The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  I took the chair opposite hers and sat down. Maisie did not acknowledge my presence; this is usually the case. I waited, listening to the river. I thought of my own future and what Nick and I might decide when I returned to London. I thought of my children. I thought of what Veronica had shown me in those upstairs bedrooms and what it might mean. I thought of Dan’s son. I missed Dan, my lost Dan, missed him acutely.

  I was not calm, despite my efforts, and I think my lack of calm communicated itself to Maisie eventually. She looked up. Her dark blue eyes rested on my face without sign of recognition, as always. I looked at my sister, who has never grown since her fall, my sister who is now a child of thirty-six. She cannot speak or communicate. She is incontinent. She is four feet nine inches tall. Her left leg, the worse fractured of the two, is in calipers. Her left hand has developed arthritis and is badly swollen and twisted. Her fair hair is graying a little at the brow. Her face is unmarked by lines, and serene; her gaze can seem untroubled; at other times, as Dan saw and Lucas captured in paint, it seems baleful. Her responses are unpredictable, and her moods are inexplicable. They pass across her face like clouds across the sky. At the moment, that sky seems gentle.

  “Dan has died,” I say. The words aren’t planned. I speak them without premeditation. It’s Dan I’m thinking about and his name that comes to my lips. Maisie doesn’t react. Her serene gaze has moved—it’s now resting on space, somewhere to the left, over my shoulder.

  “I thought I should tell you,” I continue, compounding my own stupidity. What was I going to do next? Tell Maisie about Finn’s death? Tell her about my own life, ask Maisie’s advice as to whether I should divorce or try again? Should I tell her about deception and a maze of lost opportunities? Ask her to explain bolts on a door and an old photograph? Ask her why Dan decided to die before I intervened—always supposing that I could have intervened, anyway? Beg Maisie, at last, to unravel the past, tell me what happened, why she jumped, why that summer went wrong, plead with her to make sense of everything? I might as well talk to a stone, to the air.

  “The nuns tell me you draw circles now,” I say. “They tell me you’re good at it, Maisie.”

  I hate the patronage and desperation I can hear in my voice. I think Maisie dislikes it, too, though I’m probably imagining that. Her face takes on that expression of scorn I remember so well. She continues to stare over my shoulder.

  So I revert: I do what I usually do when I come here on these monthly visits. I start to speak about the past. I conjure up memories to a woman-child who is without memory. I say: Do you remember that time, Maisie, when we had a picnic by the lake at the Abbey? Do you remember Daddy’s memorial service, and all the fuss Stella made about the stone, and the carving on it? Do you remember how Stella locked herself away, and we took up those offerings to tempt her? Flowers, fiction, and food—do you remember that, Maisie? Do you remember how you saw Dan first, before anyone else did, that wild boy, looking through the glass pane in the church window?

  Do you remember walking through the woods on my sixteenth birthday—and I had a new white dress, with stiff petticoats and broderie anglaise. Do you remember Bella and the cottage and the pink blancmange and the photographs of Ocean? Do you remember the tarot, the crystal ball, the chickens and guinea fowl, and how Finn gave them their names? Do you remember watching Joe plow, and counting the gulls and the furrows?

  Do you remember your nuns and our first bicycles, and Dan teaching us to ride down Acre Lane, and how fast we went; do you remember the books, and the dogs and the scents, and the meals and the talks and the plans and the hopes and the fears. Can you remember Wellhead? Can you remember Holyspring? Can you remember the fields and the elms and the skylarks?

  Do you remember it, Maisie, all the love and the pain and the loss of it, do you remember how it twists in the heart? Please remember it, Maisie, because if you don’t, I’m the only one of us left who does, and when I’m gone there’ll be nothing left, it will vanish like a dream, and no one will care. It won’t matter, and why should it, to anyone?

  Maisie, answer me, I say; please, just this once, answer me, because for once in my life, I don’t know where to go or what to be or who I am. I am alone. Speak to me, Maisie.

  I hear these words. I hear silence, the sound of the river and bird-song. After the warmth of the day, the air is cooling. I look at my sister.

  Her attention has been withdrawn. She is no longer staring at the space over my shoulder. Her head is bent to the paper; her thick leaded pencil is clasped tightly in her fist. Her tongue is clenched between her teeth in concentration. With a firm, steady hand, she draws a perfect unwavering circle on the clean piece of paper in front of her.

  also by sally beauman

  Destiny

  Dark Angel

  Lovers and Liars

  Danger Zones

  Sextet

  Rebecca’s Tale

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: Five of Cups

  One: Summer Maisie, 1967

  Two: The Boy in the Glass

  Three: Ocean’s Daughter Tells the Cards

  Four: Mixed Doubles

  Part II: The Lovers

  Five: Vigils

  Six: Ancestral Voices

  Seven: Starling

  Part III: The Tower

  Eight: At Elde

  Part IV: Retrospective

  Nine: Correspondence

  Part V: The Hanged Man

  Ten: Trinity Daniel

  Eleven: Squint

  Twelve: Look Closely

  Thirteen: At the Palazzo Julia

  Fourteen: Reflections

  Fifteen: The Love/Sex Quandary

  Part VI: The Empress, Reversed

  Sixteen: Waiting for Godard

  Seventeen: Nun Wood

  Eighteen: What a Piece of Work…

  Nineteen: Fall

  Part VII: Ten of Swords

  Twenty: Corporal Body

  Twenty-One: Double Trouble

  Twenty-Two: What’s God On?

  Twenty-Three: Netherland

  Twenty-Four: PVS

  Twenty-Five: Fin

  Part VIII: Nine of Wands

  Twenty-Six: Honest Ghosts

  Twenty-Seven: Nick

  Twenty-Eight: Shredder

  Part IX: Queen of Cups

  Twenty-Nine: The Way He Did It

  Thirty: Dosta

  Thirty-One: Reading Silence

  Thirty-Two: Circles

  Also by Sally Beauman

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Sally Beauman

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following: “Time and Again” from Selected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by J. B. Leishman and published by the Hogarth Press. Used by permission of St. John’s Colle
ge, Oxford, England, and The Random House Group Limited.

  Grand Central Publishing

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  First ebook edition: July 2013

  Originally published in England as The Landscape of Love

  Published in hardcover in the United States by Warner Books, January 2006

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBN 978-1-4555-5149-1