The Sister (4 page)

Vivien sits down to rest on the stone bench that lines the porch and puts the dog on her lap. We’re utterly exhausted. I allow a wave of nostalgia to sweep through me like a revelation. It was Maud and Vivi who used to fill this house with laughter. Sometimes, as I listened distantly to their late-night conversations, I envied how they could make each other laugh, and now, sitting here in the porch with Vivien, I’m aware for the first time that part of me went missing a long time ago, that without her I’d become a different person and I’ve just had a taste of who I used to be or even what I might have become, had she been there.

The dog on Vivien’s lap gnaws the top of its paws, cleaning them, scrunching its upper lip in a concentrated effort to get into the gaps between its claws. I’m watching him and wondering if his paws have ever been dirty, if he’s ever been allowed to walk, or if cleaning them is something dogs are programmed to do, whatever their state. To tell you the truth, I’m usually most wary of dog owners. In general I find them loud, meddlesome people, who invariably love their dogs in an unhygienic sort of way.

“This is Simon, by the way,” Vivien says, following my gaze. “You won’t even notice him. He’s very old and I’m sure he won’t last long,” she adds.

I don’t know whether to thank her for the reassurance that he will die soon or to say I’m sorry about it. Or to admit I’d almost stopped noticing him already. Instead I look at the creature and try to screw up my nose in a way that is supposed to indicate that it looks like a very sweet dog, like the faces people make at babies. By Vivien’s reaction—or lack of one—my expression doesn’t look remotely genuine or, worse, she doesn’t register that it has any meaning at all. She looks away as if she’s just witnessed me picking my nose.

I am, and always have been, hopeless at social expression. Our mother, Maud, was a master. She’d say all the right things and make all the right faces at exactly the right times. For it to come so naturally, I think you need to start believing you’re earnest even if you aren’t. I can’t dupe myself like that; I’m too straightforward. If I don’t believe it, I can’t say it. It’s partly why people don’t feel comfortable around me, why I’ve always found it difficult to fit in. I can’t work out if it was something I was never born with or something I’ve never learned.

Clive wasn’t socially skillful either, but that was because he never made an effort rather than through lack of understanding. Clive preferred silence to small talk, but Maud could do both. She was instantly able to judge the person she was with and adapt herself to suit them.

Once, when I was twelve and Maud and I were buying me stockings in the ladies’ wear department at Denings in Chard (for a barn dance that she was making me go to with Vivi), she rushed up to a fat, exhausted-looking woman with a pram and bent down over her new saggy-looking baby. Then she looked up and said “Oh, isn’t she
g-o-r-geous
” (in the only way she would—really loudly), so that everyone in the shop turned and stared at us. Her insincerity was so blaringly obvious that I thought they were staring because she’d made a fool of herself. Later, while I was hiding alone in a dark corner of the dance, I resolved to let her know, kindly, so that it didn’t happen again. When I did, she stroked my hair and thanked me lovingly. Years later, I realized I’d been wrong about the other shoppers: The ladies’ wear shoppers hadn’t questioned Maud’s feigned delight for a second. Maud had thought to give the tired new mother a little gift of encouragement, a ticket to confidence. The mother had pulled herself up and smiled and, while I was tugging at Maud’s trousers to encourage her to leave, that woman had felt warm and wonderful and worthwhile inside. What I want you to know is the part that baffles me isn’t that Maud lied for someone else’s benefit, or that she didn’t let herself admit it, but that none of the other shoppers questioned it. They understood instinctively why she was complimenting that baby, as if they all belonged to the same club, born knowing club rules.

Vivien stands up and walks past me into the house and up the stairs, instructing the driver to follow with her bags. I’m still in the porch and I’m starting to wonder so many things at the same time, like a small child beginning to question the world. I wonder if she’s as immaculately dressed every day; I wonder why she wants the east wing; I wonder if she too is plagued by arthritis; I wonder if she’ll remember to miss the second from last stair, which squeaks (Vera had once told us it was groaning in complaint after a century of being trodden on, and we’d made a pact to let it rest for a generation); I wonder what Vivien’s left behind in London; I wonder if this is the start of another special bond, like the one we had many years ago. Most of all I wonder why she’s decided, finally, to come home.

From the doorstep, I look up at the east windows on the first floor. Vivien appears and stares out disconsolately, without seeing me. Beautiful, warm, fun-loving Vivi. Finally she’s back at Bulburrow.

I
’M STILL OUTSIDE
when Vivien comes downstairs, followed by her obedient driver. “Darling, what happened to the house?” she asks reproachfully.

“Oh, it’s beginning to fall down,” I say, feeling wonderfully at ease with my sister.

“I mean all the furniture. Were you robbed?”

I’d forgotten she hadn’t seen it like this. Selling the furniture has been such a gradual process. Bobby came once every few months and took another load in his transit van. I met him first when he worked for the water board and had been sent to fix a series of leaking pipes on our land. Three days later, when he’d finished the work (and all my biscuits), he told me he owned an antiques shop in Chard and suggested he sell some furniture for me. When he’d got rid of it he came back with an assistant and loaded some more, the heavier oak pieces, and then, a few months later he took more, until his visits became fairly regular over the last ten years or so. Each time he paid cash for the items he’d sold. It was an excellent system and it suited me. I converted assets into grocery money without having to use a bank or go to town. I lived amid my own cash pot! I laugh out loud at the thought, still giddy with exuberance from our doorstep hysterics, as if I’ve become tipsy on a single sip of wine.

“It’s become my pension,” I quip, readying myself to laugh again.

But Vivien isn’t laughing. “You sold the lot?” she gasps, her darkly rimmed eyes widening in disbelief. The change in her throws me. Alongside the makeup, I find it impossible to judge if she’s being serious. I look at Simon, who blinks, incapable of offering any clues.

“Well, I’ve kept all the clocks and barometers that work, and Jake’s head,” I say, motioning to the stuffed pig’s head on the wall as we walk in. (To tell you the truth, Bobby had said he didn’t want it, but now I’m glad. Jake was Vivi’s pet pig when she was about six, and she was so upset when he died [of unnatural causes] that Clive had his head mounted for her so she could see that he was smiling happily when he died.)

I smile myself at the long lost thought of Jake, but Vivien can’t hide her disappointment. “But Virginia, do you realize”—she says this like Maud would have done, slowly and emphatically, Do…You…Realize—“you needed only to sell the Charles the Second chest in the hall for your pension? Or the settle, or the sideboard, an Aubusson tapestry, a few caquetoire chairs…” Her voice rises until it cracks. She sits heavily on the porch seat, as if the very idea has whipped her legs from under her. “Or a fucking painting,” she half shouts, half cries. “But
everything
?! The house was crammed with furniture, Ginny. Furniture,” she says again, waving her arms in front of her, as if painting it back in its place. “Furniture, rock-crystal chandeliers, dressers,” she rants, in a senseless naming game of anything that springs to mind, “carpets, canteens, silver, vases, mirrors”—she pauses for breath—“porcelain, that, that oyster mirror just there”—she points at the bare wall in front of her—“the William and Mary…” She puts up both hands to cover her face. “
Priceless
furniture, Ginny.”

I assure you I am now in no doubt of her seriousness. I understand that it’s been a shock, and one she had never expected, but I’d never have guessed it would affect her so deeply. Why is it that as people grow old they cling to possessions and let go of knowledge? After all, it’s only furniture. Each generation has spliced down Samuel Kendal’s original estate, first the land, then the estate houses and the outbuildings. Surely the unnecessary hordes of contents are a natural progression? Besides—and this is just between you and me—I don’t think Vivien’s thought it through. She thinks there’s a legacy to continue, poor woman, but it’s all over now. Vivien and I are the end of the line, there is no
future generation.
It would have been split up and sold off after our deaths, free money for the government, if it hadn’t been sold already. Perhaps she’s slightly doo-lally—our own father went demented much younger than this. I try to reassure her, as I used to when we were little. I always enjoyed comforting her.

“But it’s completely, absolutely, entirely empty,” she complains, as if there are recognizable degrees of emptiness. “No pictures, no clothes, no photos. I mean, you’ve wiped out every reference to our past. Our family might not have happened. There was no point in its existing for the last two hundred years if it’s got nothing to show for itself.”

It is an interesting view but not one I share. Is it really necessary to record your life in order to make it worthwhile or commendable? Is it worthless to die without reference? Surely those testimonials last another generation or two at most, and even then they don’t offer much meaning. We all know we’re a mere fleck in the tremendous universal cycle of energy, but no one can abide the thought of their life, lived so intensively and exhaustively, being lost when they die, as swiftly and as meaningless as an unspoken idea.

“I don’t mind, Vivien, really I don’t. I never used all those things and I don’t want the clutter. I feel far better off without it,” I say softly, sitting next to her. And I mean it. I found the furniture stressful. I didn’t want to look at it for fear it needed cleaning or I’d discover a scratch that I’d not noticed before. Since it’s gone so too has the constant tightness in my stomach, and I find the house and the space much more manageable. Vivien drags her hands down her face, smudging her eyes some more, and pushes her lower cheeks up with her fingers, making her mouth a duckbill. She seems to come to some sort of resolution.

“Oh, darling, Ginny.” She sighs, more relaxed now. “That was our family’s…our ancestors’ entire collection of furniture, of belongings, of everything. It’s taken nearly two hundred years to accumulate.”

“I haven’t sold any of the moth books. Or any of the specimens, or the equipment,” I say quickly, a little too defensive. “The museum and the lab and the other attic rooms haven’t been touched.”

Vivien nods slowly.

“I forgot. You’ve always been hopeless with money, haven’t you?” she vituperates. “You should have phoned me about it, you really should,” she says wearily. She speaks as much to the flagstones on the porch floor, smoothed deliciously wavy with wear, as to me. I don’t reply, not because I agree—I don’t even have a telephone—but because it seems a good place to end the conversation. And, believe me, I desperately want it to end. I want to salvage our laughter, the excitement and euphoria I felt all too briefly. It’s irrelevant, anyway. The furniture has gone because I wanted it to, and I needed the money. It was my choice, and that’s that.

Now I’m irritated with myself for becoming defensive. After all,
she
left all those years ago and
she
invited herself back, and now she’s disappointed with a decision I made and says I should have phoned her for advice. I remember now how Vivi sometimes patronized me, but I used not to mind. I always accepted that she was worldlier than I and, actually, I quite liked it, as if she was looking out for me. It was part of her color, part of her quality. Now that I’m self-sufficient, now that I’ve achieved my own goals in life, I find her criticisms more difficult to stomach. I force myself to stop thinking about it. I don’t want to ruin our reunion.

I tell her I’m going to make us a cup of tea, then go inside to put the kettle on the Rayburn to boil. We are going to forget about the furniture. We are going to drink tea and talk, reminisce and laugh, and she will tell me funny stories about her life in London. I will sit, listen and relax, live them all through her and we’ll laugh again. We are going to catch up, and what a lot of time we have to catch up on! Vivien was right. She was always right. The kettle starts its whistle, faint and hesitant at first. It was her idea for us to live together again and it feels natural that she is back as we near the end of our lives, companions and soul mates, devoted and inseparable. The kettle is now screaming at full steam, shrill and desperate. I slide it off the hot plate.

CHAPTER
4

Belinda’s Pot

V
IVIEN AND
I haven’t spoken to each other since our dispute about the furniture. I’m focusing intently on the tea-making process so that I do not have to look up and see her walking back and forth past the open kitchen door talking on her mobile phone, or her driver carrying her boxes and bags from the car into the house and up the stairs. I’m impressed that Vivien has such a phone, that she’s kept up with the times like that. I pour until the teapot is a quarter full.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Simon, the small dog, trotting presumptuously into the kitchen. He stops next to me and wrinkles his eyes, ingratiating himself. I ignore him frostily and, accepting that he lacks the skills required to change my opinion of him, he takes himself off to lie by the Rayburn, first circling over his chosen resting place, then flopping to the ground.

Holding the handle in my left hand and moving it in a small circular motion, I swish the water inside the teapot while my right hand cups the outside, high up, waiting to feel the water’s heat through the bone china. I study the pattern of small, prettily entwined wildflowers that ramble up from the base to the lid, while willing the swirling water to gain enough momentum to reach up the sides in its circuit inside the pot. To be honest, I have no idea why the china must be warmed or whether the tea really does taste better for it, but it’s those little tenets your mother teaches you from an early age, which her mother instilled in her at a similar age, that become the most difficult to let go of in old age.

The teapot is an elegant one, tall rather than fat. Although it was Maud’s, we’ve always called it Belinda’s teapot. I don’t know the details—I never knew the old woman—but the story went that Belinda had left it to Maud in her will as a way of thanking her for whatever help, advice or listening time Maud had given her, as my mother was naturally predisposed to do. During her lifetime, Maud came to fulfill the role of village consultant and appeaser. It was she who wrote, for instance, requesting more prisoners of war to help bring in the harvest at Peverill’s farm and later, she who quelled the uproar when Charlotte Davis’s horse was found trampling the graves in St. Bart’s churchyard and later still, she who deflected the bloodshed when Michael gave the Axtells’ youngest daughter a cannabis cigarette. Maud would counsel, correct and court-martial. She’d offer coffee at Bulburrow after church on Sundays, give a twice-yearly drinks party and open her garden for a week in the summer. Maud loved people. She understood them and liked to surround herself with them, whether to entertain or to help them. Vivi always joked that our mother wouldn’t survive without doing things for other people.

All in all, I’d say Maud was a near-faultless woman. She had just the right amount of wisdom and wit and charity. Taller than her husband, she was also the sort of woman who looked elegant in whatever she wore, from her gardening clothes to her dressing gown. She had rows of mid-length floral dresses in her wardrobe, full-length sequined evening wear, long and short boots and hats and gloves for every occasion. Maud loved occasions.

Clive, on the other hand, was neither sociable nor well groomed, but he was not allowed to hide himself away. He trailed along to all the local events and gatherings and would smile wryly when Maud introduced them playfully as “the lady and the tramp.” As I said, Maud would be dressed immaculately, while Clive would walk out in one of his two lifelong gray suits, which hung off him from the days when he ate more and were frayed at the collar and cuffs. Sometimes it seemed as if he dressed shabbily on purpose. Once—and I can swear to this—he wore his slippers to a luncheon in the neighboring village. He said there were fewer holes in them than in his shoes, but Maud teased him all afternoon as if she was enjoying his deviance from the social etiquettes she observed so stringently herself. After a few drinks, Maud became the soul of the party, and sometimes I’d see Clive watching her adoringly from afar, entranced by his wife’s charm and vitality. But Clive himself—who never drank because he said it gave him gout—was also surprisingly popular, especially with the ladies who mistook his inadvertent nonconformity to be furtive antiestablishment, which excited them in 1950s Dorset society.

I
PUT TWO
of the new pyramid-style tea bags into Belinda’s pot. Michael bought them for me instead of leaves two weeks ago, explaining that the extra effort required in dealing with the loose stuff was unnecessary, these days. My immediate instinct—as you can imagine—was to resist the novelty, but I tried it and found the bags so much easier to handle with the poor grip control I have in my fingers. I used to have such trouble, especially on those mornings when my fingers curl up with pain, in keeping the leaves on the spoon rather than shaking off and skidding all over the counter. Then, when I’d maneuvered as many as I could into the infuser, the trap that stops them free-roaming the pot, I’d fiddle about for several exasperating minutes trying to close the catch to shut the little devils in, only to be given yet more trouble hooking the tiny link over the pot’s rim. In the end the strength of the tea was more dependent on my deftness for delivering the leaves into the tea trap, rather than consistent with my own preferences to taste, and often I’d have to start all over again. Now that I’ve tried the bags I’ll never go back to the loose. Michael is trying now to convince me that teapots aren’t necessary. I’ve been pretending I agree with him, to avoid having to discuss it, but between you and me, Michael knows nothing of the satisfaction in the ritual of making tea.

I fill Belinda’s pot with boiling water and put on the lid to let it brew. Perhaps today it would have been better to deal with the leaves. I’d have had a longer task to concentrate on, to take my mind off what Vivien is doing and thinking. She’s now upstairs making shuffling noises and wandering between the room directly above me and the one over the pantry that used to be her childhood bedroom. Her driver is carrying up the last of her belongings.

I take down two cups and saucers from the dresser and fetch the milk from the fridge, arrange them by the steaming pot and wait. I won’t pour the tea until she comes down, or it might get cold.

I’ll tell you a strange old thing that I’d never have predicted. I can feel the start of Vivien’s and my relationship re-forming again, but—and this is what is odd—it’s
exactly
the same as it was half a century ago, as if we’ve not matured at all, as if our childhood is flooding in and scrabbling to catch up with our old age. Here I am again, leaving the decision with her, waiting for her to judge whether our little altercation is over and to resume our reunion. Vivien sets the rules and the boundaries, she takes the risks, and I’m there waiting for her when she needs me. I’d almost forgotten that that was my role.

Those sisterly boundaries shifted when, two years after Vivi’s accident, we were sent to Lady Mary Winsham’s School for Girls. Maud gave us a little talk the night before we left for our first term. “I want you to look after each other so that if either of you gets into any sort of difficulty,” she said, looking at us sternly, one after the other, “you know that you can go and find your sister and talk about it.” As I was the eldest, I was sure she was asking me, especially, to look after Vivi.

Our parents thought that if we started at the same time we’d be a support to each other, but as it turned out, Vivi didn’t need my support. While she started at ten in the lower fourth and found herself instantly popular with the forty other new girls, I was the new girl at thirteen, looking for a niche in a long-assembled year group where friendships and alliances had been brokered for three years already.

The school was an hour’s journey away, and at the start of each new term, Vivi and I were squashed up with our trunks in Clive’s light blue Chester, which he’d converted into a mobile moth-setting station. He’d ripped out the backseats to make way for a setting table that he’d bolted to the floor, so Vivi and I squeezed in on either side of it and worried that our heads might bump if the road got rough. Bottles of bromide, cyanide, ammonia, sodium nitrate and other noxious potions rattled casually in the back, loosely tied into a rack, while nets, traps, pins, scalpels, water baths, corkboards and other essential mothing equipment were arranged neatly in boxes and strapped down elsewhere. By today’s standards, Clive would be vilified for carrying such vast quantities of poisons alongside his children on bumpy country roads, but in 1950, Clive’s mobile setting station was the envy of his colleagues. It had everything required for killing, anesthetizing, relaxing, color fixing and setting moths when they were fresh from the field so he was able to prepare them before the common problems of wing damage, color change and rigor mortis had time to set in.

Lady Mary’s was where well-brought-up girls might “acquire manners, posture and conversation” and a little bit of education. Each week our MPCs (manners, posture and conversation) were graded and suitable punishments set if they were found to have a low average. Even so, during my time there, I never found any evidence of manners in that school. Instead, I was severely subjected to the underhand taunting of an all-girl environment.

The first small incident took place during my second week, when I challenged Alice Hayward who was squishing flies for fun, flies that were desperately vying for freedom through the 5B windows, and I appealed to her to let me open one for them. Within seconds she’d managed to get the whole class laughing at me. The incident instantly marked her out as a leader and sealed my fate, stamping out any hope I might have held of making friends—all because I wouldn’t hurt a fly.

I wasn’t quick-witted or confident enough to play them at their cruel games. I’d feel the heat rush to my face as I fumbled for a rebuff, and I’d become highly aware of my heavy bottom lip, the position of my hands, of my entire body, and I’d end up looking silly and uneasy. I’d walk away hearing the other girls snigger, and it hurt. I didn’t cry, but each time it changed something in me, deep down, shaping who I was and who I would become: each time less confident yet stronger; more insular yet more self-contained.

During the holidays I confided in Maud, who held Clive fully responsible for my not being able to cope with the gibes of other teenage girls. “I’m afraid you’ve got a bit of your father in you somewhere, darling,” she’d say remorsefully. “He’s not a fighter either.”

Although I loved my father dearly, I didn’t see it as a great compliment to be told I’d acquired any of his characteristics. On first impressions, Clive might seem no more than a small, dull man, but once you knew him, he was an interesting sort of dull. He was a uniquely two-dimensional person, either uncommonly interested in things or uncommonly uninterested. For instance, he wasn’t interested in food so he wouldn’t waste much time on it. He’d eat once a day at most, usually in the evenings, and even then he would often get up halfway through, distracted by a matter of greater importance that had come into his head, such as bleeding the library radiator or planning the order in which the vegetables were to be planted. He was punctilious about those things that interested him, yet completely chaotic with everything else, such as the mess in their bedroom, or a broken window which he’d Sellotape up as a long-term solution.

Maud tried her best to help me overcome the difficulties I had fitting in at school. First, she invested much time and energy persuading me to be proud of myself, giving me the confidence to see my best sides and not worry about what other people might think. She’d hold my face and make me look directly into her eyes, as if to hypnotize me. “Don’t you ever forget,” she’d threaten, “you’re a beautiful, intelligent and kind girl. They’re just jealous because it’s so rare to be all three.” She’d often end with something like “Now you go back out there and show ’em,” as if I was acting a part in a play.

Second, she’d do all my fighting for me. She never did it for Vivi—she said Vivien could fight for herself—but if I told her I wasn’t happy about something she wouldn’t hesitate to glide into the event and, with either charm or aggression, sort it out. Then I was labeled a sneak, which left me with the greater problem of judging what, and what not, to tell her.

Whereas Maud overcompensated for my unpopularity, Vivi clearly couldn’t cope with it, so, during term time, I didn’t see her much. When we did meet, it would be near the bins behind the changing rooms in the quad, or in the third cubicle in the central loos. Maud had hoped we’d help each other at school but Vivi didn’t need any, and I understood that she couldn’t possibly offer me the kind of help I needed. I didn’t blame her for a minute but I missed her company terribly. Each time we traveled the bumpy country lanes to the far side of the county, packed between the poisons, I was saying good-bye to Vivi as well as to my parents for another term. I yearned for the school holidays when we’d do everything together once more. I never told Maud about Vivi’s term-time desertion. Somehow I knew that she would have been devastated to hear of it.

O
UTSIDE THE WINDOW
I can see the fog creeping in. The light is fading even though it’s mid-afternoon.

Vivien and her driver are talking upstairs. I can just about hear their muffled voices. I’m watching one of the last faint ribbons of steam funnel out through the teapot’s spout and, I have to say, I’ve been wondering if she’s planning not to come back downstairs at all. I had thought, briefly, of taking the tea up to her but I couldn’t possibly. She’s on the other side of the landing from my bedroom, through the glass-paned double doors, and I’ve not been in that part of the house for more than forty years. I doubt I’d even be able to. I wouldn’t feel safe. It’s not for superstitious reasons, I’m far too levelheaded for that. It’s just not what I call the Normal Order of Things. I do like Order.

As the tea is made and I’m lost for anything else to do, I wonder if I go to the pantry and put my head against the door frame, I might be able to hear something of the conversation she’s having. I try all sorts of positions and, although I can’t hear her very clearly, I gather she’s on the phone, a one-sided conversation in which I think she’s thanking someone for their help. Her voice tails off as she walks away, her footsteps telling me she’s heading down the corridor towards the small bathroom, just left of the landing door. I catch up with her movements as I get to the hallway beneath her and I hear her ask her driver if he’d “reach up for it.” I’m surprised to find that as I creep between the two pantries, the back stairwell and the kitchen, straining to hear her movements and the other noises above me, I can visualize a little of what she’s up to.