The Bad Sister (6 page)

‘I'm making scrambled eggs,' Tony said from the bedroom.

I heard him walk past on his way to the kitchen and I stared at myself intensely in the mirror. Sometimes his movements in the flat were like the stealings-up of an enemy spy, sometimes an outright military takeover. I could never tell where he would be next. I dreaded meeting him in the passage, as if our passing there only underlined our meaningless lives in which we were anyway going in the opposite direction to each other.

‘Do you want scrambled eggs or not?'

‘Have you by any chance seen a pair of jeans anywhere?'

I had given myself away. If they weren't there I didn't know what I could do. I thought of the outside of the building where I lived, the pretentious façade that made it, the only block of flats in the street, the kind of building where people scrawl insults in chalk on the lower walls. I saw myself going out, in jeans and jacket, walking on air, and coming back in the clinging silk dress. What had happened? Why had the other world rejected me like this?

‘Yes. I put them in the washbox. I'm making the eggs now.'

This brought me out of the bathroom. I had a bath towel round me, which emphasized my fatness and my sloping shoulders. I went along the passage to the kitchen, already a victim for Tony, unable to wait for what he had to say.

‘Why… why did you put them in the washbox?'

‘They're not yours, are they? They looked far too small. I thought you must have got into some tangle with someone.' He looked at me oddly. ‘What the hell's going on, Jane? With your hair and everything?'

‘But why were they dirty? They didn't have … blood on them, or anything?'

Tony forked the eggs onto plates. He set his marble profile above them and began to eat.

‘No, they weren't dirty. They had a strange smell. Like burnt matches, rather.'

I went back to my bedroom smiling. So the other world smelled of sulphur, did it? I would have to consult Meg on this. And I put on my ‘normal' clothes with a light heart: a cotton skirt that had gone at the waist so that the zip had to be dragged up to the waistband and stuck there, a green T shirt and floppy white sandals. I wouldn't be needing them much longer, if my other outfit was really lying in the washbox; and they felt already like a dead woman's clothes, neither in nor out of fashion, slightly embarrassing and poignant. I pulled back my shoulders and walked at a quick march to the kitchen and the scrambled eggs. One of Tony's virtues, which went with his low expectations of life, was his lack of curiosity: he would almost certainly fail to ask me what I really
had
been up to the night before. He didn't like surprise, which he treated as if it were sudden pain, backing away from something unforeseen, however pleasurable, with a hurt, blinking stare. If – which he must have suspected – I had picked up a youth, played with lighted matches, fallen with him in waste ground somewhere beyond the refinement of our street and shopping precinct, Tony didn't want to know about it. And, sure enough, we had our coffee and eggs in silence while the brimstone-tainted jeans lay, carefully covered with the lid, in the straw box in the corner.

‘There's a press showing today,' I said at last. We either talked about the films I went to and wrote about, or the progress of Tony's script. Tony, with his gloomy standing invitation to bad luck, was involved in a script of Conrad's
Chance
, and had already announced that there was a jinx on Conrad in the film business, things never worked out as they should. Secretly I didn't blame Conrad for cursing people like Tony. Why couldn't they leave his work alone?

‘It's a West German film,' I said to Tony's half-questioning look. ‘About two men who wander the roads on a lorry.'

‘
Easy Rider
, German style,' Tony said. ‘Why're they showing it on a Sunday?'

‘The Schroeders always do. Don't you remember, you came to one.'

‘No lunch then?'

No lunch.

I got up, feeling vaguely guilty as always. Sunday lunch was supposed to be a cementing thing for couples: you could see the woman fingering bleeding meat on the Friday, frowning over the joints as if the secret of their future happiness lay in the grain of the flesh. Yorkshire pudding solidified relationships too, producing a drowsiness after the meal, a soft acceptance of everything. I would be sitting watching the screen instead of preparing all this. And Tony would be hard and distant as a result. All for a portion of an animal. But offerings were important. Without the smell of roasting meat from the beaches below, the gods might have turned away from the world.

‘I'll do the meat,' Tony said. ‘I'm only juggling around with the script this morning. Did I tell you, it looks as if Susannah York might be Flora de Barral.'

‘It's not true!'

‘You think she'd be right for the part?'

I tried to give an encouraging smile, and failed. What on earth did it matter? I certainly wouldn't be going to a press showing of
that
one. And at the moment, because I knew I would be leaving soon, travelling to places where, in a million years of searching, Tony would never find me, I felt a great warmth towards him, an affection filled with regret that I would be losing him too. I went over to where he was sitting and put my arms round his head. I brought my chin down on the top of his head. There was no parting in the thick brown hair, which smelled of toast. How would he manage without me? Perfectly well, was the answer as I straightened up again. He would hardly notice I had gone!

‘It's just that I don't want lunch today,' I said. ‘I'm thinking of going to see Gala after the film.'

‘Oh.'

‘You don't mind, do you?'

‘Of course not!'

‘Very well then.'

After this exchange, in which I apparently conveyed total heartlessness and from which Tony emerged downcast, I went with too buoyant a step to the door of the flat. He was watching me as I left, but there was no way to present my physical departure acceptably. If I walked like a woman cowed by thousands of years behind the veil, eyes down, erect, shuffling gait, there was no reason for me to be allowed out at all and I would be unable to get as far as the main door of the building. If I went ‘ordinarily', as Tony would go, simply walking out of the flat with a quick wave, it would be selfish, uncaring. If I were coming back for the meat, of course, I could make a quick apologetic dash of my departure for my job. But I wasn't. So I went with an energy that was clearly provocative. Tony's sulky glowering face came out with me into the darkness of the stairs and hung in front of me like the after-image of a violently bright light as I groped my way towards the black plastic button. I heard his silence affect the whole building, and it hung over me like a hood until I was halfway down the street.

There is a wind blowing today, the air in the street is milky white, and scraps of white paper float along at first-floor level. The street is as different today from the black stillness of the night before as I, in my cotton skirt and plodding step, am changed from the creature who flew down it. Since then, the full bottles that went in to Paradise Island have been emptied and are set out on the pavement for collection. The supermarket, still closed because it's Sunday, reflects in its plate glass windows the ghostly figures of the women who will go in and become enclosed there tomorrow. A noise comes from the wives' shelter: children, pent up, and suffering from the misery of their mothers, pelted, like the street, with mysterious scraps of words, nervous in the hot wind which also blows white dust into
the open windows and flaking paint of the surrounds. I walk up to Notting Hill Gate, where the press showing of the film is being held. The flowers in the sloping gardens are smothered with the fine white dust. One householder, rich and proud, has a sculpture six feet wide and twice as tall in his front garden – it looks like the head of a white tulip, two of the heavy stone petals peeled back to reveal the empty centre. In a poorer street, where the railings of the houses seem to press against them, allowing only a mantrap-size descent into the basement, someone has propped a flying figure in white papier mâché at the top of the steps: one leg and one arm are flung out into the street, the eyeless face, like the face of a victim of an accident, swathed in white plaster bandages, gazes at the houses across the strip of grey concrete. I feel a sudden fear, as I walk past, that this is someone like me, someone who tried to escape, punished by the world, frozen into a ludicrous figure, not even made of hard substance but ready to melt into shreds of pulp at the first burst of rain. Or is it all that is left of the Snow Queen, this white, artificial, sexless thing, after her splinters of ice had gone out into the world and she had fallen from her cold throne? The rich smell of Sunday dinners cooking, the red meat spitting in this white bottomless world gives me nausea. I have to cling onto a railing, at the end of the street of the arrested, flying figure, before I go on up the hill.

I know or recognize most of the film critics standing outside the cinema. They have tired, blank eyes from seeing too much of other people's fantasies, and are annoyed too at having their Sunday morning taken away from them. One or two nod to me. ‘Yes, but did you see that other Fassbinder?' ‘He comes in at the end of this – the Wenders, you know.' ‘I know. But I mean, did you see that very early one?' They seem to be mouthing the words, the door of the cinema is shut, and they are agitated and anxious, longing for the film to be over and for Sunday lunch. What is the film going to show us? Life in contemporary society, it says on the hand-out. The apathetic, passive, alienated life, an
Odyssey without any point of return. I would rather watch a pearl grow in an oyster! I stand amongst the velvet trousers in the small crowd, and wonder if Meg will really send me away from all this. She once said, cryptically, that she would show me everything, all that was inside me, and all the different regions that can be reached without taking a step. I believed her. I stand thinking of tomorrow, when we will meet. Already, last night's journey seems far away, like a flash from a distant meteor. ‘Jane!' One of the critics, a short man with a frown, comes towards me in the white air. ‘Tell me, what did you think of the Skolimowski? They showed it again the other night. And I wondered if you'd seen it when it first came out …'

‘The best foreign film to be made in England.' I hear myself offering this stupid remark, but I remember the film well. It is violent, obsessive, surprising: as if a whole layer of England had been peeled off, the whiteness scrubbed away, and the underside, people's real passions and feelings, pushed up into the light. The critic nods as if I had said something interesting, and we begin to file into the cinema.

It is as we pass into the first dusk of the foyer that I see the girl. I stand for a moment, clutching my press card, waiting for her to turn and see me. So Meg answers me when I think of her! She has sent me this girl. And yet …

The girl turns. What is it that is so familiar about her? She has something of mine. We have been bound in an ancient story, of bitterness and revenge. Yet I feel I have never seen her before in my life. I can see that she recognizes me too, for her eyes flicker and the message from her skin is one of familiarity. A small triumphant smile compresses the corners of her mouth. What did she do to me? Or was I the victor and is she, at peace now while I suffer, regarding me with pity and contempt? I move slightly in her direction, with a stumbling movement as if my knees have forgotten how to function while I walk. She stiffens at this, and glides into the cinema, but her stiffness is an invitation. Her head is full of pictures for me. I follow her into the dark red darkness, and sit down behind her, in the second row.

The film begins. In black and white, it says on the screen. But it's not the real blackness, nor the real whiteness: it's grey. A grey motorway stretches out on the screen above our heads. As it soars upwards, making us, the audience, like tiny creatures at the side of the road, my eyelids bisect it and come down halfway over my eyes – and through my lashes, which are trembling slightly with the effort of staying in that position, the first flickering blobs of colour begin to appear.

My mother was in the kitchen. The kitchen door led straight out onto the hill: there was no yard, just the grass that was always wet, either with rain or heavy dew: it went up in furrows to the line of Douglas firs planted as a windbreak by the grandfather of the laird; it was humped, long bolsters of grass which seemed to move on the steep hill when the rain swept into the valley from the west. On the grass were small white mushrooms, exhumed every morning from the deep, stony land, and sheep, fleece yellowing with rain and faces oddly patterned as if with their markings they could signal something to each other. Beyond the line of firs and the half-broken stone wall grew the scratchy heather. I went up the cleuch sometimes, to search for cloudberries, those strange fruit which look like a drawing in a medical student's textbook, of internal organs stitched together: their taste is acrid and they grow only above the cloud line, tinges of red on their pink fleshy surface suggesting a faint scorch from the few moments when the clouds part and the sun comes down on them. But my mother used to like to make cloudberry jelly. I took a basket and I would pick blaeberries too, but sometimes the laird and his party were on the hill above our cottage, shooting from the holes in the ground burrowed out for them, or collecting the dusty purple blaeberries, and then I would have to slide back down the hill over bumps of heather and harebells to the grass and the kitchen back door.

What had my mother done? When the laird poked his
head round the back – he always tried the front door first, forgetting that cottagers keep their front doors locked and the front rooms like small mausoleums behind them – she would go crimson, as if he had caught her stealing some of his property while he looked on. He had given her the cottage. He often referred to this as I stood at the door between the kitchen and the escape to the hill behind. She always thanked him, but went on looking guilty. Why was she so uneasy, fingering the old black skirt she wore, gazing past me at the hill as if she was longing to run for it and disappear into the white mist that came down the cleuch at midday every day and stayed there until rain and dark cloud brought on night. She had been his mistress, of course: some part of me understood that even when I was very young. I was his daughter. That was why she was allowed to live in the cottage. The way he looked at me was furtive and eager, like the stare of a man searching for evidence of disease on his own body. He never touched me if he could help it. Yet he and my mother often looked vaguely at me and through me at the same time, as parents do when discussing ordinary matters in front of their children. Sometimes I felt I belonged to both of them, and then the cottage and the kitchen seemed to grow – and I did too, suddenly seeing into some bright space where there would be infinite possibilities. Soon, though, my mother would catch herself out in this relaxed attitude, and so would he – and Meg would be seen, walking up from the Burn Wood in her long skirts – and they would return to a combination of embarrassment and resentment, and the gloom, the stone floors, the stone-sided sink, the thin wooden table with the gay plastic cloth seemed more oppressive than before. When there was sun, it was all right to go out the back: the light blue sky over the hills looked as if it could be reached in a minute, peewits and larks were everywhere, the gurgle of burn sounded loud as it slipped down out of sight to a hidden loch. But there was so seldom sun. The valley was steep. It looked, on a black day, as if its contours had been drawn with slashing lines on rough paper, and as
if the lines contained our sentence, my mother's and mine. For our sins, we should stay here forever. And as it was clear she had practically no money, there seemed no way of getting out at all.