The Bad Sister (18 page)

‘She's Mrs Aldridge, Jane! Think of your and Marie's bravery last night! And think of the great deed that lies ahead. But first, Jane, before she destroys you … take her … with the knife!'

‘I must say I'm rather grateful to have been invited to this do!' (Why is Mrs Marten apparently intentionally leading me on, drawing me further and further into the kitchen, she is almost by the window, now, where Miranda leaned out so perilously last night.) ‘I spoke to Miranda this morning and she said she'd been invited too. She says she knows the film director
very
well … she's known him for years. It's extraordinary how many people Miranda knows, don't you think, Jane?'

I'm sure I've never seen this knife before. It's smart and has a French name on the handle. Did Mrs Marten buy it for the purpose? Will she spring forward, wrench it from my grasp?

‘Jane, do you want to cut some bread with that knife? If so, I've moved the bread over here, near the window. I thought the bin was in
such
a fusty place! And that's when I came across that rather dirty pair of jeans, and jacket. I hope you don't mind me popping them in your room, but I thought if you looked at them you'd be bound to decide to give them to Oxfam, or something!'

Mrs Marten has become quite breathless. I am advancing on her, which she seems to have willed, but as I walk I feel my feet drag on the floor, and a wave of faintness come over me. Oh, not now … the faintness takes part of my vision, so that I see only segments of the room, and the
window, and small chips of Mrs Marten like a mosaic with missing pieces. I can feel my legs give, and bring me down to the floor…

‘Jane, I
told
Tony you weren't well. I think we should call the doctor! I don't think you should go to the party at all!'

Meg, where are you now? I lie on the floor and stare up at the ceiling. I begin to choke. The white bulbs hang together as thickly as fungus growing on a tree. They are hung on wires, and the wires are nailed in to the corners of the ceiling. They are round and white, but their skin is flaky, like paper. My mouth opens, but I can't even retch. And as I lose consciousness I know Mrs Marten can't have fixed them up there on her own. So Tony helped her! They know how to make me disappear! My eyes close, as the bulbs swell, and come down on me …

I am in bed. So I'm ill. It must be late afternoon, the light is comfortable to the eyes, but how weak I have become! Did Meg know the battles I would have to survive in this world before she let me into the other? Crash! There go the soft-drink crates outside Paradise Island … it must be even later than I thought … it's strange, but now I can't see the street and the trees that are dead to my eyes, and the generations of women on the pavement, I miss it … I don't really want to leave. I'm afraid of catching Miranda, and going to the new regions. Suppose I could become a part of this street and walk every day to the supermarket and dance with the women at Paradise Island, and talk to the bruised women, and grow old with the women with their parcelled bodies, wouldn't it be better, more accepting than what I have in store? But Meg tells me I will never suffer. I'm sanctioned, so she would have me believe.

I look round the room. Certainly they're treating me like an invalid! Stephen is sitting in a chair at the end of the bed, and Gala is cross-legged on the floor near the window. Am I as ill as all that? They've brought grapes, and bunches of sweetpeas and roses. The sweatpeas are right by my bed, on the low table where Miranda's photograph once lay. They
look like moth's wings, only in the colours of an early sky. I don't like them … I try to move the jug, but my hand is trembling and misses it altogether. Stephen is smiling reassuringly at me. Am I going to die then? What have Tony and his mother done?

‘Where's Tony?' I say. ‘And … what time is it?'

‘It's six,' Gala says. ‘Tony'll be back in a minute, won't he?'

‘What happened to me? Am I ill?'

‘Mrs… Mrs Marten rang
me
,' Stephen says. ‘She said you were ill. And Gala too I suppose … what did she say to you, Gala?'

Thank God, they can understand my anxiety. Has Mrs Marten formed a plan to stop me from going to the party? She suspects, perhaps, that I was going to follow Miranda from room to room and – how clever! – she's pinned me here with my friends instead.

‘She said she'd been worried for some time,' Gala says. ‘Had been particularly worried at our lunch!' At this, Gala burst out laughing and I tried to smile – but the vile substance from the kitchen was still in my mouth and to move my lips was painful.

‘She even went so far as to suggest that you had a disease her younger sister died of …'

‘Yes,' Stephen puts in. ‘She told me the doctors thought you had leukaemia.'

‘But it's unbelievable …' I struggle to sit upright. Now I see that both Stephen and Gala are looking very upset. Am I so pale, then? Is Mrs Marten going to finish me off so easily?

The door opens. Tony comes in. The draught from the opening door ruffles the curtains and, as they blow apart, for an instant I see the grey leaves on the top branches of a tree and a new moon, cruelly small and thin, hanging in the sky. The parrot gives a long whistle. Tony is followed by his mother – of course: I stare at Gala and Stephen, willing them to stay, dreading that they will go now or just disappear into the ether.

‘I agree we should get the doctor,' Tony is saying to Mrs Marten. ‘If we can get him to come quickly …' He leaves the sentence unfinished. What he means is he can get the doctor's visit over and still make the party. Tony wouldn't like it very much if he had to give that up while sitting here with me. And what would he tell Miranda, waiting in her black dress for him to come?

‘We can stay with Jane and wait for the doctor,' Gala says quickly. She knows, I'm sure, that she can make me better in time to get there myself. She'll get Meg over – anything.

‘Oh I don't think it would be right for the family to leave Jane!' Mrs Marten says, and gives a low laugh that is supposed to be self-deprecating and compassionate. Instead, there is the chill of terror in the room again. Tony catches his mother's eye and nods.

‘Luckily, I prepared rather a delicious meal,' says Mrs Marten. ‘And of course if Jane shows improvement we could probably leave her for a minute and pop off to the party. It's your favourite, Tony darling!'

‘What's that?' Tony has settled himself on the end of the bed in a husbandly way. I know he dislikes Stephen as well as Gala, and he keeps his eyes carefully away from both of them.

‘Why, lobster with aioli, of course! Don't you remember when we went to Avignon and you ate so much of it you were nearly sick!'

‘Hmm,' Tony says. (Yet I know he must have hung the garlic there, that it was really all for me.) ‘Well, Mummy, it sounds delicious!'

‘Gala, would you like to come in the kitchen and see the little feast I've prepared?'

What extraordinary behaviour! In all my weakness I can only gasp at Mrs Marten's cool insolence. But Gala knows only too well what would happen to her, even though I haven't had a chance to describe the wicked bulbs suspended from the ceiling. She shakes here head.

‘I'd rather stay here with Jane, if you don't mind.'

‘I expect you would!' Mrs Marten gives her venomous
laugh. But she seems too much in control of the situation. Where has she found her new power? She stands a moment longer in my room, with the Pierrot costume still swinging on her arm. Tony switches on the lamp, from which I recoil – she has never seemed so white, from her hair, to the dead whiteness of her face, and the white chiffon at her throat and the neat little suit and white shoes. Her eyes look out from sockets dark with eyeliner and mascara.

‘I'll go and ring the doctor now, Tony dear! And then we'll eat. See you in a moment!'

There are so many people on the stairs. It's strange how the women are dressed: about half of them are witches and have black robes and pointed hats – some of them have even stuck on big, curved noses and their eyes are bright – and the others are courtesans, seductive and tempting, with beauty spots on their breasts and flounced, pretty skirts. When they look at me they smile openly. But I press on, waiting patiently to get to the top. There I will find Miranda. Every minute my strength returns.

Stephen tried to stop me from coming. He told me I should go with him, and he would help me to find life. He had a handkerchief he kept taking from his pocket. He mopped his face with it. It's true it was oppressive in there, with the curtains still closed and the evening sounds coming in from the hot street. Every few minutes he put it back in his pocket and pushed it down before pulling it out again. Gala told me I must go. I lay listening to them, still very weak – Tony had muttered an excuse and gone to help Mrs Marten with the presentation of the aioli in the kitchen – and at one point I could have sworn Gil-martin came and joined my friends in that room, sitting on the end of the bed where Tony had sat and looking straight into my face. Yet I still couldn't describe him, if I tried: I only know I was relieved and happy to see him there, and promised I would pay no attention to anyone who tried to prevent me from carrying out my task. I would be with him later that night. I would find him when it was time.

The doctor came, a doctor I had never seen before. He said I was tired. I remember the syringe he held up to the light, and Gala knocking it from his hand. He left after an angry consultation with Mrs Marten and Tony in the passage. Then Tony came in and said supper was ready. I said I had to get dressed and they all left the room except Gala. That was how we escaped – but look at me now!

All my clothes had gone from the cupboard. Mrs Marten must have taken them. All she had left me were the jeans and the jacket, and the ballerina dress: the tulle skirt was pink, and bulged out into the room from the tin hanger, on the bodice was an assortment of tarnished sequins. And of course the jeans won't fit me till later, I'm on Miles Alton's staircase in the ballet dress and that's why people smile. It's none of me, as they say. They must imagine it's some buried fantasy of mine! But I don't care. I look up and down the staircase; some of the women are in masks; there are even one or two Pierrettes, holding the little cat-grinning faces in front of their own. None of them is Miranda, I think. If only they would go up faster! Some of the men, who know me slightly, are laughing at me openly now, and my mood of defiance won't last. Gala is beside me, as always, and a stair higher up. She is pushing with her shoulders and her face is set.

We left the flat so easily it amazes me they hadn't thought we might run when we had the chance. Stephen is too greedy – he was exclaiming with pleasure at the scarlet lobster and the great bowl of pounded garlic paste. Tony was being ordered by Mrs Marten to try and find ‘good knives and forks, if such a thing exists in poor Jane's flat', and was bustling to bring up chairs. Their sense of politeness and taste and good living let us get away into the night in search of our prey! It will always be possible, in the end, to defeat such people, because if you choose the middle of dinner their defences will be down. We simply went down the main stairs and out onto the lino of the hall. I was carrying the jeans in a bag. We shut the main door and went out of the gate into the street. It was a dark evening. The
new moon had gone high up into the sky. We looked back once and there, sure enough, were the three of them in my kitchen window, smiling at each other rapturously. Gala had put her coat over my shoulders so that no one in the street, at least, could stare at my outfit. This time… it was the very last time… I knew I would never come back.

When we get to the top of the stairs I see that all the rooms have been draped with material, as if Miles Alton is trying to persuade people they're in the Arabian Nights. There are some real Arabs in evidence, no doubt he has his eye on them to put money into his films, and some stupid young English journalists wearing Arab headdresses. On either side of Miles, who has long golden hair, two chins and a stomach gently pregnant in a striped caftan, stand a ‘beautiful lady', thoroughly enjoying herself in her period costume which pushes her breasts forward and makes it possible for her to wink and flirt behind a fan, and a tall, raven-haired witch with a false nose and a mouth under it as thin and red as a gash. What happened to women, that they were forced into these moulds? At least there are no ‘wives' here, that would be too boring for a fancy dress ball! Unless … I grab hold of Gala's arm. At the far end of the room where we're now standing I see a figure in grey chiffon flitting about in front of a large candelabra. Her hair is dark. She is quiet and grey as a moth. I think she has a mask on, but at this distance it's difficult to tell. Surely… only Miranda, the rightful wife of Tony, the quiet, dark wife, would present herself at this gaudy occasion in such a way. Yet of course I had envisaged her in quite another way! Scheming, anxious to ‘make' it in the film world, willing even to be taken up by a rich Arab and have money to spend. Why should I suddenly be convinced that this was she? Ah, Miranda… she changes and dissolves as I do… and as my force comes back to me now, fed by the night and the hunger that is beginning to return, she melts into softness, a wedding ring, a veil.

Gala is nodding at me in response. She says we must go in search of Miranda. We begin to push our way through
the crowded room. Some film critic in lemon shorts and a tank top comes up to me and asks why I wasn't at the showing of the Francesco Rosi this morning. How hot it is in here! The incense is too strong, the heavy sweet smell of dope is rising above it and there are broken clouds of smoke on the ceiling, on the loosely hung, theatrical material which comes down in a clumsy swag in the middle of the room like a tent. There are arum lilies. Why are there so many mirrors, enclosed in swirls of bright gold, all the length of the room? I can see the reflections of the fancifully dressed, faded as ghosts in the antique glass. Some of the people are already lying on cushions the size of small boats. And suppose it isn't Miranda, or I fail, as I failed with Mrs Marten earlier on. What will be my fate then?