The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  Does she have a name, this enchantress, this Circe who gave me the magic means to enhanced orgasm? I think she does, a boyish, honest sort of name—and suddenly I’ve got it. “Frankie,” I say, hurrying after her. This girl doesn’t hang around; she’s already sashayed through to my sitting room, she’s already examining the private objects on my mantelpiece. “Frankie,” I say, “this really isn’t a good time.…”

  Well, I say something like that. The exact words don’t matter, because the amyl-nitrate nymph isn’t listening. She’s examining those mantelpiece objets: a Chinese ivory sphere and an ancient book token next to it. She picks them up; she looks at them carefully; she looks searchingly at me. Eventually, after a spacey pause, my words appear to penetrate. “Wrong,” she replies. “It’s the right time, Dan. I read the tarot tonight and the cards were, like, unambiguous?”

  She’s committed two sins in one sentence. There are two modern tics I cannot tolerate. One is the moronic Oz/U.S.A. interrogative, in which statements are habitually pronounced on a rising inflection as if they were questions. The other is using the word like as punctuation. I know it’s pedantic, I know it’s old fart and uptight and sad—but fuck it, I do write, or I used to. I do work with words, and I care about them. So the pedant in me should show this girl the door, like, now. On the other hand, she’s suppressing a smile, and there’s a certain amusement in her eyes, so those tics could be deliberate, she could be reminding me of something, or teasing, sending me up; in which case she must know about my pedantic quirks… and I must have told her.

  Suddenly I’m really worried. What else did I tell her? What else did I do? My memory’s saying our meeting was brief, confined to that club and that dance floor. But my memory isn’t reliable and can be merciful; it has a tendency to edit things out. So maybe the meeting, the encounter, was of slightly longer duration. Maybe this girl and I went on somewhere, and in that place, wherever it was, certain intimacies occurred… like confessing my conversational prejudices, for instance, or banging on about a dead grandmother and tarot cards.

  I don’t like the look of this. How did we get from tics and tarot to amyl nitrate? That’s quite a conversational jump. Why would the subject of orgasm have come up? Surely we didn’t… no way could I have… why, this girl’s young, it’s difficult to say how young, but young enough to be well out of bounds for a man like me. She has a Lolita-ish look, and I’m no Humbert Humbert. Late teens, mid-teens? I’m in a low state, and my synapses are shorting—I’m having problems processing this. I’m not helped by the fact that she’s wearing a ton of makeup, but I think she’s easily young enough to be my daughter, and even pre-Thailand, pre-Tokyo, when this encounter must have happened, even then, when I was ricocheting around like a pinball, even then I had standards. Or did I?

  The room is starting to mist up. Time is slowing the way it does in a car crash. I try to examine her face. Her face is distracting me. Her face and her figure. She has an arresting figure and an intelligent face, and what’s more, her unusual appraising eyes are sending me a message. I seem to be receiving a burst of Morse from those greenish eyes—an exciting burst of semiotics.

  You don’t mean what I think you mean, do you? I Morse back. Oh yes, I do, comes the answer.

  I stare at the girl for a few centuries. I stare at the objects in her hands. Her expression is eloquent; she’s holding my past in her palms, and it’s crying out to me. I’ve been here before, I realize. I’ve been in similar fixes before. Two years ago I could deal with it, and now I can’t. Two years ago, I’d wake at four a.m. in a stranger’s room; I’d retrieve my scattered clothes, tiptoe out of the stranger’s door, and leave her sleeping. No note, no follow-up calls, and no repercussions beyond a new understanding of pointlessness, some shame, and a certain indefinable but dragging acquaintance with misery.

  Yes, it’s a bleak place, this love/sex quandary. Been there, seen that, got the Expense-of-Spirit T-shirts—and nothing on God’s earth will persuade me back there.

  No way, sorry, I Morse, and something dies in the girl’s eyes. Gently, I take the two objects out of her hands. I replace them on the mantelpiece. The girl, the young woman, says nothing. She moves away from me.

  I replace the book token. It’s creased and faded, but the handwriting inside is still clear. I examine the message a boy wrote all those years ago: “Wishing you a Happy 14th Birthday, Finn! Please use this to buy a really great book! Yours sincerely, Daniel Nunn.”

  The boy’s writing is round and unformed. I still made elaborate loops on the tails of letters, as I’d been taught to do at the village primary. What possessed me to write “Yours sincerely”? Why sign myself “Daniel”—and add my surname? What do you want for your birthday, Finn? I’d asked her weeks earlier. What I want most of all is a bottle of scent, she replied. It’s called Taboo, Dan, and they sell it in Woolworth’s.

  Was Finn being kind, because she knew I had very little money, though I’d been saving for months? Possibly; but I think she really did want it—Taboo was cheap; it smelled powerful, sexual, and adult. But I didn’t buy it. Nick’s mother talked me out of it. And that was easy enough: I lived in perpetual, cringing terror of doing the wrong thing, of saying the wrong thing, of being exposed as a… well, as a common little toad, I suppose. So I listened to Mrs. Marlow and bought this “impersonal and appropriate” present. I couldn’t bring myself to give it to Finn; it felt like a betrayal.

  I lean the book token against the mantelpiece wall. I place the carved ivory Chinese sphere next to it, secured by a blob of Blu-Tack adhesive. Its internal hemispheres rotate as I lift it. Something else Gran nicked from the Abbey. She gave it to me when I was seven, a few weeks before the Mortlands left New Mexico and came home. Who’s going to miss it, Danny? If they ask, I’ll just say it got broke. You mind you keep it safe now.

  And keep it safe I did. To this day no one knows I have it, not even Finn, not Julia, not Nick—and not Lucas. Lucas may have incorporated elements of the Lady Chapel library in the background of his Sisters Mortland painting, but he could never have seen three ivory spheres on the altar-wall mantelpiece. By that summer, there were only two; the third was secreted away, as it had been for years. It was part of a cache of sacred Finn relics under a floorboard in the room I shared with my father, at the Nunn family’s ancient crooked tip of a tied cottage.

  So much for my theories, I think; so much for drug-induced insomnia-fueled insights. I turn round, wondering if the amyl-nitrate girl is similarly insubstantial. But no, I haven’t imagined her. She’s real, and she’s still here. She’s wandered down to the other end of this long room—it runs front to back; the bay at that end overlooks Malc & Co., or it does when the shutters aren’t closed; the bay this end overlooks a back garden jungle. Yes, she’s wandered down there, is meandering around on the bare boards, is examining the boxes and crates I’ve never unpacked, and is inspecting the only piece of furniture in the room. It’s a large, cutting-edge-fashionable sofa, bought in Milan two years ago when I was between planes. I had it shipped over; that was the sort of thing I did then. I can’t remember why I bought it, except I was in the store, and I saw it, and in a blink I’d imagined a future for it. On that sofa, I was going to sit with a wife and children: a happy family engaged on a familial task. What task? I think we were unpacking decorations. Yes, it’s true: We were about to decorate a Christmas tree.

  Christ, what were we going to do next, sing carols? I stare at the sofa. It’s white, it’s minimalist, and it’s not child-friendly. I don’t understand why that other Daniel ever liked it—though Frankie seems interested in it. She’s inspecting it; she’s weaving her way toward it—she seems a little unsteady on her feet, I notice. She’s now sitting down.

  “So you’re still camping out?” she remarks. “You still haven’t unpacked?”

  That “still” is alarming. She can’t have been here before, surely? If we did go on somewhere after that club—and I’m almost certain we didn’t—surely I couldn
’t have brought her here? Tell me I didn’t do that.… Then I know I didn’t do that; it’s not possible. On paper I owned the house then, but I didn’t move in until months later, after I’d finally returned from the collapse, the freak-out in Tokyo. The day I moved in, I received the McIvers’ telephone call. I left at once for my father’s bedside at Wykenfield.

  “ ‘Still’? What d’you mean, ‘still’?” I say, moving toward her. Who is she? Why is she here? She is pretty, this punky Circe. She has thick glossy hair, dyed a defiant, unnatural red gold. It’s twisted and spikily gelled and pinned with a glitter of ties and jeweled clips; she has several silver rings in her ears and a small sparkling stud in her left nostril. She has Nefertiti eyes, a green gaze, too much blusher, and freckles. She’s wearing umpteen silver bracelets; they chime when she moves. Her fingernails, painted purple, are bitten. Her long, slender legs are embellished with spray-on jeans and kickboxer boots. She appears to be wearing an Edwardian corselet-type thing under a softly luxurious leather jacket. I can’t place her accent, which is standard young-speak and estuarine, with a faint drawl on the vowels that suggests the estuarine is adopted, not natural. Did she work in PR? I think she might have done. That party might have been for the latest guns’n rape rap group, and she might have represented them in some junior capacity. Yes, the rap group that did the backing track for one of my ads. Shall I show you fear in a handful of dust? No, not that ad, some other.

  “You said you were moving,” she replies. “When we met at that party—and that was like fifteen months ago? Plenty of time to unpack.” She frowns. “What’s that rope for? Why have you got all that rope coiled up over there? Is that some kind of artwork?”

  “No, it’s to mend the sash cords. All the sash cords are frayed. They have to be replaced, and for that you need Manila rope.…” I come to a halt: Cotter’s Early Giant. When one is lying, too much detail is a giveaway. “Frankie,” I continue, “I’m not sure why you’re here, or how you know where I live, but it’s late, and I’ve had a lousy day, and irrespective of what your tarot cards may have told you, I feel you should leave now.”

  “You don’t know why I’m here?” Her expression, wounded and affronted, becomes dismaying. “Oh, great, thanks a lot, Dan. Now I feel really welcome. Okay: I’m here because you told me to come. You said, ‘Frankie, I have to catch a plane to Bangkok in three hours’ time, and that is a bitch. Now I’ve found you, I don’t want to leave you. I’m away for months, but I won’t forget tonight. I won’t forget you. The second I’m home, we have to meet and talk again, ’ you said. Then you gave me this.”

  She delves into her jacket pocket. She retrieves a card, and I inspect it: incontestably my handwriting, incontestably my address—and incontestably, no matter how fried my brain, I would never, never have made the speech she’s just quoted. I look at her uncertainly. Despite Nick’s good food and all that purifying water, I’m still not sure she’s here. I’m still hoping she may be some trippy after-effect. Then I see she isn’t. My hallucinations are painfully plausible, but this hallucinatory girl is now reacting in an implausible way. Her eyes have filled with tears, and she’s begun crying.

  “You don’t remember,” she says. “That’s how much it meant to you. You remember my name—and that’s it. You don’t remember how we talked. I’ve never talked to anyone that way before—I can’t believe you’d forget that. All those things I told you—all those things you told me. About how you grew up in Suffolk, right, and your mum was dead, and your grandmother was Romany, and she had second sight—it was called the Gift—you see how well I remember every detail? But then I would, I’ve had over a year to think about it. I’ve thought about it every day, I’ve thought about you every day. How amazing you look. How totally sexy you are. How sad you seem. How funny you can be. I mean, like seriously funny. Why hide it, right? I love you.”

  The tears are now spilling down her cheeks. Her hands, with their touching bitten nails, are shaking. I can see that she means what she says—or believes that she does, which amounts to the same thing. I can see that she is indeed young, too young to have grown those necessary protective skins, young enough to risk being absurd. I can also see, and should have noticed earlier, that she’s not sober. Either it’s taken Dutch courage to make this speech, the words of which are occasionally slurred, or she’s well and truly stoned. I stare at her, uncertain what to do. I didn’t think there were any more guilts to discover, and now, out of the blue yonder, here’s another.

  “Frankie,” I begin, trying to make it gentle, “I’m sorry—but I don’t remember any of this. There are reasons for that. I wasn’t in a good state then, and I’m not in a good state now.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” She rises alarmingly to her feet. “You think I can’t see that? That’s why I’m here. I can help. I can cure you. Okay, it doesn’t have to be love, you may not be ready for that, that’s cool—I understand. We can just make love, right? Where’s that amyl nitrate I gave you? You promised to keep it for—you know…”

  And before my startled gaze, she peels off the leather jacket and begins to unhook that witchy black corselet thing. It unhooks down the front. She has beautiful shoulders; she has amazing breasts; her bracelets chime… I recoil sharply. “Frankie,” I say in a firm voice, “do that up now. Put that jacket back on immediately. Sit down on that sofa and pull yourself together. I’m going to make you some coffee. When you’ve drunk that, you’ll feel better. We’ll sit here for a while and have a sensible conversation, then I’ll call you a cab, and you can go home and get some sleep and forget this ever happened. Believe me, and I speak from bitter experience, that is by far the best course of action.”

  Well, I make a speech along those lines. It’s not as fluent as that, and it’s less trite, but that’s the gist. When it produces no discernible change, I repeat it, with variations. Eventually it has the desired effect, in that Frankie calms down and the corselet thing gets refastened. There are still a few residual problems, however. I discover I’ve aged a few more millennia. I discover she’s tenacious and obstinate, this amyl-nitrate girl.

  “Go home?” she says, eyeing me sadly. “I so don’t have a home. I’ve been sleeping on this guy’s floor, but we had a fight, and he threw me out. If I can’t stay here, I’ve got nowhere to go. I’ll just end up walking the streets. Oh, Dan, it’s really weird—I’m so miserable. My life is one big miserable mess. D’you have any food—I’m like, really starving?”

  Through a mist of fatigue, I hear alarums. I begin to see Frankie might be manipulative. But I’m tired, I’m exhausted, I’m running on empty here. I suspect this is 90 percent garbage, 10 percent genuinely troubled, but can I be sure? Supposing I’m wrong, what then? I can’t abandon a stoned girl to the tender mercies of Malc Inc. Besides, troubled girls have been on my mind recently, and this difficult girl is reminding me of someone I once knew… I’m certain, almost certain, it’s Maisie. I have no idea why; there is no physical resemblance, the speech patterns couldn’t be more different. But I can sense some ghostly shadowing, some echoing imbalance. I don’t want to cause any more harm, even inadvertently. We were blind to distress, Nick wrote to me.

  And so, in the end, after more crying jags and pleading, I give way. It’s agreed that Frankie can spend this night, and this night only, on my Milanese sofa. Apart from that small concession, I’m firm. It’s astonishing, I can’t believe it: I feel quite fatherly. Yes, I’m turning into that paterfamilias I imagined earlier. It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done, I tell myself as I make comforting Nescafé and root around for some not too stale gingersnaps; as I trudge upstairs and downstairs fetching blankets and cushions. I get Frankie settled on the sofa. I turn out the light. I tell her to get some sleep, and with a distant sense of progress made, and heroism imminent, I move quietly toward the door. By now the fatigue is intense: I’ve stepped through a mirror; I’m wading through unreality. The long day has caught up with me. I’ve been pushing a
boulder up a mountain all day long, and I can’t, won’t, push it one inch farther.

  “You were in love with her, weren’t you, that book-token girl?” Frankie says in a wan, sniffly, muffled voice. “I could tell from your face. Are you still in love with her?”

  “Go to sleep, Frankie,” I reply. I’m not really listening. I’m standing in the doorway, looking at the shadows in the hall. I feel old, incredibly old: I’m Tiresias. Outside, a helicopter is circling, and it will be a police helicopter, searching the London streets, on the lookout for muggers, molesters, murderers—all the usual suspects.

  “Finn. That’s an odd name. Who was she, this Finn?”

  “Someone I used to know,” I reply, realizing that is the truth. “We lived in the same village when I was a child. She was one of three sisters.”

  “Why do you sound so sad? Did she die? Did you lose her?”

  “No, she didn’t die,” I answer. I’m looking at the dark, listening to that helicopter; it’s lower now and still circling. “But there was an accident, a terrible accident.”

  “Finn had an accident?”

  “No, the youngest sister. Her name was Maisie. She fell from a high window.”

  “Was she killed?”

  “No. She wasn’t killed. If she had been, it might have been more merciful. But she survived. She’s still alive—after a fashion.”

  “That’s terrible. Is she… in a home?”

  “Yes, a very good one. It’s run by nuns; nuns look after her.” “That’s really sad. Do you go and see her?”

  “No, I don’t. Not any more. Go to sleep now, Frankie.”

  “Won’t you tell me what happened?”

  “Sleep well,” I reply, and close the door.

  I mount the stairs to my room. I lock the door. I don’t trust Frankie, and I don’t want visitations. Through the thin curtains, the street-lamps stripe the walls with prison patterns. I lie down on the bed, too tired to undress. The past day moves in my mind like the sea, and I wait patiently for the moment when the waves will quieten. Slack water: The helicopter continues to circle.