A Tale of Two Sisters

by Anna Maxted

  ‘There’s a taxi waiting outside,’ she added. ‘I’m taking you to the Dorchester Spa for some pampering.’

  She did. The Dorchester Spa was sleek and superior, not like my local beauty salon where you’d go for a leg wax and try not to notice the unemptied bin of hair and lush carpet of assorted pubes. Cassie slid off for an Eve Lom facial, and a kind lady in a white coat lay me down under a warm towel and gave me a deep tissue massage. I remembered the books saying that you should avoid treatments and aromatherapy oils in the first trimester, and it occurred to me that she was literally rubbing it in that I wasn’t pregnant.

  Each week, there was a thoughtful gesture, some treat. One day Cassie turned up with a hamper from her local Italian deli. It contained parma ham, soft oozing cheeses, chocolate espresso beans, and vintage red wine, all lying in a bed of pink tissue paper. I suppose the subtext was, there are advantages to not being pregnant. She meant it kindly, I know. But the truth was, her kindness came too late. She’d resented the existence of my baby, and now my baby was dead. I felt that her bad vibes had willed it to happen.

  I hated her.

  Chapter 14

  Our mother had no idea of what was appropriate, and often, when she spoke, I dreamed of force-feeding her peanut butter until her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Once, she and I attended a circumcision. Everyone, including the rabbi, was so busy yapping, they didn’t notice that the poor baby was about to roll off his velvet cushion onto the floor. Tim yelled, ‘Look out!’ And Vivica shouted, ‘JESUS!’

  But to my surprise, she seemed to understand a little. She was sad and subdued when she visited, and then she blurted, ‘I never should have bought the baby clothes. I got carried away. I’d already imagined him as part of the family.’

  I had already imagined the baby as part of the family. I thought I was the only one. In my dreams, she lived an entire life. I was touched that Vivica blamed herself. Normally, any suggestion from our father that she might be responsible for anything bad – leaving a cigarette smouldering and burning his beloved Parker Knoll armchair to a blackened shell, say – and she turned cold and incredulous.

  Actually, I was glad that Vivica had bought baby clothes. It showed me that she believed in the baby. It was important. Like believing in fairies. If you don’t believe in something, then it dies. Cassie, for instance, hadn’t believed in the baby. We, the faithful, had assigned the baby the room with pale blue walls, and every day I sat on its varnished floorboards, held the tiny trousers and tops to my face, and cried silently into their softness.

  Tim’s mother was all big bosom and soft voice, and I had expected her to be perfect – a one-woman crack emotional response team – but she wasn’t. She came to see us and, beyond a brief ‘How are you?’, didn’t mention it. In fact, she seemed almost sullen, as if I’d wilfully done her out of a grandchild. Her parting words were, ‘Next time, Elizabeth, dear, you must relax and let it happen.’

  I had known her for seven years, and suddenly I found that I didn’t know her at all. She and Tim’s father had always been polite and respectful to our family, but then, this politeness and respect was easy to maintain because they rarely saw our family. Also, it occurred to me that until now, I’d been the perfect girlfriend for their son. I’d never caused Tim’s parents so much as an uncomfortable thought. I wasn’t sexy, I had no desire to convince them of my political views, I didn’t have any piercings, I was a good eater, and I adored their boy. Mrs Higgins had been sweet to me all this time because I’d never given her reason to be otherwise.

  Tim was full of excuses for her, and I wondered if he would have defended me as valiantly. ‘She’s so sensitive that she finds it too painful to mention,’ he said. I smiled at him while, in my head, I let rip with a Tec-9 and splatted his brains up the lounge walls, ruining the Mountain Mist matt finish (which was fine as accidental damage was covered by our home insurance). I didn’t care what mystery lay behind his mother’s startling inability to acknowledge that anything bad had occurred – was I meant to guess? If I was, I might imagine that it just didn’t seem important enough to her to express regret.

  ‘No,’ I corrected. ‘She’s so selfish that she finds it too painful to mention.’

  Tim couldn’t have his mother less than perfect, and stalked out. I stamped after him, wanting the fight. Not long before, his parents had made the curious decision to attend a bullfight during their week-long holiday in Alicante, and Tim’s mother had found it so traumatic, she felt compelled to share. She was like a tanker dumping toxic waste in a nature reserve.

  ‘Then they cut its ear off . . . The poor bull, he wet himself . . .’ – on and on, the disturbing details gabbled out, and all the while I was begging, ‘Stop, stop, please! Don’t tell me this!’ But she couldn’t stop, she talked over me. I’d made a Can you believe this? face at Tim, and he’d shrugged, half laughing. Now I saw that Tim’s mother was too weak to hold any pain inside her. She had to displace it.

  I was stronger than she was. I had no choice. So when I answered the phone and she cried, ‘Oh, you sound better!’ I didn’t bother to correct her. I just handed the receiver to Tim in silence, and held the pain inside me.

  I moved differently. (Tim: ‘Are you constipated? You’re walking funny.’) It was a delicate operation, like transporting a highly flammable liquid. I felt that if I jolted my hip on the table edge, the world would explode.

  I think pain serves a function. It can be something when the alternative is nothing. To let go of the pain was to accept Fate – Fate, in the cruellest sense of that word – and there was no question. Acceptance would make me fickle. Still. The determination of others that I should ‘move on’ was wearing. There is really no point in showing people something they have no interest in, so I filed the grief, inward.

  It was best, I felt, to draw a line under the subject, because everyone’s reaction was annoying me. The consensus was, it was probably my fault. Now, I am happy to blame myself for almost everything. When it rained on Cassie’s wedding day (in June) I felt responsible. But I couldn’t blame myself for this. I blamed my sister. I recalled seeing Peter Pan at the theatre. Cassie was the only child in the audience who refused to clap to save Tinkerbell from dying. ‘I don’t like her,’ she’d said, and folded her arms. I remembered the way she said it – like a gypsy curse.

  Maybe they were right. I was overreacting. I wasn’t, for instance, a mother screaming after a drunk driver, with her nine-year-old lying dead in the street. There’s no quibbling with a tragedy like that. You can tick all the boxes with a clear conscience. Bereavement? Yes. Grief? Yes. Sympathy? Yes. No one, not even the stupidest person, is going to tell a mother of a dead nine-year-old, ‘Maybe it was for the best.’ But a number of supposedly intelligent people had no problem saying those exact same words to me. It was confusing. I was used to being convinced by others, and now, it felt strange to be resisting.

  The only person who was any comfort whatsoever (Cassie empathised, but she was a fake) was Vivica. It was strange, it signified a total overhaul in our relationship. Before I fell pregnant, she’d never been overly bothered with me. If I called her on the phone, she wouldn’t just sit, have a conversation. You’d hear her, walking around, lighting a cigarette, shuffling papers, fidgeting to make the time go faster until I stopped talking about myself and she could put the phone down.

  I always got the impression as a child that I was a disappointment to her – not glamorous, not clever. I was quiet, squinty-eyed, with a grey tooth. I wasn’t user-friendly. I was ok with that, because she was a disappointment to me. But with the baby inside, I felt I had succeeded for her, for the first time. And when the baby left me, I felt the loss of status – as if the loss of life wasn’t enough.

  With Tim’s mother, I went from VIP to invisible, so Vivica’s response was a bonus. I appreciated her private devastation. There were signs. A Pampers ad came on the TV, and she screamed at our father, ‘Mute it! Mute it!’ She didn’t discuss her feel
ings because I don’t think she liked having them. If ever she expressed an emotion, you suspected it had bolted when she wasn’t looking – hence its wild, dishevelled appearance. I’d had the same sense of her conscious and subconscious mind, not talking, on leafing through early seventies copies of Mother & Home.

  Under Vivica’s editorship, the tone of M&H was cheery, upbeat, bursting with recipes (cake of the week: peach and coconut gateau), fun hobbies (‘make your own dachshund cushion’), romantic fiction (‘A Kind of Giving’), and decorating ideas (‘A clever husband made this super pine dressing unit . . .’). And yet, the subtext was frightening. I saw our mother in every page, yelling, ‘I am propagating a nightmare!’

  There were the endless advertisements encouraging readers to lose weight. (‘There’s nothing quite so ugly as great hulking thighs . . .’) There were the advertisements that suggested that losing weight was a bit of a trial (‘How to Relieve Tense Nervous Headaches . . .’ ‘All-Bran – The Natural Laxative Food . . .’).

  There was the host of new convenience foods: Birds Eye Lamb Casserole, Shepherd’s Pie . . . and the understanding that such shortcuts were simply unacceptable (the ad apologised for its implied slur on readers’ culinary talents, and was placed smack in the middle of ten cordon bleu cookery pages).

  There was a wealth of products designed to make housekeeping a breeze – ‘Ajax Liquid: Twice the Ammonia, Half the Work!’ There was a weary resignation, in features like ‘Beating the Blues’, that peace was impossible: ‘When things pile up, tell yourself firmly, Stop flapping around like a demented chicken.’

  There was a medical page, designed to restore the M&H audience to its peak mental and physical health. And the glaring fact that Doctor Frank found women both impertinent and disgusting. His answers all began, ‘Perhaps you are overweight . . .’ and ended, ‘You should also think carefully about the way you are behaving.’ However, to the ‘WORRIED READER’: ‘What you say your boyfriend is doing is part of normal sexual expression and no harm can come from it.’

  I closed the final page of Mother & Home (an advert for Petito – the first ever calorie-reduced mashed potato) and imagined a woman shouting for help in a world that was stone deaf. After my miscarriage, I felt an affinity with our mother that I’d never felt before.

  I did nothing about it. I couldn’t be bothered to relate. She was probably hurt, and her visits dwindled. Meanwhile, Cassie was still turning up with fascist regularity but I’d excuse myself and run a bath, and she’d talk to Tim instead. I’d fill the tub to the top with hot water, and lie there like a hippo, submerged except for my nose. It was my little treat, like stepping off the planet for twenty minutes. The water muffled sound, and if I shut my eyes, I could imagine I was floating above the earth, serene, weightless – dead, actually.

  Eventually, Cassie would leave, Tim would knock and when I could, I’d reluctantly heave myself out, back to reality. Once, he actually splintered the door. He said he was scared I’d fallen asleep and drowned, but I think it was an excuse to be violent. It seemed he was always calling me, when really, all I wanted was to be left alone. ‘Lizbet, Lizbet’ – he could never come to me; I always had to go to him. He could have got gangrene in both legs and his life would have barely changed.

  I was in the baby’s room one Sunday, when I heard him, shouting, ‘Lizbet, Lizbet.’

  I stormed out, screaming, ‘What the fuck is it now?’ There was no answer so I thumped downstairs – to see Tim, Tabitha and Tomas standing in an awkward huddle by the front door. Tabitha had – I blinked – her new baby, Celestia, on her hip.

  ‘Oh, ah, sorry!’ I trilled. I lowered my palm in the vague direction of Tomas’s head, and added, ‘I’m in a bad mood with my husband!’ I couldn’t look at baby Celestia, but I could feel her presence, pulsing radioactive in the room.

  ‘You said “fuck”,’ replied Tomas.

  ‘No, no, no, I said, “truck”.’

  I smiled at Tabitha, when in fact I wanted to shout, ‘What’s he doing here? Get that kid away from me. And the baby – how could you, are you insane?’ Presumably, if I were a recovering alcoholic, Tabitha would knock on the door and wave two bottles of vintage Krug in my face.

  Tim turned to me with a stiff look. ‘Tabitha wondered if we could look after Tomas for an hour, she—’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense!’

  I glanced down at Tomas. ‘What doesn’t?’

  ‘“Truck” doesn’t make any sense. You didn’t say “truck”, you said—’

  ‘Tomas!’ said Tabitha. ‘That’s enough.’ She gave me a smile. ‘My sister’s just gone into labour – it’s her first – and I said I’d drive her to hospital, and I—’

  My mouth fell open, I’m sure of it. Tabitha was beaming at me, and when she said, ‘It’s her first,’ she gave me a oh, you know, these novice mothers, aren’t they a hoot sort of look.

  ‘What’s wrong with a cab?’

  The smile dropped off her face.

  Tim coughed. ‘Lizbet means, wouldn’t it be faster?’

  ‘Actually, I—’

  ‘And of course we’ll look after Tomas,’ he added, putting a hand on my back, and squeezing the skin between my shoulder blades.

  Tabitha’s smile bounced back. ‘Oh, you stars!’ She sighed. ‘I wouldn’t bother you, but the annoyance is, Nanny’s ill, says she’s run down – weak! Weak! And Jeremy can’t cope with Tomas and the baba. I left them for five minutes yesterday while I had a pedicure, and Jeremy sat by while Tomas emptied a great big box full of polystyrene chips from the new plasma, and crumbled them in millions of pieces all over the pine floor. Jeremy said he couldn’t do anything “because of the baby!” – although I saw he’d managed to read the Guardian from cover to cover. So I thought, aha, Tomas hasn’t seen his godparents in a while.’ Pause. ‘I thought it would be nice for you too.’

  I choked, ‘You thought—’

  ‘It is nice!’ said Tim, briskly. ‘Tomas is my little mate, aren’t you, Tomas? You’re going to help me unblock the bathroom sink. We’ll need drain fluid. I know! I’ll show you how to get the cap off, and then you can pour it, how about that?’

  ‘Tim –’ Tabitha’s voice was hesitant – ‘it’s a lovely idea, but I’m not sure Tomas should be playing with—’

  Baby Celestia started to cry, and she interrupted herself, ‘Oh, oh, come on darling, hush now, it’s ok.’ Her voice lost its habitual rasp, acquiring instead the softness of silk, and I felt my throat constrict. ‘Oh, she’s bored of Mummy, aren’t you, darling? Here, why don’t you take her for a minute?’ I realised with a jolt that she was addressing me.

  I dug my nails into my palms, attempted to speak.

  Tomas beat me to it: ‘Mummy, Mummy. Her said “fuck”.’

  ‘Tomas!’ I said. ‘You’re right. I said fuck! Ok? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’

  Tabitha was already backing away, opening the front door with her back to it, twisting Tomas in front of her with a steel grip on his shoulder, scurrying down our path at a brisk pace, baby Celestia clinging to her side like a small koala. ‘Not to worry!’ she called, from beyond the hedge. ‘I can see it’s not a good time!’

  Tim shut the door, and ran his hand through his hair. He’d lost weight, it made him look tired. ‘Listen,’ he said. His voice was businesslike. ‘I know it’s tough. I know. But, sweetheart, that’s how it is. Sometimes, they don’t stick. It’s Nature’s way. The baby probably would have been deformed. You heard what the doctor said. He said that if an embryo is genetically abnormal, often the fact is that—’

  I screamed in an alien voice, ‘Don’t talk to me about facts, you fucking moron. Are you crazy? She wasn’t deformed! You saw her! She came out of me! She was perfect! She had your face! What’s wrong with you? I don’t understand you! You’re like a brick wall! Our baby is dead!’

  If Tim was slightly surprised that the love of his life had just called him a fucking moron, he didn’t show it. Maybe he had glue ear. He replied, in a
calm tone, as if I was chiding him over a broken teacup, ‘Elizabeth. I am so sorry. But you have got to rein yourself in about this.’

  Chapter 15

  Tim was right. I was making an exhibition of myself. And in our family, that was a bad thing. I refer you to Cousin Bernie. Cousin Bernie never married, and believe me, there was no mystery. He had a nervous habit of grabbing his hair – always greasy – and rubbing it between his fingers again and again, and he had a compulsive, intermittent cough. He was a physics professor, good with equations, not so good with people. When Cousin Bernie turned forty, he decided, with great fanfare, to make Aliyah. (‘What’s that?’ said our mother, who disliked Cousin Bernie and took pleasure in baiting him. ‘Is it a cake?’)

  Making Aliyah, as our mother knew full well, was to emigrate to Israel. In Judaism, this was a mitzvah, a good deed with spiritual overtones. And so, the family was forced to make a great fuss of Cousin Bernie’s mid-life crisis, and the rabbi mentioned it in synagogue, and the Jewish Chronicle ran a story. (Really, loads of people made Aliyah, but Uncle Bernie wanted his four pet ferrets to make Aliyah also – ‘A great, attention-grabbing ploy,’ commented our mother sourly.)

  Cousin Bernie, unused to being made a fuss of, revelled in the attention. There were three different leaving parties held in his honour. He offered to write a weekly column entitled ‘Jottings From Israel’, for a little-known publication entitled the Zionist Bugle (the rather more prestigious Jewish Chronicle had passed on the invitation). He taught the ferrets to respond to ‘Dinner Time!’ in Hebrew. He got a bigger send-off than the Titanic. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Cousin Bernie emigrated to Israel, couldn’t hack it, and came back.