The Bad Sister (12 page)

TONY'S MOTHER
WAS
sitting in the flat, on the sofa where Tony and I sit as far apart as Martians and watch TV. She was doing several things, all of them characteristic: she was smoking, and waving her second and third fingers up and down with the cigarette between them, as if to admire her painted nails; with her other hand she was opening and shutting her bag – click! – and taking out her compact, which was white and frosted over with a goldish sheen; she was flicking open the compact lid with her thumb and raising the round mirror to her face, and making a strange little moue into it, as if she was trying to shrink her face down to fit the lid; and with her foot, in a pointed and high-heeled shoe, she was tapping to some fast and silent rhythm on the floor. I stood for a while and watched her from the doorway, but she knew I was there for she must have heard the front door slam, and I knew she knew she was putting on a performance to prove that Tony could give her the key of the flat whenever he liked. I wondered if she had put her overnight bag in the spare room without even asking me. It was probable. What terrible event had she come up from the country for this time? A ‘delicious play', perhaps – but plays were getting too rough these days for Mrs Marten's delicate tastes. ‘As long as it's funnee,' she would say with a sigh. ‘All I want is something fun-nee.' She had walked out of nudity and agitprop, bewildered but still dignified, all the way to the Savoy. Or a ‘dinner': perhaps there was a ball-gown in my spare room now, bulging like an uninvited guest against the back of the door. The ‘dinners' were in flats in Eaton Square, and there were hired footmen and gold chairs, vases of sweetpeas and lilies which were
described afterwards with an odd laugh, as if they were in some way more significant to her than the people. She had seldom dared to stay more than one night. But now, with Tony away, I had the feeling she had come for longer. There was a bravado to the small shoulders in the perfectly cut coat. The chignon of flaxen white hair nodded, as the foot tapped and the little made-up face, hardly bigger than a gibbon's, stared at itself, rapt, on a far journey but still perfectly conscious of me there. Her hair was like the wool on the distaff of the wicked old woman who puts a castle to sleep for a hundred years – her whole person was the spindle, which pricks you through and through. I went towards her warily: I was tired and all I wanted to do then was to sleep, and after to speak to Gala. Her sharp, minuscule frame swung at the sound of my step and the curves of her lips followed the smile which was already painted on.

‘There was no one at the Bartons. Do you know Lady Lucy Barton? Oh. So I came on here. There's a “do” this evening, Jane, at the Belgian Embassy. Do come!'

No sign of apology or explanation for being in my flat, I noted. I gave her a stiff nod, no smile. Mrs Marten seemed further away than ever now. Her cosmetics, her concealed terrors of death or solitude were as poignant and distant as the rigidified body of an unknown woman preserved in lava. Her lifespan seemed tiny, concomitant with her body: a butterfly span, a scarf. I felt I could see her flutterings, her crumbling to chalk. She was smiling still in my direction, eyes glinting from a bed of green mascara and imitation lash.

‘Jane dear, would it be awful to ask for a G and T?'

Oh God, I thought, Gala, where are you? Meg, come soon and make a spell over this ghastly woman. But I went to the drink cupboard at the other end of the sitting room and took out the gin and tonic. Without asking, I went to the kitchen for ice, and found half a mouldy old lemon. Mrs Marten wanted her drinks with ‘all the trimmings', as if they weren't alcohol but instead some sort of gay, childish
drink, harmless and refreshing. I scraped off the grey-green mould and put a slice of lemon in the glass.

‘How heavenly! Then I simply must have a bath. I do hope my dress hasn't got too crumply! Well, Jane dear, tell me all your news! Lots of exciting things been happening?'

I smiled. I sat down on the armchair next to the sofa. Perhaps I should tell her I was going all out to ‘get' Tony's girl – or the girl who had once been ‘his', at least. If I confided in Mrs Marten, would she suddenly tell me something I didn't know: that Tony was indeed still seeing the girl, for instance? Would she break his web of lies, if he was in fact at the centre of one? No, of course she wouldn't. She would protect Tony for all she was worth. From that frail, expensively suited chrysalis Tony had come: his head had appeared between her legs to stare anxiously at the reversed order of things. She would guard him against ‘predatory' ladies like me; she would have preferred me, but for my useful ownership of the flat, to have been an out-and-out victim. But little did she guess quite how predatory I had become! So I smiled again.

‘Busy seeing films all the time? I really don't know how you do it! I find they've become so dreary, recently.'

Privately I rather agreed with Mrs Marten, but I decided against saying so. The slightest mark of encouragement and she would move into the flat for the entire ‘season'. As it was I was prepared to let her stay one night, then she could find friends, or go back to her home in the hills of Surrey where the woods and belts of trees looked like curtain on a swish rail, pulled across the sinister, semi-rural countryside.

‘Yes, I've been seeing quite a few. Nothing I could recommend to
you
, I'm afraid.'

After this blatantly snobbish remark on my part, we fell silent. The evening was beginning to come in the windows, there was the sound of the soft drinks crates being thumped down on the pavement outside Paradise Island. The parrot gave a squawk or two to greet the pale, untropical evening and Mrs Marten rolled the ice in her glass and tapped her
foot and grinned like a skull in front of the blank TV. I reached for the evening paper she had brought with her, to see what programmes were on later – I might not sleep. I might watch instead. And I felt the faint dampness on my legs, from the plants outside the main entrance to the flat, the residue of rain showers and the cuckoo spit which collected there. I brushed my leg dry with the back of my hand, while Mrs Marten looked with surreptitious horror at the lack of stockings or tights. If only she could know how far I had been! Yet for her, to go outside barelegged would be an unimaginable step into the unknown.

While I was thinking these thoughts – tired, increasingly irritated with her presence – the telephone rang. Mrs Marten was on her feet before I could move. What was this? Had she left the number here already to a host of social secretaries? Were we to be
poste
restante
for summer invitations? It was because of Mrs Marten that Tony and I had gone to the Berring party – she was a ‘close personal friend' of the Berrings, and Tony, pretending enthusiasm, had insisted we go (who had summoned Meg there? Had she simply followed me?). Were we now to be subjected to more of this? I decided to tell her, as soon as she was off the phone, that she must leave by tomorrow morning. Friends were coming to stay. And I thought – what a good idea – Gala could come and keep me company, and help me in case I became afraid thinking of Meg.

Mrs Marten was speaking low and fast into the receiver. She presented her back to me as she did so, as trim as an airport doll with its topping of nylon hair. Her left hand waved a perpendicular cigarette and the scarlet nails danced about like fish in an aquarium. ‘Yes. My dear, I wasn't sure … Yes … Yes. Look, Miranda, why not wait … no, not for two days more I think … Yes. Yes. I quite agree. But this is the trouble, Miranda …'

I felt a slow coldness, first in my stomach, but there was a wriggling and a fainting in my stomach too as if it had become a sack of fish, packed and anaesthetized by ice. Nerves jingled in my fingers and toes. Miranda. Of course,
that was her name. It would be Miranda. She was smiling out at me from the photo in the kitchen drawer. At night she pursued me on my journeys, and chained me when I was about to escape. She stood under my window … Meg had stunned her, but only for a while … She was on the phone now to Tony's mother. And who better? The woman who must for every psychological reason detest me more than any other human being, was conniving with the other woman enemy. These two women – one who had carried Tony as a water creature, a nail-less monster, a blind, puckered parcel of flesh attached by a crusty yellow cord to her bag of food, who had finally pushed out into the world a man responsible for her future comforts, her Surrey home, her electric blanket and holidays abroad, and the other with whom, having crawled from between the legs of his mother, he had finally found refuge, plunging in again between her legs for safety – formed a wall against me, a society for my end. They would drive me mad, extinguish me, remove me. I had no place in Tony's unbearable trinity. And yet they wouldn't get away with it as easily as that! I gritted my teeth as Mrs Marten spoke, and thought of Meg. She was right in saying I could only do good by bringing the girl to her – that I would purify women's legion souls.

‘Yes, dear, well why don't you come? Of course they won't mind. It's a buffet … but I'll tell them and I know they'll be thrilled. It's the Belgian Embassy, at eight. Well, I'm wearing long, but at your age … lovely, dear. Goodbye.'

Mrs Marten rang off. She turned in my direction with what was, I thought, a guilty smile. But no – as she came nearer she seemed actually triumphant. Her face looked even smaller, like a shrunken African head painted white.

‘Who was that?' I said. I heard myself sound blunt, manly: somehow between them the mother and the true love had excluded me from their sex.

‘Oh Jane darling, I don't think you know her. I'm so pleased to have someone to take to the Belgian Embassy party … I was simply dreading it alone …'

‘Is she a friend of Tony's?'

‘Well I suppose she
knows
him. As a matter of fact I think she's in the film world a tiny bit. She said something about the film… is it one of the books by that marvellous Joseph Conrad?'

‘
Chance
,' I said.

The phone rang again. This time, while Mrs Marten still stood in a mock-abject attitude before me, I rose to my feet, almost pushed her out of the way, and went over to answer it. Thank God, Gala's voice was loud and clear, strangely grating as it always was when she had been on her own for a time. She had guessed, of course. ‘Are you all right, Jane?' Gala said. ‘I was worrying about you. Where did you go today?'

‘Come over,' I said. ‘Can you?'

‘Yes, but not for very long. I will though. I'll see you.'

‘Good,' I said.

It was my turn now to face Mrs Marten from the other end of the sitting room. She was still directing at me her primitive-mask smile, her small eyes shone from the thick white pancake.

‘You were asking about Miranda. Rather fascinating … it's an old theatrical family of course. No … she said just now they were going to ask Janet
Suzman
to be the heroine in the movie … Isn't that rather exciting? I don't know how she knew of course …'

No I bet you don't. She's been with Tony, or she's been speaking to him. I nodded at Mrs Marten as if I had received important news on the telephone and failed to sit down, which left us standing awkwardly, like people at one of the cocktail parties Mrs Marten loved so much.

‘Janet Suzman as Flora de Barral,' I said. ‘Yes, that sounds very interesting.' Inside me, at last, a great wave of laughter was coming, and with it the strength to abolish the woman who brought me so much pain, who stood in my way. (Gala was coming. She would help me.) ‘I'm afraid I have a friend coming to stay tonight unexpectedly,' I said. ‘Her husband has just died. So I can't invite you to stay after all!'

I had never behaved like this before. I saw Mrs Marten step back from me as if I had just announced a leprous condition, then, with infinite care, she approached me again and put her arms on my shoulders. Her eyes in the buried face looked up at me with a passable but exaggerated show of sympathy.

‘Jane, do you know you're looking a little pale today? I'm feeling ever so slightly worried about going out and leaving you here. And I couldn't help noticing, when your scarf slipped … you seem to have hurt your throat. Is there anything poor old Mother can do?'

‘I'm sorry. This is really the situation.' I could hear the firm gruffness of my voice, I could see Mrs Marten's ball-dress being bundled into a suitcase and away to a cheap hotel, I could feel Mrs Marten's terror. ‘There won't be time for a bath, or time to change, I'm afraid,' I said. ‘She's coming now, you see, and she needs every care.'

Why was it that it appeared more cruel to treat a woman like Mrs Marten in that way than to do far worse to a person really in need of care? She was so outraged. The monkey face began to gibber. I took her stick arm, with a sense of revulsion, and led her through the hall to the spare room where she had made herself at home.

‘Now pack,' I said.

‘Well, Jane, I don't know what Tony will say!' Mrs Marten stood in the centre of the room, arms akimbo, like an expensive scarecrow. ‘You aren't well, Jane, I fear!'

‘I'll call a mini-cab,' I said.

Five minutes later, Mrs Marten and the ball-dress, which lay in a polythene bag like a slumped body, and the suitcase, and even the smell of her scent that made me think always of the chintz armchairs in her Surrey house and the sickly roses that grew outside, had left the flat. I went to the sitting room to wait for Gala. I was weak, and my heart was pounding. I prayed she wouldn't be long.

Waiting is painful because it is an eternal present. The past is frozen, the future atrophied. And objects become lifeless
too: the armchair which a short time ago contained Mrs Marten, had been an indispensable part of her maddening pose, is square and stiff as a chair in a hyper-realist painting. The cloth on the round table goes down to the ground in folds that could never be disturbed. On the table are a half-dead geranium in a pot, a tubular straw container which was made to put a glass in, in a tropical country where sweat and heat make glasses drop from hands – it holds broken fibre-tip pens, and out-of-date postage stamps – and a pile of books and papers, all covered with a fine film of invisible, immovable dust. I sit like an object myself, one leg crossed over the other – it would be as hard to part them as to roll two tree trunks in opposite directions. My left arm is firmly down on the arm rest of the settee. My right hand holds a glass of white wine, which is from time to time raised to my mouth. In this state of permanent suspension, I wait.