The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  In London, on my way from the station to Heartbreak Hotel, which I’ve decided to rechristen Hotel Resolution, I called in at an office supply shop.

  Result: one brand-new megafast heavy-duty shredder. It is called, inevitably, the Supa-Shredda. So much easier than the bonfire I’d originally planned for these pages. Won’t cause a back-garden forest fire, won’t attract attention, won’t offend the neighbors. It can slice through forty pages of A4 at a time, this baby. Made in Taiwan. CIA approved. It has a hungry look, steel teeth. I’m already fond of it. Not long to wait now, I tell it.

  The house is in an orderly state. Everything’s prepared. I’ve chucked the rope and the razor blades—won’t need those particular weapons. I’ve told the importunate milkman, who’s been pressing for payment for weeks, that I’ll pay him tomorrow and if by any chance I don’t answer the door, he should just keep ringing. As a fail-safe, I’ve just posted a brief note to Julia. I couldn’t think of anyone else, and with luck, if she gets it on return from location or wherever she is, she’ll come here and ensure that the police come with her. The cops in their kiddie cars, I’m sure they’ll cope. And if they don’t, too bad. Sorry, lads—it comes with the territory.

  Now I’m just sitting here, with the beloved Nescafé and a Marlboro, thinking about long words that begin with C. Such as Consummation, as in——devoutly to be wished. Such as Completorium.

  I’m at the window, with a good view over the Fields. There are four illegal skateboarders, two illegal cyclists, and several furtive dog walkers. Malc and crew are back on the corner. But if I look hard enough, I can’t see any of them—not Malc and his myrmidons, not the walkers, skateboarders, cyclists; not even these sad onetime pastures. Instead, I can see the people I’ve loved, and the places I’ve loved, the fields of my childhood, where I walked, played—and learned to use a shotgun.

  Hamlet couldn’t do it, he couldn’t top himself, not at the “To be or not to be” point, anyway. Why not? I’d think every time I read or saw the play. Why not? I’d think that time at Cambridge when I directed it. Why not? Because Hamlet claims not to know what’s on the other side of death and to fear what might be awaiting him. That undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveller returns, he calls it—yet he knows that statement’s untrue. The dead do return: Hamlet’s already spoken to his father’s ghost; he’s already received his dead father’s instructions.

  At the end of the last act, Hamlet will meet death unsuspecting, flicked with a poisoned rapier, at a point in his life when he’s ready to die anyway.… But earlier in the play, that unknown afterdeath region puzzles his will and stays his dagger: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause…

  I’m obedient. I pause.

  What do I see on the other side, in that undiscover’d country? Not the heaven or hell of Joe’s Bible, that one book in our cottage—though I could believe in Dante’s subtle divine comedy, his vision of paradise and inferno. Maybe I see a territory that mirrors the one we come from, the prebirth nothingness—and I don’t fear that. Should you fear nonbeing’s emptiness, the prewomb nonexperience? I don’t think so.… Maybe it will be like the underworld of the Greeks—now that I can half believe, that I would welcome. A Styx to cross, Charon at the helm and shades lifting their hands in greeting from the far side of a dark river. The other side of Black Ditch… maybe I’ll see Joe and Bella and my lost mother; maybe Ocean is waiting to greet me.… Or maybe Shakespeare, using Hamlet as his mouthpiece, was right as always: What awaits me will be a region of dream—and it will be as unpredictable, as repetitive, as resonant yet enigmatic, as benign and terrible, as dreams are. Yes, I can believe that also.

  An eternity dreaming. I’ve spent nearly forty-six years in such shadows, so no doubt I’ll cope with more. By the time I find out, there’ll be no choice in the matter.

  I just hope you don’t have to watch. Because if you’re damned with angelic eyes and condemned to spend an eternity viewing the proceedings down here on earth; if the final twist is that you’re fated to be a celestial voyeur, fated never to intervene… that truly would be a hell. Think, look, look; look closely at the mess, the diurnal evil and bloody horror we make of it now. Would anyone want to watch its continuation? Watch their children die, watch those they love suffer? Will I want to watch an eternal sequel, know what terrors await Maisie, or Nick, or Julia, or Fanny, or my godson, Tom? No, I would not want that. No, I do not want that. Christ. Spare me that possibility.

  Barring some last days’ cataclysm, it’s going to get worse slowly: the hole in the heavens widening; the seas and rivers poisoned; the land sick; Europe become a Sahara; more wars; more widespread famine; new diseases and new pestilence… Think of the tools we have now, our stupidity, our arrogance, our blindness, our cruelty—all those lethal weapons in the human arsenal: Can anyone see life on earth improving? I certainly can’t. What’s God on, indeed. He must be on something, on some ultimate acid; he’s got to be celestially spaced out, because otherwise even he might notice his creation’s unbearable. Or maybe he’s just had enough; maybe God, in his many guises and aliases, has finally given up on this evil narrative and lost the plot. Given man’s millennial inhumanity to man, and not forgetting man’s millennial inhumanity to woman—who could blame him?

  On the other hand, maybe the Buddhists are right—in which case, I’ll be coming back again, coming back as some lowlife no doubt, like a worm or a caterpillar. Given my performance this time around, I’ll probably come back as something truly obscene, an epiphyte, for example, or an oncosphere… shit.

  I’ve just tested the shredder. Its appetite’s keen. The light’s poor outside, and it’s starting to rain. Only two skateboarders now and one last dog walker pacing the Fields. I never thought this would be easy, but it’s hard in ways I hadn’t foreseen. I wonder if Maisie felt that.

  Maybe I was wrong, maybe all my theorizing was wrong, and the timing of Maisie’s fall had nothing to do with Compline. Maybe she was somewhere hidden away, listening to us calling for her, trying to summon the nerve to act—just as I am. Or perhaps she wanted a stretch of silence in which to let the world go. I could understand that. I can understand that.

  I’ll never know why she jumped, I see that now—I never could have known, I realize. Even if I had found that imagined letter, that last explicatory document I’d been so sure she’d left behind—what would it have told me? Would Maisie have said that she couldn’t bear her outsider status any longer, that she could no longer endure being a curiosity, a child who could not fit people’s expectations of children? Would she have explained the loneliness and isolation I think she must have felt?

  Or would she have said that she felt herself a burden to her family—a burden she had the power to remove? Would she have accused us of being blind to her distress, of turning away, impatient and bored, when she tried to communicate with us? Would she have said that we had turned away from her once too often? We were all certainly guilty of that. Blind to suffering. Misreading. No answer to that accusation.

  How they weigh on me now, the sins of omission. Maybe Maisie would have been more specific, have given us some reassuring instance of cause and effect? Revealed, perhaps, that she had somehow learned the truth about her father’s illness—and that that had tipped her over the edge? I suppose that might have been possible, given the gossip in the village. Or would she have claimed that art had done the damage; that she could not live with the Maisie she saw in Lucas’s portrait? When she jumped, it was only a week after seeing that painting for the first time.… Perhaps there was some hidden factor she’d reveal in this convenient document, some incident or influence that none of us had had the wit to suspect.… Or would she simply have said that, on a fine summer’s evening, aged thirteen, she’d decided she had had enough of this world and wished to join her father and her many friends among the dead?

  Any of these things, I think now. She might have written any
of these things—and no matter how specific, how clear or how detailed her words, the information would still have been approximate. We look aslant at our own lives. I doubt Maisie would ultimately have known why she did what she did. I don’t know why, or how, I myself got to this point—sitting at this table, writing a last page, looking at a gun and a shredder, and switching on the desk lamp in the failing January light.

  I can see some of the stages on my journey and some of the forking paths I didn’t take, and I’m beyond the point where they matter. But I also see the final comfort of suicide. At last, I’m in the right place. Like Maisie, I won’t be subject to circumstance anymore, and no outside factor will determine how I end. Load the gun. Open the window. Step through it: our choice. It feels pure, doesn’t it, Maisie, strangely pure, this state.

  I mustn’t hesitate. If Maisie, a child, had the courage to do this, surely I—my hands are steady enough, and that’s important—I don’t want to botch this. But there are voices—I can hear voices, calling my name, tempting me back. This action grieves my father, I can sense that. Christ, they’re all so clear and so close: I didn’t expect that. Here’s Joe, lifting me onto the tractor seat that first time, and I’m plowing my first furrow, and I haven’t got the art, the knack, and it’s crooked; here’s Bella, reading my fortune in the cards and then sliding them quickly into their case and saying, Life’s what you make of it, Danny, you know that. And here’s Finn, taking my hand as we walk up Acre Field and saying to me, to the summer evening, It isn’t possible, is it, Danny, to be happier than this? And here’s my blood brother, Nick, helping me bait a hook for the sharks I know lurk in the Abbey lake. And here is Maisie, five years old, weeping over the rabbits I’ve just shot, saying, Why aren’t they breathing? What have you done? Make them come back to life, Danny. Make them come back to life for me.…

  No more listening to those voices. No more looking back—those fields, that sunlight, those voices, that England: They break my heart. They’re too dear to me, I can’t risk it.

  It’s coming up to three—it’s nearly three o’clock. I am dealing with this. It should take fifteen minutes at most to feed these pages through the shredder. Then I will

  part ix

  Queen of Cups

  [ twenty-nine ]

  The Way He Did It

  I’m looking at what Dan wrote: I have that last page in front of me. At the end of the final sentence there’s a mark, which perhaps began as a dash but became a long jagged line that trails off the edge of the paper. Dan was sitting by the window as he wrote this page—I could see him sitting there as I approached his house. I think he looked out of the window as he wrote that sentence. When he saw what was happening in the street, I think he rose to his feet, knocked the desk, perhaps—and his pen made that mark. I cannot be sure of this, obviously, but the timing would fit.

  I will tell you what he saw. I will tell you what he then did. I want someone to know. I want you to know, Nick. And you, Fanny. And when you are older, Tom, I want you to understand. You, Tom, witnessed some of it, but not all. I saw everything.

  I am Julia. Wife and mother and—according to Dan, a few other things besides, such as empress of trend, alpha bitch, et cetera, et cetera. Let’s put those comments on one side. I’ll come to them later. I am Julia. I am the eyewitness. Let’s forget what I told the police, inventive though that was. This is what happened.

  Earlier that same day, you, Nick, had called me from the Abbey. You’d promised to do so. I won’t say that your departure had been without acrimony—a little acrimony is perhaps to be expected when a wife discovers that before and during a twenty-year marriage, her husband has been conducting a tangled and passionate affair with her sister. But my sister was dying, and although Finn maddens me with her obduracy and blind selfishness, I love her, so the acrimony was not as deep as it might have been. When he telephoned, I was hoping Nick might tell me that Finn was now ready to see me: I wanted to see her one last time; but I knew I would have to wait. You cannot push Finn. You have to wait and wait until she comes to you—even Dan knew that.

  That moment still hadn’t been reached, Nick told me. I could tell from his voice that Finn’s condition was worsening. He did not give details, and I did not press him. He told me that he had gone to Dan’s cottage and finally told him the truth. Dan had packed up all the family belongings, was preparing to leave Wykenfield for good, and was returning to London. I tried to envisage this scene and couldn’t. “That must have been difficult for you both,” I said awkwardly.

  “Of course it was difficult,” Nick replied with faint irritation: I’m not supposed to trespass on the secret territory of male friendship. “But Dan was very good, very understanding. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. He was far calmer than I was.”

  I made no comment. I doubted this.

  Nick can be very blind—for a doctor, astonishingly so. His diagnostic skills, so acute when assessing disease, are less accurate when assessing people’s feelings. That he should be blind at this particular moment, I could understand; he could not really see beyond Finn. But I also knew how deeply Dan must have been affected—Dan, who has always been adept at concealment. Concealing his feelings is his religion. It is also mine.

  “Did Dan try to pass it off with a joke? Did he make jokes at any point?” I asked. I think that question puzzled my husband.

  “I can’t really remember,” he replied. “At the end, when I was leaving, maybe. He said something about T-shirts, I think—he was just Dan. You know what he’s like.”

  I do. Nick wasn’t alarmed by Dan’s apparent calm. I was. I started to feel guilty, too. After all, I had hit Dan in the face with a heavy cell phone, and even if that blow was glancing, I shouldn’t have then left him, and swanned off in my car in a rage, and spent the next five days on location nursing more resentment and fury. And on my return, when Fanny finally came to me contrite and confessed the truth, I should have written to Dan, telephoned, done something.

  I found I was in a strange state. I had recipes to test, but I was pacing my kitchen, and fiddling with things, and spilling them, and I couldn’t understand where I was or what I was doing. Eventually—it was about two by then—I found I couldn’t bear the indecision and inertia any longer. I phoned the PA and told her to cancel the afternoon’s appointments, and I put on my coat—it was a filthy day, gray and raining—and set off along the terrace. I’d gone about a hundred yards when I changed my mind and went back to the house. I’d take Tom with me, I decided. I’d kept Tom home from school that day, because he’d scarcely slept the previous night, and although there didn’t seem to be anything physically wrong, he hadn’t a cold or a temperature, I knew he wasn’t well. He was ill with unhappiness and with fear. He couldn’t understand where Nick was and why he’d gone, and he couldn’t believe that he’d ever be coming back, though I kept telling him and telling him that Nick would come back. In due course. Eventually. Maybe I couldn’t lie very well anymore. That might have been the reason. Anyway, I felt I shouldn’t leave Tom with Ingrid—and then I thought, Why not take him with me?

  And that seems a perfect solution. It will be so much easier to make it clear to Dan that I’m sorry, that the ban is over. I’ve never doubted how much he loves Tom, how much it matters to Dan to have Tom as a godson. Dan is childless, but if he had had a child, I believe he would have made a good and loving father. Besides, visiting Dan alone might be misinterpreted—especially now my husband’s walked out. If I take Tom with me, it will be obvious at once that I come as a friend. There’s no possible ambiguity.

  So I wrap Tom up in coats and scarves, and he’s pleased and excited to be doing this, and at the last moment, he runs back upstairs to fetch that triceratops plastic dinosaur thing that Dan bought him, and off we go. We walk along Upper Street, and we’re both in a much happier state by then, laughing and talking—and I stop and think, Maybe I should buy Dan something, a kind of peace offering. I almost buy a bottle of wine and then realize that, f
or Dan, that’s probably the worst gift I could get. I haver about and can’t think of anything suitable, because I’ve passed all the bookshops by then. In the end, I buy the first thing I see that’s beautiful, which happens to be oranges, a great pyramid of oranges, Seville oranges, just in, the perfect season for them. And I don’t know what Dan will do with them, because he can’t cook and never could, but I think, He could make marmalade. I’ll show him how to make marmalade. I can see now, I was in a nervous jittery state and not—as I usually am—rational.

  I buy a kilo of these oranges, and Tom and I swing along the street. He’s waving the triceratops, and I’m swinging the bag of oranges. Then, on one of the corners, the worst corner, just by the Highbury and Islington roundabout, I stop. I stare at all the lorries, and a wave of sadness crashes over me, such a huge wave that for a moment I can’t move. It hits me without warning: fears for the future, fears for my son. I just stand there, despairing and paralyzed.

  It passes eventually. Tom clutches my hand, and we navigate the crossings. We start the trek Dan describes, across Highbury Fields, a miserable, godforsaken place—I hate it. We navigate the ugly erupting tarmac paths and nearly get knocked down by two skateboarders, and one of them shouts, Awesome turn, and then we come out of the park, such as it is, and I can see Dan’s house up ahead of us on the left—and I can see him, too, see his bent head, at an upstairs window. There’s a faint light in the room, perhaps a desk lamp, but it’s visible because out here in the drizzle, the light is already poor—we’re walking in that perpetual January London twilight.