The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  “ Stella,” I’d say as gently as I could, “this isn’t quite the same. You know that.”

  “I can get her back,” she said fiercely to me once. It was at night, and I’d come to visit after work. “I can get her back. I know it. I just have to find the right words, the right book—something that reaches her.…” I glanced at the book Stella had been reading to Maisie when I entered. It was Jane Eyre, a novel Maisie disliked. She disliked all novels. What Maisie liked was scripture. And poetry. And facts.

  “Maybe if you tried the Bible, Stella,” I suggested, pretending not to see the tears that fell regardless down her cheeks. “Or Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, or some history, or Darwin. On the Origin of Species, Voyage of the Beagle…”

  “Of course,” Stella said, embracing me. “How stupid I am, Dan. I’m not thinking properly. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll get Gramps to send them.…”

  When I next visited, Stella was there, with the Bible on her lap and a history of the French Revolution on the bedside locker. She wasn’t reading to Maisie from either. Set-faced, she was telling Maisie the story of how she, Stella, had first met her husband, Guy, encountering him one wartime evening outside the refectory, by the old nunnery gates.

  On various visits, I came to hear that unlikely romance often repeated. I’d listen to the details of some equally unlikely literary pilgrimage that preceded it. This pilgrimage was punctuated by, and packed with, maiden aunts—their number seemed to me remarkable. But who was I to question these maidens? Stella’s story, word perfect, never deviated from by so much as a phrase, became a daily occurrence. And one day—it would have been late in September, I think, Maisie did respond. I was there, and I saw it. We’d reached the point when Stella, standing by Jane Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral, holding a copy of Mansfield Park, had heard the whispers in the nave that presaged war. At the word war, Maisie made one of her strange and frightening grimaces, a rictus of the lips. Tears leaked from her opened eyes, and her hand, clasped in Stella’s, jerked.

  “She reacted, Nick,” I said later that night. “I saw it. Something happened.”

  “Dan, it’s possible,” he said wearily and a little irritably—he’d just worked an eighteen-hour day on a cancer ward. “It probably means nothing. I told you: Maisie is subject to involuntary spasms. You see her move, and you think the movement’s been prompted by a word or a touch. It hasn’t. It isn’t a case of cause and effect. It’s arbitrary. I advise you to remember that. Guard against imagination and sentimentality, Dan. They won’t help.”

  I’ve always had a problem linking cause and effect. I’m not going over that again. And although I didn’t confess it to Nick, I couldn’t accept his diagnosis. There was a primitive part of me, an instinctive part—the Roma part, I used to think—that clung to a different belief. I’d known Maisie since her earliest childhood. I’d witnessed her peculiar ways of thinking and her intractable will for a decade. When I was sitting by Maisie’s hospital bed, I’d think of Maisie’s loyal companions, her invisible nuns, and of the disciplines they’d observed. I’d remember Maisie explaining how a day was divided: Vigils, Lauds, Eucharist, Terce, and so on. I’d think of the time she chose to jump, and the implications of Compline, and I’d feel convinced the doctors were wrong. I felt that Maisie was capable of speech but chose not to speak. Balked of death, she’d taken a vow of silence. This wasn’t damaged circuitry of the cortex: It was a discipline, of sorts.

  Late one evening in September, I found myself alone with Maisie for once. Stella had gone to fetch some tea; the nurses were at the other end of the ward. Taking her small hand in my mine, I leaned over the bed. Maisie smelled of hospital soap and rubbing alcohol. Her appearance made my heart ache. I spoke quietly and directly to her. “Maisie, I know you can hear me,” I said. “I know you wanted to die. But you haven’t died, and this silence of yours—it’s terrible. It’s breaking Stella’s heart, and your grandfather’s. The whole family—everything’s disintegrating, Maisie, since you did this. You’re intensely loved. You’re intensely missed. Now come back from wherever you’ve locked yourself, come back, and speak. I know you can. Please, Maisie. For the love of God, Maisie, speak.”

  I waited. There wasn’t the smallest flicker of movement. Her eyes, which were open, remained fixed on space. That failure left me hurt, miserable, and angry—and my miserable vanity was wounded, too. For a moment I’d believed, I’d actually believed, that I could be the one to effect the miracle. I feel now that Maisie may have sensed that vanity and ego were involved, that this plea wasn’t as pure as I’d have liked. With her obsession for niggly but accurate degrees of sinfulness, I wouldn’t put it past her.

  I visited less frequently after that.

  A month later, and it’s early October; the second monthly anniversary of Maisie’s fall. In the hospital, the situation is unchanged; there’s been no improvement. Meanwhile, the fallout from that fall is only too evident. Gramps has had the first of his two strokes; Finn has been looking after him at the Abbey, which he’s too weak to leave, but the Michaelmas term has just begun, so Finn has had to return to Cambridge, to Girton College. A nurse has had to be hired, as Gramps can’t cope on his own. No one knows how this nurse will be paid for; it’s one of many spiraling expenses.

  Stella has refused the Viper’s offer to put the Viper’s Eaton Square house entirely at her disposal; the Viper is displeased. Stella, who can be obstinate, has chosen instead to stay in some room at a friend’s house, a shabby bohemian house off Tottenham Court Road, close to the hospital. This friend, a man of literature, edits a vituperative literary magazine; the magazine is small, as is its circulation. Stella has known him “forever”; she has “kept in touch over the years,” and he’s now kindly letting her pay seven pounds ten shillings a week for a miserable room in which you can’t swing a cat. This is one pound more than Nick and I are currently paying for two rooms in Islington. I suspect that this man may be one of the maiden aunts from Stella’s premarital literary pilgrimage year. I do not say so.

  Julia, whom I rarely see and sedulously avoid, has begun work on The Observer, been poached by the Sunday Times, and is already earning a certain réclame. To my rage, I’ve discovered that Julia can actually write. She wields a poisonous stiletto of a pen. Point her in the direction of some famous man (and her editors are smart enough to do just that), and lovely Julia will fix this man with her bluebell eyes and bewitch him. When he’s sufficiently disarmed, blinded, and convinced of her luscious stupidity, Julia gets the quotes that will damn him. I have to admit that, in the process, she’s lethally funny. I cannot forgive this. My loathing for her deepens once I learn that Julia is living virtually rent-free in a desirable flat off Portobello Road. Two outrageous queens own this flat, and—according to her—the deal is Julia irons their shirts, or possibly their dresses. I don’t believe in this deal or the sexual orientation of this flat’s owners. I do not say so.

  And I? Well, I haven’t actually made the commercial that’s going to wing me to Hollywood yet—it’s early days. I’m at my agency of choice. My job involves making tea and coffee, sorting the post, and being humble. As of this week, I have my first trial assignment: writing copy for a mail-order catalog. This catalog, aimed at the larger lady, features a thousand variations on the Crimplene tent dress. I’ve already learned that a maximum of fifteen words per sentence is standard for this kind of copy. Any sentence longer than twenty-five words is unacceptably Dickensian. Paragraphs longer than fifteen lines are offputting to larger ladies and everyone else, so I eschew them. I’m keen: I’ve been out on the streets doing my own market research. I stop larger ladies outside shops and ask them what they want from their clothes. These larger ladies are good fun. One suggests I come home with her and she’ll show me. As a result of this research, my intro copy reads: “Ladies, want to feel comfy and look like a million dollars? Want to make men’s pulses race? Also want a nice sensible flexi-waistband? Here’s the answer.…”

&nb
sp; I write to Finn once a week, and I telephone frequently, though it’s difficult to call Finn. First, Nick and I still haven’t acquired a telephone, a process that seems to take about three years and involves negotiations of labyrinthine complexity. Second, at Girton there’s only one phone, near the porter’s desk. So I have to call from a box, and it takes a pound of penny coins before Finn’s fetched and can answer. The corridors at Girton are religiously long; Finn’s answers are sibylline.

  Meanwhile, working in the ad agency has taught me that it’s not just larger ladies whose image needs an overhaul. Mine does, too. This image of mine has already gone through more adjustments than I care to remember. It’s been Elvis; it’s been Borstal escapee (blame the grammar school); it’s been James Dean, complete with cigarette pack tucked into the rolled-up shirtsleeve—the acme of cool. It’s been rocker and Jagger, it’s been borderline hippie, or hip—I was never sure which. Now, given my salary, I’m aiming at eclectic, via Oxfam shops. Oxfam, I say, is where it’s at.

  When Stella calls me at work early in October and asks me to come to the hospital the next day as backup, I agree at once. Next I start planning what I’ll wear. Yes, I know, I know, but youth can be trivia obsessed. Besides, this visit is key: Finn will be there, and I haven’t seen her for weeks. And the Viper, who has been interfering and pulling strings and humiliating Stella from day one, is also going to be there. Stella fears what Violet calls a “conference” and she calls a “showdown.” I can’t wait to encounter Lady Violet, a woman I’ve detested at long range for years. I plan to slay this dragon in front of Finn, thus earning Finn’s undying admiration. I plan what I’ll say—and I dress accordingly. Do I look like St. George? Do I look chivalric? Not exactly.

  I turn up in a long Oxfam tweed overcoat made by a superior tailor. Under it, I’m wearing an Ossie Clark velvet jacket bought in King’s Road, a jacket that cost two weeks’ wages. The outfit’s completed by ripped jeans, an antique shirt, an embroidered waistcoat, and no tie. My hair, disheveled in a way that takes hours to achieve, brushes my collar.

  I enter the hush of the coma ward. One glance at Maisie, and I’m ashamed of myself. The curtain that separates Maisie’s bed from the other occupants is drawn. Finn is not there. Julia is. Stella is also there and is in a state of obvious distress. A woman who can only be the Viper is standing at the end of Maisie’s bed. She’s wearing a mink coat. And pearls. And impeccable tweeds. And shoes that whisper handmade. Her presence is formidable, and so is her voice. This accent—I thought it had died a righteous death.

  Wrong. That accent and the attitude that goes with it are alive and well. For the first time in my sheltered life, I truly understand the meaning of the term ruling class. I’m ready to hate—and so is the Viper. As I make my appearance, she pauses and turns. Her ice blue gaze rests on me. It takes her one second to sweep that gaze over me from head to foot and less than one second for her to write me off. I don’t think she knew who I was at that point—Stella, in her usual muddled way, hadn’t warned her that Danny the Gypsy lad would be joining this conference. But Violet doesn’t need to be told who I am; she can smell me out at a hundred yards, just as I can smell her. We are mortal enemies before a single word’s been spoken. I see Violet register the fact that I’ve strayed in from the wrong side of the tracks, the wrong side of an eternal divide. This upstart shouldn’t be here in her presence, but—since I am, since she’s going to have to endure my weirdness and working-classness for a short while—it remains only to put me in my place.

  The English upper classes are rude and insensitive—at least, that’s been my experience. And Violet’s rudeness is way up there on the winner’s podium. As Stella begins on awkward, muddling introductions and explanations, all of which are resolutely ignored, Violet turns to me, inserts the tips of her still-gloved fingers very briefly between mine, removes them before any soiling can take place, averts her ice blue gaze, and, having cast me into the outer limits of invisibility, turns back to Stella, interrupts her, and says: “Stella, do let’s get on. Pull yourself together. I’ve already spoken to Maisie’s consultant. I’m not impressed. You should have brought my man in, but of course you wouldn’t listen. Even so, the situation is clear. The prognosis is very poor. Now, Stella, are you going to accept that?”

  You cunt, I think. You rich, mink-coated, unfeeling, unmitigated cunt. Stella’s face is a mask of misery; she’s flushed crimson, and her eyes have filled with tears. Julia, to her credit, I have to admit, intervenes fast, before I have a chance to do so. “Stella is in a rather better position to judge Maisie’s situation than you are, Violet,” she says. “Remind me, how many visits have you made?”

  “I have made two. And two were sufficient.”

  “Please feel no obligation to make a third,” Julia replies—and it’s only then, it truly is only then, that I realize there’s another woman present, a young woman, who was sitting down, invisible behind the Viper’s sweeping mink, a young woman to whom Violet saw no need to introduce the peasant.

  This young woman now rises to her feet. I see she’s about nineteen or twenty. She has shoulder-length dark hair, held back by a velvet Alice band. She’s wearing one of those piecrust-collared blouses that Julia scorns and a pink cardigan. She has a sweet, entirely unremarkable face and a gentle demeanor. Let’s cut to the chase: virgin and 1950s-style debutante. “Violet,” she says in a gentle voice, laying her hand on the mink, “please, we mustn’t upset Stella. This is so frightfully hard for everyone.”

  And, astonishingly, this girl’s intervention is far more successful in its effect than Julia’s full-frontal attack. Violet pauses, then pats the gentle hand. “Yes, well, Veronica dear,” she says, “you may be right. We should discuss this quietly, and this is not the place in which to do so. Forgive me, Stella. I always speak my mind, as you know. And the past two months haven’t been easy for any of us.”

  There’s then a flurry of activity, during which Violet persuades Stella to accompany her to a quiet room where the two of them can talk this through in private; during which Julia insists that she will accompany her mother—and overrides the Viper. Violet extracts me from the proceedings expertly; it’s happened before I’m even aware of it.

  The sweet-faced girl and I are left standing at the end of silent Maisie’s bed. Maisie’s eyes are closed; she may, or may not, be sleeping. The sweet-faced girl, coloring, holds out her hand and explains who she is. She is Veronica, bride-to-be of Edmund Mortland, Violet’s grandson and heir. This gentle girl is staring at me, I realize, staring in a dazed, hypnotized way I’ve come to recognize and find tedious. Eventually, in an apologetic tone, she suggests that while the others talk we go downstairs and have a cup of tea in the hospital’s singularly unpleasant and depressing cafeteria.

  We navigate our way downstairs, through a hospital maze, to this cafeteria. “So what exactly is this conference about?” I ask Veronica as we sit down. “Why is it necessary?”

  “Violet thinks—she feels the moment’s approaching when—when a decision will have to be made.” She hesitates. “Whether treatment should be withdrawn, in other words. I’ve tried to argue with her. I still hope Maisie will recover—it’s terrible to see her like this. But Violet is so decisive. She sort of sweeps all before her.”

  I pass the sugar bowl to the child, who blushes again and refuses, and all the time I’m wondering why Violet should do this. This kind of intervention seems unwarranted, even for someone so viperous.

  I offer Veronica a cigarette. She accepts one, and I light it for her. She’s not a smoker; her nervous, inexperienced puffs betray that. She’s accepted the cigarette, though, and I think I know why. Silly little thing, I think, and for no very good reason beyond boredom, and a lazy curiosity as to whether or not it will work, I switch on the charm. I’ve learned how to do that. Within five minutes, less, and in that unpropitious place, too, with its clatter of cups and smell of fatty food and stale cakes, I can see that the charm is working. Veronica is chatt
ering away, her remarks punctuated by small darting glances in my direction, as if I were some exotic creature behind bars in a cage at a zoo, a creature that might prove charming and diverting or might prove stealthy and deadly.

  She tells me that her marriage is to be moved forward; they had been going to wait until the spring, and a much bigger affair had originally been planned, but in the circumstances that seems inappropriate. The wedding will now take place quietly, in November.

  I’m not interested in wedding plans. I’m miserable. I’m thinking about Finn and wondering why, having promised to attend this conference, she’s not done so.

  “I was disappointed at first,” Veronica is saying. “But I can see Violet’s right, of course. And, in a way, it’s nicer for Edmund and me. We’re going to Paris for our honeymoon, then Rome. I’m madly excited. I’ve never been to Rome.”

  “Have you known Edmund long?” I ask, surfacing.

  “Forever. Edmund’s older than I am… well, eight years, which is nothing, really. Violet and my grandmother are like that.” She holds up two crossed fingers. “So I’ve always known him. But he’s frightfully shy, and I am, too, so it took us a while to understand how we felt. Then Edmund had to get up the nerve to propose, of course.…”

  This child’s ingenuousness has a fascination of a kind. I can’t believe this shining naïveté. “And how long did that take, Veronica?” I ask dryly.

  “Years.” She blushes deeply. “I thought he might propose when I left boarding school, because he’d been so sweet to me when I first went there. It was such a ghastly dump, like a prison camp. Edmund knew how miserable I was, and he wrote and used to come down and take me out to lunch… and Granny said she was sure he was mad keen, and he was just waiting till I was older. But my birthdays came and went. When I was sixteen they whisked me off for two whole years to this horrible finishing school in Switzerland—and Edmund hardly ever wrote then, so I gave up hope. In fact, I’d met someone in Switzerland. I was quite fond of him, actually.…” She glances at me. “But nothing came of that in the end. When I came home, Granny said she and Violet were going to have a council of war.…”