The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  So I could go and signal through that gate. I have, after all, come a long way, a spiritual marathon. If I do, Lucas will emerge, feed, and water me. He’ll give me raw fish to eat. And I could ask him all those questions that, last night and first thing this morning, seemed so urgent. Rest assured, those questions weren’t vulgar—I’m not a fool, and I’ve had time to think. So I wasn’t going to ask Lucas whether, twenty-plus years ago, he was Julia’s lover as well as Finn’s. I think I know the answer, in any case. I wasn’t going to ask him whether, by any remote chance, he had watched Julia and me that last evening, when we emerged from our medieval hiding place. I know he didn’t. He was in the refectory. He was reworking a good painting and was making it great.

  I know what prompted those alterations. He had listened to Maisie, who told him, in front of me, what was wrong with his version of The Sisters Mortland. Maisie said the dead were missing from his portrait. Lucas was inserting them—honoring them, perhaps. That was what I saw, what I finally understood, when I stood looking at the painting in the gallery yesterday: the three sisters, and all those dead, all those generations of the dead, who were both with them, and inside them; who are beside, and inside, all of us. Who are in and with me, and whose ancestral voices now speak with eloquence and understanding and warning inside my genes, blood, heart, and head.

  I slump against the wall. That fatigue’s hit again, that peculiar fatigue that’s been affecting me of late. I’m tired. I’ve come all this way, and I now understand that I’m in the wrong place. I shouldn’t take the Jonathan Aske route, that cul-de-sac. It isn’t Lucas I need to question. Everything Lucas has to say on the subject of the Abbey, and the sisters, and Maisie, of that particular summer and all it stood for—it’s in his portrait. The Sisters Mortland is his last word on the subject—and quite right. What I should do is concentrate on my last tasks—and for those, I need to be in Wykenfield, not London.

  I push myself off the wall, take one last look at Lucas’s locked gate, and walk away from it. I start trekking back the way I’ve come, the rain pelting down, a cold wind blowing, the London air so thick with water vapor that it’s like walking through sea fog. I’ve gone about fifty yards when a black cab passes me at speed, spraying me with filth. It stops farther up the road behind me, and when I hear the squeal of brakes, my sad, small, and unreliable Gift flickers back to life.

  I stop dead and turn round just as the gate into Lucas’s lair swings open. I know it’s Finn, know it one second, maybe two, before I actually see her. She comes out of the gate, clangs it shut behind her, and runs across to the waiting cab. She’s wearing a mackintosh, the belt knotted. Her hair, bleached by the African sun, is as short as a boy’s, just as it was in that photograph. It falls over her forehead. As she bends forward to speak to the cabdriver, she pushes it back from her face. I know that gesture. Forget the rain, the failing light: I’d recognize Finn, my Finn, across a thousand years. I’d know her from outer space.

  I shout her name and start running toward her, but the taxi’s engine drowns out my voice. Finn climbs inside, and the cab pulls away fast. It accelerates into the distance, out of my life.

  I run across to Lucas’s gate. I hammer on it hard. I shake it and rattle it. After an interval, that bloody intercom thing he insists on using crackles to life and Lucas’s voice says, “Yes? What is it?”

  “Lucas,” I say, frantic now. “It’s me. It’s Dan. Let me in, let me in.”

  “No,” Lucas says. “Sorry, but I’m working.”

  “Lucas, fuck it, fuck you—open this gate.”

  There is a lengthy pause, then Lucas’s crackly, distorted voice says: “You saw Finn?”

  “Lucas, I thought she was in Africa. I thought she was in Mozambique—Lucas, I have to see her. Where is she going? How long is she here? Why hasn’t she called me?”

  “I can’t answer the final question,” Lucas replies, a slight tetchiness creeping into his voice. “As to how long she’s here, about another hour. She’s late for her flight. As to destination, I believe she mentioned Cairo.”

  “Holy Mary Mother of God. Which airport? Which airport, Lucas?”

  “Heathrow, I think.” And the intercom clicks off.

  We’ll pass over the subsequent debacle. Forty-five minutes of running in the rain, semaphoring, before I found the one taxi in London that wasn’t occupied. Gridlock trying to get to Heathrow. Two hours circuiting Heathrow’s hells, making sure that there were no later planes to Cairo, two hours checking whether Finn had decided to miss her flight and by some divine chance sit in one of four terminals, in one of six thousand cafés, drinking coffee, a Francesca waiting patiently for me, her Paulo, to turn up.

  This odyssey nearly finished me off. I made it back to Liverpool Street station, finally. I got on one train and then a second. After that, I think there was a bus, maybe a taxi. Half a day later, and close on midnight, there I was, cold as charity, back in Wykenfield, trying to light the kitchen range, in the house of my ancestors.

  I got it going eventually. I lit the candles under the pictures of Ocean, my ancestress. I put the eight-inch-square box with my father’s ashes in the funereal front parlor, where Dorrie was laid out. Then—it seemed so cheerless and lonely there—I brought Joe back to the kitchen and put him close by, on the table, with the crystal ball and the tarot. I put the ivory sphere I’d rescued next to the Rider-Waite deck. Once these powerful objects were in place, I sat down, picked up a pen, and began writing to the dead, the loved, and the lost again.

  I wrote for hours, Joe. I got this far, Maisie. I got as far as this page, Finn. Then I fell asleep, with my head on the table. The sky wept rain all night.

  I’d survived Saturday or—as Julia so accurately used to call it, Shatterday. She was quoting someone. Today, it’s a new morn. It’s Sunday—or, as I’m going to call it, Son’s day. The sky’s still weeping; the world’s awash.

  My dearest Finn, my beloved Finn, I’ll wait until it eases, and then I’ll walk up to the Abbey. I’ll be reunited with you there, in one sense, at least.

  [ twenty-three ]

  Netherland

  During the morning—I’m not sure of the time, and time doesn’t matter, in any case—I set off from our cottage. I’m carrying a spade and a Sainsbury’s plastic bag, inside which is the box with Joe in it. My penultimate task, and I can’t shirk it. This is what sons do. They determine a parent’s final resting place. If they want to involve religion, some guru or priest, fair enough. If not, and I don’t—Joe was not religious in that sense, though he was in many others—then some alternative ceremony is needed. Maisie favored libations. I’m thinking more along the lines of a handful of dust and some words of mine, together with powerful words from the King James version of the Bible, for which—unlike the modern abominations that have superseded it—I have the deepest respect.

  I’m no sooner out on the road than I’m lost. Another of those Hamlet moments, but this time I’m on some misty Elsinore battlement, waiting for my father’s ghost. He will tell me where to go next. I stare at the familiar village street and discover it’s become unfamiliar overnight. Of the old landmarks, only the pub, with its wily fox and foolish goose, remains. The duck pond is long gone—filled in when they installed mains drainage. The shop and the post office have gone; the school has gone. Each of these, as Realtors would say, is now a desirable residence. But these changes haven’t happened in the last six weeks: I had plenty of time to discover them, and rage over them, last summer, when I was here with Joe. So what’s now making this street so alien? I think it’s the behavior of the road, which is undulating. I don’t like it, this switchback road; I don’t like this ride. I want to get off.

  I frown at the road, sway a bit, and wait for it to stabilize, which—eventually—it does. I inch toward the lane that leads up past Acre Field to the Abbey. The long line of elms has gone, killed by a Dutch disease some years ago. The roof of the Abbey is just visible, and peering at the chimneys, I can see hallu
cinatory smoke. Up there, on the higher ground, a thick, heavy rain is falling; it doesn’t appear to be falling here in the lane where I’m standing. I raise a dry hand to my wet face.

  It looks impossibly far to the Abbey. I’m no longer sure that Joe will want to lie in the haunted environs of Nun Wood or in a garden he once tended that will be knee-high in dead docks. Maybe I should choose some other place? I begin walking toward the fields—those fields he loved, those fields he and his father and his grandfather worked—and I can’t locate them anymore. I can’t find any hedgerows or gates, and they’re impassable, these dark prairies, newly plowed, the sticky boulder clay instantly adhering to the feet. It’s making my feet leaden. I can scarcely move. I find I’ve somehow got myself into a vast Somme of mud, a terrible no-man’s-land saturated with pesticides, pumped full of high-yield profit, unprotected from the wind, featureless and bleak.

  I don’t know this England. I don’t know where I am. Is this the field where my grandfather, aged six, was paid a penny to stand for eight hours, on just such a day as this, scaring birds off the newly seeded wheat? Or am I in Pickstone, so called because its ground sprouted flints and the village women and their children were paid to pick up the stones at a rate of tuppence a bushel? I bend and pick up a stone. I can’t remember what a bushel is, but it’s a lot, especially for a child, and especially when engaged in such a miserable task as that. I don’t know when that happened and when that ancient practice was finally discontinued: back in the dark ages, I think—that is, within living memory; in my father’s boyhood, about 1928. Am I there, in that world of rural penury, where Joe’s parents couldn’t afford to buy him boots? Or am I in that hay field where I lay with Finn, the sweet grasses making us a fragrant hiding place? That field where we pledged adolescent hearts, and I said, Will it be for always, Finn? And she said, Yes.

  Whichever field it is, I find I’m in it one minute and in the graveyard the next. I have no recollection of moving from one to the other. The morning service must be over: I’m alone. I wander between the gravestones, trying to find the fifteen Nunns here, the Nunns to whom I spoke as a child, a very small child. They would always listen patiently and wisely and—unlike Bella—couldn’t lose their tempers and pinch me or smack my head. I find five of them or six, but I can’t find my mother. And then I’m inside the church, inspecting Guy Mortland’s neat, rectangular final resting place, and that of Gramps, which is next to it. I inspect the Tudor wife’s brass memorial, the wife whose head has been almost erased by polishing. I inspect the grinning devils with their sharp pitchforks in the Day of Judgment fresco. They’re enjoying their work. One of them, he’s obviously a senior devil, bears a strong resemblance to Malc.

  When the church floor begins to move, to snake and switchback, I slump in the pews and sit there for a while, head bowed. I discover this church is hellishly hot, and I’m freezing to death. I stagger outside—I really can’t walk at all well at this point, and whatever’s wrong, my body’s definitely refusing to deal with it. I make it past the Old Rectory and the almshouses and the former school that’s now such a desirable residence.

  I can see our cottage up ahead of me: Bella and Joe are standing at the gate. Supper’s on the table, Bella says. Come on, lad, Joe calls. And pain shoots through my lungs and heart, because I know they’re there, and I also know they’re dead. I’ll never hear these voices again. That world’s gone, they’ve gone, and, Christ, it’s ten feet, ten miles, to that gate.

  I increase my pace—or I try to do so, but it’s hard, there’s such a weight of mud on my boots, such a weight around my neck—and then that treacherous road rises up to cushion me—and I don’t remember much after that. There’s another of those gaps.

  During that gap—it was the first of several—I was rescued. I now know that. I was rescued by Hector McIver, a man as strong, brave, and heroic as his Trojan namesake; by Hector, the son my father should have had. Hector’s mother, Flora, had seen me tottering around the village like a ghost, and when she saw me pass by for the third time and—this time—saw my face, she realized something was wrong. So Hector, as tall and muscular as I once was, girded up and came out to rescue me. The ignominious truth is that, with ease, he lifted me over his shoulder, carried me into our cottage, and—with assistance from various McIver womenfolk—got me into bed.

  That bed has, has always had, a feather mattress. Old feather mattresses are uncomfortable at the best of times: I sank into its scratchy lumpy billowing folds, and—it was an inferno down there. I was suffocating; I was burning up. I started yelling for Joe, who ought to have been beside me, a reassuring presence throughout my childhood nights. I started yelling for Bella, and the M&B tablets they gave me when I had whooping cough, back in prepenicillin prehistory; they always did the trick. I yelled for those horse pills. I croaked for water; I cried out to the queen of the night, that empress in a white slipper-satin dress who was standing by my bed. She didn’t reply, and after a few more gaps I heard that most feared, most terrible, of all sounds: the voice of a woman doctor. When I heard that, I started fighting for my life.

  This fiend stuck something invasive in my ear. She was now putting something cold and deadly on my chest. “Thirty-nine point five,” she said. “I don’t need to ask if he’s a smoker. Why is he wearing three patches? Why is he so thin? What’s happened to his face? Turn him over, will you, Hector, and hold him down. I need to get at his nether regions. I’d better give him a shot. Severe bronchial infection, possibly pneumonia. We’ll have to take him in, I think. He can’t stay here—I mean, look at this place.”

  That needle was eight inches long—minimum. It was the kind of needle you’d use on a rhino, an elephant. I don’t like needles; in fact, I fear them, as do many of the wise male sex. I don’t like needles when they’re stuck in my arse for an eternity, either. The instant it was extracted, I rose up like God from the bed. “No, you don’t,” I cried out in a voice of wrath. “My gran died in this house. My dad died in this house. I’m not going to some fucking hospital. I know you. I remember you. I’m going to die here. Let me die here. Get your hands off me, you bitch.”

  Well, I did have a high fever—normally I would, of course, show a woman, and the medical profession, more respect. After that, I calmed down. The temperature stayed at Fahrenheit 451 for a bit; no doubt I babbled o’ green fields, the full Falstaff deathbed riff. But that shot—that shot was a miracle; God knows what was in it, but whatever it was, it was extraordinary in its effect. It was liquid gold, fluent insight. De Quincey, Coleridge, all those illustrious morphine junkies—they’d have envied me this. It shot me straight to Xanadu and back.

  That substance gives me seven days and seven nights of time traveling. On the seventh day, I’ll surface, but meanwhile, down there in netherland, I’ve been gifted with new eyes. I see Maisie clear. I see Finn clear. I also see myself.

  I watch the curious circumstances of Maisie’s partial recovery; I watch me make the only proposal of marriage I’ve ever made or am likely to make. And this time, thanks to the Xanadu effect, I’ve lost the power to edit, soften the focus, or adapt. Reel two starts to loop through the viewing screen. I watch the past’s jerky footage: I watch the events after Maisie’s fall; I watch what I inexorably became and what I did.

  The loop begins in that hospital in London, in that ward where Maisie rose from the dead.

  [ twenty-four ]

  PVS

  Patients destined to emerge unscathed from a coma usually return to consciousness in the first two to four weeks. Maisie did not do so. “Is that a bad sign? What does that mean?” I asked Nick—he and I were sharing that Islington flat by then; he was working at University College Hospital, the same hospital where Maisie was being treated, though not on the ward where she lay, hitched up to monitors, silent and unresponsive.

  Nick explained again. He’d already done so many times; he’d drawn me diagrams; he’d explained there was almost certainly irreversible damage to the cerebral cortex
, that part of the brain used for higher cognitive functioning. Although Maisie could now breathe without assistance, and although there appeared to be a sleep/waking cycle, and although she would sometimes smile, and sometimes weep, and sometimes make strange mewing sounds, this did not mean that Maisie’s brain could function normally or ever would.

  She was unresponsive to sound, touch, and light. The smiles and the tears and the grimaces, the occasional moments when she gripped Stella’s hand, as if in response to something Stella had said, meant nothing. I had to think of them as random, a random muscular reflex. Maisie was being kept alive by a gastrostomy tube; she was incapable of swallowing. If that tube was removed—and unless she improved, a decision as to whether or not it should be removed would have to be made eventually—then Maisie would die of starvation or, more accurately, of thirst. Dehydration would bring her story to an end, but her passing would be eased, obviously, with the very latest and kindest medication.

  Maisie had drifted away into what we would now call PVS, or persistent vegetative state. That term had yet to be coined; “deep coma” was the phrase Nick used then. The condition remained mysterious, he said. The diagnosis was reached by clinical means—and there were instances when patients in deep coma did surface to consciousness. He then cited the various percentages. The first year, especially the first three months, was critical. In that time 52 percent of patients made a recovery; in 18 percent of those cases, that recovery was classed as “good”; in 33 percent of those cases, patients were left with disabilities, which could range from severe to slight. I would always stop him at that point. I kept thinking about that other 48 percent, the ones who were left awake but not aware, alive but dead, the ones who never surfaced.

  Stella refused to accept such explanations, but then Stella was in denial—a state I’m familiar with. “The doctors don’t know Maisie,” she’d say to me again and again. “This abnormality, that abnormality—they first told me Maisie was abnormal when she was three years old, and they’ve said it ever since. She isn’t abnormal, she’s just different.”