Talking to the Dead

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Nina cut the eyelashes off Rosina. She thought they’d grow again. She doesn’t realize Rosina’s only a doll.’

  But she doesn’t tell how every time it was my turn for the doll’s pram she would calmly, firmly take out my doll and put in her own.

  ‘You see, Nina, Mandy doesn’t fit in the pram properly. Look at her legs sticking out. Rosina came with the pram, so it’s hers really. But I’ll let you have a turn pushing her.’

  And off we went to push our doll’s pram round Barnoon Cemetery, up and down the little paths, visiting our favourite graves. Below us the sea glittered and the holiday people threw themselves in and out of the waves, but we took no notice of them. Our parents let us go where we liked. We’d walk as far as Wicca Pool sometimes, and swim with the seals. Once we saw a honeymoon couple bathing there naked, their fronds of pubic hairs touching.

  ‘They’ll lie down on the rocks and cuddle each other next,’ said Isabel authoritatively, and they did. Isabel was so sure of things that sometimes I thought it was her certainty that made them happen. Without Isabel’s predictions I’d have been lost in a world where anything might come next. She even knew when I was going to cry.

  Once I slipped when we were running back along the cliff path. We’d been picking blackberries and I was watching the berries bounce in the bucket clasped in front of me, not the path. My foot caught on a stone, and I fell sideways, not safely on to the path, but sliding with horrible smoothness and speed to the lip of the cliff. I saw myself going and heard Isabel scream, and then I went over. But it was a rough slope, not the edge of the cliff itself, which was still fifteen feet away. I slid ten of them, bumping and banging, and then stopped. I began to scream, lying on my back, looking straight up at the sky. A second later a half-circle of terror broke the sky, upside down. It took me a moment to realize that this was Isabel’s face. The next minute she was with me, dragging me back with both hands over the scattered blackberries. I got back to the path and sat down on it, shivering. My legs were smeared with blood and blackberry juice. There was a long burning graze up the inside of my arms.

  ‘My bucket’s gone,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll have a look.’ Isabel stood up and peered down. ‘I can’t see it. It must have gone over.’

  I thought of my new bucket, silvery inside, bouncing and clanging down to the rocks, and I began to cry. Then Isabel was crying too, worse than me, shaking and hiding her face with her hands. She hardly ever cried, and this was worse than losing the bucket. I patted her shoulders but she didn’t seem to feel it. ‘It’s all right, Isabel. I didn’t fall. I’m all right.’ But she cried harder and I gave up and began to pick up the fallen blackberries and eat them. I wiped off the dust carefully and popped them into my mouth, one by one. They were delicious. And then there was Isabel, facing me on hands and knees, her face fierce. She was all smeary with crying, but back to herself again.

  ‘And don’t you dare tell them, Nina. Or I’ll say I told you to stop and you ran on.’

  I wonder what Isabel sees when she looks back at the past. We aren’t the kind of sisters who talk about their childhood together. If we did we might find we hadn’t got many shared memories. And here’s Antony, who won’t have a brother or a sister at all. No one to cover up for, and no one to betray. Isabel hasn’t talked about that. She showed me the scar but she hasn’t talked about what the hysterectomy means to her. Now that there are no more baby clothes to embroider she spends hours doing a cross-stitch landscape, while Edward talks to her. I can see Edward loving it: the dip of Isabel’s head, the maternity he can enjoy when the baby’s not there, the needle flashing in and out. Isabel works quickly, and she listens carefully, looking up at him from time to time, letting him talk himself out. Or they are silent together. I don’t like it when I come into her room in the middle of one of their silences.

  Richard comes into the kitchen while I’m jointing the chicken.

  ‘How’s Isabel?’

  ‘She’s trying to sleep. She says she can’t settle down while I’m there.’

  He pours water into the kettle and plugs it in. ‘I’m getting that doctor over. She ought to be feeling better than this by now.’

  I expect him to go straight out with his coffee, but he sits down in one of the high-backed kitchen chairs.

  ‘Can I give you a hand?’

  ‘You could chop these onions and put them in the salad.’

  ‘What’s that you’re making?’

  ‘I’m going to do a chicken risotto for Isabel. She might like something hot, we’ve had a lot of salad.’

  ‘You’re a good cook, aren’t you?’

  ‘I should be.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘People who like eating make the best cooks.’

  He smiles. ‘Have you been drawing again today?’

  ‘Yes, I was out this morning.’ I say it quickly, like someone hiding a secret greed. ‘I took some pictures too, over at the Wilkinsons’. But it’s not my subject. I don’t know enough about farming. They’re just snaps. Susan’s interesting, though. I’d like to do some pictures of Susan when she’s working with the baby.’

  ‘I haven’t really looked at her,’ says Richard. I smile, and cube breast of chicken with one of Isabel’s sharp knives.

  ‘Susan’s going to be quite something when she gets going,’ I say.

  ‘Can’t you take some pictures of Isabel? I know she wants you to.’

  ‘Oh, I expect I will. There’s plenty of time.’

  ‘It seems a bit of a waste of time photographing Susan. It’s not as if she’s going to carry on working here. The baby’ll never see her again once she goes off to be a nanny.’

  ‘It’s what’s happening now that interests me,’ I say. ‘That’s what I draw. That’s what I photograph. I don’t look at a cabbage and say it’s not worth drawing because we’re going to eat it tomorrow.’

  Richard is silent. Then, ‘I don’t care what you do,’ he says rather irritably. ‘I was only thinking of Isabel.’

  ‘I know you were.’

  I look up from the bowl of fine, moist chicken, and hold his eyes.

  ‘I’m here because you asked me to come,’ I say, ‘but I’m not just something of Isabel’s.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were,’ he says, looking straight back at me.

  I stand up and go to one of the cupboards behind me. I take out green olive oil, arborio rice, a tiny packet of saffron, pine-nuts.

  ‘You’ve been shopping.’

  ‘Yes, I took your car into Lewes this morning. You remember I asked you if I could use it.’

  ‘Of course you can use it. It’s ridiculous the way no one drives it but me. But you’ve got lots of stuff there – how much do I owe you?’

  ‘I’m staying in your house, eating your food all the time. Anyway, I’ve got plenty of money at the moment.’

  ‘Have you? Are things going well?’

  ‘I’m charging more than I was. It’s going fine.’

  It’s true. The kind of work I don’t really want flows in. Documentary, and a bit banal. One day I got out of the taxi and saw my camera bag still on the floor. I could never afford to replace the stuff. And yet I had to stop myself from paying the fare, turning away, disappearing into the anonymous crowd.

  ‘It’s going fine,’ I repeat. I’m standing as I say this, pouring a thin stream of oil into Isabel’s heaviest pan, looking down on him.

  ‘It’s important to make sure you charge enough. Other people judge you by that,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘Money’s important to me.’

  ‘And to me. But then I’m not an artist.’

  ‘Artists don’t have to be stupid. My mother wasn’t. She was very good with money.’

  ‘I want Isabel to approach Wilkinson again, about buying this house. I could make him the kind of offer he’d think twice about. But she’s against it’

  ‘It would be your house then,’ I point out.

  ‘It would be
in our joint names.’

  ‘Yes. But the lease is in Isabel’s name now.’

  ‘She doesn’t like talking about it. She says I knew the situation when we married, which I did. But situations are fluid, they can change.’

  This is the first time I’ve heard Richard say anything remotely critical of Isabel. He’s noticed something I thought only I had noticed, that Isabel doesn’t like change. She’s afraid of it. It’s true that she’s followed her own path, but having done so she rarely steps off it. And suddenly I feel a wash of tenderness for her, without knowing where this comes from.

  Chapter Seven

  Beyond Isabel’s garden, before the Downs, there are the water-meadows. The river runs through them. All day it’s been wrapped in the heat haze that hides the Downs. It’s been hot enough for mirages, for rivers walking upside down on air. Isabel says the river is the reason she came here. She was walking along the river, and she saw the house staring at her from its empty windows. She climbed the wall and dropped down into the garden from the branches of a plum tree. Just Isabel, alone in a hot quiet garden which had been empty so long even the birds weren’t afraid of her. Everything was matted with bindweed and brambles which would take her two years to clear before she began to plant.

  Some winters the river floods the meadows, but now it runs smoothly between its banks, which are raised above the land on either side. There is so much chalk in the water that it turns a pale, opaque green in the sun. Isabel says it’s full of chemicals washed off the soil, and though children used to swim in it, they can’t any more.

  It’s one in the morning, and I’m lying in the dark, the curtains open wide, the warm air moving over my skin. I can’t sleep, because of the heat and a homesickness which I’m used to, which has no thing to do with being away from my flat in London. I think of the sea, and the noise of the waves. When I first moved to the city, it took me a while to realize what I was listening for all the time. In London, if I’m half-asleep, I make distant traffic on the flyover into the snarl of a winter sea. I wish I could hear the river, but it slides silently through the fields, hidden. The current runs deep and strong.

  ‘Neen. Neen.’

  ‘Come in.’

  I pull the sheet over me and sit up. Isabel pushes the door open, and comes in.

  ‘Put the light on.’

  She crosses the floor and switches on the little lamp by the bed.

  ‘I didn’t wake you up, did I?’

  ‘No. I was listening for the river.’

  ‘You can’t hear it.’

  ‘I know.’

  Isabel goes to the window, and looks out. ‘You can’t even see it from here,’ she says. ‘Do you remember how we used to go out at night, without them knowing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You used to be frightened of how loud the sea sounded in the dark.’ She yawns, pushes back her hair, rubs the stains of tiredness under her eyes.

  ‘You should be asleep,’ I say.

  ‘He’ll wake in less than an hour. It’s hardly worth it.’

  ‘You ought to let Susan give him a bottle at night so you can get some sleep. She said she would.’

  ‘You bet she would. But she’s not going to.’ Isabel grins. ‘Let her have her own baby.’

  She comes back and sits on my bed. ‘You know, you could feed him, Neen,’ she says. ‘Did you know that? Women who’ve never had babies can breastfeed if they keep on letting the baby suck. Some women strap little pouches of milk to themselves when they adopt a baby, with a tube running to their nipple, so he keeps sucking till the real milk comes.’ She looks at me, smiling, and her hair shines with wisps of light.

  ‘He’s not my baby,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t get cross. It’s just a piece of information.’

  The baby is everything. Everything starts in him and circles back to him, and the rest of us are shadows on the outside of the circle. Me, Richard, Susan. I wonder how Richard feels about it.

  ‘You think I put him first,’ says Isabel.

  ‘It’s natural,’ I say, coolly, lightly. Or so I hope. I feel as if Isabel has just snatched her hand out of mine.

  ‘That’s a laugh,’ says Isabel. ‘I’ll tell you something, Neen. When it was happening, when I started bleeding and I saw the midwife’s face and then Richard was running to the phone, all I thought was, “Don”t let me die.” I didn’t think of the baby. I thought of me. I thought I was going to bleed to death.’

  ‘You nearly did.’

  ‘I know.’ She plucks at the ragged end of the bedspread, and then asks abruptly, ‘Neen, do you think about death a lot?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Richard says he never does.’

  ‘He’s probably lying.’

  ‘But aren’t people different? Isn’t it frightening, how different they are?’

  She looks at me intently, and yet I have the feeling she’s still holding back from me. Then she says suddenly, ‘Does Richard talk to you?’

  I feel myself blush, for no reason, but I answer easily, ‘Not much. You know he never does.’

  ‘No.’ I’m not sure if her face relaxes slightly, or not. ‘Maybe he will, while you’re here. After all, you’re my sister. If he can’t talk to you, who can he talk to? It’d do him good.’

  Suddenly I remember something Isabel must have forgotten. A picnic, when I was sixteen. A cool windy afternoon and we walked above the railway line to Carbis Bay. Michael was with us, Isabel’s friend from London. I was drawing two fishing-boats as they wallowed round the point. I had my back to Michael and Isabel, and I’d almost forgotten them, when Isabel said in a high, insistent voice, ‘You could draw him, couldn’t you, Neen? You could draw Michael?’

  I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to break off what I was doing. But they were older, and they wanted something from me, and I rarely felt that Isabel wanted anything I had to give. I began to draw him, sitting against a stone way-marker. He was good-looking in a way Isabel liked then, thin and a bit evasive-looking. The wind tugged at his hair and my paper, but he was easy to draw and I knew it was coming out well. He got up once to look at what I’d done so far, and after that he suddenly became much more interested and began to talk to me, asking me about my drawing and what I was going to do when I left home. I saw why Isabel liked him once his face was lit up with flattering attention and it was all flowing my way. The drawing went better and better. We were talking about him now, the film he wanted to make, the famous actor who had more or less promised to be in it. Isabel had wandered off somewhere. When she came back the sun was out on the sheltered spot where I was drawing, and I’d nearly finished. Michael called to her, ‘Have a look at this! You should have told me she was really good.’ Isabel stooped, smiling, and examined what I’d done. Then she looked measuringly at Michael, a long look.

  The next day Michael went home, three days early. I thought he’d have taken the drawing, since he’d asked me if he could have it, but he didn’t. I found it crumpled on top of the kitchen rubbish, where he must have thrown it.

  ‘You will stay, won’t you?’ asks Isabel. It seems to echo, as if she’s asked the question before.

  ‘I said I’d stay as long as you needed me,’ I say. ‘But you’re all right, with Susan and Richard, and Edward. I’m not doing much except the cooking. You don’t really need me here.’

  Isabel frowns. The rich, half-hooped upper eyelids drop over her eyes as she looks down. Her long fingers pluck, pluck at the bedclothes. They are thin, and her wrists are oblong, showing their bones. Only her breasts are heavy. ‘I do need you,’ she says, not looking at me.

  Chapter Eight

  I told Susan that there were just the two of us, Isabel, and me, and this is what I always say. But there were three.

  My brother was born when I was four years old. Like Isabel earlier, when I was born, I was old enough to notice my mother’s pregnancy. It seemed endless. For years, it seemed, she ported a hump in front of her, big and tense and white wh
en she was undressed. Her belly button turned inside out, like a mushroom stalk. I touched it, and she jumped and pushed me away. Every afternoon she locked the studio door, went upstairs to her bedroom and lay down. We were not allowed to make a noise then, or go to her unless one of us hurt ourselves. It was a late pregnancy: my mother was forty-three and hadn’t expected to have another child. I don’t know whether she wanted it or not, while she was pregnant, because everything is coloured afterwards by the real presence of the child.

  I didn’t want it. She was my mother, mine and Isabel’s. Why had she chosen to make things worse like this? There wasn’t enough money for us two, let alone a baby. That was why our father was away more and more. I knew this because Isabel listened to them talking, and told me.

  ‘What’s it like, having a baby?’ I asked Isabel, and she wrinkled her nose, remembering. ‘Noisy,’ she said at last. We’d both been born in the house, but this time my mother was going to hospital, because she was older. There were streaks on my mother’s stomach now, red and purple as it stretched. I don’t remember my father much from that time.

  The day the baby was born was fine and hot. Isabel was given a picnic, a pound note and two boxes of Rowntrees Fruit Gums, and told to take me to the beach for the day. We walked round beyond the surfing beach to a little cove of white sand we knew, where we could make a house by draping seaweed over the black rocks, and stick our lemonade bottle in cold sand.