The Sister (3 page)

“I just forgot,” I lied.

“We’re all on your side you know, Ginny, but sometimes you have to help us a little,” he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he asked if I was angry about what had happened, how I felt about it, if I was cross with Vivien or with my parents. He went on and on with the most peculiar questions, and really I just wanted to tell him that the only person who was making me angry was him, couldn’t he leave me alone. I know Dr. Moyse was a good man and he was always trying for the best, but sometimes it felt like he was interviewing me—what I felt about this and that and stupid things; if I ever wanted revenge. He never did it to Vivi. In the end, I told him I didn’t feel anything. I’d come to realize this was the best way to end his diatribe. He never knew how to continue when I said that.

Later that evening the telephone rang through the silence of the house. Clive answered it.

“Crewkerne two five one,” he said, pushing out his chin as he did habitually and stroking the thick-cropped beard that spread down his neck and merged with the hair rising up out of his shirt. He rubbed it with the back of his fingers, upwards against the growth. A moment later, “Thank you, Operator, put the hospital through.”

My heart beat away the time as Maud and I watched him, searching in vain for answers in his firmly set features as he listened. But his face, much of it hidden under the cropped beard, gave nothing away and the rhythm of his hand strokes up his neck were slow and even, unaltered by the news he was hearing.

“The good news is that Vivien is okay. She’ll be fine,” Clive informed us matter-of-factly after the call. “They’re watching her closely, but the doctor is confident she’ll pull through.”

My world regrew, not least because whatever the reason for Maud being upset with me soon dissolved into the many layers of a family’s misunderstood memories. Later, when we’d come back from visiting Vivi in hospital, it was as if she’d never even thought it. She hugged me and told me how lucky Vivien was to have such a loving older sister. Maud was right about that. I’ve always loved Vivi, even all the years she’s been away. And I always will, no matter what.

W
HAT
V
IVI LOST
that spring when she fell from the bell tower was not, luckily (as everyone kept telling her), her life, but the ability to have children. She’d been impaled on an iron stake, part of the balustrade that had run round the top of the porch. Maud said it used to be a balcony leading from the first-floor landing and my lookout window had been the door that led on to it. For the war effort everyone had to hand over any iron to the munitions factories, Maud said, to be melted down into guns and bullets, so the balcony—along with the house’s main gates—had to go.

Vivien had ruptured her womb and the infection quickly inflamed her ovaries so that a week after her fall she had an operation to take away her entire reproductive system. She lost it to save her life. It didn’t bother her, mind. She liked to tell people she had died once already, or give them the weeks, months or years since the accident that she “could have been dead for.” In the village, Mrs. Jefferson assured her that she must have been spared for a reason, that there would be a “calling” later in her life, and Mrs. Axtell questioned her persistently about what she had seen, trying to get a preview of eternity. Later, at school, she impressed her friends with stories of what it had felt like to die. None of them had known anyone who had died before. And once, when she’d found out that all a woman’s eggs are already in her ovaries when she’s born, she told Maud’s lunch guests that she’d lost all her children.

But Vivi herself was still a child. She hadn’t yet developed the womanly urge to hold her newborn, to feel and need its dependence and to understand that that was what life was about and nothing else mattered. Nor had I, so at the time neither of us realized the true significance of her accident. Only that she’d been so incredibly lucky.

CHAPTER
3

Vivien, a Small Dog and the Missing Furniture

T
HIS FULL-LENGTH
arched window at the end of the first-floor landing, where I’m still waiting for Vivi, is my lookout. I know it might sound funny but sometimes I think of the house as my ship, myself as its captain, and here I’m at the helm, in charge of its course and direction. I can see who’s coming up to the house, who’s walking their dogs on the footpath running up to the ridge and what’s about to come down the lane from the top of the hill. For instance, I can tell you that every day, at eight in the morning, the woman from East Lodge—I don’t know her name—takes her collie up to the ridge. Sometimes, not often, she’ll glance this way when she gets to the bit that curves into view of the house, but she doesn’t know I’m watching her—I make sure I’ve pulled back against the pillar in time. I feel in control in this captain’s post: I see what I want to see and nobody sees me.

I have two other strategic lookouts. From my bedroom window I can see the church, the postbox in the wall on the other side, the lane leading up to the rectory and Peverill’s bustling farmyard. From the bathroom I can see directly south to the brook and beyond to the peach houses, and to the Stables where Michael lives, the other gate houses and the lane that leads to them.

I don’t venture out much anymore. It’s unnecessary. Michael, who used to garden for us with his father, buys my groceries and does the odd job, like putting out the rubbish at the end of the drive. I don’t employ him anymore so I don’t know if he does it out of kindness or duty, but he’s the only person I see close up these days, even though I spend hours watching the daily turns of the village from a distance. Bulburrow’s houses are clustered in a valley bowl and from my three vantage points I can see them all, except a couple of new bungalows built halfway up the lane to the north. If I’m at the helm of a ship, then Bulburrow Court is at the helm of the village, the central control tower from which the rest can be monitored and directed.

When Vivi and I were growing up, we knew every single person in every single house, but I don’t know any of them now. The ones we knew have died and their children moved away. It’s one of the problems with getting old: the more people you outlive, the more your life reads like a catalog of other people’s deaths.

Poor Vera, our housekeeper, was the first person I can remember dying. It took her four months. Maud said that, really, she blew up slowly and eventually burst. Vivi and I weren’t allowed to visit her in her north-wing room, as Maud said it might give us nightmares, but I’m certain we had much worse ones just imagining what Vera’s death looked like. But it was Maud’s death that had the biggest impact on our lives. It was pain-free, although probably not as dignified as she’d have liked. She tripped down the cellar steps. But afterwards our lives changed direction forever. That was when Vivi left this house for the last time and she hasn’t been back since. It’s quite a thing, you know; she was twenty-one when I last saw her, not much more than a child. I was twenty-four.

My reverie is disturbed by the even hum of a modern car slowing down the hill and fading, then rising again in this direction, and I can tell it’s cruising up the drive. It must be her. Not many people come up the drive these days. Mostly it’s strangers who’ve taken a wrong turning and quickly reverse or turn round again at the top. Then there are the sort who have recently been coming more and more, in their tall, smart cars. They bang the door knocker, and when I don’t respond, they go away and come back later with a letter asking if I’ll sell up. Why on earth do they think I’ll want to start moving house now? Once a month the woman in the stripy bobble hat walks up the drive. She’s from Social Services, and when she gets no answer to her knock, she leaves her calling card and a pile of leaflets. I like to flick through them—it keeps me in touch with at least some of what’s going on in the world—and all the junk advertising that comes through the door: offers on credit cards, holidays to win, how to switch my fuel supplier, or the free
Diamond Advertiser,
which they don’t always bother to bring up the drive. I used to have a radio but it never worked very well so I got rid of it.

It’s the leaflets from the bobble-hat woman that I find the most interesting, and relevant. It’s how I know, for instance, that my gnarled joints and blotchy fingers, my loss of appetite, low energy, dry eyes and mouth are all part of my rheumatoid arthritis and that I should be eating a lot of green-lipped mussels. It’s how I know that, because I have “flares” followed by “remissions,” my case is fairly mild at the moment but will get a lot worse when it becomes chronic. Then it will be permanently painful and I’ll have to have the joints “popped” to let out some of the excess synovial fluid and I don’t like the sound of that at all.

A silver car rounds into view. It is broad and long and low, and purrs with an air of quality and arrogance. Vivien had told me
when
she would arrive, but not
how.
The car makes a wide sweep of the drive’s circular frontage and comes to a standstill alongside the front door, as horse-drawn carriages would have done when Maud was a girl. My heart is beating so hard that when the engine cuts, the sound of hollow thudding fills the silence, and I’ve just realized I never
truly
believed until right now that she was going to come at all. At the same time I wonder—for a fleeting moment—if I really want her to. But then the thought is gone. She’s coming back because she needs me now. After all, I’m her older sister.

The driver’s door opens. Why is everything happening so slowly? Perhaps it’s true that time is slowed by a quicker heartbeat, like the mayfly, with one hundred wing beats per second, which can fulfill a lifetime in a day. I imagine a young Vivi getting out, the girl I remember her as, quite forgetting I should be expecting someone I won’t recognize. Instead, out steps a young man, no more than twenty-five, with thick dark hair and a smart blue suit. I’m stunned. Where’s Vivi? Perhaps he has nothing to do with Vivi at all. My wave of excitement crashes around me. Has he the wrong house? Another person come to offer to buy it from me, leaving an obsequious letter when there’s no answer? But instead of coming towards the porch, the man walks round the car and opens its back door, the one nearest the house. Now I know
she’s here.

A decorative walking stick is thrust out of the car onto the muddy gravel, the man holds out his arm and, leaning on the stick with one hand and taking the young man’s arm with the other, Vivien emerges, guided like royalty. My face is pressed to the window but she is too close to the house for me to see her clearly. All I can see is the top of her head, gray like mine, but while my hair is long and lies flat against my head, hers is cropped short and obviously shaped. She walks to the back of the car, stops and faces the house. She plants the stick firmly on the ground in front of her, both hands resting on the pommel at the top, one over the other, her feet slightly apart for balance, and surveys Bulburrow Court. All the while the young man is collecting bags and boxes and hangers of clothes wrapped in plastic, and piling them outside the car. Vivien takes in the house slowly, looking crossways from one side to the other. I can imagine what she is seeing: the windows, a few cracked, others smashed with boards replacing the glass; gargoyles, exact copies of those from Carlisle’s twelfth-century cathedral, whose farcical grimaces scared us as children; the corbels that hold up the porch; escutcheons carved under the mullioned windows, the battlements above. It is easy to imagine what she can see, but what memories does every window of each room stir in her? What emotions do the dark gray haunting stones bring, or the enormous quoins at the base of the house, each made from a solid piece of granite, the almighty foundation stones of our lives, holding up for generations the framework of our ancestry?

As she is gripped in her consideration of the house, so I am gripped by watching her from above, all at once desperate to know what is going through her mind.

Her head lifts as she studies each section slowly, methodically even, and I am about to make out more of her features when her eyes begin to run diagonally, crosswise, towards the top of the porch, and up, to the arch of my window…. I pull back into the shadows before she spots me, but as I do, it strikes me that I have seen a ghost. Maud. I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t even tried to imagine what Vivien would look like but I’d never considered she’d be so like Maud. I feel like a little girl again. I don’t dare look out of the window now for fear that I will meet Maud’s all-knowing eyes. I’m numbed with indecision, for a moment paralyzed. I can’t tell you how many minutes go by before I am slowly aware that the goat’s-head knocker is being rattled from side to side (rather than banged as a stranger would do).

I glance at my clothes. I’ve been so busy wondering what Vivien would look like that I haven’t considered the impression she’ll have of me. I’m thinking now of how I might appear to her, but because I never check myself in the mirror these days, I can’t really decide. My hair, I know, must be pretty unruly, like a vagabond’s I should think, and whereas I can tell she’s made an effort with makeup, I don’t have any. Quickly I undo my ponytail, run my fingers through my hair in an effort to comb it and refix the elastic band. I check the front of my navy cardy and pick off a couple of specks of something white and crusty, toothpaste, perhaps, then go down to answer the door. I’m brimming with that sick, nervous apprehension, the sort that churns your stomach. When I get to the heavy oak front door I stop. I have to gather myself for our meeting. I begin to fiddle with the black plastic watch strap on my left wrist, a habit I find consoling. I run my finger back and forth along the inside next to my skin and rub the smooth Perspex face firmly with my thumb, until I know I am ready.

When I open the door Vivien is standing back a couple of paces in the porch, as if to give me a fuller view of her. She’s discarded her stick, as if it was a mere affectation. I am impressed. She must look at least ten years younger than me, not three. She’s smart in a pair of rust-colored cords and a thin gray jumper with a speckled furry collar. A thickly beaded belt with an enameled clasp is draped loosely round her hips and she smells strongly of scent. She wears a simple twisted gold bangle on one wrist and a heavy bejeweled spider crawls up her left breast, rather reminiscent of the brooches Maud collected. She has dangling, brightly colored earrings, on each of which, at further inspection, a cockerel is painted. A small dog, I wouldn’t know which sort, a wiry white one, is tucked casually under her arm. Although the resemblance to Maud is still a surprise, thankfully, up close like this, Vivien is less like our mother than she was from the landing window. She has Maud’s intelligent face, shaped by wise, reflective lines at her brow and mouth, but her eyes are not Maud’s at all.

“Hello, Vivien,” I say coolly, though I’ll admit I’m a little in awe of her immaculate appearance. I remember how Vivi, like Maud, always liked to make an impression, to strive for a reaction, and it used to rile her that I was impassive and imperturbable—or, rather, that I was able to hide my true feelings. My emotions weren’t played out on my face, like hers. I’d always thought it was the price she paid for having a pretty, highly defined face, with delicate, precise features—a hard straight nose, distinctly curved lips, visible cheekbones. Such refinement was not well equipped to shield a disturbance rising beneath it, and every one of Vivi’s emotions would surface and give itself away. None of my features were so elegant or clear-cut, but a thousand thoughts and feelings could be buried unnoticed beneath my broader cheeks and softer, rounded nose. My lips were too wide and full for my face, the bottom one too heavy, curving down a little to reveal a glimpse of the inside. While Vivi had worked on disguising her true feelings as she grew up, I had worked on finding a little muscle to lift my bottom lip so that it might meet its opposite.

“Ginny…,” she says warmly.

“Vivi…,” I reply, finding myself mimicking her tone.

“Is the east wing vacant?” she inquires, mockingly serious, as if she’s addressing a hotel receptionist.

“The east, the west, and the north are
all
vacant,” I say, more as an accurate answer than to affect her game.

“Well then, I’ll take all three.” She smiles, seeking my eyes. There is a brief, awkward pause as she stands watching me, and I her, openly studying each other like the meeting of two cats on one territory. When we were young I’d instinctively wait, even a split second, to judge her mood. She’d make the first comment, suggest the first move, and I’m irritated to find myself once again waiting to divine her reaction, as if the intervening years have just slipped away.

“Ginny…,” she says again, this time in a low questioning voice. Then all of a sudden her face relaxes and she breaks out into a loud irrepressible giggle, throwing her head back wildly, abandoning herself to laughter.

“What’s so funny?” I ask, a little offended.

“Oh, Ginny,” she manages, between hiccuped giggling. “Look at us, Ginny. Just
look
at us. We’re
old
people!” she says, and then another uninhibited wave attacks her. It’s a laugh I recognize instantly, that I’m surprised to have almost forgotten, the whooping little-girl giggle that carried me through my childhood, that I could recognize from the other side of a field, a laugh so catching it could infect even the iciest disposition.

And I’m off. I don’t think I’ve laughed like this, bursting out uncontrollably, since we were children. It’s the kind that makes you bend over double with a knot in your tummy and, at every lull, the frenzied embers of your hilarity are still so hot that you need only the smallest spark of absurdity to set it off again, burning through your stomach.

It’s surprisingly liberating to laugh after a long time having not. Soon we are in unstoppable and unsteady hysterics and the dog under Vivien’s arm is being thrown about, unfazed, as if this were a regular occurrence. Vivien’s dog doesn’t seem to comply with the most basic description of Dog, like barking or wagging a tail. I can’t even see a tail. It seems less of a companion and more of a protuberance, most of the time forgotten like any other body part. Uncharacteristically giddy, I look past Vivien and find her driver inspecting the higher reaches of the turrets and battlements of the house, ignoring us, akin to a manservant not noticing the torrid affair of his master even though he keeps watch at the door. Vivien catches my eye and we set each other off again, laughing until I see tears chasing the makeup down her face. I can tell this is going to be fun.