The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  Dosta, I said some weeks later, standing at the edge of Nun Wood. The first primroses were out. I’d never heard Dan use that expression, but I trusted my son. Helped by Hector McIver and my husband, I’d just buried Dan’s ashes in the clearing he’d described. I wanted him near Joe: I didn’t intend him to be scattered in some London crematorium garden. I’d asked Lucas to come, but he wouldn’t.

  Dosta, I said, and then left Hector, who was returning to the village. He had a buyer for the Nunns’ cottage, apparently. He had a meeting with that syndicate, too: time to sign on the dotted line. Where will you go, Hector? I asked him. He looked down at the valley and frowned. They hadn’t decided, he replied. Perhaps Scotland. His mother had always missed her homeland.

  Nick and I returned to the Abbey. Finn had been refusing to lie in bed, and Nick, slave to her every wish, had made the Lady Chapel into her sickroom. She was lying there on the sofa when we entered, next to the cobra table where Gramps always put his evening glass of whiskey. Now that table was piled high with books—though Finn’s sight was failing, and I think she could not have read them.

  We’d been out of the house for fifteen minutes, no more. But in that short time there had been a change; we could both see that change in her face as we entered. Her eyes were turned to the windows. Outside, it was a warm spring day; the sunlight, entering the glass at a slant, shone across the floor and struck her bright hair. She had turned her eyes, her near sightless eyes, to that light; on her face was an expression of longing.

  I knew she didn’t want to die, my sister. She wasn’t resigned to death. Until this morning, she’d been fighting it with all the strength she possessed—and Finn’s strength, her obduracy, had always been considerable. “Ah, dear God,” Nick said in a low voice when he saw her face. He crossed to her side. He knelt beside her and took her hand in his. He buried his face against her neck, and I saw Finn move a little, just a little. He was speaking to her, some last words, some outpouring of guilt and anguish and pleading meant for her ears only.

  At that point, neither of them was aware I was there. I knew that. Even so, it seemed right to leave them alone. So I left my husband and my sister, went downstairs, and walked in the cloister.

  I wasn’t an empress of trend that day, Dan. I wasn’t an alpha female. I am not, and never have been, the woman you saw—but that doesn’t matter now. You had your version, I have mine. I won’t argue with you.

  Some while later, Nick came down to me—and I knew from his face that Finn had gone. I’d never had any final reunion with her. I took him in my arms and let him weep. I thought: Now I’m alone, I’m the last of the sisters. You’ll get everything your heart desires, Bella had predicted for me on my sixteenth birthday. She had not, of course, predicted that I would keep it. Here’s a husband and a half, Miss Julia. Ah, well. Bella always disliked me, and I’d always suspected her predictions were designed to trick or mislead. Most assertions Bella made were doubled: Roses all the way for you, my darling, she’d said to Maisie that day, pointing out the lucky cross on her palm. And in some doubled sense, that is true. There is little evidence, the doctors maintain and the nuns who now look after her insist, that Maisie is anything other than content. In silence, the nuns say, she has found happiness.

  Finn had wanted a quiet funeral, and we gave her that. Her ashes were put next to Gramps’s and our father’s in the church at Wykenfield. Stella came to the funeral, along with that artist friend of hers with whom she now lives in Cornwall. He paints badly and rarely speaks, but he is devoted to Stella—so I’m grateful to him.

  My mother wept—but she took refuge from grief with plans and schemes, just as she always did. What was going to happen to the Abbey now? What could we do with it now? Maybe Nick and I thought of moving there, perhaps? Yes, it had sad memories, of course—but so many happy ones, too. And Stella was off and away, remaking the past: Did I remember this event, that picnic, that birthday; the time Gramps did this or Maisie said that? Did I remember the summers, those glorious, endless summers?

  I’d seen the expression on Nick’s face when she made these remarks. “Don’t worry,” I told him when Stella finally left. “I’m not planning on living anywhere with you. And certainly not here. If you want to come back to me and the children, that’s a decision only you can make. When you’ve made it, by all means let’s discuss it. Meanwhile, I know what I’m going to do with the Abbey. I’ve been planning it for some time. Someone in this family has to be practical.”

  “You’re so hard, Julia,” Nick said. I could see the distaste on his face. “Were you always like that? When did that happen to you?”

  I could have come back at him. I could have said, Shortly after I married you, Nick. Around the same time I realized my highminded husband didn’t actually love me. Around the same time I realized he wanted me and was deeply ashamed of wanting me. When I realized he neither respected me nor knew me. Or recently, perhaps, when I found out that I was a substitute for my sister and had been for over twenty years… that seems like a pretty good moment to harden the heart, Nick.

  But I wasn’t sure that was true. Maybe he’s right, and I am hard, always have been. So what would my answer be then? Who could I blame if I didn’t blame him? My father, for dying? My mother, who was always so painfully impractical; my mother, who needed someone to stand between her and the world—a lesson I learned long before we came to the Abbey? My sisters? Should I blame Maisie, who through no fault of hers disrupted our family and smashed it? Or Finn, who retreated to a far continent, worked hard, and did unimaginable good: tenacious, obstinate Finn, who would never relinquish the hold she had on my husband?

  Maybe I should blame my genes—there’s a healthy dose of the selfishness gene in my family. But I don’t want to blame anyone, other than myself. I am Julia. I am what circumstances and my own will have made me.

  So I made no reply to Nick’s accusation. I stood there thinking of my past: I married Nick for his rectitude—and that rectitude had always blinded me. I thought of the many occasions when Nick had worked half the night, and I had never doubted that he was with his patients, the patients to whom he was so devoted. I thought of the many occasions when he’d insisted he had to go abroad to some conference, and how it had never occurred to me that such absences gave him a pretext to meet Finn and stay with her for the two or three intense, secret days that fired his obsession and ensured its long duration. I thought of the crisis in their affair, which had come when I was pregnant with Tom and, in all innocence, telephoned Finn to ask her to be my baby’s godmother.

  “You’re pregnant again?” Finn said after a long silence. I’d heard the sharp intake of breath. I can understand her shock now: I wonder what Nick had told her. Did he lie to Finn, too, and pretend he didn’t sleep with me? I think he must have done. That was never true. Whatever it is I provide in bed, Nick has always wanted it. But Finn punished him then. She went abroad, and I think it must have been some while, two or three years, before she relented. I can compute the time: For the first two years of Tom’s childhood, Nick and I were closer than we had ever been.

  I cannot read my sister. I do not know how pure or impure her motives were. She spared Dan, but she didn’t spare me. And eventually—it would have been when Tom was about three—she must have made contact with Nick again. Finn relented, and my husband went running. After that, even I began to see that my marriage was troubled; even I began to suspect that my husband’s rectitude might not preclude an affair. Even I began to wonder if his absences and evasions and impatience and irritation might be caused by entanglement with some woman. “Are you involved with some woman, Nick?” I asked him once. He stared at me in that mute, judging way I’d come to detest.

  “No, Julia,” he replied. “I am not, and never have been, involved with ‘some woman.’ ”

  A nice distinction.

  I looked at him now: white-faced, scarcely sane with grief, unable to see beyond Finn, unable to see me, because for him I’ve always
been obscured behind the image of my sister. He is not alone in that. I found I had no inclination to argue or accuse. If he believes me hard, so be it.

  He left shortly after, returning to our London house; our future remained undiscussed. We agreed that he would spend a week there with Fanny and Tom, and I would stay here. Separated, we would try to decide what to do next. I watched him drive away. For the first time in many years, I was alone at the Abbey.

  Unseasonably warm weather for days. For the first time in twenty years I could go to bed when I wanted, get up when I wanted, eat or not eat—as I wanted. There was no husband, no children, to fret over; there were no appointments to keep. There was no TV crew standing by; no interviews or photographs were imminent. I did not need to wear the mask I daily assume. There was no television at the Abbey; there never had been. The ancient wireless set, I discovered, no longer functioned. No one apart from my family knew I was here; no newspapers were delivered. I was cut off from the outside world and all news of a distant war. I was free to think. I had all day and all night to think. And I was free to reread Dan’s account of our last summer here, free to consider his interpretation of events—events that I view very differently.

  I went up to the attics, where he’d been painting the walls that day, and looked at our ghosts: I could still sense the power of his sexuality. Dan never realized how powerful a force this was, and he never understood its effect on women. He never finished painting these walls. I could see the exact white point Dan had reached: This was where he put down his brush and followed me to the Lady Chapel. This was the window from which he watched Maisie returning from the dogs’ burial ground. The penultimate sighting: Then she went to the cloister, and then she disappeared for an hour and a half. I’ll never know, now, where she went or why. There are a thousand hiding places in the Abbey—and, as I know, a thousand and one places in which to conceal oneself.

  I walked down to the refectory, unlocked it, and went in. I counted the times I’d slept here with Lucas. Five, six? Lucas preferred to come up to the house. He liked to creep into my room in the early morning when the rest of the family was downstairs. He never stayed long—Lucas was a peremptory, unskilled lover. He needed some subsidiary boost, the threat of being caught in the act, to make it exciting for him. Sex did not really interest him, I always felt. It was a means to an end. Lucas needed to see the three sisters; that was necessary for his portrait. So he approached us artfully: Maisie through her stories and me through lovemaking; Finn he simply watched—until, not long after their marriage, he found he had watched and seen enough, and she was no longer material for him. He has a short attention span, Lucas. His gaze is so intent, so all-seeing, but once he has seen what he needs, he loses interest immediately. It didn’t surprise me that he’d agreed to marry Finn. Marriage means nothing to him, but it gave him the opportunity to watch her a while longer.

  All those drawings he did of her: Like Dan, I’d never realized there were so many. But Dan was wrong about Final Finn. It wasn’t drawn after their wedding. It was drawn at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, shortly after her baby son was stillborn. I was with Finn then; I remember that covering of the eyes. I remember the depth of her grief. It didn’t occur to me that Lucas was recording it when he retreated to the waiting room with his sketchpad.

  In the refectory, there’s still a faint sickly irremovable odor of turpentine. Standing there, remembering the unveiling of Lucas’s portrait, I felt Dan had been wrong about The Sisters Mortland, too. I don’t believe Lucas’s portrait of us incorporates the dead or that his changes were prompted by anything Maisie said. Lucas was interested not in the dead, but in us—in three girls, three almost-women. He painted us as archetypes: Martha and Mary, temptress and virgin, with Maisie the female child, eternally trapped between two female polarities. It was our physical likeness that most drew him, I think. Finn and I were so alike then that we could have been twins; Maisie resembled both of us, but in miniature. This likeness ensures that, in Lucas’s portrait, Finn and I can be ourselves—and our opposites, and each other. We are female, and interchangeable, that’s the point: We offer the conventional female gifts—love, sex, nurture, and threat; but beyond that, we have no identity. The power of his painting—and it is very powerful, I would never deny that—derives from the fact that it’s reductive.

  I returned to the Abbey and went upstairs to the Lady Chapel; I stood there at the middle window. A still evening: a soft evening. You could feel the earth stirring. After a long time spent resisting the temptation, I went across to the panel.

  I slid it back, smelled the stale, damp air, and looked into the darkness. I wanted Dan then. That fuck in the dark was the fuck of my life—every woman experiences one true fuck, if she’s fortunate. Sometimes she will confess that to another woman—though not, I think, to a man. Since I dislike the confessional mode, I confess to no one. But, Dan being dead, I can admit now what I could never admit to him alive. Most fucking is so impure, Dan, so shot through with trivial concerns, spoiled by irrelevances, or habit, or evasions, or ineptitudes, or uncertainties—is this love, for example. But that wasn’t impure. Something happened—and remembering it, here where I could feel your presence and your absence, I wept for you.

  When I was at my lowest point, I was interrupted by a telephone call from a nun, the Reverend Mother of Maisie’s care home.

  I’d written to this Mother Superior some weeks earlier; I wrote to her before Finn died, before I came back here. Two days after her phone call, toward the end of my week of seclusion, she drove across Suffolk in her small, smart, nippy Nissan to meet me. I was calmer by then and ready for the encounter.

  I have money as well as fame—it doesn’t greatly interest me, but I have it. I’m good at generating money, and those I employ—accountants, brokers, and so on—are good at growing it. A use for some of this money now seemed obvious. For over a year, Maisie’s nuns had been looking for a new building to replace their present one, which they long ago outgrew. Finn had always resisted any sale of the Abbey; she had wanted it kept as some kind of memorial or museum. The fact that it was crumbling away never concerned her—but it concerned me. Now I felt that the Abbey, with a donation to sweeten the deal, could be useful at last. I knew that the Reverend Mother, a formidable woman of Irish extraction, would know very quickly whether the Abbey would be suitable.

  I gave her lunch, a good lunch. Then we walked round the grounds and the cloister. The Reverend Mother had done her research—she knew more about the history of the Abbey than I did. That did not surprise me. She is a small woman in her early sixties, fast-moving and fast-thinking. She is without sentiment, and her acuity delights me. I pointed out to her the improvements I’d initiated this last year: the repairs to the roof, the windows, guttering, and so on. She was alert to other concerns; I suspect these repairs did not interest her.

  The attics seemed to meet with her approval, as did the kitchen. In the dining room, she glared at the ceiling and said that it would have to come out. I took her upstairs to the former Lady Chapel; I explained that the altar wall had been there, where the fireplace had been inserted. I showed her the secret panel, from which she drew back sharply, telling me to close it at once. I mentioned the Squint. She glanced up to the high, dark corner where the aperture was concealed—it is virtually invisible from below—and said, yes, she had already noticed it; and had in any case read about it. It clearly did not interest her.

  Then she moved across to the windows. Her concentration became intense. She stood in front of first one, then another. She returned to the middle window, opened the casement, and looked out. In the distance was Nun Wood, the village, and the valley.

  “Ah, I see,” she said. She crossed herself. She turned back to me and told me with a smile that, if the terms were correct—and I must remember that her order was poor, dependent on the generosity of others more fortunate—then this building was right, entirely and absolutely right, for her purposes.

  We
went outside again, and I gave her tea in the cloister. She haggled unashamedly—she’d do well in a bazaar or in the City, this Mother Superior. When she had wrung a promised donation twice the size I’d intended, with the land and Abbey thrown in gratis, of course, she departed, well pleased, in her nippy Nissan.

  I waved her off down the drive. During her visit, when she’d been standing at that window and I had been thinking of Dan, who had been born by it, whose mother had died by it, an idea had come to me.

  I returned to the library. I examined the bookshelves. I took out the musty boxes in which Gramps had stored a mass of memorabilia relating to my father. I found my father’s medals and the RAF wings he’d once worn on his uniform. I found his letters to Gramps, newspaper cuttings, war reports, and details about his squadron. I found his medical records—they made sad reading and reawoke old fears. But I found nothing else. I had not found what I was seeking.

  I sat there on the floor, the evening light softly declining, thinking of what Finn had said, as recorded by Dan—a conversation I’d long forgotten. I could hear the voices of the dead very clearly. I thought of Dan, who misread me that day; my remark about the stupidity of those who love was not directed at him or my sister. I thought of Finn’s claim that Maisie would have written her last message, if she wrote one at all, to the dead, to her invisible nuns—or to my father. Love letters to the dead, Dan called the process: I understand what he meant now.

  Behind me, on the lower shelves of the bookcases, were the family photograph albums. They included the expensive leather albums, with gilding, that Maisie had made Gramps purchase when she was about eight or nine. That summer, they’d become her obsession. Inside them, she pasted all the old photographs of Daddy and even the letters he’d written Stella, letters that Maisie—always a little spy—had found in, and stolen from, Stella’s underwear drawer.

  There were four albums in all. I found Maisie’s hidden diary in the third of them.