The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  I’ve reached that tiny shivering, fluttering thing I glimpsed. I can see that it’s real enough. It’s a scrap of material, impaled on a broken branch, a scrap of material perhaps three inches square. At first, I don’t recognize it. Then I do recognize it, and my world starts to change. I ease it off the branch and hold it in my palm. It’s fine white Indian cotton, woven with a faint scarlet pattern of leaves and flowers. So delicate is the pattern that it looks like veins, like capillaries.

  I know this material. It’s torn from one of Finn’s dresses. I bought that dress for her, on impulse, in Cambridge a few months ago; it wasn’t expensive, I could just afford it. It came from one of those new shops that have begun to spring up, a shop that sold joss sticks, crystals, and healing stones. A hippie shop, I suppose. Finn had admired it in the window, and I persuaded her to try it on. I stood inside, breathing smoky jasmine and patchouli fumes, while Finn ducked into a dark, curtained corner and then, laughing, emerged transformed, saying, I’m not sure, Dan, is it me, d’you think? So I remember the dress—and I remember when she last wore it. She last wore that dress three weeks ago, the night we all had dinner in the cloister, the night before the annual visit to Elde.

  Late that night, very late, when the sky was thick with stars, Julia played her records, her California LPs, with their discordant, irresistible, psychedelic wailings. Acid music: Grace Slick as Alice, pursuing a White Rabbit through the mind’s underworld. I danced with Finn to those discords; and in the shadows, jealous and afraid, because I’d seen the way Lucas watched her, I kissed her—kissed her in the now forbidden way, more deeply and more longingly than I’d kissed her in months. Breaking away at last, she gave me a searching, pained look, as if she wanted to tell me something or imprint my face on her mind. Then she left me and slipped away to her bed: I couldn’t persuade her into mine.

  But she couldn’t have slipped away to her bed. She must have come here. And if she came here, in darkness, I know with absolute certainty that she would not have been alone. You’ve been seen, Colonel Edwardes said. Out in the woods at night.… I should have realized then. I’ve never brought Finn here, but someone else has. I stare at the soft material stupidly; it has meanings, implications, this scrap of cotton. One of the implications is that Finn has looked me in the eyes and lied.

  I put the evidence in my pocket: I will show this to Finn later, when she returns, when I accuse her, I decide—not that I’m capable of thinking, let alone deciding anything. I gave Finn that dress. I gave Finn my heart. I walk back down the path, trying to reread my own past. When she said that to me, can she really have meant its opposite? When we did this, did it mean one thing to me and another to her? Can it amount to nothing, all these years?

  I stumble back down the path. I go through the gate. I’m staring at a view I’ve never seen before, at an alien valley. It’s silent. In the distance, a combine disappears down a road to some barns. I turn and encounter Maisie for the second, and final, time that day.

  Maisie is not alone. She’s walking toward me, holding a bottle of milk and a bunch of flowers. On one side of her is Lucas; on the other, her grandfather. I look at Lucas, my friend: He’s slighter in build than I am and not as tall; his hair is shorter than mine and dark brown, not black; but we usually wear similar clothes, and I can see that he could be mistaken for me in poor light by village spies. Most villagers are unaware of his existence, whereas they’d expect to see me with Finn; they’ve been watching us for years. I can’t bring myself to speak. Lucas, bizarrely, is carrying a spade and a scythe. Seeing me, he stops and smiles. I stare at this apparition, and eventually the air calms. I begin to understand that these three people actually are there. Maisie asks her grandfather the time, and he tells her it’s a quarter to five.

  Maisie frowns. I see that Lucas looks comparatively fresh. Gramps, in charge since eight-thirty, is showing acute strain; he’s white with exhaustion. I know where they’re going, because I’ve been on these expeditions with Maisie before. They’re going to visit the dogs’ burial ground. When they reach it—it’s farther on, at the north edge of the wood—the weeds will be scythed back, and the little stone memorials to generations of Mortland dogs will be scraped clean of lichen. They’ll be decorated with funeral flowers. A libation of milk will be poured on the ground. Then Maisie will recite the list of dogs. There are at least twelve generations of dead pets here, and that list takes a while. It’s not as fearsome as Cassandra’s links to Apollo, and his to every other Greek deity you’ve ever heard of, but it’s quite fearsome enough; last time I submitted, I timed it at an hour.

  Maisie comes to a halt when she sees me. She begins speaking, and—this can be a worrying sign, though not always—she speaks fast. The speech is addressed to the air over my left shoulder; Maisie rarely looks you in the eyes.

  “Dan!” she cries. “I hoped we’d see you. Gramps and I have had an excellent day. We read about bivalves and mollusks all morning. Then Gramps made me a sandwich for lunch—Gramps makes very good sandwiches. I ate nearly all of mine. We made a start on my pergola—you remember I told you about my pergola? We’ve begun to dig the holes for the posts. It’s difficult, because the ground is baked hard, but we made progress. After that, Gramps said we’d earned a bit of a rest, so we walked down to the refectory to see Lucas. He made us a most refreshing cup of tea. Now we’re going to visit the dogs’ graves, which are badly neglected. Daddy isn’t pleased about that. We shouldn’t forget the dead, he says. We should honor and appease them.” She draws a quick breath. “If we don’t, they become restless. Daddy says they get lonely and hungry—down there in the ground.”

  She pauses. There is a silence. I feel a shaft of pity for her, deep and immediate, like a blow to the solar plexus. Mentioning her father in this way is a new development. So now he too has joined the ranks of the invisible, with whom Maisie converses much of the time. Her grandfather’s gaze meets mine; the pain in his eyes is raw. He worshipped his only son, and he worships Maisie. Lucas gives a sigh. I haven’t greeted Lucas, I haven’t looked at him. If I look at him, I might punch him or kill him or break down and cry.

  “Maisie,” Lucas says, more gently than I’d have expected, “stop this. You know it upsets your grandfather.” He crouches down so their faces are on a level; Maisie’s has become a mask of obstinacy. “You remember what we said before? No heaven, no hell, no angels, and no ghosts. The dead don’t talk to us, Maisie. You know that perfectly well.”

  “I remember that discussion,” she replies, her voice sharp with scorn. “But you’re an unbeliever, Lucas—much you know. You’re wrong: The dead are everywhere. You could see them, too, if you weren’t half-blinded, if you’d only learn to use your eyes. That’s what’s wrong with your portrait—you left them out. You hadn’t realized that, had you? Well, look at it again. And the dead do talk to me, because they know I can interpret them and understand them—I can, I can. Can’t I, Dan?”

  Her face is red with anger. She’s quivering with indignation. “Of course you can, Maisie,” I reply soothingly. When these outbursts occur, it’s as well not to cross her; so that’s what I say. For the best of motives I give a placatory answer, and, glancing over my shoulder at the wood, I think maybe it’s true, maybe she can. I don’t feel sane, I don’t even know what the word sane means anymore—so why assume this little girl is unbalanced, or abnormal, or mad? What are ghosts? What does it mean to be haunted? I can see a phantom now: a shadowy Finn, who stands next to Lucas and embraces him; I never knew my mother, and she haunts me still.

  The reply seems to calm Maisie. “Come on now, darling,” her grandfather says, and I admire him more than I’ve ever done in that moment, because he’s old, and I can see he’s at the end of his rope. Maisie can be tyrannical; but I’ve never known him to lose patience with her, and he doesn’t lose patience now. “Come on, Maisie. Give your old Gramps your hand. We’ve got a job to do, remember?”

  And she trots off with him, apparently consoled. Lucas, to
my surprise, does not duck out of this task; he goes with them. Maybe he’s avoiding me.

  “When Gramps first came here in 1919,” Maisie begins, her voice receding into the distance, “he owned a Clumber spaniel. He named her Isabella, after our ancestor, who founded the Abbey here. She was generally called Issy. She had numerous progeny and lived to be thirteen.…”

  I turn back to the house. That was the last sentence of Maisie’s I ever heard. Then it was without significance. Now it echoes and reechoes through my mind. As I cross the cloister, I see that numerous small scrapes have been made in the grassed areas. They’re about one inch deep; a blackbird is already using one as a dust bath. At first they puzzle me, then I realize that these must be the post holes for Maisie’s pergola-to-be. There are at least forty of them. They are scattered at random all over the lawn.

  I glance up at the library windows; the middle one is closed, the others open. I cross the flagstones by the house, enter the hall, and walk across the chessboard squares. It’s five-fifteen. The long-case clock strikes the quarter as I pass.

  [ eighteen ]

  What a Piece of Work…

  Five minutes later I’m in the attics, and as promised I’m painting walls. White, everything has to be white. It’s a tabula rasa. Erase the past: Begin again.

  I’ve opened all the windows, but here, directly under the roof, the heat is stifling; no air seems to be getting in. I’ve stripped off my shirt, and I’m dripping sweat, glistening with sweat. I’ve finished half of one small chimney wall, and the roller isn’t working properly. It’s spitting white paint all over the floor. I switch to the brush, paint two stripes—it’s going to take at least two coats to cover years of neglect and grime—and then I stop. I can see it’s a hopeless task, for a hopeless person, in a hopeless world.

  I’ve lost Finn. Finn has been lying to me. When she’s said, Give me time, Dan, and, Nothing’s changed, she’s been lying. She’s been thinking about Lucas and when she can next meet him in Nun Wood. He’s my friend, how could he do that to me? How could she? But I can see all too plainly how she could do it and why she would do it. Lucas has gifts—gifts she admires. I’ve seen the way she’s pored over his work, bending over him when he’s drawing. There’s a ruthless impatience to Lucas that I could never achieve. If she prevaricated with him, if she started in on all those ifs and buts and maybes that drive me insane, Lucas would simply walk away. You’re boring me, Finn, he’d say, and that would whip her into line. Boring Lucas is something we all fear.

  Lucas is going to be famous, he’s going to achieve something. He’s never said so—he doesn’t need to—but he doesn’t doubt it for one second: Lucas has more self-belief than anyone I’ve ever met. He’s an artist, and for bookish Finn that’s appealing. If he were a poet or a novelist, I’d have known I hadn’t a prayer. But a painter will do—it certainly has more appeal than someone on the dole queue.

  I’m never going to get a job. I’m never going to escape this damned place—I’m genetically programmed to stay here. I’m going to end up a laborer, Dan the obscure, a plowman with “BA (Cantab)” after his name. That’s artistry, that is, I think, slumping against the wall, thinking of Joe and his skill. Up the field, down the field, perfect lines, perfect turns: king of the Massey Ferguson tractor and the Ransome’s of Ipswich plow; one of the few men left who worked with horses as a boy, one of that dwindling number who still knows how to handle horses, the Suffolk Punch horses that are trotted out and tarted up once a year, for the valedictory plowing competitions at the agricultural show. Yes, those horses are magnificent beasts, huge, intelligent, docile, and powerful. Yes, it’s hard to guide a tractor and plow with Joe’s precision. Yes, it is artistry—but not to me.

  “It’s not for the likes of us,” Joe said when I won a place at the grammar school. “At your age I’d been bringing home a wage four years,” Joe said when I explained I wasn’t leaving school, I wanted to take A levels. When I told him about my Cambridge place, he was proud, but bewildered and afraid. “Where’d this boy get all his cleverness from, Bella?” he asked—and as usual, no answer came. “All this book learning—I was never one for books. But you’ll have letters after your name, Danny—think of that. Bachelor of arts. No one can put you down, I reckon, not once you’ve got those letters. And if they try—they might try, Danny, you best be ready for that—you mind you fight your corner, boy.”

  Joe has faith in those letters. I don’t. Those pathetic letters mean sod-all to thirty-five advertising agencies. And where did this cleverness come from? I don’t know. I wish I hadn’t had it inflicted on me; it’s like a disease. All it does is make me a misfit—born a little Martian, still an alien. That long line of my obscure ancestors: I’m terrified of being like them, but it’s a no-win situation, this. If I’m not like them, then I’m betraying them, I’m a traitor to my family, a traitor to my class.

  I paint another stripe on the hopeless wall. Why am I even doing this? Why am I up here, under the roof, suffocating, dying of heat stroke, when there are umpteen rooms on the next floor down that would be far more suitable? These attics were once the nuns’ dormitories. When Gramps converted the house, they became servants’ rooms. “Are you sure you want the students to be up there, Stella?” I said when she explained her plan.

  “Oh yes,” she replied, bright-eyed. “Once they’re painted and spruced up a bit, they’ll be lovely. We’ll put down rugs, and move some of the good furniture up there, find some paintings. The rooms are large, and the views are wonderful. Besides, it will give the students a degree of privacy. They won’t want to feel on top of us all the time.”

  Well, yes. Except in winter it’s freezing up here and there’s no heating. There’s one bathroom, with a vast claw-footed bath, heavily stained with rust, and a geyser for hot water, last used circa 1932. It’s probably defunct. No one’s thought to check it. I know why Stella decided on this plan, and I should have realized before: In these rooms, the students will be well away from Maisie. With luck, they’ll remain ignorant of the journeyings Maisie makes once everyone’s asleep, once it’s dark.

  Maisie sleepwalks. She sleepwalks all over the house; she sleep-walked into my bedroom once. I woke to find her standing by my bed, plucking and scratching at my hand, a small ghost, a miniature Mrs. Rochester, a little demon in a white cotton nightdress. “Where’s Dan?” she demanded. “Where’s Dan gone?” I had to fetch Finn, and we carried her back to bed, along miles of corridors, moonlight striping the walls, Maisie’s eyes wide and glittering. So, yes, Maisie sleepwalks. As far as I know, she’s never sleepwalked here in the attics, but who knows where she journeys, what she discovers, on those nightly expeditions of hers?

  I think of the prospectus Stella wrote, which even now is being handed out in W1, SW7, and SW3 by an abnormally helpful Violet. I tried to help with that prospectus, but when I read what Stella had written, all that guff about the “family” and the Abbey’s “relaxed and convivial atmosphere,” my heart failed. I couldn’t bring myself to object, and there was no way of persuading Stella to alter it. That’s what she saw in her mind’s eye. What I saw was that cold, ugly dining room, with Maisie at the table, taking an hour to chew a lettuce leaf; Maisie, with that heartbreaking air of bright attention, starting in on her lists, asking one of her peculiar and unsettling questions, launching herself on one of the stories.… Is this cookery school going to work? Is it hell.

  On the other hand, I want it to work. I passionately want it to work. It has to. The money’s running out, and Maisie will always need care; there are no alternatives. I want it to work, because if life were fair, it would. And because I love this family. Give them a fucking break for once, I think, and start slapping paint on twice as fast.

  I’ve reached the dormer window section, when I hear footsteps—no, not footsteps: What I hear is the soft slip-slap of thonged sandals against a woman’s heel. They flee from me, that sometime did me seek / With naked foot, stalking in my chamber… I know at once wh
o is coming along the corridor.

  It’s Julia. I turn my back on the door. Through the window, in the far distance, I can see Maisie, her grandfather, and Lucas walking back toward the refectory. The ceremony of the dogs—shorter than usual—must be over. Maisie must have decided the dead are placated, for the time being, anyway.

  I look at my watch. As Julia enters, it’s a quarter to six. Or there-abouts.

  She barely greets me. I think she says, “Hi, Dan,” or, “I wondered if you’d be here.” Something offhand. Beyond that, she seems to feel no need to explain her presence, but Julia is like that. She always assumes her presence is desired.

  I continue painting; she begins to move around the room. I can smell the scent she’s wearing; it has a cool, blue fragrance. I wonder if I smell of sweat—then know I do. Too bad: I didn’t invite her up here, and—unlike her—I’ve been working all day. She circles the space, inspecting the sections I’ve already painted, peeling little bits of paper off the walls that remain to be done.

  “Don’t do that, Julia,” I say, with irritation. “You’ll just make it worse.”

  “Sorry,” she says absently. “Though it would be hard to make it much worse. God, it’s so dingy up here.”

  “Yes, well, that’s why I’m painting it white. Two coats and it’ll look completely different.”