The Bad Sister (44 page)

‘Why not ask the girl to come down for a week or two?'

The neighbours came, and sat under Uncle Rainbow's ancestors. They laughed very little, speaking mainly of threatened estates. Their coats were stiff, and when they hung in the hall they made a curtain that cut off the life of the fields and woods outside. Even the feel of the house was muffled. Imprints of complacent faces hung in the air after them, until Letty opened the windows and went from room to room brushing them away.

In the absence of sun and moon, the house took on the appearance of a luxury cruiser. A tinny piano could be heard every time Letty opened the dining-room door to go out with the plates. A Charleston record came intermittently, as if blown by a sea wind. Without real light from outside, the house manufactured its own: the guests had green faces, and the food looked dead and tasteless. Yet even in its new guise,
things didn't go as they should. The music sounded as if the needle were going the wrong way on the track.

As the control just held, the neighbours ate off gold-rimmed plates and Letty poured wine from thin bottles. My mother and Uncle Rainbow looked anxiously about them, to see if any further transformations were taking place. The leaf and root features of Uncle Rainbow's ancestors were autumnal. They were in suspense for the changes to come.

My father, when persuaded to join the company, dressed in a dark suit and spoke in a solemn voice as if explaining bad news. While the guests complained of the weather and the dark, he saw the vanished planets in Letty's moving arse. A crescent moon was there, running slap up the middle of an orbiting sun. My mother rang the handbell incessantly, like a votary demanding the resumption of an interrupted mass.

Annie, Victor's sister, waited by the war memorial after she had finished washing up the plates. She waited for Victor to come and get her, and in the evenings that were already longer he came from the village on his bike. His black, greased head was a blur above the white lamp. She climbed up behind him, and they went on the twisting roads over the downs.

Everybody and everything waited for the turn of the wheel. Then, spring would come. The house waited. On Doric columns in the hall, the frieze of serpents stopped their chase and waited to reverse direction. Uncle Rainbow and my mother waited. Under the shells in the dining-room they felt the gyre falter and stop. Letty waited. She laughed at my father's mournful stare, and at the eyes of guests averted from her muddy hands.

Uncle Rainbow disappeared often in these days of suspense. He left meals early, and stripped off the last vestiges of identity, and went out through a side door to the garden. I followed him to the river. Uncle Rainbow crossed a bridge over swamp, and the tributaries that lay hidden in the grass. He came to the river. The remains of a boathouse, built as
an Oriental pagoda, stood behind him, and water filled it. On this floor of onyx a boat sighed, to the ripples of wind on water that came in like fans. Uncle Rainbow knelt on the bank. He stared intently at the mud, and the little round holes like buttonholes made by the worms as they went in and out. On the important tide a swan passed. I had seen the tall nest of twigs, further upriver, where the eggs, packed close together as bombs, lay waiting for the sun.

The first signs that water would burst everywhere within the next twenty-four hours came from Letty and my mother. The sound of the weir, usually no more than a faint rustle, seemed to emanate from Letty. My mother rising from her bath found herself covered in pearls of water, which clung stubbornly to her skin. The plates and cups my mother and Letty washed took on an indelible watermark. A salty smell invaded the house, and the pictures in the frames warped as sea air attacked the gilt.

Uncle Rainbow's river bank grew to a wide beach of pebbles. He crouched still, under a sky torn by wind. The blue air and racing clouds swallowed him, and sea birds danced wildly over his head. He looked up sometimes and stared out at the ocean. He scanned the waves, as if a message could be deciphered in the foam.

My mother and Letty paid no attention to the drama Uncle Rainbow was about to produce. They fussed round my father instead. My father had set up a deckchair, found in one of the collections and rotting in its fabric, on the landing where in earlier days he had stood at dawn and looked out. The window was open as far as it would go: my father, lolling like a passenger in his new enjoyment of the house, inspected the world through binoculars. They made port-holes of his familiar window, but he never said if he saw the sea. Letty and my mother never asked him. They brought up soup, and club sandwiches my mother was fond of making, and if they glanced at the window they nodded non-committally at the grey mist that could have been sea or land, the yellow gravel path just visible below.

Uncle Rainbow walked along the beach until he was
dovetailed by mist. He went in sharp stones up to his ankles. Sometimes he picked up a smooth white stone and hatched it in his hand before letting it fly to the sea. I followed at a distance, and when he heard my feet on the pebbles he turned and looked uncertain. He might have been hearing his own echo. He searched below the high tide mark, on stones that looked as if they had been scalded by tea. Rags and rubbish clung to the broken concrete posts of the breakwater, and he poked amongst them with a stick. These posts had been put up to repel the enemy. Now a solitary wire straggled from the top of each but they still stood to attention, clutched by detritus. Rag skirts swelled round them in the tide and weed made slimy ribbons. To the thump of the waves the stone defenders danced with the rags which had been swept in on them.

Uncle Rainbow went down to where the sea was coming in, and the sea circled his shoes and soaked them without his knowing. In his wet shoes he tramped the city of the edge of the sea. The sea came in in arcades, and in single columns that shot up the beach and then toppled. In these shallow edifices, where tiny fish swam and black poppers of weed were embedded in the stones, Uncle Rainbow explored with caution. The water was treacherous, and dappled like the belly of a great, flat fish. It might rise up at the prod of his stick and bring the ocean down on our heads.

The sea hissed at Uncle Rainbow. He stood on the beach, thwarted. The stone heads of the sea tossed, and pounded down at his feet, and pulled back again, gasping, through combs of black weed. The mouths of the sea refused to answer him. From the stone mouths of the sea came riddles, impossible to understand, and spewings of foam.

My mother went up on the downs and along the road to the village and back again to the house, and she did this every day as if the constant circulation would exert the spring. I went with her, wishing I could play with Victor. But his motorbike, in the shed to the side of the garden, was
dangerous and forbidden. My mother was afraid he would take me with him on a ride. As we passed the garden, and the house where Victor and Annie lived with their mother, she stared at the bike as if it had no right there. The neat beds that waited for wallflowers, and the raked path Annie walked obediently every day, were threatened by the black bike. It stayed in the shed like a crouching man, shoulders colossally padded and a narrow waist.

After the spring had come, no one remembered the last blank, unmarked day, when Uncle Rainbow brought the sea finally into the house, and the tide in Letty's pool rose, and the water covered us completely. In the bright rays of the sun, when the shadows from the hedges in the maze were black on the path, and the last drops of water blazed in the trees, we thought only of light, and of the summer that was opening out in front of us. In the last, dark day, we had looked up at the sky made of water. We never imagined we could be free of it.

The sea emptied into the sky when the earth tilted at the turn of spring. We lived under trees of dripping weed, and high in the sky, like a trail of stars, the keel of a ship would leave a wake of phosphorescence. Letty, deeply immersed in her pool, saw us only as reflections in the still water: a group of people distorted by the jolt of the season, under shells that grew over our heads.

In the cave, Letty lay and waited for the hour of birth. After it had come, and the day fell into marked divisions, we had as little memory of the past as of an eventless dream of water. My mother put on a bright lipstick and combed her hair. Letty had brought the sun, and a thin new moon which never left its place beside it.

When spring came, my father and Uncle Rainbow walked on the downs that had risen from the sea in the shape of lobsters. They congratulated each other on the coming of spring. Over them, in the pale haze from the sun, swallows flew to their nests. On the roads, smooth and black as the birds, Victor and his friends circled and dived.

My mother put on her sunglasses and stared straight up
at the sun. She saw it coming out of the cave, bursting from Letty. In the garden she pulled in wonder at the chestnut leaves, which had flapped out limp from the chrysalis. The grass stained her shoes, and she came back into the house with green feet, as if she had been walking on a wet canvas. The white and red blossom began to affect my father. He sneezed, and tears ran out of his eyes. In the new brightness, the flowers and trees contained some intolerable knowledge, and my father pined for the north. The harmony of the south disturbed him. Flags of all colours waved together, and my father wanted the intransigence of the north, the one, stubborn view.

Uncle Rainbow and Letty ate green vegetables that came up in the garden. They were happy, in the bright sun they had made. Letty rose early, and my mother found her at the back door, pulling at the dandelions and coltsfoot that had come down in a shower from the sun. Letty always turned to my mother and said:

‘Why not stay all summer this time? Don't go back so soon!'

Hot and yellow, the sun lay all day in Letty's arms. The brightness of the light crept into my father's mind and made him think of the future of the world. But he chose the dark. We drove to the station, and waited for the train that would take us to the dark again.

In the north, spring had hardly touched the trees and hills. It had come in pale, uneven waves, and then receded, leaving a faint wash over larch and elder. The dark came down in the evenings as if it never would give way to spring.

THE BAD SISTER

Daughter of the second Baron Glenconner and Elizabeth Lady Glenconner, Emma Tennant was born in London in 1937. Educated at St Paul's Girls School, she spent the war years and her childhood summers in Scotland at Glen, the family castle in the Borders, and was one of the last debutantes to be presented at court. Growing up in ‘swinging' London in the '50s and '60s, she took an active part in the social and creative life of the city working as a travel writer for
Queen
magazine and then as features editor for
Vogue
. Her first novel
The Colour of Rain
was published in 1963 under the name Catherine Aydy. Married three times, with a son and two daughters, she became a full-time novelist in 1973 with the apocalyptic
The Time of the Crack
(1973), later reprinted as
The Crack
. More than twenty books were to follow, including thrillers, comic fantasies, books for children and a series of unconventional and revisionary ‘sequels' to classic texts, such as
Tess
(1993);
Pemberley
and
An Unequal Marriage
(1993–4) from
Pride and Prejudice
; and
Emma in Love
(1996).

Tennant's interest in archetypal narratives and especially in how women are placed in them has led her to reinterpret other canonical texts in a characteristic voice which blends witty fable, social satire, a feminist analysis of patriarchal power, and an engagement with divided identity, which she sees as a theme particularly close to Scottish experience.
The Bad Sister
(1978) and
Two Women of London
(1989) cast a telling eye on Hogg's
Justified
Sinner and Stevenson's
Jekyll and Hyde; Faustin
e (1991) does the same for the Faust legend;
Queen of Stones
(1982) takes on Golding's
Lord of the Flies
, while
The Adventures of Robina, by herself, memoirs of a debutante at the court of Elizabeth II
(1986), ‘edited' by Emma Tennant, revisits the London of her youth as an ingénue from the north told in the style of an 18th-century novel by Defoe or Smollett.

More recent work has seen Tennant turn to a creative reflection on her own life, starting with
Strangers: a family romance
(1998), much praised for its lyrical mixing of imagination and recollection as it engaged with the history of her talented and eccentric family and her own early years.
Girlitude: a memoir of the '50s and '60s
(1999) covers her experiences from eighteen to thirty, followed by
Burnt Diaries
(1999).

Tennant was the founding editor of the innovative periodical
Bananas
(1975); she has worked as general editor of In Verse (1982) and as general editor of the Viking series lives of Modern Women (1985). She was awarded an honorary D. Lit. from the University of Aberdeen in 1996.