The Sister (5 page)

Now someone is coming heavily down the stairs and I hear Vivien shouting “Thank you” from the landing. I’ve moved back to the teapot and cups, and as the driver passes the kitchen doorway, he pauses, taking a firm hold of the door frame with one hand and leaning into the room. I’m focusing on his hand, wishing he hadn’t put it there, thinking I’ll have to scrub it pretty hard after he’s gone to get him off it. Then I look up and briefly catch his eye. This might sound strange to you, but that fleeting contact unnerves me; I haven’t looked a stranger in the eyes for an awfully long time now and it at once feels domineering, intrusive. Does he know I’ve been listening? Instinctively I drop my gaze to the floor, inherently apologetic, but a moment later I wish I hadn’t as his other hand shoots up in a firm, friendly wave, and I realize I’ve misread him. He calls out cheerily, “Good-bye, then,” as he passes. I want to answer but I’m not quick enough. I feel like a little girl again, back at school, waiting for the ridicule, the scorn, and never being fast enough to reply.

Did I tell you it was Maud who taught me the self-control that I desperately needed when I was teased? She told me about that place you can go in your head, a place you can walk into and barricade up so no one can come close and you don’t need to listen and you don’t get hurt. Of course, I had to learn to hold my breath while I ran down the tunnel away from myself. All I hear is the pounding of my footsteps, and their echoes, echoes of echoes chasing up my heels and the rushing of the dark wind screaming past my ears, blocking out all other sounds. Distant voices merge with the rushing wind; unidentifiable sounds, incomprehensible meanings in a constant faraway flow, like a ball of thunder yelling along the tunnel behind me, collecting and bulking as it rolls, gaining on me in speed and size and momentum. Until at last I reach the end, stepping into a room of my own, heaving the door closed behind me, shutting out the rushing wind, the ball of noise, the cascade of footsteps and echoes and nonsense. Safe and secure, I can bolt the door slowly. Confidently. One iron rod at a time, from top to bottom, slamming them firmly into their catches, unrushed and unflustered. There’s an infinite number of bolts, so I am able to slide across as many as I want to give me the comfort I need in hearing them snap shut, one by one, until finally, when I’m alone, all I can hear is my own serenity. I have found composure. Peace. I can breathe again, silently and calmly. And I can check: Has it stopped? Have they gone?

I wait and listen to the car as the door is slammed, the engine starts and it purrs off along the drive, leaving Vivien and me alone. I hear the car reach the end of the drive, stop, then turn left into the lane, its engine straining up the steep hill and briefly becoming louder again as, at the top, the lane curves nearer to the house. Then it’s gone, and as I glance out of the window, I see I am unable to make out the beech hedge just four yards away. The house is stranded in thick fog. And, apart from the sonorous ticking of the two hall clocks, silence.

Normally I would have welcomed this fog, by no means uncommon in the Bulburrow valley. As it swallows the house, it makes me feel safe, a blanket of warmth and security, asylum from the rest of the world. But today, it doesn’t seem to bring me its usual solace, as if isolating Vivien and me from the rest of the world has made our own separation more stark. The thing is, I’m just not used to knowing someone else is sharing this house with me and, it might seem absurd to you, but I’m finding it most distracting. My concentration has shifted from its solitary focus on my life, to what each of us is doing in relation to the other. I could quite easily convince myself that Vivien and I are alone on this world, inextricably linked—nothing else exists and the other is our only hope of refuge. I’m waiting to hear her walking, talking, shuffling, anything, but I hear nothing. I’m transfixed by the silence, staring at the stagnant fog outside, empty of thoughts, existing in stillness, in a space somewhere else.

I
T’S JUST AFTER
four o’clock when I hear a lorry pull up outside the house. Vivien never came down to drink her tea. I wander into the library—with its walls of bare shelves—where I’ll have a better view from the window, and finally hear Vivien on her way downstairs. Like an apparition through the fog I see the outline of a small lorry and can just about make out the hazy black lettering on the side,
R & S FURNISHINGS, CHARD.
Two young men jump down from either side of the cab, screech open the tailgate and carry a small single bed, in pieces, into the house and up to Vivien’s room. Then they collect a small table, a basic rack to hang clothes on, two lamps—one of which they bring back and return to the van—and some other things that I can’t see clearly. I spend the entire time listening and distracted, uncharacteristically preoccupied with a growing need to know what’s going on.

They stay upstairs for a while, and from my listening post at the bottom of the back stairs I can hear them doing what I suppose is putting the bed together, muffled voices talking and, at intervals, laughing. I can’t quite catch what is being said, but I feel strangely compelled to stay and listen until well after I hear the men leaving in their van.

“G
INNY, DARLING
, there you are,” Vivien announces as she strolls into the library a while later. “I fell asleep earlier. Utterly zonked,” she says. “It must be the country air.” She’s behaving as if she doesn’t realize she’s stood me up for tea. Perhaps she doesn’t? I’ve forgotten how exhausting I find it to predict other people’s frame of mind or to assess their general humor.

After my moment of thought, I say, “It’s probably this house. I’m always falling asleep during the day.”

“Well, we’re up now. What do you say we make pizza? I’ve bought some bases and lots of different things to go on top….” She fades as she walks back into the kitchen with me following. Should I have thought of what we’d have for supper tonight, her first night? How did she know I hadn’t?

I’ve never made pizza before. In fact, I don’t recall eating it either, although something holds me back from telling Vivien that. Her furniture outburst was such a surprise, I’m not so certain now how she might react. Privately, I’m thrilled we’re having pizza. I’ve seen it so often on the leaflets that come and I’ve always wanted to try it. We spend as fun an evening as I can remember, deciding whether olives go best with ham or with mushrooms—or both—and how much cheese is needed. We also discuss our hands—she’s got arthritis too, but not yet as severely as me—curious to inspect each other’s, almost competitive to claim the harder time of them, and we exhaust the comparisons of pain and pain relief with which we’ve learned to live. We agree that we can’t do buttons and that zippers are so much easier, and what we really need is a shoe horn with a really long handle so we don’t have to bend over when putting on our shoes. She tells me she takes an aspirin every day, which her doctor told her keeps the knuckles symmetrical, and she promises to give me some anti-inflammatories she’s been prescribed.

So we fuss and fiddle about hands, feet and pizza, all very pleasantly, and then we eat pizza, pleasantly too, sitting in lazy chairs in the small study behind the kitchen, warmed by a fire we’ve lit in the hearth and by the company we’re offering each other. But now here’s something surprising—neither of us refers to the missing furniture, or asks each other any of the more searching questions we know there’s plenty of time to ask later. For instance, why it is now, after all these years, that she’s decided to come home?

CHAPTER
5

The Monster, the Thief and Pupal Soup

T
WO DAYS AFTER
my sixth birthday I found a monster of a caterpillar among some dead leaves on the second terrace of our south gardens. He was extraordinary: as fat as a shrew and twice the length of my finger, mostly an apple green but splattered with blotches of white, purple and yellow, with a shiny black, sharply hooked tail. I watched him for a while, as I thought Clive would do. He looked gorged, fit to burst, taut in some places but flabby in others, and even then, at six, I realized he had the most unusual manner.

I’d seen the way caterpillars behaved normally on open ground. Prime and juicy targets for birds, they race purposefully along, stopping only sometimes to rear up on their hind legs as if to peer about, surveying the area for the direction of their next meal. My caterpillar, however, was sluggish, heaving himself across the ground oddly, first in one direction, then another, and when he tried to rear he’d get halfway up before his great, torpid body would come slapping down to the ground, exhausted by the effort. He was going nowhere and finally I scooped him up, together with the leaves he was on, and put him into the front of my jumper, which I’d shaped into a pouch. Holding the jumper with both hands, I ran back to the house to show my father.

Just as I got to his study door I stopped, so entranced was I to see that the creature was rearing up at me in a display, stretching itself to its full five inches and waving its legs, dancing in a sudden fit of writhing energy. Then, even as I stared at it—you’re going to have to believe me—I began to see bulbous warts rising up along the length of its back, swelling and bubbling like thick boiling treacle, and within a minute I counted eight. Then the warts began to seep.

I’ve never been more afraid, before or since, and I was still riveted to the spot, holding my jumper stretched out in front of me, when Clive came out of his study. He saw me staring down, my face pale with horror, as if I were watching my insides spill out of my stomach. He peered over me. “Where did you find him?” he asked, neither alarmed by its appearance nor delighted.

“Underneath the lilac,” I whispered, not taking my eyes off it lest the revolting creature start to shimmy up my jumper. Clive straightened and, rather than help by taking the damn thing off me, he started into one of his lectures.

“It’s a Privet Hawk-moth caterpillar,” he said. “They also like lilac. And ash. It wants to pupate and that’s why you found it on the ground, rather than on the bush—”

“No, it’s not,” I interrupted sternly, astonished that an expert like Clive was unable to see the difference. “I’ve seen lots of Privet Hawks,” I said, stretching my jumper to get it as far away as possible. Clive had even bred some in the attic last year. “And they’re green with purple, white and yellow stripes,” I said, “not blotches. And they’re smooth, not lumpy.”

“Well, that’s why this one’s so interesting,” he said as, at last, he gently retrieved it from my jumper in a silver serving spoon. “He’s shivering, he’s sweating, and look”—Clive unfixed a needle from where he kept it in his lapel and pointed with it at some slime by the creature’s anus—“he’s got diarrhea,” he said, smiling at me. He took it into his study and I hoped he might throw it in the fire, but instead he returned a moment later, carrying it in a biscuit tin lined with moss and covered with glass. He sat me on the stairs outside his study and put the tin on my lap so I could watch the caterpillar through the glass.

“If you want to see something interesting, don’t take your eyes off it,” he instructed.

I sat on the stairs outside Clive’s office with the tin on my lap, entranced for the next two hours. The caterpillar gradually darkened and soon I watched it spontaneously rip itself apart, starting behind its head and continuing to split itself open, right down between its eyes, the skin on both sides falling away to reveal the shiny mahogany pupa underneath. As the skin continued to fall off, pairs of legs, a moment ago walking, became instantly inanimate, hanging down limply, a discarded costume. There was nothing unusual about that—I’d seen caterpillars pupate many times before—but it was midway through when I began to see something new. The caterpillar’s shiny new underskin started to burst all over in tiny little uprisings, one at a time, a gash here, a gash there, and then all over, and out of the holes popped the writhing, tapered heads of a totally different creature’s larvae, tiny translucent maggots hungrily eating their way out of the caterpillar, devouring the body alive, from within. I continued to watch, transfixed by the most sordid feast you could imagine, as these small larvae not only gorged themselves on caterpillar but also ferociously cannibalized one another whenever they met.

Before long those larvae, in turn, had pupated and the biscuit tin was swarming with flies under the glass, the huge body of the once Privet Hawk caterpillar half devoured by the flies’ forgotten forebears. Later Clive told me they were ichneumon flies, that their mother had stabbed the skin of the caterpillar and laid her eggs within it, so that when they hatched they wouldn’t be short of food. The caterpillar had become a living hamper.

Well, that momentous event at six years old thrilled and disgusted me so much that I have been fascinated by these creatures ever since. The moths didn’t interest Vivi so it was always me, rather than her, who volunteered to help Clive during the busiest times of the year and it was me, rather than Vivi, who followed him into the profession. Clive often told me that I’d make a great lepidopterist. “It’s in your veins,” he would say. “Nobody can take that away from you.”

It turned out he was right. But it wasn’t until a few years later, at Maud’s annual harvest drinks party, that I understood it was my vocation. I’ve always been taciturn and have never liked parties, so Maud, as usual, set me up offering people nuts from a tall glass dish and there I was, satelliting the room, hoping to be ignored. Even then I found eye contact with anyone outside of my family almost unbearable so, as I stuck out the dish for each little group of guests, I stared at the hands coming in to appropriate the nuts as if I was monitoring their takings.

When I came to Mrs. Jefferson, the rector’s wife, I recognized her instantly from the waist down. She was a rotund, weatherworn, boot-and-skirt kind of woman who, when she had an opinion, let it be known. She would have thought it rude to ignore me, so, while she took four nuts in her fingertips, she asked what I was going to do when I grew up. I liked Mrs. Jefferson, and of course I would always have answered her, but I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. I’d never thought about it. I was still studying the delicate frosted rim of the glass dish, searching for my answer, when Maud cut across me—she often talked for me—and said, “This one? She’s going to follow in her father’s footsteps.”

Mrs. Jefferson bent down so I had to step back a little to give her room. “So it’s moths then, is it, Virginia?” she asked at my ear level.

Is it? I thought.

“Yes, moths,” Maud answered resolutely from above us.

Mrs. Jefferson straightened and I went on to offer my nuts to a huddle of people by the window.

From that day on everyone seemed to know that that’s what I was going to do. Maud, having said it, had cast the future in stone. Many years later, when Vivi and I were expelled from Lady Mary’s, it was a foregone conclusion, an undisputed assumption by everyone, even me, that I’d become my father’s apprentice.

Vivi was fifteen when she was expelled for pilfering bananas from a box beside the fruit delivery van as it dropped off supplies to the school kitchens. She tried to argue that she simply had them a little earlier than she would otherwise but Miss Randal, the head, saw it differently. Randy had worked out that this must have been a long-term plan, with Vivi timing the delivery each week and taking notes of the man’s progress as he went in and out with boxes. Vivi was not only a thief (Randy said you either are or you aren’t, it’s part of you, like your nose shape) but it was a premeditated heist and there was only a cursory difference between this and a bank robbery (one leading to the other sooner or later). It was all about principle, Randy said. She made Vivi stand up in morning assembly in front of the entire school and say ten times, “I’m a thief.” Vivi thought it was funny but I cried for her in the back row and at the hopeless injustice of it all.

Maud received the letter expelling her lying, thieving daughter on a Monday morning and by lunchtime, having hurtled through much of the West Country’s narrow, high-hedged lanes, she was banging on Randy’s door and making such a fuss that Ruby Morris came running to class 6M to tell me that my mother was trying to kill the staff.

What happened next, and why I was also expelled, I’ll never know the truth of. Maud said she’d been so enraged by the abominable way Vivi had been treated that she’d taken me away too, as a sort of punishment to them, she said. But Miss Randal told me that thieving was inherent and that the same characteristic might possibly show itself in me too, at some point, and it was part of her job to protect the school against the inevitability of future occurrences. When I looked unconvinced she told me that, if I wanted to know the truth, I was only there in the first place because Vivi was there. We’d come as a package, she said, so we’d have to go as one.

I was in her office and she was standing with her right fist on her desk as she spoke, her arm locked straight like a fulcrum for her stocky body, swaying back and forth with the pressure of a long and troublesome morning. Behind her hung a vast print of an oil painting, an elephant charging at full pace out of the canvas, and I was just waiting for it to hurry up and mow her down.

When I told Maud about Randy’s sister package, she went berserk, said it was nonsense, that she’d never heard such tripe, and after that she swore rather a lot whenever Miss Randal was mentioned. Then she lectured me about how clever I was and what a lot I had going for me, which, I have to say, both my parents did frequently. They never seemed to offer the same compliments to Vivi.

What surprised me most was that Maud wasn’t at all cross with Vivi for stealing the fruit in the first place. She said that seeing some bananas in a box outside school kitchens and helping yourself without asking was hardly an expellable crime. She accused Miss Randal of trying to find any excuse to get rid of us. She said the school was prejudiced.

So, according to the school, I was expelled too, but to the family I’d left in protest and in allegiance with my little sister. It’s one of my most glorious memories.

Clive had said we didn’t need any more schooling; we were clever enough as we were, so I knew that, after the long summer, I would at last become Clive’s apprentice.

I haven’t made many active choices in my life—I’m not that sort of a person—and I’ve never resisted anything that life’s thrown at me, or even thought to steer it in a particular direction. I’m one of the lucky ones who are carried along and life falls into place by itself. It was as if my eventual success was printed at the beginning of time in the universe’s voluminous manuscript, a very small part of the wider big-bang/collapsing-star theory. I was always going to be famous, even if I’d tried to resist it. Did I tell you I’m actually quite a famous lepidopterist?

Mrs. Jefferson would never have predicted it. Vivi was supposed to be the one to make something of the life she nearly lost when she was eight, not me. I just fell into it, and now my name will be heard for many years to come, whispered through the corridors of one eminent institution or other, citing my papers or my expertise in practical experimentation, the insight of my deductions or the acuity of my hypotheses. I hope you don’t think me immodest to imagine that those praises would now have spread around the world within the most highly regarded entomology circles, in all the leading universities, societies and other elite academic establishments. Even here, in the small farming community of Bulburrow, they’ve heard of my reputation. I believe that here I am commonly known as the Moth Woman—after my late father, the Moth Man.

C
LIVE DID NOT FOLLOW
directly in his father-in-law’s footsteps. The way I saw it, Clive was the first of a new breed of lepidopterist. He was
not
a collector and did not wish to be regarded as one. Collectors want to complete a collection. Some want to pin all the species to be found within an area, others want just one species, but from all parts of the country, while others still are rarity hunters. As long as the specimens can be grouped together in some sort of unified classification and the quantity in that categorization is a finite number, then, without doubt, that group will be collected.

Clive’s goal was different from that of his colleagues. He didn’t care about collections and—between you and me—he didn’t care much for the insects either. Clive wanted to find out how nature worked. He was concerned with all nature, but he had chosen the moth as the subject of his research because, he said, it is an ancient animal whose evolutionary pathway is much older even than that of a butterfly, which, in biomechanical terms, is a lot more sophisticated. He wanted to know how a moth ticked, how all its intricate little processes make the thing live, die, breed, eat, move, molt and metamorphose.

There was a fundamental difference between the way that the collectors and Clive (and those like myself who came after him) studied these insects. Collectors have one goal in common: they are looking for the perfect unadulterated specimen, with flawless markings and anatomical composition. An insect with an aberration, say a spot too few or a spot too many, or any other imperfection or handicap, would be discarded at once. The point is, my sick Privet Hawk caterpillar, the one that I found on my third day of being six, would have been thrown, by a
collector,
straight into the fire in disgust.

To find out what makes a moth
a moth
it wasn’t the perfect specimens Clive was attracted to. He appreciated earlier than all of them—Thomas Smith-Ford, Robin Doyle and the D’Abbrette brothers—way back in that slow postwar era, that it was nature’s
imperfections
that we needed to study to discover the secret codes of inheritance and genetics and other biological mechanisms. Clive used to say you find out more about a machine when the machine goes wrong and, to him, that’s pretty much what a moth was—a little robot that one day could be reduced to its biomechanics, a formulaic equation; every little piece could be pulled apart and laid out on the table, rather like the pieces in a construction kit. He wanted the moth’s entire formula, such as