The Bad Sister (43 page)

For all the long sewing evenings my mother spent with Letty, and the vigilance of my father amongst the opened letters on the landing, Letty went from her room before the beginning of day, and I followed her. In that chaos of darkness, when the spiky flowers in the cracks of the flagstones nipped the toes like pincers, and the tops of great beeches floated slowly in convoy towards the downs, she walked with purpose, drawn to the source of water in the woodland like a thirsty dog. I soon learnt to go after her, by sliding down a slope of thatched roof under my window, and when I leapt the last feet on to the drenching grass I had only to cross one estuary to catch up with her before she went into the trees. It was surprising, even then, that my father didn't wake. Under his room, and directly in the path I had to take to be with Letty, stood the house on stilts where the white doves, going down lazily from the window sills at sunset, slept until first light. As I went barefoot under them, there were coughs, and the sail flap of wings. In the blackness, the invisible white bodies made a soft whirring. Then, as the birds crowded in again, the struts of the house groaned with the weight of the ringed and scrabbling feet.

In the wood, the river was buried. Its course could be seen by the trail of bright moss that hugged the hidden banks. In the clearings in the wood it came up in a green fizz. Letty went with it, feet magnetized by the pull of water under the earth.

Letty lay by the side of the pool. Above, the trees made an arch that was endlessly broken by wind. The moon, pale in the dawn sky, came down through whipping and coiling branches. Its face was shaken by the wind on the water, and went off in splinters into the mud. I stood by a tree, with my back against the trunk. Knobs on the bark, where limbs had fallen or been lopped, dug into my spine. I looked up at the sky, and I looked at Letty, as she lay still by the mouth of the cave. In the first days of spring, when Letty lay abject by the deep pool, legs straddling the buried river and head down in the mud, it seemed as if the cave might never grow by her side. Winter, which had laid down a carpet of yellow aconites and snowdrops in the dead leaves of the wood, had a stranglehold under the show of gaiety. With its iron flatness it held down the earth. The cave would never come up from the deep waters of the pool, and the spring would be throttled, buried alive under the old year's weight.

The winter trees had their own laws. The dancing flowers at their base were a short feast, enough to show that winter could dictate its pleasures. And they held their grim parody of life, too: in the branches, locked into shapes of faces and eyes, were the green men of the forest. Skeletal smiles were etched on a sky the colour of slate. Balls of twigs, thickly mashed, made heads no bigger than pygmies. Winter had its own citizens. Until the end it resisted the spring.

When winter finally succumbed, and leaves seized the flanks of the most impregnable trees, the grinning men left their branches and went to church on the downs. From columns in the transept, stained green as moss, the foliate faces looked down in laughter. Children, dragged to a service of Harvest thanksgiving, would look up at the pagan smiles set in stone. It was possible that one year, at the
ending of the world, winter would conquer spring. Then the ancient faces would stare down for ever at the pool, and the cave always submerged, and Letty lying as a lifeless sacrifice, with a belly as flat as the iron armour of the year.

In those first mornings when I followed Letty to the pool, I understood why my mother tried to keep her from leaving the house, and why my father stood in the detritus of Uncle Rainbow's past, his only hope that he would catch us one day. I would grow and become as vast as Letty, and if he did capture us, we would only wilt in his hands. For what could he do with us? And I knew, despite my mother's longing for the spring and her coming south to meet it, that she too resented the lurch forward into time. There was a longing for standstill, for fear of the feel of the world turning under foot.

My father disliked the first signs of spring, the smell of swamp that Letty brought into the house after her morning excursions, the heave, away from law and order, from winter's graveyard tidiness. He stood on the landing in the half-light, listening to the faint drone of motorbikes on the downs. Local gangs, racing home after a night on the town, scorched the roads around the Old Stones. He belonged in a half-lit world, where spring reduced him to creaks and aching of joints, and where the future, unconcerned with Earth's prospects for the new millennium, made composite men and sent them out to space.

In the house, Letty was firm and brown, with the tread of a hen. Soft bags of knitting fell from her lap when she rose, and pins slid from her hair, which was always brown. In the woods, I watched her as she went down in the slime by the side of the pool. It seemed that another woman grew beside her in the mud, and with enormous limbs overcame and subsumed Letty. The pool waited for the first splash of the creature as it went to the depths. There, in a gloom thicker than the winter night, not even a leaf could stay, rotting. All went to mineral, to the beginning of a world without life. From those stones and boulders Letty had to rise, to drag herself to the mouth of the cave. As the ripples went out
from her body, the light began to show through the trees, and the pool, like an eye hidden in the bushy woods, wept at the first rays of the sun.

In the later part of the morning, when my mother wanted to walk in the garden, I persuaded her to come into the woods, and through them to the first slope of downs under the pylons' legs. I wanted to see whether the cave, which formed in the shadows of night, was still there, or whether the sun, scouring the woods with a fiery besom, had chased it away from its dank spot by the side of the pool. My mother stood in the leaves under the trees while I crept round the small expanse of water. Where Letty had been, with her back as fat as a seal's in the pond, there were a few twigs floating. The cave was half gone, no more than a denseness of air between trees. I penetrated what had been its floor: a mulch of leaves, the colour of onion skins. And I walked along a runnel in the ground, where an ancient ship, on its way to the aquatic cities of stone, had gone into harbour. I wanted to see the furthest recess, where Letty crawled out of sight as the sun went higher, and where I had never dared to go.

‘If this pond was a little bigger, it would have been nice to have a boathouse here,' my mother said.

Wind and sun together had taken away the mysteries of the cave. The sun had rushed in there, to whiten the walls and then dissolve them altogether, to paint Letty's diurnal face on her and send her back to house and duty. The wind had whipped up the leaves, hiding the last traces of Letty's altar. A thrush hopped in the sacred places. My mother grew impatient, pulling away from the pool towards the downs. The trees, which in their tattered winter coats of green moss failed to impress my mother, seemed thinner on the ground at that time of the day. We soon left them, and climbed to the crest of the downs. We stopped, looking down at the trees, and the garden sinking to the river beyond, and water meadows where cows stood without feet, marooned in the spring floods. My mother nodded, satisfied. ‘It's a late spring,' she said. And then, remembering
she had come south in the longing for spring, remembering the coral reefs and purple evenings that had haunted her in the north, she pointed at the trees below us. A fuzz of pale green hung round them. In their subjection to the coming summer they stood neatly below us, with the heads of obedient schoolchildren tied in green ribbon.

When we arrived in the garden, my father came out to say it was time to eat. As we went past, I saw the buds were bigger on the chestnut tree outside Letty's window. Nearly free of their armadillo shell, it would take one more wriggle before they could explode into leaf. But the green men had gone from the branches at the defeat of winter. The trees sighed in the wind, bowed down already with deckings and loadings to come.

At the time most hated by my father, when spring hadn't yet got properly under way, and Letty seemed every day to grow bigger and vaguer, Uncle Rainbow stayed in his room; and when he did appear for meals he had a shrunk, wizened look, as if the last ounce of sap had been taken from his veins. I knew that Uncle Rainbow, or some semblance of Uncle Rainbow, went out at dawn, and prepared for the change in the year. It was impossible to know whether my mother and father knew this, and when my father sat at the table in the dining room, staring out into the anxious gaze of the garden, there was a sense that everything was locked: that the trip to the south had been for nothing, that the host had no longer the strength to sit under the portraits of his forebears, and that the world, lacking a key to wind it up again, clung like a sticky burr to space. My father made a spiral from his apple peel and failed to meet my mother's eye. She talked of the primroses that were beginning to come up in the lanes, and he saw the lanes in a quadrille, dancing in flowered skirts at a court where the manners were foreign to him. Or he saw them as a maze, closing in on the yew hedges round the house, and he knew he would never escape. If the wind blew outside, he pinched the side of his nose and thought of the north. The north wind was racing now in the corridors at the top
of his house, but what was blowing outside was southwesterly: it brought the fresh rinsed sky of the Azores and the flat fields of southern Ireland, and my father yawned.

But the nights were drawing back, and Letty went earlier to the cave. As the green men settled in the churches, polyanthus shot up in the village gardens and a bunting of yellow jasmine ran round the walls. Boys, hidden all winter in low rooms, came out with quiffs of hair malignantly shining. On bikes and scooters they dived in the shallow hills, and when they passed our gate they stopped sometimes, by the war memorial to Uncle Rainbow's brother, and stared in through the trees at us.

One of the boys, Victor, came through the maze of hedges and we played by the river in the garden, where it was too muddy for my mother to walk, or by the back door, out of sight of Letty in her window sewing. We listened by the pool in the woods for signs of the cave coming up again.

As well as the living, the dead stirred at the roots of spring. They jostled in the woods by the cave in the hope of regeneration. While Uncle Rainbow crouched in his room, or disappeared on journeys where it was not yet possible to find him, the portraits in the dining room ingested his vital properties and went out wandering. They went in search of their own forgotten traces: of the one mark they had made for which they might be remembered; yet they were seldom successful, leaving only a garden and woodland more disordered and trampled than before. Uncle Rainbow's brother, woken under the granite cross of the war memorial by the growl of Victor's engine, was particularly astonished – by the sameness of the place he had known half a century ago, and by the fact that the Great War had not allowed him to make any changes before he died. From a pencil sketch in the hall he looked bemusedly out, and when my mother, in her goings about the house, happened to pass him and catch his eye, she looked away in mild disapproval. The ridiculously short life span, the hopeful expression, gave her guilt in her own careful exultation at spring. On certain
days, when the frame was empty and Uncle Rainbow's brother had gone to the woods, she pretended not to notice. But both she and Uncle Rainbow were relieved at the absence: the brother had been no more than a hiccup in the line, and he reminded Uncle Rainbow of the discrepancy in their earth and silken beds.

Some years, because my mother was afraid to arrive too soon and fret at the delay of spring, we came south as the folded leaves were prising open the buds. The dark, sour light round the house didn't deceive my mother then: she knew there was no sun to be seen, and the moon had gone too, and although she looked at Letty appraisingly, the fears of earlier days were gone. It was too late to stop the impending changes in the year. My mother unpacked sunglasses. My father, delighted at doing without the revulsion of watching winter's burial, and the bloody shoots it sent up into the apple trees, hummed in the house and read through piles of Uncle Rainbow's old newspapers. These announced forgotten wars and treaties: my father, looking out from time to time at the landscape stained red by spring, sighed at treachery. On the wide landing, or in one of the little-used rooms downstairs where Uncle Rainbow had hung his shells in baskets and nets, he could be found sitting in a Panama hat and holding an ancient newspaper. The house had become a beach, and these objects were his
trouvailles
. He was a northerner in the tropics. The knowledge of the imminent birth of the sun gave him more pleasure than the thing itself.

In the days when we had arrived late from the north, my mother took care to hide her disappointment at the lack of southern stars, the absence of tropical flowers, the meadows logged with water still silver in frost. She walked the house in her sunglasses, and picked her way among Uncle Rainbow's collections. The moon had gone from the sky, and the sun chased after it. Day and night were obscure and undivided. Only Letty's meals announced the time. There was talk of neighbours: they called at this blank stage of the year, as if
they knew they didn't fit by rights into any real season: Uncle Rainbow muttered of getting a girl in to help. While my mother and Uncle Rainbow spoke the names of houses and their occupants, I thought of Victor. As there was no longer any way of knowing the time, I couldn't wait to see him. The village that looked as if it had been beaten by a broom into a corner of the downs held him close then. When it was neither winter nor spring, Victor stood pale by the door of his mother's cottage. It was impossible to tell whether he was going in or out; but his neck, rising from a bright white shirt, arched to the colourless sky.

My mother said she had heard from Letty that Victor had a sister who might help in the house. And she smiled at Letty as she said this. Letty looked back at her unsmilingly. A good dinner service would have to be brought from the cellar. From dusty plates entwined initials would appear. Glasses would have to sparkle, at just the time when there was no moon to come in and set them shimmering. They would stand, crystallized tulips of water, on a table as black and smooth as winter earth. I saw Letty sigh and throw glances at Uncle Rainbow. But he nodded at my mother and said: