The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  [ thirty-one ]

  Reading Silence

  I read this diary, this journal, with care—Maisie had written it with scrupulous care, I could see that. I placed her account of that last summer alongside Dan’s. I saw the places where their two stories intersected. They were immediately, and troublingly, apparent.

  I was not sure if this was the last message, the suicide note, that Dan had been seeking—there was no indication that it was intended in that way. Nor was I ready to take it at face value, as I suspect my little sister might have wished. I knew Maisie’s controlling tendencies: I also knew her opinions about storytelling—indeed, Maisie herself used this tale of hers to emphasize them.

  I watched that last visit we all made to Elde, watched that lunch, watched Maisie walk out of the French windows with Edmund, her departure at that point a well-established ritual. Now I saw with new eyes—and a part of me, shocked, sickened, and angered, succumbed to Maisie’s narrative temptations. Easy enough to blame Edmund for everything that subsequently happened. Easy enough to say: Of course, that is why she jumped; she could no longer live with this terrible secret.… But was that the case? I was by no means sure—not when I was calmer. Maisie’s tone did not encourage that view; she was describing an event that took place over two weeks before she went up to the Lady Chapel that evening and opened the window. It was not the first time it had happened, either—she made that clear. So, was there indubitable, direct cause and effect? Did this story of hers, at last, answer all those questions Dan had asked, that we had all asked? This is why Maisie jumped? That is what went wrong, that summer?

  I could see only too clearly the damage Edmund might have done, by his actions and by his words. We’d all tried so hard to protect Maisie, to shield her from any knowledge of our father’s illness, to pretend to her that although she could not go to school, was constantly having to see doctors, was always being appraised, tested, and medicated—to pretend that, even so, she was not abnormal in any way, she was just, as Stella liked to say, “special” and “different.” To have those reassurances ripped away—yes, I could see what damage that might have done to her. Edmund had shown her a Maisie that would have hurt her very deeply. But then Lucas had done so, too, shortly afterward, when we trooped down to the refectory for the unveiling of the portrait. I can still remember the expression on my sister’s face as she looked at herself on the canvas, looked at a Maisie made unnaturally small, pinned between her two elder sisters, a tiny pair of scissors clasped in her hand like an instrument of self-harm, or a weapon.

  That episode, she did not describe. It lay in the silent period, in the gap between the visit to Elde and her attempted suicide—in those two weeks and five days Maisie chose not to document. I reread what she had written, and any certainty I’d felt slipped away. Where I had seen causal links before, her story unraveled. Why had she chosen to begin it here and to end it there? Why begin with her storytelling to Lucas and end with a dream, a dream about our father? I looked and I looked, words, words, words, and I began to feel that—as with Dan’s account of his last twelve days—I needed to read silence rather than words, and how do you read silence?

  My secret shall remain inviolable, Maisie had written—and told the truth. I could not know why she jumped, any more than I could know, or guess, what she believed she had seen in the crystal that day at Bella’s. What had I myself seen that day? Nothing I can remember clearly, just a haze, glints on glass, reflections—a sense of oddness in an ordinary room, of dislocation. The second shall be first, Bella had said to Finn—and of course, Finn, the second sister, was the first of us to fall in love, the first of us to fall pregnant, and the first of us to die—but I refused to be influenced by such coincidences. Bella was canny, as fortune-tellers always are. She made sure her so-called predictions were vague enough to fit all possible futures. If you’re going to make a living predicting outcomes, it pays to be dramatic and elastic.

  I see a sacrifice.… Bella had said that, too. I’d forgotten that particular prediction, until Maisie’s account reminded me of it, brought it rushing back, along with that hot, cramped cottage room, that appalling tea; reminding me of Dan’s awkwardness and shame and Bella’s malice. Did that particular prediction have any significance? None that I could see. No doubt it was shop soiled, a regular part of Bella’s patter, of her repertoire.

  Maisie had written in a blue notebook. I weighed it in my hand. I moved across to the Lady Chapel windows and looked out. I fitted my fingers into those bullet grooves Dan describes. I opened the middle window, as Maisie had done, and breathed in a sweet evening’s air. Something plucked at my heart then: all those unknowns, all those Dans I never knew, all those Maisies I never suspected. Out of the silence in the room, they spoke to me, and out of the silence, the deep silence, I answered.

  One question only remained—and I considered it carefully later that night, a night I passed in a state of anxiety and sleeplessness. Should I take action now, as a result of what I’d learned from Maisie’s story and from Dan’s? And if so, what action could I, should I, take? Over twenty years had passed since that last visit to Elde. Maisie was a strange child, and she was not always a truthful one. Perhaps it was better, and more merciful, to do nothing.

  The very next day, I received a telephone call from Elde, from my cousin-by-marriage, Veronica Mortland. I had been debating whether or not to contact Veronica.

  She was calling, she said, to ask my advice. She’d decided that one bedroom wing at Elde needed a complete overhaul, redecorating from top to bottom. She wasn’t sure if it was the kind of project my company would undertake and wondered if I might look at it and advise. Besides, it was some time—two years, at least—since we’d met for that pleasant lunch in London. It would be so nice to see me. Translation: Veronica wanted to talk about Dan, she wanted to ask me about Dan and the circumstances of his death. I knew that immediately.

  I agreed to meet her. I had planned to visit Maisie before returning to London—I visit her regularly; and Maisie’s care home is not far from Elde—indeed, it was Violet who knew of the care home and first suggested it. I can see now why Violet might have involved herself in Maisie’s predicament as she did—something that had always puzzled me. I can see too why Violet might have wished Maisie to be near Elde—where she could keep an eye on her. If I’m right, Violet need not have worried: Maisie is permanently silenced.

  Veronica said she would make lunch. I said I would go on from Elde to the care home.

  That Sunday, that Son’s day, Dan, I set off. It was always a long, slow drive to Elde, made worse by our cramped ancient Wolseley and by Gramps’s erratic driving. Twenty years had done little to alter these cross-country roads. I am a fast driver, and I was in a fast car—but on this narrow, winding route, speed is impossible.

  As I drove, I was replaying the telephone conversation I had had with my daughter, Fanny, the previous night and considering the conversation I was about to have with Veronica. How truthful should I be? It’s never easy to judge whether truth will be helpful or irreparably damaging. I’d told Fanny the truth last night—and I was by no means sure that had been a wise decision.

  I’d been calling home every night to speak to my children. Last night, Fanny snatched the telephone from Tom. Within seconds, I was immersed in the ten-act ongoing melodrama that is my daughter’s life; within seconds, the happiness and reassurance I felt when speaking to my son had fled. Fanny specializes in wreckage. Out flowed the grievances, in one unstoppable torrent: how she’d never get over what had happened to Dan; how his death was completely, entirely, from beginning to end, her fault. How her life was one hideous mess. How she’d chucked in the PR job with that rap group, who were a bunch of sexist losers anyway. How she now couldn’t decide: Should she plead to get her place at Durham University back, or wait and reapply to Oxford; should she go to Patagonia or Paraguay, or maybe enroll with Médecins sans Frontières or something—because she couldn’t get over Finn’s death, e
ither, and she felt, she really, really felt, that she just had to get out there and do some good somewhere.

  While this lengthy, extravagant, and foolish speech continued, I thought of my daughter and her thanklessness: of the difficult hours I’d lavished on her and the scorn and hostility that had resulted. I thought of the business meetings I’d canceled or cut short, the long holidays that conflicted with work—holidays that became a daily torture once Fanny reached her teens—holidays in Italy, France, Greece, holidays that were punctuated by a daily lament, a litany of frustration: This place is so bo-oring, why can’t I go home? I thought of the cost of her privileged schooling and the exhausting energy that had gone into it—all the attempts to help Fanny with this subject or that one; to advise when some teacher or friend had a down on her; to find activities, drama, music, sport, ballet, horses, anything that might divert Fanny for more than ten minutes.

  I thought of Fanny’s intelligence, which is considerable, and her self-destructiveness, which is also considerable—as mine was at her age. I thought of my constant fear, never admitted even to Nick, that Fanny might have inherited some defect, passed down through me from my father, a family fault line that might also have accounted for Maisie’s abnormalities. I thought of defending my daughter to Dan. I thought of the accusations I’d made against him, which proved false. Those accusations constituted the last conversation I would ever have with him. Had Fanny not appeared when she had, what might have happened? I thought of this, and a door closed in me.

  “Fanny,” I said, cutting her short, “I’m not going to advise you. Whatever I advise, you will do the opposite. You’re nearly twenty. You decide where to go and what to do. If you want to go to Paraguay, earn the money for a ticket. If you imagine you could be any possible use to Médecins sans Frontières, when you have no nursing skills whatsoever and little intention of acquiring them, by all means contact them. Go to Durham, go to Oxford, go wherever you choose. But don’t blame other people for problems of your own making. Stand on your own two feet. And stop this sick-making vanity and hypocrisy. Don’t you dare to mention Dan to me ever again—ever, do you understand me?”

  There was a long silence.”What did you say?” Fanny said in a tone of disbelief.

  “I said: Grow up, Fanny,” I replied. “Just damn well grow up.” I replaced the receiver.

  Was that wise? It was the truth—and probably long overdue; my daughter is spoiled. But was it too harsh? I’d exhausted every other approach. I found I was now beyond caring.

  I’d reached Elde village. I drove past the neat estate cottages and turned in through the iron gates to that three-mile-long drive. Should I be equally truthful to Veronica? Her husband, my cousin Edmund, died about eighteen years ago. He was killed in a car crash some six years after their wedding, killed when returning to Elde from a school reunion dinner in London; he was driving, and he was not sober. Humphrey is also dead, though he lived to be nearly ninety. And Violet too has gone; she died of a stroke about seven years ago. Veronica and her only child, her son, Edgar, named for his Mortland great-grandfather, are left. At Elde, there was no physical evidence of these changes. The park was as perfectly maintained as it had always been. A landscape laid out in the eighteenth century: a great avenue of oaks; and—in the distance—a small temple to Artemis, with a lake in the shallow bowl of rough pasture known as the Wilderness.

  As I reached the steps below that great pomposity of a portico at the front of the house, Veronica emerged. I looked at Dan’s sweet-faced girl; I saw the debutante he’d met that day in the hospital ward and the sad young matron he’d encountered outside a Sloane Square department store in the dog days of a long-ago August. She had aged, as I have. She was waving at me.

  [ thirty-two ]

  Circles

  It’s a Julia lunch,” Veronica said, kissing my cheek. “I thought we’d eat in the kitchen—I can’t bear that stuffy dining room. Look, Julia, I had this room redone about three years ago. I hope you approve—it’s pretty, isn’t it?”

  It was pretty. A huge, cool, stone-flagged kitchen; an Aga, inevitably. One of my paints—yes, Dan, I think it was Skylark—on the walls, and another, Tern, on the dressers.

  “Very you,” Veronica said, coloring. “And the lunch is, too. It’s from your latest book—I adore that book. Your recipes are so clever and chic and delicious, and they never let one down.”

  “They’re designed to be foolproof,” I replied. Veronica’s color deepened. I hadn’t meant to imply that she was a fool. It’s remarks like that, said without thought, that have contributed to my reputation. I am sharp-tongued. I hope I am not malicious.

  “It’s a perfect room, Veronica,” I said quickly, trying to make amends. “You’ve done it brilliantly—and thank God not to be in that dining room. I always hated it.”

  “I hoped Eddie would be here,” Veronica went on, chopping basil, ladling soup. “He’s down from Oxford for the weekend, but he’s gone off with some friends. He said he’d try to get back before you leave—it’s such ages since you’ve seen him; he must have been at prep school. I hope this lunch will be up to standard, it’s so intimidating, cooking for you—Damn, is that too much basil, do you think?”

  “Perfect amount,” I said absently, watching her. She’d changed, Veronica. She must now be forty-three or -four. She’d never lost her girlish prettiness. She was a little overweight—there’d been a thickening around the waist since I last saw her—but her dark shining hair, now short, was well cut and sleek; and she still retained her gentleness of manner. But being widowed in her twenties put steel in Veronica. These days, she sits on committees, oversees the estate, works for numerous charities, upholds the sanctity of the Tory Party, and campaigns on behalf of the local hunt. She is mistress of all she surveys and seems content to be so. She thinks conservatively and dresses conservatively, as she was always destined by her upbringing to do. I thought of Dan’s description of their affair. I thought: Veronica and I have nothing in common whatsoever.

  As I was about to discover, I was misreading Veronica—and had done so for many years. I was making the very same mistake that Dan made: a failure of vision and imagination—that solipsism most of us are cursed with. Blind to distress—a myopia that afflicts many. I ate an excellent Julia cold soup, a Julia game pie (pie included pheasant, not in season, so must be frozen: I forgive you, Veronica). She’d made a good salad with Julia dressing, and the pudding was a gin-and-lime-juice Julia jelly, one I’d invented in a moment of inspiration-deprivation. It was not perfect in its consistency (two gelatin leaves too many, Veronica), but it was good even so. I resolved never to write another cookery book, not if I live to be a hundred. I waited; she would bring up the subject of Dan over coffee, I knew. She did so.

  “Will you tell me what happened, Julia?” she said, sitting opposite me. “I’ve read the newspapers obviously—”

  “They can’t report that much. It’s sub judice,” I replied—the trial was still months away when Veronica and I had this conversation.

  “I want to hear it from you. It’s made me terribly sad. It knocked me for six, actually. Dan was such an extraordinary man.… He read my palm for me once, did I ever tell you?”

  “No, I don’t think you did,” I replied with care, and truthfully.

  “It was at the hospital that time, with Maisie, do you remember, Julia? Dan persuaded me to go and have tea with him in the cafeteria. I was so young and inexperienced then; it sounds silly, perhaps, to say this, but I could tell at once that he was attracted to me. Edmund and I were about to get married, of course—the wedding was only weeks away, because Violet insisted on bringing it forward—I think she was terrified Edmund would get cold feet.…” She frowned. “It never occurred to her that I might get cold feet, that little Veronica might realize Edmund wasn’t such a great catch after all. But that’s exactly what happened. I came as near as dammit to calling off the wedding. Dan was begging me to do that. Do you know what he told me when he read my
palm, Julia?”

  “I can’t imagine.” It was becoming clear that it wasn’t Dan’s death Veronica wished to discuss. His death seemed not to concern her.

  “Dan told me all about the fears and uncertainties I felt,” she continued, wide-eyed. “He saw them all, Julia. And he told me that I mustn’t be afraid or timid—I was frightfully timid then—because inside I had all this strength. I had a great well of strength, he said. One day I’d learn how to use it, but I must be careful to use it wisely.”

  I inspected the table. A familiar patter: I’d heard Bella use one very similar. So you were kind, Dan, I thought. Kind on that occasion, anyway.

  “I’ve never forgotten that. Never. I still remind myself of it every day. If I’m ever in trouble, I think of it. I think of Dan, too—I’ve thought of Dan every day for twenty-three years. I expect I’ll think of him for the next twenty-three. I just wish…” I heard her voice falter. I saw that her eyes had filled with tears. I looked away. Tears are catching.

  “I loved him. I loved him so much. I’m going to tell you something, Julia. I probably shouldn’t tell anyone this, especially you, and I hope you won’t mind—but I had an affair with Dan. Before I married.” She hesitated, giving me a small, darting glance. “A very passionate affair. He… well, the truth is, Dan was desperate to marry me. But I just didn’t have the strength to break my engagement. I was too frightened of what people would think, and too frightened of Violet. That was devastating for Dan. And that makes me feel so guilty now, Julia.… I keep thinking, if only he’d known how much I loved him.”

  “I wouldn’t agonize over it too much, Veronica,” I replied. I was wondering if she really believed this and how long ago she’d invented it. “No doubt he recovered from the disappointment. People do. You know: ‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them—but not for love.…’ ”