The Sister (8 page)

“I think you should let her go to London to do a secretarial course,” I blurted.

I think Clive was about to say something when Maud cut in. “You do, do you?” I thought she almost laughed. “And why is that?”

Clive only seemed interested in the leads of his pencils. He looked intent and serious as he took them out of the drawer one by one, pushing the tips against the pad of his middle finger to gauge their sharpness. I wished he’d join in and have an opinion for once on something so important to Vivi.

“Because she really wants to go and do this and I think it’s unfair not to let her. She’s not going to be happy here—and I won’t be happy either, if she’s so sad,” I said.

“Oh Ginny,
reeeally,
” said Maud. “Don’t you worry about Vivien. She’ll be fine.” That made me want to shout at her, to tell her to stop saying it, to tell her that Vivi was far from fine—had they not noticed how unhappy she was? But the words got stuck in my head and never made it out.

Maud looked at Clive again. “Vivien put you up to this, didn’t she?” She sighed. Vivi had told me Maud would say that.

“No.”

“Well, she’s fifteen and she’s not going anywhere,” said Maud definitively.

I glanced up at the boarding above the door to the kitchen and imagined Vivi’s hopes soaking into the rafters behind it.

“She’s going to stay right here and—”

Maud was interrupted by Clive slamming his desk drawer back into place. “Sorry,” he said, because the noise had broken off our conversation. “Virginia, thank you for coming to tell us.” He stood up. “Now, if you could leave us, your mother and I will think about what you’ve said.”

Of course I didn’t believe him. He hadn’t seemed interested in the slightest in what I was saying. I wanted to stay. Vivi would be disappointed I hadn’t talked for longer; she’d say I hadn’t tried hard enough. I wanted to think of a way to prolong the conversation, put forward a different viewpoint, anything to make them reconsider. But Clive had cut me short. He’d made it clear he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Perhaps he had blunt pencils to attend to, I thought unkindly.

I waited nervously in Vivi’s room for her to come back and tell me what had happened next. The wall by her bed was plastered with posters and postcards and messages from her friends. The posters were an odd mix of animal pictures and film stars that she’d pulled out of magazines. A funny one of a donkey in a boater, with holes cut out for his ears, was right next to Ava Gardner drawing seductively on a cigarette.

When Vivi came back she told me she’d heard their entire conversation. Apparently Clive had told Maud to let Vivi go to London, although I couldn’t imagine him being so forthright. They’d had quite a row about it, but in the end she said Clive had put his foot down. His decision was final, and he didn’t want to hear another word about it. I was surprised. None of it sounded like the Clive I had seen, the one testing his pencil leads. I wondered if she was making the whole thing up.

Vivi leaned her head back against the wall next to a recalcitrant-looking James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause.
She’d never seen his films so I thought it was extraordinary that she’d cried so hard—along with most of her friends—when he’d died in a car crash last month.

“What did Maud say?” I asked.

“She was worried about you and me not having each other, but Clive told her she should stop being so silly, we were going to have to go our separate ways at some point.” She looked up at James Dean—his jacket half undone and a defiant, ungovernable look on his furrowed brow—as if really only the poster could understand.

My room was painted yellow, and I’d not put anything on its walls. When, a few weeks later, Vivi left for London, I remember I felt that, somehow, her bedroom wall displayed how much I was going to miss her.

I
AM STANDING
on the landing, with my head bent as far back as it will go, steadying myself with my right hand on the dado rail and staring up at the ceiling. I’m following her footsteps above me. Now she’s in the museum rooms, walking slowly, stopping. Something scrapes along the floor. Forty-five seconds later I hear her in the attic library, more shuffling and scuffing, then silence. The thud of a book landing on the floor. Now she’s in the storeroom, which isn’t above me but above the other landing, the one that’s out of my boundary through the double doors. Faint, faraway noises. Now she’s heading towards the laboratory, I think. A gentle tapping. Silence.

All of a sudden she’s coming, walking across the ceiling directly above me with purpose, towards the top of the spiral staircase. I hurry down the main stairs, leaning heavily on the thick banisters as I go, and twice splash a little milk out of the glass onto the stairs, but she’s coming fast. Now she’s on the landing. I sidestep off the bottom stair into the little study, close the door and sit quickly on the padded leather seat of the fire guard, poised awkwardly with my glass.

Vivien opens the door and walks in. My heart is still racing. I am surprised that, only three years younger than me, she is so much sprightlier. She came down two floors almost as fast as I came down one. “Oh, hello,” she says. “Well, you weren’t wrong. It really has been emptied, this place, hasn’t it?” She sits down on the window seat. “They even took the marble hearthstones in the drawing room and the main fireplace.”

“Did they? How odd,” I say, meaning it, and lower the glass of milk from my lips as if the thought had made me change my mind about drinking it. What had Bobby wanted those for? I wonder. He wouldn’t have been able to sell them, surely. They were made for this house.

“The fireplace. The hearthstones.” Vivien sighs in disgust. “Imagine that!”

I try.

“What does it look like? What’s underneath the hearthstones?” I ask her.

“Well, it’s just a great big hole. They must have been very thick slabs of marble. It’s like…well, it’s like a great big grave, darling,” she says grimly. “I was wondering, Ginny, did you keep anything of Maud’s, any little personal thing? I’d really like something of hers.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I reply.

“Are you sure? How about a perfume bottle…or a gourd? Just something to remember her by.” I’m studying the milk in my hand. My hand—and the outside of the glass—is wet from when I spilt it earlier so I hold it away from me. If it drips it’ll do so on the floor rather than on me.

“A shirt you’ve kept to use as a rag?” she offers.

“There are lots of Clive’s things, all his equipment and the observation diaries and recording books—”

“I don’t want anything of Clive’s,” she snaps. “I’d rather not be reminded of him, thank you,” she adds callously.

“Vivien!” I say, taken aback. “I know you think he favored me but he loved you too, whatever disputes you two may have had.”

She looks slightly disgusted. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she retorts, firmly but not unkindly. “He spun a little silk cocoon around you like you were one of his specimens.”

“Oh, that’s absurd. We just worked together, that’s all.” I’m shocked she has such a wrong impression of our father.

“He made everyone roll over for you, Ginny. Even the world would have had to go round the wrong way if necessary,” she adds.

I don’t know what she’s talking about. I never imagined we could have such opposing memories of Clive. I don’t remember any times that he went particularly out of his way for me, or anyone else, for that matter. He was always too embroiled in his work. I think she makes things up in her head. I’d always thought Clive was impossible to dislike. He was such a passive person, quiet, I’d go so far as to say unnoticeable, most of the time. He never had a strong opinion on anything outside his work. Or if he did, I certainly didn’t notice. He got on with his own business and didn’t meddle much in anyone else’s, and I couldn’t see how he could have caused offense to anyone. I probably understood him better than Vivien because I worked with him and we shared more interests. That was what it boiled down to, different interests, and I’d have thought she’d realize that. I try to brush it off lightly. “Vivien, we both know Clive couldn’t have made anything much go round. He was so entranced by his own little world.”

“What do you mean?”

I thought it was obvious. “Well, he didn’t have a clue what was going on anywhere in the house apart from his lab.”

“What, Clive?” She laughs scathingly. “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong person, Ginny. Clive could smell a rat in the pantry from that lab,” she says.

“A rat in the pantry?”

“Give me that milk if you’re not going to drink it. It’s dripping over the floor,” she says, changing the subject, and I’m glad; I don’t want another pointless argument. I also don’t want her to realize that I’m not drinking the milk, that it was a prop to help me spy on her, so I put the glass to my mouth and tip the milk up a little without actually sipping any. She’s watching me so I pretend to take some more, this time tilting it farther, until I feel the milk covering my lips. I wish I’d used something I don’t mind the taste of. The way she’s looking at me, I think for a moment she might have guessed I’m only pretending to drink it, but when she winces and says, “Do you want to go and wipe off your milk mustache?” I know she hasn’t seen through my milk prop after all, so I can stop.

Vivien follows me into the kitchen. “So, is there anything of Maud’s?”

“No, sorry,” I say. “Nothing.”

CHAPTER
8

The Apprentice

M
Y OFFICIAL INITIATION
into the world of entomology, as Clive’s apprentice, in the autumn of the year that Vivi went up to London, was to accompany him to London to give a popular lecture at the Royal Entomological Society. It was called “The Response of the Barred Red to Differing Spectrums of Light.” Clive instructed me on how and when to change the slides, and the cues he would give to let me know when to show an exhibit.

He wasn’t looking forward to the lecture one bit. “Popular” meant that anyone could attend, and Clive didn’t have much time for part-time enthusiasts. He himself, having had no significant further education on the subject—past his chemistry degree—and not working under the auspices of an institution, would also have been labeled an “amateur,” but he liked to think of himself on a par with the academics. It was the only thing Clive was ever snobbish about. He had been given a doctorate and was awarded grants in the same way that university professors were, and although he hadn’t yet made any astounding discoveries, he was well known for publishing a great many papers on wide-ranging subjects, from species dichotomy to the extraction and assaying of a great many of those minor biochemical compounds he’d painstakingly identified.

Clive said amateurs were made up of ex–medical men (who were, at the very least, educated), ex–military men (who were only interested in collecting beautiful specimens to display alongside their medals) and clergymen (who had far too much spare time, were all too often argumentative and dictatorial and at odds with everything—killing and collecting, evolutionary theory, the ferocity of nature). He told me he wasn’t looking forward to the same old questions and arguments from this latter section of the audience, and within twenty minutes of the start, an eager, smooth-faced man with spectacles and a reduced chin challenged him.

“Are you suggesting that the moth has no say in whether it approaches the light or not? It doesn’t make up its own mind, its actions are absolutely determined, and there is no decision-making process?” he said, in a much-rehearsed manner.

“Good afternoon, Rector,” Clive began, and I wondered which one, out of all the rectors Clive had mentioned or Maud had laughed about, this might be. “Yes, I believe that insects are not capable of making a decision,” he said.

“But…but, Dr. Stone, we’ve all seen a caterpillar making single-minded decisions, whether it’s searching for a place to pupate, burrowing an underground chamber, spinning a silken sling or wedging itself into the nook of a rotten tree. Surely, before the preparation for its pupation, it must have
decided
to pupate,” said the rector.

“No.”

“No?” The rector appeared superficially aghast and looked about the room in a bid to rally support.

“I think you know, Mr. Keane, that I believe it is involuntary,” Clive replied quietly. So it’s Keaney, I thought. I knew all about him. He’d never made a sermon without reference to a moth hunt. He set light traps in his Cotswold church and would stop a service to check them, then enthuse to his congregation.

“Involuntary? What, like the muscles that pump our hearts? You really believe that insects are living automatons? They have no emotions, no sentiment, no interests and no mind?” the rector continued with practiced eloquence and feigned disbelief, his voice rising in volume and tone for crescendoing drama.

“I do,” Clive said, as though it were a vow.

“Not even a conscious purpose, Doctor?”

Clive was on trial. He scratched the stubble on his neck with nervous irritation. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not even sure
we
have a conscious purpose.” The room broke up with appreciative laughter, but I knew it wasn’t a joke. Clive didn’t make jokes, and certainly not quick-witted, belittling ones like that. He continued earnestly, “Of course we’d like to believe it, to make our existence more meaningful.”

I saw a group of people in the front row lean forward to exchange glances like naughty schoolchildren not understanding why they were having a telling off. I was sitting on a chair up at the front in the shadows beside the projector and took a long look at the entire audience.

Maud had told me once that Clive was a misfit among misfits. She didn’t like these people. She said they adopted pet names and idiosyncrasies to make themselves more interesting. They’d hone the eccentric characteristic they wanted to be known for and, if they were lucky, it soon became synonymous with their name, to be cited in the same breath: “Ah, I know Dr. Toogood, he’s the one who stirs his tea with surgical forceps.” “Oh, of course, Lionel Hester, who pins his moths on his hat when he’s out hunting.”

Maud said they were often under the infuriating illusion that, as eccentrics, they might also be regarded as geniuses, or at least hoped to be mistaken for them. She said she had finally understood their collective affectations when Major Fordingly (who kept a pet seagull) once quoted grandiosely to her: “To distinguish between eccentricity and genius may be difficult, but it is surely better to bear with singularity than to crush originality.” Well, Maud thought,
surely not.
She said it was better to admit who you were even if it meant admitting you were dull and had a dull little hobby, rather than covering it up in a pathetic attempt at some sort of singularity. Of course, Clive was different. Maud said Clive was the only one who didn’t try to be eccentric and was.

From where I sat in the shadows of the stage, I looked at this room of charlatans and tried to spot any of their fabricated habits.

“So these creatures are just machines to you, are they?” someone from the midst of the bearded auditorium asked Clive.

“By definition not machines, no. They are living. But I believe every action an insect makes is due to a reflex, a taxis or a tropism. Their existence is purely mechanical.”

“So an ant lion chews a struggling ant with no more emotion than a machine mangles a man’s hand?” the chinless rector in the front eulogized loudly and poetically, still trying to elicit emotional outrage in the room.

“Yes.”

The rector stood up to address the entire room.

“A caterpillar has no idea why it’s spinning a cocoon or making a chamber for itself in the ground?” he continued, throwing up his hands with Shakespearean effort.

“Exactly,” Clive replied in a quietly bored tone.

“So if a female moth saw her own larvae, she wouldn’t recognize them as hers or even understand that they belong to her own species or class of animal? She has no parental feelings?”

“Love, you mean?”

“Yes…love.”

“Oh, I don’t know about love,” Clive said, a little more roused. “I think many animals exhibit love for their offspring.”

“Well, there you go,” said the rector, sitting down heavily and slapping his hands on his knees in a show of triumph.

“It’s just that I believe
love
itself is no more than a mechanical process,” said Clive, once the rector thought his victory was settled.

“But love is an emotion, Dr. Stone,” the rector replied with a certain asperity.

“Yes, and an emotion is merely the symptom caused by a particular chemical being released into your brain and central nervous system, which, in turn, acts on other parts of the brain to elicit this feeling.”

“Your beliefs are more far-fetched even than I thought,” said the poetic rector in a final irate judgment.

I could see Clive was glad that the matter was closed and he could continue with his lecture. He didn’t want to argue with these people. He just knew what he knew, but, unfortunately for him, what he knew had always attracted impassioned opposition.

Afterwards everyone gathered for a drink, to discuss the lecture and to catch up with news of butterflies and moths the country over. I was glued to Clive’s shoulder and he introduced me to everyone we came across. When he led me over to Bernard Cartwright I was relieved, finally, to see someone familiar. Bernard often stayed at Bulburrow—either to discuss his latest research with Clive, on his way down to the West Country for a field trip, or as a family friend for the weekend. Bernard was a proper academic. He was a professor at a London college, and a few months ago he’d isolated a caterpillar hormone, one that initiates molting, so he was now a household name in that very small and exclusive collection of entomology households. He was addressing a group of men as we approached.

“A gland secretes a hormone in our heads, which actuates a nerve, which then activates a muscle, all involuntarily, without us knowing,” he was saying.

“Congratulations on your paper, Bernard,” Clive interrupted, shaking his hand.

“Thank you, Clive. Good talk, very lively as usual. Hello, Virginia,” he said to me, then leaned down to whisper in my ear, “do you like the way your daddy gets them going?” as if Clive had goaded them on purpose. Then he laughed loudly and I winced as a fine mist of spittle engulfed my face.

“So, Clive, what do you think makes the gland secrete the hormone in the first place?” said one of the men in the group.

“Most probably something that has not yet been discovered,” Clive said.

“That’s ducking the question, if I may say so.” Another laughed.

“No. I could speculate if you like,” said Clive, “that it was another hormone, one released as a coefficient of a mechanical process, like growth, perhaps. Before Bernard here”—he nudged his ally—“found the hormone that loosens and releases a caterpillar’s skin at certain stages of its growth, you probably thought that a caterpillar
decided
to shed its skin—voluntarily—when it was getting a little uncomfortable, a little too tight? We now know it wasn’t
thinking
of shedding its skin, and I’d say there’s probably a lot more thinking that the caterpillar is given credit for.”

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t agree with you,” said the same man.

“No, I know,” said Clive, satisfied once again with a cease-fire, and the conversation drifted on to something else.

I looked towards the acclaimed Bernard. He was a truly ugly man. He was short with a pan-shaped face, a tiny nose in the middle and tiny eyes too. Bernard must have been slinking up to middle age but seemed younger on account of his plump cheeks and shiny-skinned complexion and his reputation for hailing round the countryside on a Triumph motorcycle. He had a loud, inappropriate laugh but, I thought, at least he was cheery and a friendly face. Whenever he visited Bulburrow he’d always take notice of Vivi and me, and make conversation or sit down for a game of dominoes, unlike some of Clive’s more stuffy colleagues, many of whom would walk in and ignore us. (Maud said most of them ignored her too; they were weird about women, she said.)

When he saw me looking at him he sidled up, slapped his hand on my back and pulled me a little closer to him. “I’m glad to hear you’ve joined our team,” he said privately to me, as he ran his hand down the length of my back. Then he caught my eyes and held them, his puffy face a few inches from mine, so I couldn’t possibly avoid pitying the extent of his unnatural ugliness.

I assumed he was waiting for some response.

“I’m glad to have joined the team,” I replied with a hiccuped laugh and an idiotic smile. It was all I could think to say.

“Great,” he said. “Great. In this game you need allies, so remember I’m an ally.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling again.

Then he ran his hand from the small of my back down over my bottom, which he grabbed lightly and shook a little. And then he left it there. I didn’t know what to do or say. I felt a little heat rise in my face and we both turned our heads back at the same time to resume being part of the group’s conversation. His hand still lightly cupped my bottom but our bodies were too close for anyone else to notice. Was it familiar friendliness? Or a consequence of a tight space? Or was I being fondled? The answer wasn’t as apparent as you’d imagine. We were squashed more or less into a corner so space was a little limited, and that confused my judgment for a start—the intimacy that’s tolerated on a packed bus isn’t on an empty one. All the options ran through my mind: He was protecting me from being pushed farther back into the wall. There was nowhere else for his hand to go. He’d merely forgotten it was there, as our familiarity over the years had deemed my bottom not a particularly personal place.

I was further prevented from reaching a conclusion by Bernard’s own puzzling behavior. He seemed to be listening so intently to the conversation in the group, with his head strained forward, that I was convinced he couldn’t possibly be thinking about his hand, so it was most probable that he’d just forgotten where he’d left it. A genuine mistake it may have been, but I couldn’t help but feel a strange hand cupping my bottom was oddly uncomfortable. I clenched my bottom muscles a couple of times, hoping he’d feel the movement and realize his mistake—the equivalent of a sharp look of distaste—but he merely shifted it a little, so intent was he on the conversation going on in front of him.

“You think a dog has instinct, don’t you?” a walrus-like man asked my father.

“Yes.”

“So where do you draw the line in the animal kingdom between those that have developed instinct and those that haven’t?”

“I don’t. All animals have instinct. The difference is most of them don’t know about it. The thing that sets us apart from other animals is self-awareness. And don’t ask me where, in the animal kingdom, I’d draw the self-awareness line, because I couldn’t tell you, but you can be sure it won’t be distinct. It will be a question of degree, and there will be lots of animals with only a little self-awareness.” Clive rattled off his thoughts without pause for breath, and I realized he’d said the same things many times before. He went on, “What do you think makes decisions for a pupa when it’s in liquid form? There’s no brain left. It’s a primordial soup. Surely you don’t imagine Pupal Soup can think. Its genetic coding orchestrates the proceedings, like a key opens a door. It’s not a decision-making process.”

A throng was now gathering round him, like a dissatisfied mob, and I could tell he was increasingly uneasy, as he stepped up the frequency with which he scratched his neck beard.