The Twilight Hour

by Nicci Gerrard

  ‘She wouldn’t like to be fat and ginger-hued like me,’ he said.

  ‘She is a little slip of a thing,’ agreed Sally.

  The slip of a thing sat on her father’s lap, and put the end of her plait into her mouth. Eleanor, facing her, felt savage but she kept her face inscrutable.

  ‘Your mother tells me you love books, Eleanor? Or can I call you Ellie?’

  ‘I prefer Eleanor.’ She saw him flush slightly, and added hastily, ‘I do like books’, although she couldn’t think of a single thing that she had read that she could mention. Merry squirmed on Robert’s knees, wanting attention.

  ‘You want to write when you’re grown up, is that so?’

  Eleanor stared at him. Rage itched inside her. She wanted to be cold and rude; she felt her mother’s eyes on her.

  ‘She’s a very good writer,’ said Sally. ‘You should see her short stories.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Eleanor. ‘I just like reading.’

  She liked escaping, that’s what it was. She yearned now to be under her covers with a hot brick warming the sheets, in a different world: ice, fire, adventure, journeys across wastelands and through perils. Love. Walls fall down, worlds open. Her own house felt hot and small. Four of them couldn’t fit in here. Robert and her mother on the other side of the thin wall; her cheeks flamed. At night, she could hear her mother snoring, or even sighing deeply in her sleep. And then she and this Merry would have to share a room. Stifling. She would never be alone again, but would be the responsible older sister to this winsome delight. She glanced at her father’s photograph as if he could save her. He smiled and smiled, but not at her.

  ‘Merry’s mother died eighteen months ago,’ Robert Forrester was saying to her.

  ‘Oh.’ Eleanor looked at the girl. ‘I’m very sorry,’ she mumbled. This made it even worse: she couldn’t even be cool towards her without feeling brutal.

  Merry sucked her plait even harder. Her blue eyes filled with tears. Eleanor saw that her nails were bitten down to the quick, her white socks were clean but threadbare. Sally leant forward and patted her on the knee and her father rested his chin on her yellow head for a moment. The three of them made a tender group.

  Six months later, Eleanor was sharing a bedroom with Merry. The room was small and she only had to reach her hand across the space that divided them to be able to touch her new sister (stepsister was a word neither Sally nor Robert would countenance; they wanted to be one happy family). At night she could hear her breathing, sometimes murmuring in her sleep. In the first year, Merry would regularly wake with night terrors, sitting bolt upright with her blue eyes glazed and her face pinched to a narrow blank, her heart galloping beneath the brushed nylon of her nightgown. She would talk fast nonsense. Eleanor never woke Robert: she disliked going into her mother’s bedroom, where the pair of them would be bundled under their blankets, snoring, a faint thick odour in the air. Instead, she would climb out of bed and sit beside Merry, take her by her shoulders, speak to her soothingly and lay her back down on the pillow, putting her rag doll in her clutching hand and wiping the strands of lemony hair off her sticky forehead. In the morning, Merry would remember nothing. Her face would be pert and fresh again. ‘Did I really say that? Were my eyes really open?’ She loved to hear stories about herself; indeed, her whole world was a story about herself.

  Every morning Eleanor brushed her sister’s hair and tied it into plaits or pigtails. She taught her how to play cat’s cradle and how to crochet, and before long was giving her rudimentary lessons on the recorder and the piano. She helped her with her reading and her sums and watched her practise her ballet steps: first position, second position, third, fourth; flicking little jumps and pirouettes. They walked to school together, Merry’s hand in hers, and back again at the end of the day. She altered her cast-off clothes, adding flounces and flowers to prettify them. She wiped Merry’s eyes when she wept, which she did often; Eleanor never cried. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done so.

  She fooled everyone, and sometimes even herself. She was the big sister, the dutiful daughter; grey-eyed, watchful and grave. She never showed that she minded how the household revolved around Merry, who was vulnerable and trusting; who laughed and wept and danced and opened her blue eyes wide; who sat on her father’s lap and whispered confidences into Sally’s ear and knew how much everyone adored her, because she was, of course, adorable. Like a bouquet of spring flowers, like a sweet pea, everyone’s cosseted pet. Eleanor’s fists were clenched inside her pockets. Her face was blank with rage.

  ‘The worst of it was,’ said Eleanor to Peter, ‘she really was sweet. I kept trying to catch her out, expose her hypocrisy, but I never managed. She was helpful and pretty and well behaved; complacent but not exactly spoilt. It was simply that she had to get her own way and if someone refused her or wasn’t charmed it was as if the sky had fallen on her. She had no inner anchor; no real resilience. Her well-being depended on everything going the way that she wanted; when it didn’t it was as if her whole sense of self collapsed. That must have been a very scary way to live. But she had a cheerful temperament, like her father, and she never doubted for an instant that I loved her and wanted what was best for her. It seemed to me that she lived in a picture-book world, with herself as heroine. The rest of us were colourful characters who had walk-on parts or were her audience. I was a make-believe sister. She behaved towards me the way she thought she should behave towards her older sister, and she expected me to do the same with her. And I did.’ She frowned. ‘Or at least, I did until that summer.’

  ‘What summer?’

  ‘The one this story is all about.’

  Many years later, when she was in her late sixties and Merry’s memory loss was becoming too obvious to ignore, Eleanor went to see a therapist. She never told anyone about her sessions, not even Gil. She was slightly embarrassed by herself: an elderly woman wanting to finally face up to her feelings of shame and guilt. The therapist had suggested she lie on the green couch by the low window. Eleanor had to unlace her stout boots and rest her head on a ridiculous doily-like spread. She lay, limp and tired, dazed by the feelings that had brought her there, looking out of the window at the spring day, the sun sending shafts of light through the budding trees, and thought of all the people who had lain there before her and would come after her, to weep out their secrets and their pain.

  But she found it hard to say the words she had practised. The woman sitting at her head, invisible but breathing audibly and occasionally giving a dry cough, was too young, at least twenty years younger than her. Sometimes she asked questions that Eleanor found irritating or irrelevant. She wanted to talk about her sister and explain what had happened when they were both young. She tried to say something that would open the door into the room she had not entered for all these years, but she had kept the past a secret for so long that now it had become almost impossible to break her silence. She supposed she wanted to confess, but not to this woman, not lying on this couch. Perhaps a priest hidden behind a grille would have been better: to murmur to someone you cannot see, like Midas whispering into the rushes. I am not what I seem; I am someone else.

  Images filled her mind, like snow settling, covering over the present with the past. Merry’s soft round face and her own narrower one in the mirror together: the two sisters, blonde and dark, sweet and inscrutable. That day, the one she was really here to talk about, and Merry’s innocent blue eyes staring at her. Had she seen anything? Had she known even then, and in her rambling forgetfulness and the foggy reaches of her mind, did she still know? Is that why she sometimes laughed with such silvery wildness when she saw her sister’s face? Sometimes Eleanor wondered if Merry’s guilelessness was really a profound deviousness: that she was so practised in her role that she never revealed herself to anyone, even herself.

  ‘You were saying,’ the therapist had reminded her at last, ‘that you feel oppressed by something specific in your past.’

  ‘
In a way.’ Eleanor stared at the tiny clouds sailing past in the blue, blue sky.

  And yet she had never wished it had not happened, not even in the darkest days. How could she? Joy filled her throat, a thick desire that choked her words. She lay on the couch consumed by longing and loss, an elderly woman, a wife and a mother of grown-up children, with a ladder in her tights. She couldn’t speak to this woman. She couldn’t speak to anyone.

  ‘Perhaps I began at the wrong place,’ she said to Peter at last. ‘Although I had to begin with Merry. Merry is where it started.’

  He stood up and put more logs on the fire. They were slightly damp and they spluttered, sending up greenish flames. He thought Eleanor looked exhausted. Her mouth was a funny shape and it occurred to him that she might have had a stroke in the past, like his grandmother with her tugged-down mouth and slurred speech. ‘Pether.’ What should he do if it happened again, just the two of them in this remote place?

  ‘Beginning is always hard,’ he said, remembering those days of sitting at his computer, seeing the glowing blankness of the screen, unable to press a single key. He used to crouch for hours like this, in the grip of a monstrous boredom, while his mind twitched uselessly.

  ‘I was going back too far.’

  ‘Perhaps you needed a run-up.’

  ‘Yes?’ She smiled in the gloom – a smile back into herself. ‘That might be it.’

  ‘So what is the right beginning?’

  10

  Eleanor Wright always remembered the birthday of the father she had never met. She used to commemorate it with her mother, lighting a candle in their church, although of course he had no grave there. Later, she had made her own rituals, reading out poems by Tennyson in her clear, low voice, saying tender things to him and assuring him he was not forgotten. On this beautiful spring day, when the whole world was young, he would have been forty-six; his brown hair would be darker and perhaps receding; his smile would not be so white or so wide. But he was for ever young. Soon, she would be older than him.

  She untied her apron, put on her hat and her light coat and left her schoolroom, nodding at the children who hung around the entrance. Two girls, who a few minutes earlier had been taking their weekly doses of syrup of figs from Eleanor, were bouncing a yellow ball between them, counting out loud in a high chant. It was a warm day, but they still wore scratchy jumpers, blue skirts, grubby white ankle socks. One of them had clogs on her feet and her face was unhealthily pale, almost grey, as if she lived underground. Gil was waiting across the road, standing in the shadows of the tall building. He didn’t smile when he saw her but the angles of his face relaxed and he watched her as she walked towards him, so that she felt suddenly conscious of herself: the way her black shoes clacked on the cobbles, the brush of an escaped lock of hair on her neck, the touch of the rough fabric of her dress against her legs. The sun was low and calm. She tucked her hand into the crook of his hand, smiling up at him, feeling a faint quiver pass through him at her touch. They didn’t speak and for a moment the busy street receded and it was just the two of them under a bright sky.

  Was this love? Her friend Emma said that it probably was and her mother, when Eleanor mentioned Gil on the phone, hoped it was. Her class, who had seen her with this tall, dark-haired young man, giggled and whispered behind their hands. He was a medical student, following in the footsteps of his father, who had been an eminent doctor, but had died two years before in an unfortunate road accident (there were rumours he had been drunk at eleven in the morning when he stepped off the pavement into the path of a Ford).

  Eleanor had met Gil at the house of a distant cousin on her dead father’s side, Rosalind, whom she had got in touch with on coming to London and who occasionally invited her to small unpredictable parties that she called her ‘dos’. Gil had come up to her while she was standing by the picture window, knowing nobody but quite content to stare out at the blossom in the square, while behind her voices rose and fell and someone wound up the gramophone and filled the room with scratchy love songs. Later, the carpet would be rolled back for dancing; Rosalind, loosened by gin, shimmying across the bare boards with her head tipped back and her hair rippling over her shoulders. Eleanor would normally have gone by then, although she had always loved to dance; her slender body would become sinuous and her face dreamy as she let the music flow through her. She had spent her teenage years dancing, in village halls and in friends’ houses and sometimes in her own bedroom, to the music floating up from the wireless in the parlour.

  Gil had introduced himself. He looked older than he was, more grown up than the rest of the men in the crowded room, and had a slow and easy manner, quiet without being reserved. In all the years of their marriage, Eleanor never saw him hurry or heard him boast. He hated being the centre of attention and never minded being outshone – indeed, he rather liked it, preferring to watch others.

  Soon, she was telling him about her school in the East End, her class of girls with pinched faces who called her ‘Miss’ and ate boiled potatoes or cold bread and dripping for lunch, about her Islington bedsit, freezing through the winter months, and how she would go the cinema just to warm herself. She spoke about being from the countryside, and of the mud and darkness as the days shortened, of picking soft fruit in the summers to earn money. She told him how she had always known she would leave as soon as she was able to be independent, not adding that that was the only way she could be free and in control of her life. She didn’t tell him about her father, or about loving books, or about her stepsister Merry – not for weeks, and then only bit by bit. Perhaps, even when he died and she folded his blue scarf beside him in the coffin, brushed the hair that had once been black behind his ears, laid her fingers against his cheek one last time, she still hadn’t told him everything. She was a woman who liked to keep things back. There was a place coiled inside her that was secret and closed to almost everyone.

  He bent towards her, attentive, curious, his brow wrinkled. He never patronized her. Older than her, better educated, better off, more successful, he always believed that she was cleverer than he was and in every way that mattered more important. A week later he wrote to her – a brief note asking her if she would accompany him to the theatre. They had met, drunk Martinis in a bar with small dark cubicles, where Eleanor had felt hot in her black woollen dress with its high neck and long sleeves, the zipper knobbly against her spine. Her lipstick left a mark on the glass that she tried to rub off with a finger when Gil wasn’t looking because it seemed somehow suggestive. She felt pleasantly cloudy. Then they had gone to the theatre together and watched a poor play from the stalls. He hadn’t held her hand or tried to kiss her, but walked her back home to Islington along dark streets and left her at the door.

  He was solid, tall, with untidy dark hair, dark blue eyes and an absent-minded, benevolent air that came, Eleanor believed, from being the only child of comfortably middle-class and indulgent parents. She soon learnt that he always left a trail of possessions behind him. On that initial date, he had had to return to the bar to collect his scarf – the same blue scarf he was to have for the rest of his life and that she put in his coffin when he died. The first time he came to her bedsit, he left his keys on the table. He would leave his coat in the cinema, his hat on the table of the café where they often went for cups of tea and iced buns, not remember where he had parked his bike, put down his medical bag in foyers and then forget to pick it up. His absent-mindedness attracted women, who wanted to look after him, but he didn’t seem to notice. When they flirted with him, he would look at them genially and then turn his gaze back to Eleanor. It seemed to her he had simply decided, from the moment he set eyes on her standing alone by the window, that she was the one. She felt that he saw something in her that no one else recognized and even she barely knew existed, a virtue that she could only aspire to, or resist.

  Today they went to the small park, where there was still blossom on some of the branches and the birds were singing their hearts out. A sad Chi
nese man was sitting under their usual tree, so still that Eleanor wondered at first if he might have died there, with his eyes wide open and fixed on some mysterious horizon. He probably worked in one of the new factories that belched their smoke into the London skies. Terence, who lived on the floor beneath her in Islington, and who had a large belly and spindly legs and talked to himself in his poky room, said that she should avoid speaking to the Chinese at all costs. As if they could cast an evil spell simply by resting their brown eyes on her. She looked at this man’s smooth sorrowful face and his neat hands folded in his lap. She imagined a vast country of rice fields and mountains and peaceful oxen and little temples, and then to be living in the East End, in a crowded room with his whole family, while pink-faced Englishmen smelling of beer and sweat muttered insults under their breath.

  Gil laid out his coat on the bleached grass and they sat on it. He had bought some oranges, and he took the pocket knife with the mother-of-pearl handle he always carried with him and with great concentration cut circles into the skin and peeled it off, handing segments of the fruit to Eleanor who ate them slowly, feeling their tang in her throat, watching Gil’s competent hands. Hair on his knuckles, strong wrists. Perhaps he had cut people open with those hands, certainly had felt their bodies, prodding, probing, feeling for pain and discomfort, finding hidden lumps. Her glands started to ache slightly. As if he could sense this, Gil took off his scarf and wrapped it around her neck, saying it was getting cold, now that the sun was low in the sky. She found his solicitousness both reassuring and vaguely oppressive, a soft, heavy blanket she could wrap herself in.

  ‘Today’, she said, ‘is my father’s birthday.’

  ‘Is it?’ Gil sat up straighter, waiting for her to say more.