The Bad Sister (30 page)

‘Somehow I got through the dinner. All the talk of the rapist was getting on my nerves – especially as “I” in my persona as Mrs Hyde (who was unable to prevent myself from running naked in her terrible anger in the gale-lashed gardens) was actually a heroine now, as far as you, and most of the more radical women in the neighbourhood, were concerned.

‘When everyone had gone I went out into the gardens to get some air. I could hardly believe what I had heard from Sir James – it had been couched, of course, in evasive language – but it seemed he was getting out of England altogether and setting up business in California – and the concomitant suggestion that both the Shade Gallery and his textile business would close down had been left hanging in the air between us. I walked a little; came back into the flat, and I must have fallen asleep. I woke at some dead hour of the early morning. And there … hanging by my side … like a dead rodent … like something that has been dragged in and left to die … was the hand of Mrs Hyde.

‘For the first time, I had changed as I slept: the Yuppie who took a quick nap after a successful dinner party had woken the avenging slattern, practically a witch in the locality by now, hated and despised by the respectable inhabitants of these leafy crescents and squares.

‘I went out into a night that had the false dawn of a London night hanging above it like a cloud from a crematorium. The birds began to strike up. Valentine's Day …
two hearts indeed, I thought, as I saw a man walk down towards me on the path … two hearts, my sweetheart, beating as one in the dawn of spring.

‘The rapist walked there, Mara, with the face of my husband and the landlord's long, straight legs, and the slight pot belly of Sir James.

‘The rapist loomed and leered at me.

‘With the parrot head umbrella Ms Jekyll carries wherever she goes I walked towards that Valentine man; and I smiled at him as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be out walking in the middle of the night, in the gardens.

‘He looked worried as he passed me. I dimly saw there was a dog at his heels, a little white thing I'd grown to hate, as it bit the kids when they went out.

‘He looked surprised – that was all. For, after going past him, I nipped as suddenly as the time I felt the change come on me in the gallery when I ran to heave – against my will and with all the will in the world – a brick through the window of the place – I nipped sideways and behind him and hooked him round the collarbone with that parrot on a stick with nylon wings.

‘Thank God – I could change quickly back to Eliza Jekyll that night. And next day I had to stand by and watch them take Mrs Hyde's children into care.'

The film ends suddenly here. There's a run of white tape; and then a black and white fuzzy scene, as if a child was doodling with a pencil on a dirty piece of paper.

‘She begged me not to follow her,' Mara says. ‘And I didn't. Don't tell me I was wrong.'

I said I wasn't telling her anything.

‘I gave her all the money I had,' Mara says. ‘She promised to hide in the cellar. And then she climbed up from the basement and hid under the dug-up street until I gave her the all-clear.'

There was a silence.

‘Where are the children?' I asked. ‘And why did they come out of care?'

‘Jean Hastie applied to foster them – in Scotland,' Mara replies, as if it had been dumb of me not to see that there was kindness in the Scottish lawyer, all along. ‘Jean told Eliza that if there was trouble, she'd bring the children up. She guessed some of this, I think.'

Or she listened to Dr Crane's notes, I thought to myself. And, before I could imagine Mrs Hyde's children's transformation into bairns in the hands of Jean Hastie and her husband, Mara had added quietly that, although Mrs Hyde, still sought internationally for the murder of businessman and local magistrate Jeremy Toller, had briefly been sighted on a cross-channel ferry from Weymouth to Cherbourg, there had apparently been no sign of her whatsoever on board when the French gendarmes swarmed on to the boat.

‘Mrs Hyde came up into Ladbroke Grove,' says Mara. ‘But by the time she was in France – well, she must have been Eliza Jekyll again.'

‘Or,' I couldn't help remarking, ‘for all – as Jean Hastie would say – that the woman had killed and must answer for the crime, perhaps she has at last been able to find herself.'

Fife, Christmas '88

It was today that I posted the manuscript of my work on Original Sin to the publishers in London and a copy to my agent in Edinburgh.

Despite my conviction, earlier in the year, that my research on Original Sin in the Garden of Eden, showing a choice for Christians up until the fourth century and the coming of St Augustine between salvation and damnation, was conclusive evidence of an innate sense of moral responsibility in each individual, I have to say here that I am no longer certain on this – all-important – point.

The case of Eliza Jekyll has caused a considerable rift in both Christian and atheist feminist thinking.

For, while it is incontestably true that the stress and discrimination suffered by a single mother in an environment growing daily more hostile in both financial and psychological terms can cause defensive violence as well as misery and frustration, it is also true that Eliza has proved to have been the harbourer of sentiments and impulses which can only be described as evil. Scribbled notes found by the bed of Mrs Hyde, in the final clear-out of her flat, attempt to give some substance to the ‘bad dreams' the poor woman suffered in her phase of acute Anxian withdrawal.

That these were not dreams but murderous intentions is borne out by the knife she describes as hiding under the floorboards of the kitchen – and which was found there, under cork tiling disintegrating to the touch.

The knife was brandished at the rapist – as Mrs Hyde went out to get him that night in February, but naked, under the see-through white plastic mac.

He got away – that time. The police caught him in the end. But Mrs Hyde – will they ever catch her?

I keep hidden from her children, who stay with me here and breathe the purer air of Scotland, any news stories or headlines that crop up in the search for their mother. And I'll make sure they don't find the other side of this tragic victim of our new Victorian values: the word, scrawled across the pad under a list of household essentials—

Ajax

fish fingers

ketchup

Mother's Pride

KILL

WHEN MY AUNT
Zita came, there were changes everywhere. The days outside, which were long and white at that time of year, closed and turned like a shutter, a sharp blue night coming on sudden and unexpected as a finger caught in a hinge. The house shrank; the walls seemed to lean inwards; my mother's shoulders grew hunched, as if she were trying to ward off some weight that was bound to descend from above. The people in the house were as sensitive as oysters. As they turned to look at each other, or if they brushed past each other in the long corridors, they trembled and their eyes ran. Caught by this new early night, so unlike the slow stealthy evenings which up till then had removed trees one by one and hidden the house only after everyone was safely inside – the women who were helping my mother make Aunt Zita's bed stumbled against corners, lost their feet on a bottomless floor, swore as they pressed the switch to make the light come on. Then the night outside mocked them, once they had made its presence official, by turning a pale, innocent blue like a hedge-sparrow's egg. But even to run out into it was to be tricked again. The shadows under the trees were as black and rich as the feathers in Aunt Zita's hats.

In spite of all this, my father paid no attention to the changes and sat over his papers in his study. He had had to put on the light, and by doing so he had ended the summer. He had bundled the long days, the dog days when the grass begins to show yellow and the haystacks slip over to one side, into one of the drawers of his enormous desk. They disintegrated there, amongst the faded legal documents: a north wind came down from the hills and my father
pinched his nose. He did this when he was pleased. And he was pleased, of course, that Aunt Zita was coming, on that cold shudder of air from the mountains. He must have thought of the games they had played together in the winter, in the cold rooms upstairs when the freezing air played a Tom Tiddler's with them, and sent them running to beds and chairs for shelter. Even now, with my mother's face drawn and her eyes agonized and lifeless like the eyes of a toy animal, he had to assume a frozen look at the coming of Aunt Zita. He had to hide his old love for her. But he was unable to stop himself from pinching his nose. And my mother, with those dead, staring eyes, suffered in silence as, unaware, he demonstrated his emotions.

The window of my father's study was square, and a bright red since he had turned on the light. Round it the rest of the house was unrecognizable. The walls and turrets – all of them unoccupied – of the mock castle his grandfather had built seemed to hang in folds, uncertain, waiting for the new season, for the advent of Aunt Zita. The evening wind puffed a few leaves from the rowan tree by the door, but they went out of sight before they reached the ground. Other windows of rooms long empty shone in their own way, by reflecting the new moon, and ghosts began to get ready for Aunt Zita in these dusty rooms full of dead flies. After she had eaten the ordinary food with my mother and father, she would go up and be with them. I had seen her on a window sill, with the moon shining straight in on her. When I couldn't sleep, I heard their skirts rustling on the floor above.

Some of the summer was still trapped in the wide, grassy path that led down to the house from the hills. From the path, which still smelt of day and dying flowers, the house looked as it normally did. It hadn't yet swelled in the upper storeys to accommodate the ghostly maids. The turrets, which had always been despised by Aunt Zita, were not small and cross-eyed. The house basked in the endless, white days of the falling summer. But the summer was false. Aunt Zita and the north wind together had ended it.
Even on the path, with its last traces of summer, my mother now walked with an autumnal, anxious step. Once she had gazed up at the sky, which was always darker over the hills. Now on the shaved, yellow grass of the path she went with short steps and head down.

When the grass path, wide as a drove road, had passed the house it grew narrow and went down over several banks towards the fields and the chicken-house. The uncut grass on either side was very long, and people who walked on the path could only be seen from the shoulders up, like people standing in a boat and being carried downstream by the current. Strangers who had wandered in their walks on the hills and lost their way, turned up in these grassy canals and found themselves at the house before being rescued and pulled out, set on the road to the mouth of the valley. Their frightened eyes danced about like bees just above the level of the coarse grass. Over them, as they flowed in and out of the maze, stood the stone guns and flying buttresses of mid-nineteenth-century capitalism. They heard the machinery, the turning wheels of my uncle's latest invention as he strove, year after year, to turn the whole edifice around so that it would dance on a pivot like an elephant on a ball. Then if he had succeeded, the house might have opened up to them too – and they would have seen my father in his study, and my mother in her bedroom, stepping in and out of her cupboard with dresses sealed in bags, and Aunt Zita unpacking in a front room that never caught the sun. Pale women, known only to Aunt Zita, would be found coughing in four-poster beds, and over their heads, exposed shamelessly to the air, wreaths of faded willow leaves and berries the colour of dried blood. The money that had built the great revolving house, and the iron dust in the air, and the thick curtains and sinuous drapery which had more vigour than the women who lived among them, had killed the daughters of the house. But the strangers saw only a great monument to the Industrial Revolution. My uncle's invention had no more strength than a sewing machine, and a good deal more frivolity.

Maurice was often down by the chicken-house. He had told me many times that an old man lived in the house with the hens, and he showed me human turds in the yard to prove it. He picked them up and rolled them in his hands, and pointed to the chicken shit, smaller and lighter in colour. He danced and jumped on the rubbish dump, which was made up out of old nettles and which, in the long, dry days of summer, fermented and returned to slime. The smell of the chickens and the rubbish dump sealed off the little patch, so that people coming up to it or going away seemed to walk in a haze, like the dancing air from jet engines, or the shimmer of mirage. Forests of willow-herb grew round the dump and the low, wooden hen-house. like pointed flames they pressed in the desolate area round the run. If Aunt Zita and my mother went down there, they looked at the willow-herb and then looked away again although in the upper garden they spoke approvingly of the flowers. They smelt, probably, the insecure ground from which these aggressive plants drew their strength: the stones and undernourished earth beneath. They saw the rubbish dump, with the latest handful of nettles on top in a lurching crown; they feared for their shoes, that the polished leather which came down with a hiss on the chicken shit might be overcome by the rubbish and pulled from their feet with a squelch. They never saw the old man in the hut. Aunt Zita went in once, bending very low, but she came out with the china egg, the egg they give hens to help them in their laying, and in her anger she threw it down on the muddy ground. The old man, crouching on a slatted shelf, must have seen her face coming in like a moon. Round him the chickens clucked and pecked, and he could no longer tell their sounds apart from the rumblings of his stomach. He was thin and scraggy as an old cockerel. She must have seen darkness in the back of the hut, and a few feathers, the white hairs over the muddy scalp of the old man.

Maurice hid in a tall yew tree behind the chicken-house when Aunt Zita and my mother came to see the hens. It was
often a sunny day; he would hang in the tree above his shadow; and when they turned to go he ran down the beautiful tree like a monkey until the round black head of his shadow sank into the ground. After it was dark he led me up the narrow path to the house, but he never came in. I only saw him there once, away from the farm above the house or the chicken-run below it. Night, and a bright sky, with the house filled by Aunt Zita and her whispering companions, and I went to the window to look out at the hill and the whiteness, brittle as icing sugar, which had always gone by morning. Maurice stood under the window. He was staring up at us, but the stone of the house must have seemed lighter, more penetrable than our extinguished windows like the pupils of eyes, grown blind and gigantic, swimming behind glass.

The willow-herb, stagily lit by the stars, stood in a great army round him. Perhaps Maurice always walked with them at night. Aunt Zita opened her window and leaned out, and they stretched up towards her, like swords.

Evening had settled in, bringing a new darkness to the house, a darkness that came only with Aunt Zita. The lamps lost nearly all of their power, the light that came out from behind their careful shades made the eyes strain, and my mother said, sighing on a sofa where she was hardly visible:

‘Isn't it dim?'

My father walked about at the end of the room. Bottles on a tray stood waiting for Aunt Zita. The house was cold, and apart from the distant clattering of the ghostly maids – which my father and mother pretended not to hear – it was quiet as a valley where the stream has slowly dried up. Soon, in fact, we began to notice the lack of the sound of water outside. The spring from the mountains, which turned into a river, then a waterfall, and then, directed to a dynamo, made our electricity in a glass house down by the chicken-run, was no longer going through the garden, making a sound of rushing wind, of stones knocking against
the damp reeds on either side. The house and the garden were dark and dry. My mother sat helplessly, in the shrinking circle of light. My father went to open the sitting-room door, to look out for Aunt Zita. The bottles stood behind him, and behind them books bound in leather and gold, seldom opened, where the words and the stale paper of the pages, if prised apart, gave off a strong smell.

Aunt Zita came into the room, for the first time since her arrival on the doorstep, and the faint, flickering blue flame that had played round her then had become stronger in colour, tinged with red at the tips like a fire-bearing bird. Her face was pale … as she was continually consumed and resurrected by the flames she lived bloodlessly amongst them … and her lips, a dead magenta colour, were always smiling. My mother went over to greet her. My father mixed a drink, which Aunt Zita took with a hand so white that it looked painted. My mother and father both knew the lights would go out altogether in a few moments. Their inner voices struggled to reach each other, with a mixture of anger and reassurance, but Aunt Zita lay between them like a bar of static electricity. They all moved back to the sofa, as if the drinks they were holding led them there. The lights went out. My mother gave a little moan.

‘I said it was dim. And now the lights have gone out. How extraordinary, Zita, this happened the last time you came!'

My poor mother! She still lived in the age of cause and consequence, of foreshadowings and outcomes, and she couldn't see the connections between Aunt Zita and the fading lights. My father, who was a century ahead of his brother Ralph but was still firmly rooted in the mechanical age, said:

‘The dynamo's been clogged by leaves again, I'm afraid. We'll have to hope that Willie's going down to see to it tonight.'

‘I always feel it's too dangerous to go down there at night,' said my mother.

Throughout all this Aunt Zita sat quite demurely with
her drink on the edge of the sofa. The logs in the hearth, encouraged by her presence, stirred, gave off a few sparks, and then slumped together again. Aunt Zita's fire burned on, a frill of yellow and poppy-red, playing round her face and down the sides of her white dress. Her fire was like one of those natural but magical phenomena, the wandering flame on a marsh. But my mother and father, bumping into one another in the doorway, fetching paraffin lamps, saw nothing at all.

At dinner the candles threw shadows ten feet high on to the walls. Aunt Zita ate without making any sound. A woman from the village brought in a chicken, which my father carved, and a dish of vegetables. I thought of Aunt Zita's feasts in the kitchen long after my mother and father had gone to sleep: the wild boars' heads and the swans, and pastries stuffed with larks and linnets – the magic dishes, Chinese boxes of dough, each tiny house revealing another smaller, down to the plaited sugar nest of the hummingbird, the currant eye of the white sugar pike. The kitchen had been draped with cloth, and there were candlesticks in the shape of golden stags, and gold bowls to drink from, with cinnamon in the hot wine. Aunt Zita wore a fiery dress then, where the flames crawled over the stiff gold skirt, always trying to climb up to the bodice encrusted with gold beads, and the pearls, sometimes flushed to a pale rosy glow by the fire, so tight against her neck they seemed to be embedded there. Aunt Zita smiled at my father, but he looked away. He had possibly for one moment looked into Aunt Zita and, like a landscape seen in lightning, glimpsed the feasts where he was no longer invited, and felt fear.

Already, as they ate, groups of his possessions, her old playmates, were arranging themselves in the house in her schemes and patterns: cushions and rocking-horses, books and old riding-saddles and dusty curtains long ago bundled away and replaced by my mother. Some of the rooms, which had seemed boundless to Aunt Zita as a child, were now taking on gigantic proportions and were filling with the animals and several-headed monsters of her early dreams.
My mother was no longer in control of her home, or the house she had been told was her home since her marriage to my father. I knew she dreamed of escape, but she saw only the farm above the house, and the blackness of it on a starless night when the mountains rising steeply behind the farm buildings can be taken, with terror, for the sky – and beyond the farm the road ended and there was nothing but the hills to come at her, rearing up, as she drew near, like stone horses. She saw the chicken-run, and the road that went just above it and led out of the valley. But Aunt Zita had left her traces of blue fire there, and my mother would be burned and frozen to death. There was nothing for it but to stay, in the dining-room which already had turned sympathetically to Aunt Zita, and to live like a prisoner in the shifting ruins of her home.