ve got other things to think about. I’ve got to prepare myself for Tuesday’s lunch with the entomologists. I have to check that our collections are in order and perhaps make a display of some of my most important findings.

CHAPTER
19

The Moth Hunter

I
DON’T KNOW
what it was that stirred me but I can see the moon outside, low and resplendent, drowning the stars with its brilliance. Has it been sent to wake me? Its stark light floods the valley so that, from where I’m lying in my bed, it seems that night has settled only within the house. I close my eyes wishing innocent sleep to come and take me back to abeyance. But I know it can’t. Welcome to the endless night.

My bedside clock says twelve minutes past midnight. I shift myself heavily to a sitting position and check instinctively that my wristwatches agree on the time, which they do. It’s then that I feel the burning within my wrists and hands. I look at my distended thumb knuckles, the covering of skin pulled papery thin, taut and shiny round the swelling. Spring is here. Spring is painful. I think of Clive filling the blue plastic washing-up bowl in the kitchen, testing that the water is warm but not too hot, then laboriously carrying it, sloshing from side to side, up the stairs and into this bedroom, to this bed, where Maud would be lying stiff with this pain. He takes her hands in his and eases them lovingly into the water, bringing them back to life with warmth and tenderness and massage. Both of my parents are silent, the silence of shared pain, but I can see Maud’s eyes, needy and afraid, finding refuge in Clive’s unfaltering dependability. He looks into the bowl, concentrating on her hands with sedulous care, and she relinquishes herself to the sanctuary of his silent strength and determination, placing all her trust in him. Safe, delicious memory.

I’m sitting in bed steeling myself to exercise my hands through their pain. It’s like a cramp when you know you have to stretch it out, however much it hurts to do so. First I try to curl my fingers into a fist, but the knuckles are so swollen they can hardly bend. It’s as I’m trying to straighten them, flattening my palms as far as they’ll go, that the events of yesterday glide back to me, uninvited. I feel something like dissent rising through my body, boring its way out, as I remember in a hum of voices Vivien’s accusation: that my father murdered my mother in calculated cold blood, pretty much under my nose. I forget, or rather forgive, for once, the pain dissolved in my fingers and in my feet, in their matted woolen socks, and in this private starkness I allow myself to add it up, just to see if the signs are there that it could be true—that Clive
did
kill my mother, and all because of me—and I find myself searching desperately for the ones that will prove it couldn’t possibly have been so: I saw her with my own eyes at the bottom of the steps and I saw Clive’s devastation. I felt her hands still hot to the touch, her neck soft and warm. I smelt the blood running through her hair and the stink of sherry on her. I phoned Dr. Moyse myself. I tried to save her myself. I’d seen Maud in the weeks and months before, in her drunken stupors, falling over chairs, walking into wardrobes and, once, into the pond on our upper terrace. I never suspected anything except that she’d had her final drunken accident. But I know I didn’t see it.

I hadn’t seen the fall.

I slide myself out of bed and ease my feet into my toeless slippers, which wait like sentinels by the bed. I shuffle slowly across the sloping wood floor, drenched silver by the moon, to the door and out onto the landing, beleaguered by unanswered questions. Vivien is sleeping in her room just along the corridor through the double doors ahead. I feel suffocated for an instant, just knowing she’s there, and it’s here, now, with sudden understanding, that I realize I don’t care about the answers. Did Clive kill Maud or didn’t he? Was it for me or not? It doesn’t matter anymore. It makes no difference now. The past itself is not important. The only thing that counts now is my memory of it. I feel an uncharacteristic flash of anger, a surge of heat through my cheeks: How dare Vivien come home and steal my safe, delicious memories? Three days ago my memory of life was of a complete and happy event—a blissful childhood, a warm, loving family, a blossoming career—but Vivien’s walked into my head and littered it with doubt and anger and turbulence. The past I used to know has melted before my eyes into something writhing and fluid, with no structure, no scaffold. I can never again think of my parents, my childhood or my life without the stains she’s spilt all over them. All I see now, as my father nurses my mother’s hands back to life, is the water turning red in the bowl.

The moon greets me again as I reach my lookout at the far end of the landing. It creeps furtively from behind a sparse and smoky cloud, as if beckoning me to follow. I like the moon and its cycles. I like the way that, although it seems to ebb and flow and come and go at will, it connects with the sun and the earth and the tides in a constant, rigid relationship. In reality there are no erring boundaries, no diffusion of loyalties.

Has Vivien really come home to torment me, to point out that I have been living in the wrong history, to push me into the correct scene of the correct painting? I have always had her interests in mind, especially when I have kept things from her. She had in mind no interest of mine when she taunted me with her twisted secret.

The thin cloud scatters, the moon’s rim sharpens. What is it that has changed in this silent still night? Everything feels different, not just the past. I see the moon—and the world—more clearly now. I look down with my new eyes at my matted wool socks and toeless slippers. Is this really me standing here at this window, in these old slippers?

I move away and come to the dark oak door behind which the spiral staircase twists up to the attic rooms. I don’t know why I’m easing the wooden peg that stoppers the latch in place. It needs wiggling back and forth a few times before it comes loose in my hand and the door swings open towards me. I watch as the moon’s blue light tumbles dimly in the dust up the stairs and, I don’t know why, I’m feeling my way in through the oak door and along to the outer wall of the spiral staircase where the treads are at their widest. Just to my right there’s a thick rope for a handrail but I don’t want to trust it. The stairs are steeper than I remember, so I’m leaning forward, using my hands on the ones above, as if I’m scrambling up a mountain. But I’m going slowly, one at a time, feeling and checking for splits and cracks and, although it’s just a short distance to the top, it feels like many minutes before I’m swallowed in total darkness and I can straighten, the door to the attic rooms—to the collections, to my life’s work—in front of me.

I know, somewhere to the right, there’s a switch that will light the room behind the door, and I’m feeling for it now, a bulky dome-shaped casing with a square lever in the middle. I find it and pull down. Light flickers into life behind the door, sharp knives of warmth cutting above and below it, accompanied by muffled movements. Disturbed wings.

There’s something about moonlight that makes you feel safe to entertain dreams and fantasies, something about its grim coolness that lights a somnolent path without adding color, and wandering in it can make you feel you are still in the realm of sleep, journeying through a different plane from the living. But the warm orange hue outlining the door in front of me invites me to wake properly, shows me the colors and shades of my world rather than merely its outlines. For a while I stand in the comfort of the darkness, knowing that answers are illuminated within. Vivien has never had the same trouble opening doors.

I sweep my hand through the thin shaft of light piercing the slit by the side of the door, splitting it with my fingers into individual rays, playing with it. Vivien would have been better to tell me nothing, because now I see more than she wants me to. I see myself in the past, as a child, as a woman, and I see how mildly I looked at life. But I also see her. I see her differently now. Once, I’d seen the charm and childlike simplicity in a young girl dreaming of our futures together; once I thought of a schoolgirl who loved her sister in a way that was inexplicable, twinlike, a visceral connection standing in a wall of solid granite that a lifetime of elements and abuse couldn’t scratch. But now I see the granite crumble before my eyes, disintegrate, like a cube of sugar in tea, letting out a little puff of steam that was once a driven bond of unshakable love. Could our entire sisterhood have been a farce, years of complicated deception, of endless assurances of love, charm and manipulation, all so that one day she could take what she wanted? To ensure she could have the use of my body, and tear from it the one thing she couldn’t have without me: a child?

And when she couldn’t have it, she abandoned me in the same way that, only yesterday, she had accused Clive of discarding Maud, like a specimen that was no longer needed.

I unbolt the door and push it open, and am blinded equally by resentment and fluorescent light. I resent Vivien for shattering my illusions, not only of my parents and my life but of
her,
for making me question her, her love, her loyalty, everything she has ever told me. As I cross the room I’m assaulted by decay, old memories and the ammoniac stench of bat droppings. Four pipistrelles hanging from the rafters above me shift uneasily. Caterpillar houses line the walls, exactly as they always have, mainly homemade glass containers, some tin, a few giant glass cider jars and a dozen or so old ammunition boxes, which Clive always claimed made the best caterpillar cages. A layer of rotten humus has collected at the bottom of some, made up of twigs, leaves and crusty discarded skins.

You might have expected the moths to take over, but there are no moths. This isn’t a chosen habitat for moths. It’s now home to bats, spiders and a pod of hornets, which have made a vast and beautifully constructed papier-mâché home right under the eaves, added to and undisturbed year after year. I’m left with just one question and it’s not how Maud ended up at the bottom of the stairs. It is simply whether Vivien has ever loved me as I have loved her, ever since the day the evacuees left and I saw that she was special. A beam in the far corner has collapsed with the weight of the roof above, opening a section to the sky. Some slates lie shattered on the floor below and insulation wool clings desperately to its plaster, hanging to the floor in a matted clump. And if she’s never loved me, if she’s only ever
needed
me, what is it that she wants from me now? Why
is
she here?

I move through this room and into the next—the emergence room—a corridor lined on both sides with muslin-clad breeding boxes, some still with sticks and mounds of earth and dried moss in them. It was to here that, each spring, we’d carry the pupae up from the cool warren of cellars that run beneath the house, where they’d wintered on trays or in boxes. We’d separate each species into these banks of cages so that they could breed on emergence, laying their eggs on the muslin. Each type of moth would need twigs from different plants, each emerged at different times and each required species-specific conditions.

Above several of the tanks are still pinned some of Clive’s meticulously devised care instructions.
PUSS MOTH
reads the first, and underneath is a list of chores
to be carried out each day without fail.

1. Ensure willow twigs are always upright and stable

2. Replace willow twigs every two days

3. Check if the chrysalis reacts to touch (3 days to go)

4. Temperature must not exceed 66.2°F

5. Mist twice a day with water spray

6. On emergence offer 2.5cc sugar solution on cotton wool

Clive typed out the instructions for each species, then pinned them around the room so that there could be no mistakes and no excuses. At least four times a day one of us would check that the strategically placed thermometers, barometers, electric heaters, dishes of water and ultraviolet lights were providing the exact conditions necessary for the time of emergence. It was our spring rota. Vivien found it a bore and didn’t necessarily subscribe to the miracle that Clive would have us believe was about to ensue. But I took my duties very seriously and would hurry back to Clive to report that I’d found one tank had been a degree too warm or too cool, or that I’d felt a draft blowing on the back of another. Together we’d record the findings in his Observation Diary and look forward to seeing if it had any effect on the moths’ emergence.

Clive recorded everything, and that, he told me many times, was the key to being a good scientist and especially a good lepidopterist.

When the time (and the temperature, light and humidity) was right I spent many hours in the attic, waiting for the earliest signs so as not to miss the miracle. It starts as a vague movement deep within the chrysalis, the faint twitch of a shadow. And then the noises start. Cracking and crunching, like boots on dry leaves, or the snapping of twigs, unimaginably loud for such a tiny, tireless creature as it works its way out. When many were emerging at the same time, the chorus of noise was astonishing. It would keep me awake at night in my bedroom a floor below. Within an hour the lid of the chrysalis was detached and I’d have my first glimpses of the animal’s shiny wet head as it emerged through its trapdoor, wriggling, shouldering and heaving its way into the world. Once free, it crawls up the twig I’ve positioned for it with two small wet buds saddled across its back. At the top it stops and, like petals unfurling, the buds open and unfold, fanning out into large flat sheets. The newly awoken creature hangs them out to dry until finally they turn to delicate wings of light parchment. A moth is born.

I’d record everything, just to be a good scientist.

I
WALK THROUGH
this room and then through the library, dusty reference books in perfect alphabetical order, and finally into the “laboratory,” a small dusty space with the far wall sloping down low to a round north-facing window. It’s a museum to time. A Formica workbench runs round the room at waist height and on it, side by side, are two relaxing trays crusty with dried chemicals. Next to them a scalpel rests on a dissecting board, dirty, as if Clive and I were still at lunch. A long rack, fashioned by Clive and holding small, delicate tools, stands against the back wall of the bench. Each implement slots neatly into a hole small enough to stop the bulkier handle dropping through it. In front of the round window is Clive’s homemade version of a fume cupboard. It’s just a glass box with the room’s window as part of its back wall. Clive would use his most noxious chemicals in it and then he could open the window behind to let out the fumes and aerate the tank.