The Sister

by Lynne Alexander

  ‘‘Horribly …?’’

  ‘‘I mean the contrast.’’ I went on, ‘‘Do you really believe, Henry, that there are people who can be happy anywhere, while others are condemned …?’’

  He stroked his beard. ‘‘Lady Barb,’’ he said, ‘‘suffers from a distinct lack of curiosity.’’

  ‘‘You mean she would probably not have been happy back in America either?’’ It was the obvious conclusion, but I did not really believe it. I thought, in her limited way, she would have thrived had she been left in her original environment. But he merely shrugged and muttered something in French. He must be off, he was already late for dinner at Lord Rosebery’s.

  Katharine returned sometime after Henry’s departure. She was looking unusually pink and excited, her wiry hair escaping from under her hat. ‘‘How would you like to spend the summer out of town, Alice?’’ ‘‘Where?’’ I asked. ‘‘Hampstead.’’ She explained we’d been offered the rental of a cottage ‘quite cheap’. My first thought was that I would be too far from Henry. But Henry, she reminded me, would soon be off to Bournemouth for the summer to visit his friend Robert Stevenson. So, with a nod to Lady Agatha, I said, ‘‘Yes, why not.’’

  Seventeen

  Our tiny cottage sat at the top of the Heath. Around us were a few other old houses with tiled roofs, as well as a modern red-brick school house and a few modern ‘villas’. Down in the square was the Bull & Bush tavern with its tea-gardens, merry-go-round, shooting-galleries, penny-in-the-slot machines, &etc. Luckily our cottage was well away from all that. Besides the servants’ – or in this case servant’s – department, it consisted of four small rooms, two up, two down, into which we squeezed. (Before us, we learned, it had been occupied by a couple of artistes with five children. Did they pack them away at night in tiers, we wondered, like so many folded draperies?) But it was in a beautiful situation, and had a shallow balcony covered in creepers, a front gate that scraped, a rusted fence, a pocket-garden and half-glassed porch with roses scrambling over its roof.

  We were looked after by an elderly servant called Clara, recommended by ‘next-door’. ‘‘Have you heard,’’ she began, ‘‘about the new lady down the way who brought water with her from the Broad Street Well in Soho, well the poor dear came down with cholera … there was a leaking cesspit near the pump … so I said …’’

  And so it went on. I attempted to find out what had happened to the ‘lady down the way’ but was distracted by the sight of Katharine, dressed in a pair of her brother’s old summer trousers with knee patches, weeding the front garden. ‘‘Celandines,’’ she addressed her complaint to Clara: ‘‘too many of the damn things.’’

  I was parked in a bath chair beside the front path. ‘‘What on earth is the point of weeding,’’ I challenged, ‘‘when the cottage does not belong to us and anyway we shall only be here for the summer?’’

  Katharine sat back on her heels with a look that said Can you seriously ask such a question, and on such a day? The sun lit her from behind, and as she shook her head her hair loosened so that she resembled nothing so much as a human burning bush.

  ‘‘My dear, you look like a porcupine that’s just undergone an electrical treatment.’’

  ‘‘Well, thank you for that,’’ she said with an ironic sort of bow. ‘‘But my work in the garden, you see’’ – she was serious now – ‘‘has little to do with ownership. It’s really very simple, Alice. It is done for the sake of the plants and their future.’’

  Shamed I wriggled in my chair, making the new willow creak. Had I forgotten? Katherine’s ‘mission’, her need, was to care for others – plants, animals, humans – any cause that arose and caught her attention. Of course I admired such selfless devotion. Yet was I nothing more than another needy plant? I warbled:

  But do not wound the flower so fair

  That shelters you in sweet repose …

  She wanted to know the poem’s author. ‘‘Charlotte Smith,’’ I told her: ‘‘ ‘To a green-chafer, on a white rose’.’’ She stretched:

  ‘‘Are we not like two turtles occupying one shell, dear?’’

  ‘Two imprisoned spinsters, more like,’’ said I incorrigibly.

  She grabbed hold of a pair of secateurs and waved them at me:

  ‘‘Why, for heaven’s sake, ‘imprisoned’?’’

  ‘‘Because,’’ I rejoined, ‘‘we are outcasts – outside society.’’

  ‘‘Do you complain of it?’’ she asked, deadheading a rose and catching its head in a basket.

  ‘‘And do you not?’’ I shot back.

  ‘‘Why should I, when it means we’re free?’’ Off with another head.

  ‘‘Well, that’s settled, then,’’ I mocked: ‘‘Here reside two virtuous spinsters living in perfect freedom.’’

  Katharine sighed. ‘‘Well, it’s an improvement. Not that I – even I, the eternal optimist – believe in perfection.’’

  What she did not know of course was that Henry had called her ‘a foolish optimist’.

  ‘‘And will the two spinsters live happily ever after?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘Well,’’ she paused, ‘‘I should say that’s up to them, wouldn’t you?’’

  Once again I was at a loss for words. She stared at the rose in her hand: ‘‘Are you Gloire de Dijon,’’ she asked it, ‘‘or Bouquet d’Or?’’ ‘‘Gloire de Dijon,’’ she decided: ‘‘Bouquet d’Or is a more peachy, coppery pink, with a stronger scent.’’

  I continued to ignore her floriferous mutterings. I had other things to think about, such as the letter from Henry I’d received that morning from Bournemouth. It lay in my lap. Eventually she seemed to divine my train of thought:

  ‘‘And how,’’ she asked, decapitating another Gloire de Dijon, ‘‘is your brother?’’

  I hesitated before reading out the following: ‘‘ ‘There is no sudden change but a gradual & orderly recurrence of certain phenomena which betray the slow development of such soundness as may ultimately be my earthly lot’.’’

  She gave one of her barky laughs. ‘‘May I translate that as ‘my constipation has improved’?’’

  ‘‘You may.’’ I went on: ‘‘It seems he’s ‘holed up’ with Robert Stevenson. He writes about his rooms by the sea; how they drink claret together and discuss their work.’’

  ‘‘I daresay they also do their share of gossiping.’’

  No doubt of it, I thought. ‘‘Oh yes,’’ I said, ‘‘I can just hear Henry tattling to Stevenson about Oliver Holmes who’s ‘broken loose’ and is going about London flirting as desperately as ever, ugh, while his poor father, the good Doctor, has to put up with a wife who has absolutely lost her mind; and then there’s the physical wreck John Cross who Henry says would have departed this life since the Georgian episode if not for his sister’s care; and … .’’

  ‘‘Enough,’’ she held up a hand. ‘‘What else has he written – something has upset you?’’

  ‘‘Nothing,’’ I lied.

  Katharine parked her basket on the window ledge. ‘Nothing’, as she well knew, meant ‘something’ either too difficult or dark to reveal.

  ‘‘Out with it,’’ she ordered.

  I hesitated. ‘‘It’s the strangest thing.’’ Another pause. ‘‘He admonishes me not to be ill’’ – here I took up the letter to quote: ‘‘ ‘for in that there is a future’.’’

  Deep breath: ‘‘Read it again, dear, I didn’t quite get it.’’

  ‘‘ ‘It would be wise for you not to be ill ‘for in that there is a future.’ ’’

  ‘‘Surely he meant to write ‘failure’ not ‘future’?’’

  ‘‘That was my own first thought.’’

  ‘‘Or perhaps he left out the word ‘no’: ‘… for in that there is no future.’ There, that will be it.’’

  I would have liked it to be so but my better self knew better. ‘‘My brother rarely makes mistakes, if ever. And so,’’ I concluded, ‘‘I believe his meaning is q
uite exact: Illness is to be my accomplishment, my future.’’

  Katharine burst into tears. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ she fell to her knees like a penitent burying her face in my lap. ‘‘It’s all my fault,’’ she wept.

  ‘‘Nonsense, it’s the heat.’’ I could not bear to see her so distraught.

  She shook her head. ‘‘It was obviously the move. I should have realized, like the time after the voyage: you were laid up for almost a year.’’

  ‘‘You weren’t to know … you’re not a doctor.’’

  She raised her eyes. ‘‘I wish I were,’’ she said miserably.

  I took her dear frizzy head between my two hands and kissed her forehead. ‘‘Don’t worry,’’ I reassured her. ‘‘It will pass … besides, Henry also thinks I’m resilient.’’

  ‘‘Henry thinks a lot of contradictory nonsense.’’

  I let that pass. In due course she returned to her weeding while I searched the sky. Two days ago – not a blue hopeful day but a murky chill one – the bath chair in which I lay had been delivered. Had it in some way brought on my un-wellness? The thought was too terrible. Still, I pronounced the chair ‘‘a sure symbol, if ever there was one, of failure, of renunciation.

  ‘‘Don’t be silly, Alice,’’ came her denial: ‘‘It’s a perfectly reasonable solution to a temporary condition. At the moment you cannot walk without difficulty. The bath chair was designed to help …’’

  ‘‘Invalids.’’

  ‘‘People with all sorts of … mobility problems … Think of it as an aide mechanique.’’ She retrieved her trowel and waved it: ‘‘Alice, it’s only a minor setback, it will not be forever.’’ In return, I waved Henry’s letter. We must have looked like a pair of human windmills. ‘‘He predicts it,’’ I said, the pages of his letter shaking in my hand: ‘‘Illness is to be my future.’’ ‘‘No, Alice, he only warns against it: Henry, however brilliant, is no oracle.’’

  Katharine will not allow Henry to spoil things, not now, not today on this rose-kissed day, this special day, June 1st, our anniversary, the day we first met back in Boston twenty years ago (‘‘Alice James, I’d like you to meet our head of history, Katharine Loring Peabody: you’ll be working with her on our new Home Studies program’’); and so she snips off a branch laden with four partially opened blooms and gives the floppy unfolding cluster to me to sniff. I am defenceless against the rose’s touch, a softness that would melt a Bismarck, even an Alice James. Katharine, seeing my eyes flutter and finally close, begins to ‘paint’ my lips with the velvety nubby buds and, with the open petals, to caress my cheeks. A moan escapes. I am buried – born – into scent, into softness. Defeated by a rose.

  Eighteen

  Next morning there came a thump on the door: ‘‘Telegram from Bournemouth.’’ Our mouths dropped open as if we were about to sing a duet from Cosi. ‘‘Louisa,’’ said Katharine. ‘‘Henry,‘‘ guessed I: ‘‘he has put his back out again.’’ I pictured him spread-eagled on the floor of Stevenson’s rooms.

  ‘‘I suppose we’d better answer it,’’ said Katharine sensibly.

  She opened the door, and there we stood in the way of mothers braced for news from the battlefield. The poor boy looked terrified. But we were not after all mothers and the War was long over; besides we were in Old not New England; and as for the telegram – remember the telegram? – it had arrived on a bright, dry August morning in the peacetime year of 1885. But who was it for?

  The delivery boy read out ‘Katharine Peabody Loring’, pronouncing each syllable as if he’d been rehearsing it the whole way from the telegraph office. Tipping him generously she pushed him out the door following right behind; slam went the door in my face. A minute later – released – I followed her into the garden – she handed the telegram over – surprise surprise –

  Please come dear another attack worse this time cannot manage without you stop Louisa PS Potatoes to be dug –

  I flung the sheet away. Potatoes indeed!

  Katharine removed her spectacles. ‘‘Alice, I will return as soon as I can.’’

  ‘‘When?’’ I demanded.

  ‘‘You know I cannot say exactly.’’

  I reached for something to steady me – the rose as it happened – causing my palm to sprout a whole crop of tiny blood-fruits. Katharine muttered a sequence of damns. Then she grabbed the hand and sucked at it until her mouth came away wet and gleaming.

  Clara saw to my morning toilet and dressing, my meals and washing-up. She would even take me out in the bath chair if I so wished. But I did not wish it, thank you very much – only Katharine would do for that. So although the weather went on hot and dry with the papers crying, ‘London Sizzles in 80 degree temperatures!’ I holed up inside where it was cool and dark.

  In my mind I followed her to Bournemouth. It would be, I reasoned, not all that different from Newport with its cliffs and coves and secret shingled beaches, only more built-up with hostelries and guesthouses. In one of them would be an ailing Louisa moaning theatrically. But there’s her devoted sister Katharine who slaps a damp cloth across her eyes to shut her up and reads to her from one of Stevenson’s new stories until she falls asleep. Now what? Answer: she will go off for an invigorating ‘blow’ along the cliffs.

  Henry is staying the other end of town. What will he do when he’s had enough of Stevenson’s irritating, resentful praise? Answer: he will go for a restorative walk along the coastal path.

  On I went moving them about here and there in the way of characters in a story. Henry and Katharine are both staying, by chance, in a seaside resort on the south coast of England. (A coincidence too far, perhaps, I thought; on the other hand, was it not one of the commonest devices of the storyteller, e.g., used by Stevenson in his tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?) But back to the scene before us:

  Henry, dressed in a buttery summer suit (but carrying an umbrella just in case), strolls along feeling pleased with himself, with the sea, with the sun in the sky. A woman approaches from the opposite direction with purposeful, almost masculine strides. Her hair is wild, her dress dishevelled. He imagines an intolerable situation … an impossible choice … something precious unrealized … lost; or simply too many responsibilities. But suddenly there she is. Cries of mutual recognition burst forth (‘‘Henry!’’ ‘‘Katharine!’’ ‘‘Can it really be?’’ ‘‘Such a coincidence!’’ ‘‘I would hardly have recognized …’’). On goes their breathless tosh until the sky darkens and finger-shaped clouds bunch together into a fist-like formation. Rain pummels down. Henry, rarely one for ‘action’, manages to open his umbrella and hold it over them with one hand while steering Katharine by her elbow towards the warm, dry tea-shop … Now what?

  Nothing. The whole absurd fantasy collapsed like a pack of damp playing cards. Ridiculous mush. In real life, as I reminded myself, if Henry had spied Katharine coming his way he’d have hid his face among the seaside flora having developed a sudden passion for botanizing. Katharine would have climbed down a cliff and hung by her fingernails until he’d passed by.

  I banged my head against the glass. It made a dry, dead thump. I looked up. What if I changed their names so that they were no longer Henry and Katharine but merely ‘two strangers’? No, Katharine had been digging potatoes and playing nursemaid; Henry was on the other side of Bournemouth with Stevenson; however I labelled them, they would not meet. But the pain remained of having glimpsed within the sad recesses of my own heart the fear of losing the two people I loved most in the world.

  Katharine returned from Bournemouth a week later carrying a lumpy suitcase along with her usual rucksack. The lapels of her dress were flapped open and sweat glistened on her collarbones. Her hair looked as if it had been attacked by hornets.

  It was late summer by now, the weather hot and humid; a heavy, blanketing heat, the air cumbrous and clotted, grey as gruel. The trip from Bournemouth had been several times disrupted, she explained, because of wheel and driver trouble. ‘‘At one point,’’
she claimed, ‘‘he fell clear off his seat: drunk, you see.’’ I waited. Still she stood holding the damn case as if it were attached to her arm. ‘‘What on earth have you got in there … Louisa’s body?’’ She dropped the suitcase so that it snapped open allowing its contents to spill over the tiles. Crawling about she collected up the potatoes tossing them back into the suitcase. Back in the scullery – I helped her line them up in size-place – she described having dug them up, the childish pleasure of finding another and another when she thought there were no more, of detaching them from their growing stems. ‘‘It was also a relief’’ – she placed the last potato so it wouldn’t roll – ‘‘from sitting with Louisa all day.’’ Smug silence. ‘‘And how,’’ I asked magnanimously, ‘‘was your sister?’’ Katharine put her hand to her heart, as if Louisa’s ‘hideous palpitations’ were her own.

  ‘‘Alice, they’d been treating her – some nurse employed in my absence – like some kind of loon.’’ She was appealing to me – I had been treated like a loon myself, had I not?

  ‘‘… like a loon?’’

  Katharine nodded daring me to laugh. I did not.

  ‘‘Poor Louisa,’’ I managed truthfully: ‘‘I am sorry.’’

  We surveyed the arrangement of potatoes with satisfaction. Then Katharine said, ‘‘Shut your eyes and choose.’’ So I did. I stretched forth my hand and blindly chose two of the biggest for our supper. She drew me round the waist. ‘‘Come along, Alice.’’

  Later she will head for the bathroom behind the small scullery. ‘‘I must have a cold bath,’’ she will announce, and I will follow. ‘‘Shall I wash your back, dear?’’ I will offer. She will bend over to fit the plug, rise up and peel off her sweat-stained dress. She will give off a rather pungent smell, if truth be told, thin as a pipe cleaner and bony as a pipe. But altogether, to my eyes, beautiful.