The Sister (25 page)
Authors: Poppy Adams
TUESDAY
CHAPTER
23
Intuition
I
T IS NOT UNTIL
the next day that they come to get me. I knew they would, that they would have discovered the truth using the additional sense that everyone but me seems to have been born with. What did Vivien call it? She said she could tell what had happened here from 250 miles away because “Ginny, most people just have that sort of intuition.”
I’m ready for them as I watch the police car crunching up the drive from my lookout window, and I know this will be the last day I see Bulburrow, that I set eyes on it. I must admit I’m terrified about where they will take me; I’ve never lived anywhere but here. I won’t feel safe.
Inspector Piggott leads me out of the house. He gently lays a blanket over my shoulders and I pause by the door of the car to take one last look.
My attention is caught by a familiar figure walking up the side of the drive towards me. I can tell who it is even before his features become clear, by the hunched lope, the stocky build, the lazy gait and the big hands hanging apologetically by his sides. How did Michael know I was leaving?
Michael wanders over to me by the open car door and we stare at each other. He’s about to say “Good-bye,” I’m sure of it, and I’m about to say it too, but suddenly, I have this feeling, and again I’m sure it’s a mutual one, that we have so many things to say to each other, so many understandings to share, that even to say “Good-bye” is not only unnecessary but trite. It’s as if I suddenly understand that he’s always been in my life, in the wings, and always known and understood who I am and what has happened and even been able to foresee, with some infinite wisdom, what will ensue. And he’s here now, telling me all that without uttering a word. Half of me wants to hug him, the other wants to cry because, now that I think about it, this is the saddest moment of my life, my most naturally emotional moment. Not all those times that I might have expected myself to cry—not when my sister fell off the bell tower, not when my mother died or when my baby died. But this,
this
is the saddest moment, leaving Michael and leaving my house, one and the same I suppose. It comes to me in a chorus of understanding: Michael is the only person who cared for me and looked out for me, without expecting anything in return, without using me or thinking of me as a burden. Perhaps, if I can dare to say it, my only true friend.
Instead of words, he gives me the slightest form of a nod, a fractional dip of the head with a brief lowering of his eyelids. To anyone else it is imperceptible, but to me it is bountiful. It says “good-bye” and “I’ll take care of things” and simply and honestly “that’s it then.” I know I don’t need to say or do anything, nothing is expected of me, so I don’t even dip my head in return.
TODAY
I
’M SITTING UP IN BED
. It’s not my bed. I don’t know whose it is. I’m in a little room with pale yellow walls and a white ceiling. It has a small window with a blind and a grille on the outside and there’s another little window cut into my door so I can see anyone who walks past in the corridor outside. I have a bedside table, a builtin cupboard and a chair. The walls are bare and my bedside clock, the one with the luminous face, sits companionably on the table beside me. When I need to go to the bathroom, I’m taken to one at the end of the corridor. It has long white handles on the walls, by the basin and beside the loo, and the bath has a contraption over it, like a harness, for if I’m ever unable to get into it by myself. It looks to me like the sort of thing they’d use to lift a horse.
A woman comes into the room and rolls open the blind. The woman’s name is Helen. I’m not able to open the blind myself, even though she’s tried to show me how. There’s a knack to yanking it down a little first, then letting it glide up slowly, but it’s got a mind of its own—always getting stuck partway, or not going up at all so when you keep yanking it it just gets longer and longer.
“Morning,” she says. She says exactly the same things every day, but I don’t mind. I don’t know anything about Helen and Helen doesn’t know anything about me. She has no idea I’m a famous lepidopterist and I lived in a mansion. Can you imagine? If I told her, she’d never believe me.
I sit forward while Helen arranges some pillows behind my back. After she’s plumped them up, she turns my clock a little on the bedside table to face me.
“Tea?” she asks, leaving the room. I don’t need to answer; she’ll bring it whatever I say. I push the clock back to how it had been before. I find it infuriating when she moves it, but I’ve not been able to tell her yet. It’s taken me long enough to persuade her to make the tea satisfactorily.
Helen returns with a tray. She puts a mug of hot water on my table for me to see.
“Here we go,” she says. “Watching…?” She plops a tea bag into the mug, then stirs it continuously with a teaspoon. She counts, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,” and at once she lifts the spoon and the tea bag deftly out of the mug and drops them onto the tray. Then she takes up a dessertspoon and concentrates as she pours the milk into it. When it is so full that the milk is wobbling and about to burst over its sides, she tips it into the mug. She drops the spoon onto the tray.
“There you go.” She picks up the tray and walks out.
T
HE WEEKEND THAT
Vivien came home seems unreal now. I’d still like to know why she came, and the other thing I’ll never understand is why, throughout our lives, I’m the only one of my family who managed to pull through unscathed. It’s unnerving. I’ve had to watch the lot of them first despair and then die. I tried my hardest to help them, to hold them together, but the harder I tried the more they fell apart until, in the end, each one seemed to find their own way to self-destruct.
Here I feel as if I’m in a different life altogether, as if I’ve switched with someone. I don’t mind. I definitely got the better exchange. I don’t miss Bulburrow Court in the slightest. I’m so much less anxious here. It’s small and manageable, there’s no clutter, and I don’t get unexpected visitors. I find they have a very reliable routine and, I’ll tell you the best thing of all: if I want to check that my bedside clock’s correct, I have only to ring this little bell and someone comes, day or night, whatever the time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
M
ANY THANKS
for the hard work and insightful editing of Lennie Goodings at Virago / Little, Brown in the United Kingdom and Carole Baron at Knopf in the United States, and for the sound advice of Judith Murray at Greene & Heaton. Thank you also to Hazel Orme; to the entire team at Little, Brown; and to the staff at Knopf.
Thank you to my husband, William, for his fine judgment and unerring support; to my early readers Olivia Warham and Lizzie King for their comments and encouragement. Thank you to my other readers: Charlotte Bennett, Cat Armstrong, Victoria Mitford, Julia Pincus, Beck Armstrong and, in particular, Anne-Marie Mackay for her help and advice, and Jim Ind, who put up with my many questions. I’m forever grateful to Bella Murray for introducing my work to Stevie Lee, and to Stevie for introducing it to Judith Murray. Thank you to Sam Morgan for keeping the children from going wild.
Thank you to Les Hill at Butterfly Conservation in Dorset for his expertise and time spent checking my facts, and to the Royal Entomological Society in London for allowing me to use their library. The books I found most useful were
Moths
by E. B. Ford;
Collecting & Breeding Butterflies & Moths
by Brian Worthington-Stuart; and, in particular, I drew on and borrowed from P. B. M. Allen’s wonderful anecdotal accounts of moth collecting in the early to mid-twentieth century,
A Moth Hunter’s Gossip
;
Moths and Memories;
etc.
The scientific ideas and experiments that I have attributed to my fictional characters in this novel are borrowed from or based on true debates and experimentation during the period. I’m very grateful to countless entomologists of the mid-twentieth century whose ideas have influenced the perspective, or piqued the scientific curiosity, of my characters.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
P
OPPY
A
DAMS
is a documentary filmmaker who has made films for the BBC and the Discovery Channel. She lives in London. This is her first novel.
This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2008 by Poppy Adams
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Originally published in Great Britain as
The Behaviour of Moths
by Virago Press, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, London.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Adams, Poppy, [date]
The sister / by Poppy Adams.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. 3. Alienation (Social psychology)—Fiction. 4. Moths—Fiction. I. Title.
PR
6101.d364s57 2008
823'.92—dc22 2008001882
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26926-3
v3.0