The Sister

by Lynne Alexander

  She had tried before we’d left London to talk me out of going to Leamington but my mind had already been made up. ‘‘The waters,’’ I’d argued, ‘‘are known to help gout, rheumatism, lumbago, sciatica, liver and digestive problems.’’ ‘‘In which case,’’ she’d replied, ‘‘you should be a new woman in no time.’’ The sarcasm barely covered the bitterness, and despair.

  It was our first outing – the weather was cold but windless – and so she had asked, ‘‘Will you walk, Alice?’’ A simple question beneath which lurked the challenge: Will you live Alice, or will you give up?

  I allowed her to raise me to my feet but promptly crumpled. ‘‘Try again,’’ she encouraged, ‘‘you’re stiff with sitting.’’ I obeyed but, as if over-drugged or wounded, lurched from table to chair-back to wall until it was clear that my legs, if not I, had indeed given up.

  The bath chair it was then.

  ‘‘Wardy is a soberer driver, by far,’’ I grumped.

  ‘‘Alice,’’ she stopped short: ‘‘if you are trying to tell me I’m pushing too hard, you have only to say so.’’

  We were approaching the Leam. Once there she manoeuvred my chair close to the edge.

  ‘‘Are you planning to do me in, dear?’’ I asked sweetly.

  She braked the chair and came round to face me, her fine features all screwed up. ‘‘I do not want you dead, Alice – that is the whole point – I want you alive.’’ She was willing me, that is, not to become another Leamington invalid, densely dull and lonely, the sands of my little hour-glass slowly but surely running out.

  It is too late, I thought: I have already become one.

  The lap-rug slipped to my feet. She bent to repair it.

  ‘‘Don’t fuss, I can do it myself.’’

  ‘‘Alice, must you?’’

  Yes, I thought, I must. I was nervy with the new sensation that had begun to bloom in me: that of not being afraid. The prospect of becoming ‘another Leamington invalid’ not only failed to frighten me but – dare I say it? – pleased me. I would be free to submit to the thing that had already begun, and in that there was relief. I am facing my freedom and my nakedness, I thought, recalling William’s prophecy. I was prepared to embrace it. Katharine was not. But why should she?

  She propelled me along in her racy way. As we crossed the bridge a pretty, mild-faced shopgirl went by wagging her flouncy ducktail bustle. ‘‘Do you admire that one?’’ I asked teasingly. There was a pause, then Katharine leaned over and, whispering across the top of my head, hissed: ‘‘Not bad.’’

  Not bad? Unaccountably – I knew she was teasing – it brought tears to my eyes. But she was unrepentant. ‘‘How did you expect me to reply?’’ She jolted my chair so I nearly tumbled out. ‘‘Must I comment upon the cheapness of the fabric and the overdone waddle, not to mention the unwise-ness of going out in December without a cloak – and all in perfect French?’’

  By now we had arrived at a quiet spot near Mill Gardens overlooking the boathouse. Parking me beside it Katharine sat on the rustic bench along the path. Through the bare trees across the Gardens we could see the manor house, a romantically tumbledown farmhouse and a church in its graveyard.

  ‘‘I suppose it’s all quite picturesque,’’ she said, holding her nose. Fresh sewage was being spread on the fields round about.

  ‘‘You mean, I take it, a scene of deathliness, immobility and stagnation?’’

  She did not deny it. She was thinking of the troubles in London, the depression, the bands of unemployed men living rough in Trafalgar Square, the women supporting and demonstrating in their own right. She felt sure there would soon be an uprising, riots in the street … socialists … anarchists … people seeking alternative solutions. Was it right to withdraw, disengage from all that?

  ‘‘And do you assume there are no such troubles here?’’

  She admitted the evidence of poverty; but not the scale of it, nor therefore the impulse towards rebellion and redress of grievance. She put her hand to her head. I saw that she was hurting; her eye condition had worsened, causing headaches. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ she said. ‘‘I don’t know what got into me.’’

  Oh, but I did. She’d been shocked to see me as I was, ‘less’ than the Alice she’d left at the end of last summer. Leamington was a place where people came to dip a toe in the waters and be cured or not; but, in any case, it was not a place to live; not a place to ‘act’. Yet it was where I’d chosen.

  ‘‘London, I confessed, ‘‘had begun to jangle my nerves.’’

  ‘‘Well then,’’ she pronounced unsteadily, ‘‘you will certainly find peace here.’’ Quietus, she might have said. ‘‘But must you,’’ she added more fervently, ‘‘join the march of Leamington invalids?’’

  ‘‘Invalids do not march, dear.’’

  ‘‘Please, Alice, promise me you won’t give up, not yet.’’

  How could I?

  Oh, but I must: ‘‘Promise!’’ she shouted out, causing the cows, which were being driven in, to gaze our way. ‘‘See,’’ she pointed: ‘‘they agree.’’ Only resist, she seemed to be saying. Poor Kath, I thought. Her nose was red and chapped, her freaked hair escaping, her hat at a tilt. At last, to please her, I promised, and we tucked our chins in against the wind that had risen and made for Hamilton Terrace and my shining white stucco sanitorium.

  She came to a halt. Would not these strange white facades, she wondered, work strangely upon the imagination, suggesting ghostly presences? I said I was determined not to be bothered by phantoms. ‘‘Let us hope not, Alice,’’ she said.

  That night I was awoken by a pain shooting up my right big toe, through my foot and up into my knee until the whole leg began to judder. ‘‘Hold tight,’’ Katharine instructed as the shaking entered her also, leaving us finally in a tangled, disordered heap. But it was not the pain, finally, that reduced me to whimpering but the failure of words to express it.

  ‘‘Katharine, dear,’’ I asked when it had abated: ‘‘have you ever been in such extremis that you have feared for your life?’’ What I was really asking was, Do you begin to know what it is like to be me? Impossible question. She turned onto her back to consider it. The answer of course lay between us, in the near-unbridgeable divide between our two experiences, between her health and my ill-health, her doing and my not-doing. In the end, all she could think of was having nearly frozen to death during a hiking expedition in the Sierras. ‘‘My sleeping roll had become ice-glued to the ground. The cold … in the end,’’ she remembered, ‘‘it went beyond pain until there was … nothing. Oh, it’s hard to expain, but it was as if ‘I’ had disappeared.’’

  ‘‘Were you afraid?’’ I asked.

  She laughed. ‘‘No; I felt curiously free. I suppose I’d given up.’’

  At which I turned to her in the dark with such ferocious fondness I feared I would burst. Katharine, suffering hypothermia, had touched a condition I recognized. There, in that leached cold place her pain had disappeared until there was nothing left: no ice, no grinning moon or granite cliff faces.

  She’d been freed, as had I.

  Towards morning Wardy came in muttering, ‘‘Another bad little attack, I shouldn’t wonder with all the gadding about.’’ Gadding about? The woman was mad or silly. She held out her hand for me to take the medicine – four grains of solid opium – but my hand shook so much they were swept clear off her palm.

  ‘‘Now look what you’ve done.’’ She scrabbled among the bedclothes until she retrieved them.

  ‘‘Must she take so many?’’ asked Katharine mildly.

  ‘‘Yes, she must,’’ snapped The Ward. ‘‘Take my word for it, Miss, we have learned from bitter experience. Four grains and she’s her own sweet self again.’’ Snorting at her own joke.

  The attack lasted three nights, leaving me limp as a leek. Yet I had survived; gradually I began to feel I could do anything, as if I’d been restored to my own fizzing self.

  ‘‘Oh Wardy,�
�’ I exclaimed, ‘‘don’t you wish you were me?’’ (Hadn’t Charmian imagined herself as Cleopatra?)

  ‘‘You, Miss,’’ she snorted, ‘‘when you have just had a sick headache for five days?’’

  That did it. So my glorious role was to be a sick headache. Was I to laugh uproariously or weep my heart out, or both? In the event, Katharine offered to take me out for a dose of the waters. ‘‘It may do you some good, you never know.’’

  There was so much I did not know.

  On our way we passed a number of poor, squalid creatures, scraps of old lace and ruffle: leftovers from the great human factory. How cruel, I thought, only wishing I could wrap the poor bewildered souls in my arms to cocoon them from the cold, from life on the streets.

  Katharine steered round them.

  At the Pump Room we stood in a queue listening to servants’ complaints, winter apparently not being deemed safe for invalids to come out of their hidey-holes before ten a.m. The ‘dame’ filled our tumblers from the pump and handed them back to us, barking ‘‘Next!’’ We sniffed at our cups, bubbles exploding against our noses, rolled our eyes at the stench. ‘‘Must I?’’ I asked, while Katharine the Brave held her nose and made a dive for it – then spat, pronouncing it ‘quite foul.’ I hazarded a sip; swallowed. My stomach took one of its acrobatic turns. It tasted of dead birds and rotten eggs.

  Forty-one

  The next time I was well enough to be taken out Wardy pushed me to Lillington where I’d been with Katharine. We were crossing Kenilworth field when she braked, nearly flinging me out into a cowpat. ‘‘Should you like to be an artist, Miss,’’ she asked: ‘‘I mean to be able to paint what you see?’’ I was too discombobulated to reply, though her question interested me.

  ‘‘Miss?’’ ‘‘Yes, Wardy, I’m thinking about your question.’’ I had seen so little during my shut-away life, yet some things I had kept fresh in my mind – certain scenes – foreign cities, paintings, people, mountains – childish impressions of light and color – a moment in a cafe or a museum. But to paint such a moment – would one be able to bring it back?

  She tsked; all I need say was ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

  The brush with its smooth, warm handle is in my hand; now comes the squeezing out of color, the oily reek of it like life itself; then the mixing and moving about of said colors, the bounce of bristle against canvas; altogether the primitive pleasure of making one’s mark. Yet when at last I stood back to admire what I had done, all I could feel was disappointment at the poor quality of the copy I’d made, how I’d failed to convey the drift and pull of the clouds, the peasant crossing the field like an ambulating scarecrow, and as for the cows …

  Wardy had parked me in a meadow at Hawkes’s farm. There I lay absorbing hay-ricks, hedges and trees, composing them into a multitude of pictures … the foreground grey with ghostly slants of sunshine, vanishing to reappear in the distance, so succulent, so smooth and so slow, so from all time and so for all time … and then coming within view the peasant in his field, as ‘edgeless’ as the landscape he appeared to merge into. But he was real and robust as anything and he came across and spoke to us about some allotments the landlord had taken to build on, worked for two years by poor men. ‘‘Why, that’s criminal,’’ I objected. But he just said with a shrug, ‘‘That be the nature of landlording.’’

  The cuckoo imitates a clock to perfection.

  When we got home there was a parcel waiting which turned out to be a sketch sent by a Mrs Sidgwick from Cambridge. The picture was of the The Cobb off which silly Louisa Musgrove had jumped.

  ‘‘Do you credit it?’’ asked Wardy, peering over my shoulder.

  How to reply? It was a perfectly good copy, I acknowledged, with its fussy clutter of people with their spindly or bracing bodies, but, oh, it was so very flimsy, failing to convey the feel of the scene, the feel of anything.

  ‘‘Isn’t it wrong, Miss, to have the sky cloudy,’’ she went on, ‘‘because I’ve always been told that the sky in a picture should be perfectly clear, they say it is very ‘ard to do. And’’ – there was more – ‘‘you should be able to see the stones and read the print on the notices.’’

  What I saw was that her standard of excellence was in the number of recognizable objects. In which she was not alone. So that, in answer to her question – should I like to paint? – I understood that I would soon become frustrated with mere reproduction, would slash at the canvas with my brush in colors so fierce and thick that people would cry What on earth is that? … why a child could do better than that! Even Henry, I realized, would find it distasteful and vulgar. Best not try, I concluded.

  Back home, I called for Wardy. Would she run an errand to the haberdashery shop, assuming there was such a thing?

  ‘‘Oh yes, Miss Bond keeps a little shop with all sorts, we have already made acquaintance. She has an old mother of 84 on her hands, bad health and …’’

  ‘‘Does she sell yarns, Wardy?’’

  ‘‘Yarns? as in wool, Miss? You mean to knit?’’ she tittered, as in You mean to fly?

  ‘‘Yes, Wardy, I do indeed mean to knit, unless you think me incapable of managing even that most rudimentary of female occupations.’’

  ‘‘Of course not, Miss, only I did not think … after Miss Loring’s shawl …’’.

  ‘‘That will do.’’ I waved William’s letter in her face: ‘‘It’s for my brother William’s new baby, Margaret Mary. Go and choose a pattern: something pretty, a jacket perhaps, or cap; but not too complicated.’’

  She returned all smiles from her errand bearing Mrs Stone’s Treasury of Knitting Patterns (‘‘The latest fashions, Miss’’) and a supply of white wool for a plain little bonnet which even I, she thought, could manage, assuming I could get my silly – stiff she meant to say – fingers to work.

  Fine white Saxony on the thinnest wooden needles. Angel’s wool. Cast on twenty stitches … But I’d already forgotten how to cast on … using one needle or two? Wardy stood by smirking as I tortured the tail of wool, wrapping my fingers this way and that to no purpose until she took pity on me, relieving me of the stuff.

  ‘‘It’s like this, Miss’’ – she demonstrated – ‘‘it will soon come back to you.’’ Knit plain for twelve ribs. It was something to do with my hands … plain knitting back and forth … the clicking of the needles, their smoothness, sliding the tip into the loop of wool and pulling it through, the yarn light and soft as, yes, a child’s hair … being tethered to it. I tried to picture her, my niece, Margaret Mary – a girl-child – a life created by William and Alice – the bobbing head wobbling on its stem – filling my hand – its warm, wet, milky, baby-smell. And the hair: was it blond, or had it already turned dark like William’s … or mine (but mine was already turning grey)? Perhaps she was bald, like Henry? – they often were. I didn’t know; I’d lost touch – the distance. Touch. How Mary Was Made: was there a pattern book for that? Godey’s Lady’s Book had not considered it a proper subject for young ladies to learn.

  Knit one, purl one to the end of the row, then turn … count your rows.

  ‘‘Are you all right, Miss?’’

  ‘‘I’ve lost several stitches, I’m afraid, Wardy.’’

  ‘‘Well, I daresay you’ve been dreaming again. Never mind, give it here.’’

  ‘‘How will it ever fit around the child’s head, it’s no bigger than a lemon?’’

  ‘‘Oh, you’ll see when it’s off the needles, that’s the art of it.’’

  Art? I thought, art in a baby’s bonnet? But on I went increasing and picking up and slipping stitches and so on and so forth, all the time humming to myself, ‘The spinsters and the knitters in the sun/ And the free maids that weave their thread with bones …’

  ‘‘Oh, Miss, what a sweet singing voice you have, I had no idea – only your stitches are too tight!’’

  Forty-two

  Katharine and I, during our visit to the local art gallery, had been greatly taken by a pain
ting entitled Woman Reading, by a French artist who’s name is now lost to me. We had stood before it as if mesmerized, for the reading woman lay sprawled on a bed stark naked, the room in which she lay rendered in dark sepia. Then as we stood looking at it, or rather into it, the darkness began to take on a strange ‘stirred’ quality. As for the woman herself, she is on her front leaning her cheek on her elbow; her long red hair is parted in the middle. Her body is luminous, emerging as it does out of the shadows; yet at the same time her position seems quite natural.

  ‘‘What d’you suppose she’s reading?’’ I’d asked.

  ‘‘Oh, I doubt she’s reading at all,’’ Katharine had replied tartly. ‘‘It is to my mind nothing but the artist’s fantasy. She went on, ‘‘Can you imagine Henry being painted reading with not so much as a stitch on?’’

  To which I’d offered: ‘‘I guess Henry would be painted with his best bow-tie at least.’’ Which ought to have made her chuckle but did not.

  ‘‘Don’t be ridiculous, Alice,’’ she’d snapped. ‘‘You know very well he’d be sitting upright, fully clothed, in an armchair with his legs firmly crossed. Women,’’ she then concluded, ‘‘do not read in the nude; or if they do, it is likely to be trash.’’

  I said nothing only thought Oh, how I would like to lie naked on my front reading trash while an artist paints me!

  But it was I who now, clothed in more layers of gown and bed-jacket than a wedding cake, lay reading. As I did so – my bedroom faced pleasantly South – a parallelogram of light slithered slowly along the bed-clothes, allowing me to mark the sun’s progress paragraph by paragraph. But, sun or no sun, I was aware of being ‘kept warm’ by Henry’s new story (‘The Lesson of the Master’ recently published in the Universal Review), and moved by the story’s own desire to be read.

  But the wedge of sunlight was getting closer. Soon it would reach me – pleasurably, as I’d already anticipated; but instead it struck violently, shockingly.