The Bad Sister

The Colour of Rain
, Emma Tennant's first, and regrettably little-known, book is a masterpiece of affectlessness. Yet as this writer has grown into the voice that has consolidated her reputation, it's the opposite of affectless. So soaked and stung with sensation are the subsequent works of Ms Tennant that the reader sometimes has to come up for air. To read her is to feel oneself in the grip of something as absorbing and impossible not to respond to as a close family.

So it is with these three books,
The Bad Sister, Two
Women of London and Wild Nights
. An impression of fertile claustrophobia intensifies when the works are read one after the other. I recommend the experience, which this book, bringing the three together physically in one binding for the first time, makes simpler than it has heretofore been.

But be prepared for little more than a shared binding in the way of easiness, or of ease. For Emma Tennant has the authentic knack of tapping into one's mental and nervous wiring, more especially if one is a Scot. So marked is this disturbing affinity – she is a Scot herself, of course – that even her authorial tone is observably split in these works, that are themselves deeply consumed by the old Scots problem – and beauty – of doubleness. Crudely (and there is something invigoratingly crude about her work; when anything pretty is present, you may be sure it's not there for ornament) the voice in these three tales is either hectic, vivid and to a degree mad, or rational, buttoned-up, apparently healthy and more than a little rigid. This makes for a bracing choppiness in the reader's mind, adding to the generally untrustworthy mental weather.

Such a manner sits satisfyingly with Ms Tennant's chosen matter in these books, since she has addressed herself in
The Bad Sister
and
Two Women of London
to two unquestionable masterpieces of the Scots macabre,
The
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
and
Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde
, and to a tale of a Scots family, ‘sensitive as oysters', in the third.

All these stories are thoroughly frightening in the reading and even more so in retrospect. Even if we are not Scots, we are forced to look in the mirror and see ourselves. What we see is our best and worst selves, or, to put it another way, ourselves being fought over by good and evil. Jean Hastie, the sensible Scots lawyer of
Two Women of London
, is even writing a monograph on Original Sin. We cannot but be reminded of Sandy Stranger, Miss Brodie's ex-pupil, now Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, who is also the author of a morally and fictionally crucial dissertation.

The Bad Sister
exceeds the common run of tribute-fiction in fusing not only the central themes of its inspiration with our own times, but introducing an illuminating contemporary preoccupation, the professionalised study of psychological illness.
The Confessions of a Justified Sinner
is certainly a psychological novel.
The Bad Sister
travels with its themes and makes us ask new questions of them. So too with
Two Women of London
, which develops Stevenson's immortal study with well-integrated enquiries into the use of drugs to treat mental states and of the countervalent roles laid upon women in our society.

One of the strengths of Ms Tennant's writing is her thrilling disjunctive oddness. On account of the atmosphere she works up, her fictions are placed in a time that is of our time but not too daringly within it, so the immemorial nature of the books' depths do not feel wrenched into modern dress, even when, as in
Two Women
of London
, the setting is wilfully susceptible to fashion, being two adjacent crescents in Notting Hill Gate.

When we have finished
The Bad Sister
, we do not know what has happened; we have merely been shown various
ways to interpret what has happened. This is highly satisfactory. Ms Tennant has resisted the temptation to fix what may not be fixed. We have read of the murder of Michael Dalzell, a Lowlands landowner, and his daughter Ishbel, by his bastard Jane, six months her half-sister's senior. The murder is, though, but a flaring up of the continual chafe of what has been kept dark against what is allowed to be seen in the light. Names – Gil-Martin, Marten – summon up old stories and enhance the air of a haunting. Somehow the most concretely worldly figure, the affected over-feminine mother of Jane's boyfriend, is absolutely the most terrifying, with her white petal hat and high white shoes and little pearly powder compact into whose silver gaze she tries to fit her tiny monkey's face. Tennant achieves perfectly the ascendancy of this kind of monster over the – paradoxically cosier – coven of witch-figures by whom Jane has been raised – or has she? Is she the victim-slayer of her more fortunate sister, or is she a wicked psychopath? Are the instructions for the execution of evil she receives internal or external? Even as we enjoy the sensation of sharing in Ms Tennant's world, of catching her habits of perception, we concur with the wretched girl murderer, who is also a girl-murderer, in her cry, ‘Oh why did I see doubles everywhere?' In Jane's mad world we see reflected our own, conceivably no saner worlds. There are mirrors everywhere, doing no more than mirrors do, showing us ourselves that are yet, ‘as they say', none of we.

Two Women of London
starts, like
The Bad Sister
, in the company of an apparently reliable narrator. So we must be wary. In this cosily liberal and comfortably politicised part of London, a rapist is abroad. We meet the women of the parish, introduced to us by means of a pared-down list of
dramatis personae
, on whom the tale will put flesh. At the heart of the community and of the book is Ms Eliza Jekyll, who is, as we have learned to say, fragrant. Implicit of course in that word is the warning – let the smeller beware! We are made yet alerter when we see that the name of her occasional cleaner is Grace Poole.

Mrs Hyde is the obverse of Ms Jekyll, a hag, a child-basher, a punished member of the almost-underclass. Yet nothing but an intake of breath divides them. This unsettling story has many strands. While I have enjoyed its satire ever since it was first published, I have come enduringly to admire its evocation of the efforts a woman must make to be the dream of herself others hold in their heads. At face value an entertainment, this is a horror story in the bone, and one as close to you as your other self.

Both these stories are explicit in their naming of the enemy as grey. In this they are tonic, as they are in their stern verve, against depression, a condition in which the world notoriously grows grey.

Wild Nights
owes its title, I hope I'm safe to say, as much to the man who rides by whenever the moon and stars are set in Stevenson's poem as to Emily Dickinson. This story is a feat of the kind of sustained heightened descriptive writing all too many writers do, and do badly at that. That it also owes something (if you don't know what, so much the luckier for you; you'll get the magic neat) to Emma Tennant's family history should not in any way cloud its burning originality. Descriptive writing of a high order is not often to be met in contemporary fiction.

There may be some problem in the perception of description as somehow, in its most derogatory sense, feminine. It's as though description were make-up, as though it clogged the springs of action, the virile workings of plot. Of course, good descriptive writing is not extrinsic but intrinsic to the thing described. It is a condensing of the essence of the deep-down thing.

In
Wild Nights
, a tale of old love and family friction, you will encounter some of the most usefully intense descriptive writing of the end of the last century. Hills hang over a valley ‘like axe over block'. Nuts of sealing wax crack, giving a scarlet dust. Eyes have been ‘cut all wrong', an archduke's murderous car is a grandee's prized possession, and always the close texture of the turf of Scotland is present, set at its heights with white heather and cloudberries, and swarmed
over at its lower reaches by what this born, visceral, author calls ‘the tripe of humanity'.

At once violent and cool, these books have rooted themselves firmly in the intellectual landscape they were constructed to inhabit, and they look like staying there.

Candia McWilliam

Title Page
Introduction
The Bad Sister
Dedication
Epigraph
Editor's Narrative
The Journal of Jane Wild
Insomnia
I'll Have To
Where Was I
Gala Lives In
I Slekt and I
Monday. Tony Had
Meg's House Was
Tony's Mother Was
I Woke the
I Write This
Editor's Note
Two Women of London
Dedication
A Man Lies Dead
Editor's Introduction
Cast List
One
Two
Editor's Postscript
Afterword by Jean Hastie
Wild Nights
Part One: North
When My Aunt
Part Two: South
When the North
About the Author
Copyright

For Hilary Bailey

IN THE EARLY
1950s Michael Dalzell was a young man. He owned estates in the Borders of Scotland and a small house in central London, and when he decided to marry, as we can see from this photograph, he chose as his bride a fair-haired girl of the same class as himself. The newsprint is smudged with age, but she is pretty if prim. The caption says the honeymoon would be spent abroad – but another clipping from a gossip column announces they have decided to settle immediately on their Border estates. At any rate, whether the couple went abroad or not, a daughter was conceived, and born in Scotland. A quarter of a century later both father and daughter were murdered, victims of ‘political murder' at the hands of a woman who seems to have been a daughter of Dalzell. This strange case – for the killer was never found – has been the subject of many TV documentaries and journalistic ‘reconstructions', but until recently the original wedding photographs, and police photographs of the corpses, and bewildered statements from friends of the family have been all the evidence available. Now, two changes have come about. Several of Dalzell's old friends have been prepared for the first time to give an account of him at about the time of his wedding, and in the course of doing so have casually mentioned ‘a collection of women in the hills'; and a friend of ‘Jane' (the supposed murderer) has filled in a good deal of her life before the double crime. But, most important of all, a strange document, apparently by ‘Jane' herself, has come to light. It now seems possible to understand these odd killings a little better, and it may protect the health of our society if we learn to do so. They are not, after all,
isolated instances – murder by middle-class female urban guerillas is ever on the increase in the West – yet it is also the case that ‘Jane' may not fit easily into that category of person. I will only present what I know, or have been told, and ‘Jane's journal' can supply the rest.

Michael Dalzell, in the days before his troubles began, liked gambling and staying out late. This he did on July 21, 1952, on the eve of his wedding, in his London club, although he knew he would feel far from well the next day when it came to flying up for the celebrations. While the marquee was being put up at Dalzell, and a bonfire was assembled on the highest hill, the young groom and his friends sat playing backgammon and drinking champagne till dawn. The bride's name was Louise, and she was toasted from time to time, along with other women friends. At five, the future husband was half-carried into a cab, and twenty minutes later he was fumbling for the key at his door. He was not in a good temper – he even, a friend reported later, felt ‘rather jinxed'.

The evening at the club hadn't gone well. Dalzell lost two thousand pounds, which he could only raise by selling a wood on his estate, and he had the unpleasant feeling that his wife would stop him from gambling altogether once they were married. He dreaded the prospect, which Louise had also manoeuvred, of spending the rest of his life in the Borders. But most of all, in his gloomy drunken state, he felt uneasy at the way his ‘stag party' had progressed. His friends agreed they had never seen anything like it. The backgammon dice were laughingly examined, as if the points could vanish or multiply in the hands of a skilled conjuror. They couldn't, of course! – but it seemed almost unbelievable, and certainly ludicrous, that a man could play the game all night and throw nothing but twos. ‘Deuce Dalzell' they began to call him by the time the brandy and champagne had been succeeded by scrambled eggs and strong coffee and followed by champagne again. ‘You'll be seeing double at the wedding, old boy!'

Worse was to come, though, when the young man finally
negotiated his key and stepped into the house. He had left the hall and ground floor sitting room lights on, as he always did, to keep the burglars away, and even in his uncertain condition he could see that someone had turned the sitting room light off. At the same time, he saw that a shadow stretched from the half-open sitting room door onto the grey carpet of the hall. There was no grandfather clock, or similar tall piece of furniture which could have accounted for the shadow, and for a time Michael Dalzell stood stock still. It did cross his mind that tonight was as good a night to be killed as any. But, tonight at least, he was to be spared.

The girl who had climbed into the house from the rear and concealed herself in the sitting room – and whose shadow now betrayed her – had until recently been employed as shop assistant in a big London store. Her name was Mary, her mother was unmarried and Irish, and she was six months pregnant with Michael's child. Dalzell had seen her while buying white calfskin gloves for his fiancée, and had insisted she try on the gloves for him, telling her her hands were ‘just the right size'. She had had to have them sprinkled with powder by the chief vendeuse and had rested her elbow on a velvet pad intended for customers. He bought six pairs. When the bill was signed, Mary was asked if she would like to go out later that evening, and she said she would. She certainly found him very charming, and although there were many evenings when Michael was invited to parties he wouldn't have dreamed of taking her to, they went to gambling clubs and nightclubs enough for her to feel he must be interested in her almost to the point of proposal. That this wasn't the case she discovered, inevitably, when she became pregnant. She had a difficult time, for her mother, who'd only a few years before come over from Ireland with her daughter, shocked by the news and already in poor health, working as a domestic in a big country house in Southern England, refused to see her. When she relented the mistress of the house, a Mrs Aldridge, made it clear Mary would not be welcome.
Michael gave her a hundred pounds and suggested they didn't meet again. Social workers advised that the baby should be adopted. And Mary lost her job behind the glove counter when her condition became too evident. She was desperate, in fact, and having read in the gossip columns of her lover's impending marriage, decided to plead with him one last time before handing herself over to the hostel and the adoption society.

Michael Dalzell, of course, was adamant. He turned on the lights once he had come to his senses and realized who the owner of the shadow was, and he settled the girl on the sofa and poured a large brandy for each of them. He explained he had just lost two thousand pounds at backgammon and Mary found herself commiserating with him before she knew what she was doing. He said he had big expenses with his wedding, and had found it necessary to convert an upper floor at Dalzell into a nursery, which had involved the installation of central heating. He then went on to point out that the baby had the chance of a far better life if adopted, and that it was selfish of Mary to want to keep it and for him to pay for it. In the end, half-reeling from the brandy, which was new to her (whereas Michael's mind, after an evening's drinking, had been marvellously cleared by it), Mary let herself out of the house and stumbled a long way across London to the room in the shared flat she could no longer afford.

A few hours later Michael Dalzell was on the plane to the North. Events of the night before seemed already distant and unimportant. He remembered the unlucky gambling with more irritation than the episode with Mary – in fact he felt more sorry for her in retrospect than angry at her untimely visit – and it's clear that his conscience troubled him a little at the wedding, because he confided the visit to a friend and asked him to keep an eye on her in London over the next few months. By then she had moved and the friend was unable to trace her. But by then, too, Louise Dalzell was expecting a baby. By all accounts the young couple were excited and proud, and the last touches to the
nursery floor had to be added in haste in order for the rooms to be ready in time for the baby.
 

As I was compiling these notes a letter arrived from a man named Luke Saighton, who had been a friend of Michael Dalzell in his gambling days and who had gone to stay frequently at Dalzell before the estate was sold. ‘I can't remember exactly when the people of whom you inquire arrived there,' a part of the letter ran,

At this point I stopped reading Luke Saighton's letter, which had only a few more pleas, at the end of the page, that I try not to hurt the feelings of the friends and relatives of the Dalzells, and gazed out of my study window at the autumnal trees in the street. After collecting accounts of that summer from a few of Dalzell's old intimates, it seemed fairly certain that the arrival of the women, early ‘squatters' on the laird's land, had been very annoying to him – and also, during all those months, he had made no effort to get them out. Things only came to a head in the spring of 1968 – nearly three years after they arrived; before the thaw, when the rain was coming down but there was still no let-up from the cold, he sent half a dozen farmhands up there and the women were forced to move. It would have seemed more humane to have done this in the summer months – yet it was certainly odd that he had allowed them to stay so long. According to some eye-witness reports, it was because one of the women was doing her best to be aggravating that he finally evicted them. Here, as before, I can only piece together the few fragments I've been able to lay my hands on.

Michael Dalzell, after his marriage, soon settled down to become a typical landlord of those parts: Tory-voting, suspicious of change, and with a television kept in a back pantry, seldom visited either by himself or his wife. Louise Dalzell was a perfect complement to him and was popular in the village, in this neutralizing much of the hostility which inevitably built up for her lazy and wealthy husband. The daughter born to them was to prove an only child and both parents adored her. By the mid-sixties, when she was twelve years old, Michael and Louise, despite social changes more marked then in England than in Scotland, were planning her London début, followed by some years in a foreign university, and her eventual takeover, for death duty reasons, of the Dalzell estate. The arrival of the women in the valley, however, caused a certain strain between husband and wife, which was reflected in a rather maddening ‘hoity-toity' manner in the child – and this manner was made worse by the daily conflict, at the village school, between the daughter of the Dalzells and the girl, the same age as herself, from the half-ruined cottage in the hills. They fought so often and so angrily that the teacher became used to complaining to the laird. But each visit from the teacher to the ‘big house' was followed by a visit from the fierce-looking woman from the head of the valley. In summer she walked barefoot and wore long skirts, which had never been seen at that time in the region. She and Michael Dalzell stayed in his study for a short time and when she came out of it it was always with the promise that he would do nothing about the situation. No one ever knew what was said. So – going on in this way – the strains began to show in the Dalzell family. It was as if a shadow had fallen over the happy household – this was the opinion of others as well as Luke Saighton.