The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  The evidence of all Stella’s searchings, all her short-lived vocations, is still here. There are the dried-up paints from the watercolorist spring; there’s the sewing machine from the dress designer summer; there’re the abandoned lenses from the photography period; and there’s the clapped-out typewriter from the short-story-writer phase. That was the longest of the vocations and the last. Maybe Stella has finally found herself (I wonder how you do that?). Maybe she’s given up looking. Either way, she avoids the refectory now.

  Lucas has taken it over. He and Dan have just come down from Cambridge for the last time. They survived finals and arrived here, hideously hung over, the day after the Trinity May Ball. “It’s the last long vac,” Dan declared, “so let’s make it a memorable one.” Dan often stays at the Abbey now—he could stay with his father and grandmother in the village, but he prefers it here. He’s encamped in his usual room in the main house and will stay till the end of the holidays. Lucas has visited before, but never for long—he never stays anywhere long—so this protracted visit is surprising. I don’t think anyone exactly invited him, though I suppose Finn might have done. He’s here for an indeterminate period. It could be the remainder of the summer, it could be less, it could be more. Lucas never makes plans—or if he does, he refuses to communicate them: He simply arrives when he feels like it and departs without warning or farewell. I can accept this, because Lucas and I understand each other; but for Finn and Julia, it’s hard.

  He’s not interested in creature comforts. He sleeps under an old army blanket, on a lumpy couch in the corner. He brews coffee on a paraffin stove. When he wants a bath, he swims in the river. When he wants food, which isn’t often, he comes up to the house, charms Stella, and raids the larder. Stella is a fine cook, and she thinks Lucas is a genius—an impression Lucas does nothing to discourage, I’ve observed. On the table over there, under a muslin fly protector, I can see her latest offerings to the artist-in-residence: a slice of Madeira cake and a lopsided, golden pork pie.

  It’s had a bite or two taken out of it. Next to it, propped up on an easel, turned to face the wall, and hidden behind screens, is the portrait Lucas is supposed to be painting—his recompense for living here all summer scot-free. It’s a gigantic picture of Julia, Finn, and me, and Dan says it’s going to be Lucas’s magnum opus—for this year, anyway. It’s to be called The Sisters Mortland, which I consider a dull, stupid title. Lucas doesn’t seem to work on it very often—though he may work on it at night.

  I’m not sleeping too well at night. Sometimes the nuns disturb me; sometimes it’s my dreams. And once or twice, when I couldn’t sleep, I’ve crept out of bed and come down to the garden, and I’ve seen the lights in here, blazing away. Lucas closes the interior shutters, but there are six bright slits striping the ground outside, like golden bars. It could be that these sketches of me are preparatory work for the portrait, or they may be unimportant, something he does to pass the time. I’d like to ask Lucas if they matter and why they might matter—but I know he won’t answer: He’s a secretive man.… It takes one to know one, as Bella likes to say: I’m a secretive girl.

  I think they must be important, because Lucas says he plans to complete four drawings of me this year. I’m sure that’s an honor. It must mean that something about me interests him. The first drawing, Spring Maisie, was finished in the Easter vacation. Summer Maisie is the one he’s working on now; Autumn Maisie and Winter Maisie will follow in due course. I’m not allowed to see them until all four seasons are finished. I’m not allowed to inspect The Sisters Mortland portrait, either—and neither is Julia or Finn. I’ve tried several times to sneak a look, but I’ve always been thwarted. When he’s out, Lucas locks the windows and the door. He bought a new padlock for the purpose. “How paranoid can you get?” Julia says. Julia’s just returned from a year’s postgraduate study at Berkeley, California. It’s affected her clothes and vocabulary. “Paranoid” is now a favorite word.

  “Come on, Maisie, you’re daydreaming,” Lucas prompts. “Talk to me. Your face is getting set and fixed. This won’t work if you look sulky. It’s all wrong.”

  “I don’t sulk,” I reply. But I’ve heard the warning note of irritation, so I concentrate again. I’m beginning to wish I’d selected a different event to describe, but there’s no getting out of it now. That round, cold pebble is still stuck in my throat. I frown, Lucas waits, the pencil hovers, and—obedient to him as always—I walk back into the past.

  I watch the three of us set off, that afternoon, for the village. We take the path through the woods, something we rarely do. Julia is wearing a new white dress; it has paper nylon Bardot petticoats that make the skirt stiff and bell shaped. It has broderie anglaise around the neck. She’s turned into a woman overnight, and she’s so blazingly beautiful that it hurts my eyes. My sister Finn is wearing old clothes as usual: ancient slacks, a crumpled blouse, and sandals. She’s slender and straight as a willow wand. I can tell what Julia’s thinking—she’s usually thinking about herself, so it isn’t too hard—but with Finn, I can’t. She’s intricate, like a knot I can’t undo.

  My sisters stride ahead, arguing. I bring up the rear. I’m wearing brown linen shorts, chestnut brown Clarks sandals, and a white Aertex shirt that Finn’s long outgrown. I’ve been reading the “Famous Five” books in secret (they’re top of Stella’s list of forbidden literature) and, like the immortal George of Kirrin Island, I want to be a boy. I whistle to the dog only I can see—we were between dogs that summer, just as we are now. I put my hands in my pockets and scuff my shoes. I count the trees and name them as I pass. I think I am happy; happiness is catching. After a while, Finn and Julia stop arguing, and Finn—who has a very sweet voice—begins to sing, first a madrigal, then, jiving about and laughing, Elvis’s “Blue Suede Shoes.”

  We come out of the wood, and the heat of the sun hits us. The valley below us is burning gold. The hedgerows are thick with elderberries; thirty elms march in a long line down the lane. The apples in the orchards are ripening; the wheat ripples. God has arranged forty-one cows in perfect formation in Acre Field. There are larks overhead, so high that I can’t see them, but I can hear them, piping alarm, filling the sky with nervous song. I breathe in the air of England; it’s buoyant in the lungs and lifts my heart. Finn takes my hand; even Julia is elated. We start dancing, running, and jumping down the hill.

  At the bottom, as arranged, Dan is waiting for us. He’s grown tall since I last saw him—and that’s over a year ago, I realize. He used to come to the Abbey every day, but now he seems to avoid the place—if there’s a reason for this, I, as usual, have not been told. Even so, he and Finn remain close. She’s been to Dan’s house before, many times, but for Julia and me, this will be unknown territory—we’ve never got past the gate; Dan has always forestalled us and barred the way. We walk through the village. It’s silent in the afternoon heat. Thirteen hens peck on the verge.

  Nothing’s changed here for centuries; I like that. Julia claims it’s a bore. The ancient crooked cottage in which Dan lives is the last house on the left, facing south, exactly four hundred paces beyond the duck pond. The front entrance is never used, so we troop round to the back, where it’s shady and the door stands open.

  It’s an old, low doorway. Dan, Finn, and Julia have to bow their heads as they enter. I follow, and after the dazzle of the daylight, I’m blinded, in the dark.

  [ two ]

  The Boy in the Glass

  This cottage has four rooms—Finn’s told me that much. Downstairs, the front room has to be kept spick-and-span because it’s used for wakes. Dan’s mother, Dorrie, was laid out in that room, wearing her white satin wedding dress and holding her white prayer book. The telegram of condolence Daddy sent is still kept there, Finn says. Dan’s grandmother framed it, and it hangs in state over a fireplace that’s never used.

  That terrible death—Dorrie was only nineteen—occurred at the end of the war. Fourteen years seems a long time to leave a room unused, esp
ecially in a house as cramped as this one, but Finn says it’s the custom, and besides, Dan’s grandmother can be superstitious and pessimistic and always believes another death might be imminent, so it’s as well to be prepared. I’d have liked to inspect this funereal front parlor, and Daddy’s telegram, but that door is closed.

  We are in the kitchen at the back, where the family cooks, washes, eats, and lives. Narrow stairs lead up to the two bedrooms above—they have to accommodate Dan’s father, grandmother, and Dan. Before we came, I asked Finn where they all slept in that case, and Finn said Dan slept in his father’s room, where else? When I pressed the point, she became flushed and angry. She said I was a nosy brat, that it was none of my business; that not everyone racketed around in a great barn of a place with twenty bedrooms. Twenty bedrooms most of which are unfurnished, mouse infested, and unusable, I could have replied. But I didn’t. I saw my questions could be hurtful to Dan and that Finn was protecting him. Even so, I’m curious. Dan is tall, and his father is a giant, though a gentle one. Do they sleep in the same bed, I wonder—the marital bed, where poor Dorrie once lay—and, if so, do they sleep side by side or head to toe?

  I’m also curious about washing facilities—basically, apart from the kitchen sink, there aren’t any—and I’m very curious about lavatories. Finn says there’s an outdoor WC in the garden, beyond the pigsty, and it’s perfectly serviceable. Every estate cottage in the village has this arrangement—I do know that much—but I’ve never been in any of the cottages: The village women don’t like us; they whisper behind their hands when we pass; they call us the “weird sisters,” which is rude. So I’ve never experienced the joys of peeing in a little stone shed. I’ve been planning to visit Dan’s on this occasion, but Finn’s read my mind and she’s already intervened. I’m not to pee during this visit. I’m not to want to pee or even consider peeing. The privy is off-limits. A visit there would be humiliating for Dan and perilous for me; it would incur punishment. I know Finn’s punishments. They’re implacable, immediate, and painful. So I’m not going to risk it.

  “I’ve made tea,” says Dan’s grandmother when we’ve been in the room ten seconds.

  I can feel Finn’s eyes on my face. “Maisie won’t have tea, just a small glass of water,” she says hastily.

  “Yes, please, water, Mrs. Nunn,” I say, well drilled. Tea makes me pee.

  We all stand around the table, waiting politely for Bella Nunn to sit down first. My eyes are beginning to adjust to the lack of light now, and the room is taking shape before me. It is every bit as strange and marvelous as Finn promised, and it’s spectacularly dirty. But then Dan’s grandmother “does” for us at the Abbey and I’ve seen her cleaning methods, so this is no surprise. There are rolls of sluts’ dust on the cracked linoleum, the sink is full of unwashed dishes, and the table feels greasy. Julia’s worrying about her white frock, I can see that; her face is rigid with disdain. She hesitates before sitting down—the chairs are sticky—and with one slow, appalled glance takes in the spread on the table. There’s a plate of fatty ham, sliced thickly and attracting bluebottles; there’s lettuce, already doused with salad cream. There’s a dish of beetroot and a slice of pie I recognize—purloined from Stella’s larder and one week old. Slabs of bread and marge, a dry-looking, unnaturally yellow cake, and a slippery heap of hard-boiled eggs decorated with sprigs of wilting parsley. In the center is a pink blancmange in the shape of a castle, surrounded by a moat of tinned tangerines. It’s three in the afternoon.

  “Oh, Mrs. Nunn, you’ve gone to so much trouble,” Julia says in a faint voice. “You really shouldn’t have bothered. We’ve only just had lunch.”

  “Rubbish, I’m starving. This looks delicious,” says Finn with a glare.

  My eyes flick up to the doorway, where Dan is still standing. I catch on his face an expression of misery and shame so acute that I’m shocked to the heart. He turns away and examines the yard outside with studious interest, as if he’s never seen it before. I notice for the first time that although it’s the holidays, he’s wearing his best suit, the one bought when he won a place at the grammar school. He’s long grown out of it. A good two inches of shirt cuff are visible. The shirt, a white nylon one, is freshly washed. His lace-up shoes are brilliantly polished. He’s been shorn. Last time I saw him he had a Brylcreemed teddy-boy forelock; but I think his school objected. Now there’s been a violent haircut, a short back and sides that make him look like a Borstal boy. There’s a rash on his neck. Finn says he’s begun shaving, but if so, the process has gone awry.

  “Gran made the cake specially. Won’t you sit down, ladies?” he says, turning back to us but not looking at us—and I realize it’s the first time he’s spoken since we met in the lane. His voice has altered as cruelly as his appearance: Its pitch is uncertain, and his vowels have been ironed. I think he’s practiced this terrible remark and the wooden gesture that accompanies it. He’s tried to scrape Suffolk out of his voice; he’s killed off that odd, graceful Romany lilt that he learned from Ocean as a child, a lilt you could hear when he was excited or pleased. What is left is a sad amalgam: his grandmother’s odd Cockneyish intonation mixed with grammar school genteel. I think maybe he’s trying to imitate his village friend Nicholas Marlow (now at Winchester) or possibly Nick’s mother, she who occupies the Old Rectory, she who runs the Women’s Institute, she who could patronize God, Julia claims.

  Bella Nunn places a large brown teapot on the table. She sits. We all sit. I accept huge helpings of hard-boiled eggs, pie, ham, Heinzsmothered lettuce, and beetroot, all foods I loathe. It pains me to eat animals. The beetroot bleeds. I fix my eyes on my bleeding plate, which is a Queen Elizabeth II coronation plate—Bella is a staunch monarchist and very keen on the royals. It’s heraldic, gilded, and chipped.

  I think: Oh, Dan, what has happened to you?

  It was I who saw Dan first. No one in my family will ever accept that. They say I was far too young to remember. They say it’s just another of my tedious tales. Finn, who’s very jealous of her bond with Dan, is especially caustic about my claims. Julia, who can’t stand him and never could—or so she likes to pretend, anyway—says, “God, Maisie, you’re such a little fantasist, you know. Who gives a toss who saw him first anyway? He’s the Munchkin’s apprentice. He’s her familiar. He comes with the Abbey, the same as she does. He’s always been around.”

  This isn’t true. I saw Daniel on the day of Daddy’s funeral—and that isn’t something I’d forget, is it? Am I likely to be confused?

  It wasn’t a funeral as such, of course—though I didn’t understand that then. My father was a hero. At nineteen, he was flying Spitfires. He survived the Battle of Britain but later died in New Mexico, United States of America, where we’d gone, at Stella’s insistence, to cure his lungs. He came back with us on the boat to England, packed in a small urn that was inside a reinforced box labeled not wanted on voyage in Stella’s hand. When we arrived at the Abbey, or “the ancestral dump,” as Gramps dolefully calls it, the urn lived on the chest of drawers in Stella’s room; it stayed there for months. There was a great to-do about the urn, and where it should be put, and what ceremony was appropriate. First it was to go in a niche in the church, next to umpteen other illustrious Mortlands. A stone was to be carved by one of Stella’s artist friends (almost all Stella’s friends are artists of a kind).

  Then, no, a memorial window would be more in keeping, a window that would match the one opposite it, erected to the memory of a great-great Mortland uncle who died valiantly in some distant, forgotten war. Then it was to be the churchyard; then a special enclosure in Acre Field—a place Daddy always loved as a boy. Then it was the bluebell wood, because Stella claimed that his eyes, which we’ve all inherited, were precisely that shade of blue. And finally, when Gramps kicked up a fuss and said no son of his was going to end up where the blasted dogs got buried, it was the church again, but the budget had shrunk, so the stone shrank, too, and the great carved baroque statement of Stella’s
imagination became a small, neat, rectangular pigeon-hole. It reads: guy mortland, dso, dfc. 1920–1955.

  On the great day when the urn would be put in its final resting place, we processed to the church: first Gramps and Stella, then Julia and Finn, then Bella Nunn and me. Bella, caretaker of the Abbey in our absence abroad, had been promoted. She was now housekeeper, cleaner, confidante, and nursery nurse. Bella had been devoted to my father, so she was there to pay her respects—also to be my warder, to make sure I didn’t ruin the ceremony by fidgeting or sniffling or shaming the family in any way, however small.

  In the church, we sang Daddy’s favorite hymn: “We plow the fields and scatter the good seed on the land…” Then came some prayers from the rector and a very long poem, read by Stella, composed by Stella, and “polished” by some distinguished literary man, another of Stella’s friends. The man of literature had promised to be there, but unavoidable business detained him in London. The villagers had been invited, but Gramps was so upset, he wrote the wrong date on the black-bordered cards; besides, it was harvesting time, so everyone was working and no one came. The church was empty, echoey, and cold; the pews were very uncomfortable. I was a chubby sort of toddler, and my legs were too short to reach the hassock, let alone the floor. Bella smelled of mothballs and kept my hand imprisoned tight in hers. I sat beside her tiny person and tried to remember Daddy, as Gramps said I should. But the memories would slip and muddle, and I could snatch only glimpses: arms held out, the smell of his skin, the time he coughed blood into his handkerchief and Stella cried. I may have imagined the last incident. I may have imagined all of it. I was only one and a bit when he died.

  After a while I grew bored. I stared at Bella’s curious shoes—stout and black, with scarlet laces. I stared at Bella’s coat, trimmed with some dead animal fur that was rufous and snarled. I stared at her rings—numerous—and her jet necklaces—several strands. I stared at her wonder of a hat, which had the eye of a peacock’s tail feather stuck in its black band. I fiddled with my prayer book and stretched and wriggled, until Bella, losing patience, gave me a sharp pinch on the hand. I fell still and silent; I lifted my eyes and looked round the church. I examined the Day of Judgment painting, in which jeering devils pitchfork a crowd of naked people over a precipice into the red fires of hell. I examined the marble Mortland Crusader, asleep on his tomb, and the brass plaque commemorating a Tudor wife: It had been polished so often, her head was erased. I inspected the memorial window to the great-great-uncle of the unknown war, then looked at the window nearest to me, the one that would have been Daddy’s memorial window, had not money become tight in recent years.