The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  Finn hugs me tight and kisses me. She’s trembling. I realize that under her thin dress, she’s naked. Her face is alight, yet her eyes brim with tears. She rocks me in her arms, the way she did when we first came here, when I missed Daddy and the nightmares were so bad. Then, abruptly, she releases me. I’m waiting for her to comfort me, to take me back to bed—but tonight she’s distracted, and she forgets me. I don’t exist for my sister: I’m a solitary child. Finn watches some airy gesture, some lingering touch invisible to me, and her face contracts. Then, fleet of foot, silent as a ghost, she turns and runs up the stairs.

  I remain in the hall. It has a floor like a chessboard. It has a grandfather clock with a weight and a pendulum. I know something huge has happened. The clock ticks away the minutes and chimes away the quarters. In another five hours, we’ll be leaving for Elde.

  [ six ]

  Ancestral Voices

  Before we leave for the annual visit, we assemble at the dining room table: It’s the annual council of war. I have an ache low down in my stomach—it started before breakfast, and although I ate nothing, it won’t go away. At first I felt hope—I thought it might be significant. But it isn’t. I’ve gone back to my bedroom three times to check. Clean underwear. Not the smallest speck of blood. Something is wrong with me. What is wrong with me? Who can I ask?

  My nuns are agitated. They’re worried about Finn; they’re worried about Elde—someone’s soul is on the slide; there’s a scorch of sin in the air. It’s nine when I go back downstairs, so it’s Terce, third hour of prayer for the day. Psalms sing in my ears. Psalms pursue me down the stairs—even Julia can’t drown them out, though she seems to try hard. She’s only just got up—hours after everyone else. She plays the Grateful Dead and runs a bath. “Close the door on that infernal racket, for God’s sake, Maisie,” Gramps cries as I reenter the dining room. He has the annual hangover. He is at the head of the table, Stella opposite him. She’s decided to wear the blue dress my father bought her just before he died. It’s twelve years old. “That dress becomes you, Stella,” Gramps always says when she wears it. And I suppose it does. It brings out the gentle prettiness of Stella’s face. It magics away my mother. In her place, I see a sweet-faced, blithe, confident girl.

  I take my seat at the table, to the left of Gramps and opposite Finn. Finn’s lovely eyes are fixed on air. She hates this annual ritual, and she’s already tuning out. I try to tune out, too. Sink me the ship, Master Gunner, I declaim. Sink her, split her in twain! Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!… It’s a rousing poem, but it’s not effective today. I try other devices. I try imagining how this convent must have been when it was first built, when Isabella watched her masons at work, when prayer retained its power. I try unstringing the centuries of change; I try to understand why Gramps restored this house in such an inept, haywire way. What possessed him to create this dining room by these means? He carved out the room by dividing the double-height Lady Chapel in half horizontally, thus ruining a sacred space; one that was perfectly proportioned became two whose proportions are deformed. Above my head is a gimcrack false ceiling. It has fake beams and bosses carved with the Mortland family arms. The whole room is hideous. Even the windows, lucent, original, one of the Lady Chapel’s glories, have been despoiled. The inserted ceiling chops them in half. There’s a gushing of plumbing—Julia has finished her bath. Water gurgles along the ancient network of lead pipes, reaches the crack it’s made in the far corner of the plaster, and drips into the bucket placed below.

  Gramps gives a groan. “You see?” he says. “You see? If the plumbing isn’t fixed, if I don’t get the roof seen to soon, you know what will happen? We’ll have the whole place down about our ears. Dry rot—death-watch beetle, who knows what’s up there? I’m going to make it very clear to Humphrey. And Violet. Things are reaching crisis point. I’m not going to mince my words. All I’m asking for is justice. I mean, three minutes. Three minutes! I ask you, is it fair?”

  And so it begins. This annual council of war has two stages. There’s the reciting of the ancient grievances. When we’ve been through these hallowed refrains, and only then, we move on to this year’s tactics and campaign. Gramps’s grievances go back a long way. All the way back to the day of his birth, in fact, which event occurred, in the Blue Bedroom at Elde, on July 24, 1892. It was an easy delivery, lasting only a few hours. At twelve noon on the dot, a fine lusty male child was born. At two minutes past twelve, just as the midwife was wrapping the son and heir in his shawl, his mother experienced a new and curious pain. She clutched her stomach and moaned. Consternation! The newborn was hastily bundled into the arms of a maid; the midwife bent over the bed and gave a cry of surprise. One minute later, at precisely three minutes past twelve, baby number two popped out into the world. (Can midwifery really have been that primitive then? I wonder, when Gramps gets to this part of his refrain. Who were the incompetent doctors involved? How come that in nine months’ pregnancy, no one had noticed there were two babies? As Julia says, don’t ask.)

  This male child, also fine and lusty, was my grandfather. Identical twins. Like as two proverbial peas in a pod—with just one tiny difference between them, a difference imperceptible to the eye. The noon child, christened Humphrey (all male Mortlands have names that begin with “H,” “G,” or “E”), would inherit Elde and the considerable loot that came with it. The three-minutes-later twin, christened Henry, faced the more uncertain future of the English younger son.

  Henry, alias Gramps, accepted this. Gramps always emphasizes how fond he was of three-minutes-older Humphrey and how he never felt the least resentment as child or man. He always devotes several passionate verses to this section of the ballad, and I believe all he says. My grandfather is not materialistic or worldly. He’s benevolent. He finds it hard to think badly of anyone, though he makes an exception in the case of Humphrey’s wife, Lady Violet—or the Viper, as she’s known.

  In 1914, when they were twenty-two, both brothers volunteered within days of war being declared. They were commissioned in the same regiment. Humphrey, showing an instinct for self-preservation he’s always retained, became an adjutant and was attached to the general staff. He never saw the front line. Gramps did. His first posting was Ypres. His next was the Somme. I’m familiar with the details of the battles there, but I don’t know what happened to Gramps, for he refuses to be drawn out. All I know is that in 1918 he returned from France an altered man. He returned to Elde—and his first action was to burn his uniforms. This ceremonial burning was a public affair.

  Gramps made a tall wooden pyre in the middle of Elde’s great central lawn. Every uniform he possessed went onto it, doused liberally with paraffin; it burned for hours. The family could be relied upon to ignore this eccentricity, but if word had spread to the village or beyond, it might have been misinterpreted, so the servants were bribed to hold their tongues. His parents became alarmed, and after a few tense months his father began to see that this younger son might have difficulty making his way in the world. None of the traditional avenues seemed open to him. The church was out—Gramps was refusing to attend morning prayers in the family chapel, and he went on as he began: Apart from marriages and funerals, he hasn’t set foot in a church since 1918. The army was clearly not on the cards, and the civil service, the Foreign Office, the colonial service—even the most far-flung branches of it—weren’t looking too promising, either. Gramps wasn’t anxious to serve king and country in any capacity, and there was another problem, too. “No brains, you see,” Gramps always announces at this point. “Humphrey got the lot. No brains, can’t remember a damned thing, and hopeless at exams.”

  Luckily, there was a solution: land. In addition to Elde, the family had several minor East Anglian estates, all with pleasant houses suitable for a man of his status. The suggestion was made, and Gramps took to it. He liked the idea of being a gentleman farmer. He began reading up on it and became interested in eighteenth-century crop rotation methods,
abstruse vegetables, rare breeds of chickens, and Jersey cows.

  But the estates suggested didn’t appeal. What he wanted, he told his astonished father and relieved brother, was the Abbey at Wykenfield. It came with only four hundred acres and only two tenant farms, and the house was a semiruin—but it was just what he desired. It was a place of great beauty, a place where he could hear the beat of England’s heart. The land was heavy Suffolk boulder clay, but, properly tilled, properly husbanded, Gramps knew he could make it fruitful. As for the nunnery buildings—and at this point in his story, Gramps always looks up at his fake-beamed ceiling with pride—he could see the possibilities there, even if the rest of his family was blind.

  Besides, he’d always felt an affinity for this place, ever since he’d cycled here, one prewar summer, as a boy. He liked the fact that its connections with his family went back so far. Although the links between the Mortland family and Isabella, foundress of the Abbey, are subject to debate, and the corruption of her surname, “de Morlaix,” to “Mortland” has never been entirely explained, Gramps has always believed that Isabella was his ancestress. Not his direct ancestress, obviously, given her vocation, but a close one, through one of her several brothers, maybe. And whether she was or not, she spoke to him. Gramps heard her voice when he came to inspect the house in the spring of 1919.

  “And I wasn’t having one of my turns, either,” he will say when he reaches this dramatic point. “Admittedly, I did have them now and then—a lot of men did, I wasn’t alone. But this was completely different. I was standing in Holyspring, looking down at the valley, and I heard Isabella’s voice. Heard it distinctly—and a most beautiful voice it was, too.”

  “What did she say, Gramps?” I always used to prompt at this point.

  “She said, Henry Mortland, this is the place. It is destined for you… something along those lines. I can’t remember the exact words, but that was the gist—”

  “But how did you know it was Isabella? Did she tell you? Did you see her?”

  “Well, not as such… not exactly. I just sort of sensed her. You can’t be too literal about that kind of thing, Maisie, you know.”

  “What was she wearing? Was she in her nun’s habit? Did she have a veil? Were you afraid?”

  “Certainly not. I remained calm and compos mentis throughout. And, oddly enough, I don’t think she was wearing her habit. I’m pretty damn certain she was dressed in blue.”

  Gramps has reached this part of the family ballad now. He pauses and looks hopefully at me. He’s waiting for me to prompt, to ask the old ritual childish questions that he always enjoyed. I don’t want to disappoint him—it hurts to disappoint him—but I can’t make myself ask about Isabella or the voice or the strange incident in Holyspring. I can’t, because I don’t believe in it anymore. I don’t think it ever happened. Isabella speaks to me, but I don’t believe she ever addressed Gramps. I don’t believe in the incompetent midwife, and if smooth Humphrey hadn’t confirmed it, I wouldn’t believe in the fatal three-minute gap between the twins. It’s all rigmarole. It’s all embroidery. I’m not the only storyteller in my family—they’re all at it. Nothing but stories, night and day.

  And, unlike my stories, these are so much eyewash. They’re designed to cover up the truth—not reveal it, the way I do. The rest of my family papers over the cracks—and they don’t even do it well. Look at the wasted opportunities here. When I tell Lucas about the voice in Holyspring—which I shall do soon, I decide—I’ll really make something of it. I know exactly how Isabella sounds and what she wears. And the timing can be improved: The scene won’t take place on a spring afternoon. Moonlight would be much better. Or perhaps a summer’s dawn.

  Poor Gramps. Poor Stella, whose turn is coming next—Stella is an even worse storyteller than my grandfather. Long practice has made her bedtime stories smooth and enchanting to me, but I’ve had to train and pester her to achieve that. At other times she muddles dates, she gets bogged down in detail, she hares off on diversions; unless you prompt her, she never tells you what people looked like—or what they were wearing, which is always of prime importance, I believe. Hopeless, both of them. Anyway, you can summarize the Mortland decline in three sentences, the three truthful sentences that are too painful to be spoken, that are therefore always hidden within this great family web of words.

  First: Gramps, though kind and good, is—financially speaking—a babe in arms. What he failed to lose installing fake ceilings and leaky plumbing, he lost on the farms and the stock market with astonishing speed—his American investments were especially unwise. Second: My father, who would certainly have turned things round and made a go of it, never had a chance to do so, thanks to the war and the TB, which did not respond to the New Mexico climate or the latest miracle drug, streptomycin, in which the sanatorium, and Stella, believed. Third: Stella, the brave widow with three children to support, has even less of a clue about money than Gramps, and she’s a poor judge of character, too. Despite years of evidence to the contrary, she still believes that Humphrey is fundamentally decent; she still believes that Humphrey will take pity on our impoverished state and assist us—he is, after all, a very rich man. I look up; Stella is stating this view now.

  Oh, give me a break, Julia mutters as, finally, she makes her appearance, wafting in on a cloud of scent. Dream on, she murmurs as Stella continues to speak, and Julia sits next to silent, preoccupied Finn. And Julia is right. Any family feeling, fundamental decency, or instinct toward charity Humphrey ever had was knocked out of him by his wife, Lady Violet, years ago. Humphrey has a well-trained memory. He’s forgotten that at the time of my father’s death, he swore to take care of Stella, Julia, Finn, and me. He’s forgotten that it was always his father’s intention to make further provision for Gramps. The steady drip, drip, drip of the Viper’s contempt for us has washed away such considerations. Humphrey’s attitude now is—why throw good money after bad?

  “I can’t understand why you should expect Humphrey to cough up,” Violet said—is reported to have said—last year. The Viper is a plain-speaking woman. “Why the devil should he? Sell that damn house, Henry. God knows why you’re so obsessed with it, anyway. It’s wasted a prodigious amount of money, and it’s been an albatross around your neck from the start. And Stella, forgive me—but be practical for once. Go and get a job—surely even you can get a job of some sort? Obviously there are certain difficulties, with which I sympathize… but they’re not going to disappear overnight, that much is obvious, and meanwhile one can’t just sit around on one’s backside, you know, waiting for money to fall from trees.”

  I stare at the table, this oft quoted speech going round and round in my head. I can’t decide: Was the Viper right—or wrong? And which difficulties did she mean?

  The remark was made at three-thirty in the afternoon, and it brought matters to a swift conclusion. Gramps rose to his feet and said: “Violet, I sold half the Abbey lands to pay my son’s medical bills. I sold the remainder to educate Finn and Julia—and to make provision for Maisie, of course. All that’s left is the house and the gardens. If I sold them tomorrow, what would I get? Enough for a pittance of an annuity, that’s all. I shall not do that. My son loved the house, and his children will inherit it—it’s the only thing I have to give them, and give it to them I shall. Furthermore”—Gramps was getting worked up—“furthermore, your remark to Stella should shame even you. Stella has raised three girls in circumstances of great hardship. She has given them her love, her time, her unremitting devotion—she’s sacrificed her life to the girls! She’s had to scrimp and save; she’s worked her fingers to the bone. She never stops working! This morning, before we left for Elde, Stella was up at six. She tidied the house. She cooked breakfast and washed up the dishes afterwards. She gave Maisie an English lesson. She cleaned out the henhouse, fed the hens, dug up the vegetables she’d grown, and prepared a nourishing supper, which we will eat on our return.…” Gramps fixed the Viper with a wrathful eye. The Viper sigh
ed.

  “What did you do this morning, Violet?” Gramps concluded, his tone scathing. He was scenting triumph, I suppose.

  “I had breakfast in bed, as usual, then a leisurely bath,” Violet replied without batting an eyelid—as Julia remarked afterward, she does have matchless nerve. “Then I discussed the details of lunch with my cook and the greenfly on the roses with one of my gardeners—we do not, of course, employ unpaid drudges at Elde. After that, I went for a gentle stroll by the lake with my charming grandson. Innocuous activities, I feel. So if you’re accusing me of something, Henry, have the courage to say so. But first, take a close look at your own circumstances. As Humphrey and I have warned you, time and again, your refusal to face painful facts will end in tragedy one of these days.”

  “I knew what she was getting at,” Gramps says now, turning red and staring hard at the table. “And I damn well wasn’t having it. So I gave her a look of scorn, a look that would have withered most women… and I said: ‘Violet, I cannot think why Humphrey married you. I will listen to no more of these wicked insults and innuendos. You are a viper, Violet. And you have poisoned this family’s heart.’ ”

  “Grandson? I didn’t know there was a grandson,” says a voice from the door. It breaks the awkward eddying silence that has followed Gramps’s last words. I turn around to see that Dan has entered. He’s carrying a notebook. He greets everyone present, with the exception of Finn. He compliments Julia on her dress—she’s wearing one of her antique caftans today; her wrists are heavy with slave bracelets that jingle whenever she moves. He bestows on her a lingering glance of naked admiration—which is odd, since he loathes Julia—and slides into the chair next to me, directly opposite Finn. His manner is charming—Dan is always charming these days—but I can scent his anger from two feet away. Finn does not look up but keeps her eyes bent upon the table. I think: He can’t know where Finn was last night, surely he can’t know?