The Sister

by Poppy Adams

  At the end of the Tunnel Walk we emerged into the glare of daylight beside the brook, which languished thickly through the mud. Four ancient crack willows stood woven together, huddled at the water’s edge. I picked up the end of a wispy branch that stuck out a little over my path, holding it up first above my head and then Arthur’s, as though I were disentangling his path. But my expert eyes had already scanned the underside of the leaves for the fresh-feeding signs that told me the Eyed Hawk had already hatched.

  I led Arthur over the beech tree bridge—a weeping copper beech that had split down the center of its trunk, sending one side to traverse the brook.

  “You must have had great fun growing up here,” Arthur declared, his arms outstretched as he walked across.

  I’d never thought about it as a particularly unusual place to grow up. He followed as I jumped off the beech onto the narrow footpath, overgrown with brambles, which follows the brook to St. Bartholomew’s church.

  “Where did you grow up?” I asked.

  “Lancaster Gate,” he said. “Pure Londoner.”

  “Lancaster Gate sounds exciting.”

  “It’s beautiful. The houses overlook Hyde Park. But this is the place for children.” For the first time I wondered what sort of childhood my child would have, what sort of space it would find to play in and how different its life would be, compared to mine, if it lived in London. It was as if Arthur was thinking the same.

  “I think children should be brought up in the country, with all this,” he said, waving an arm in the air. He was in the lead now, picking his way. Whenever he came across a bramble that spanned the path he untangled it and held it back for me, like a gentleman opening a gate, then let the thorny sentinel spring back after I’d passed. It was just a little endeavor, I know, but it made a big impression on me. No one had ever shown me such courtesy before.

  “Do you think you might move out to the country, then?” I asked.

  “I’d love to, but Vivi’s such a city girl, isn’t she? I don’t think she’d ever want to move out. She’d go crazy.”

  Vivi, a city girl? Did he know Vivi had hardly stepped into a city until five and a half years ago? Did he know that she knew as much about the country as I did? That she knew the name of each bird that sang outside her window, and whether they sang for a mate, a territory or as a decoy? That she knew which animal had eaten a nut by the way the discarded husk had been opened? Did he not know how quickly she’d assumed a city personality and denied the country one?

  We reached the tiny graveyard, bound by the brook on one side and the church on the other. It was another of my favorite spots, but I didn’t want to let on that I frequented the local graveyard, so I stepped among the headstones looking, as if for the first time, at the inscriptions, names, dates and epitaphs, that I knew already by heart. Since its first occupant, PAULINE ABBEY CLARKE (Forever Remembered, Forever Missed), died in 1743, I should think the tiny graveyard was filled pretty quickly with Pauline’s family and friends. In any event there had been so much pressure from the village that the rector had had it extended into a section of his garden next door. All the new dead now went through a gap in the hedge to the garden extension, but even that seemed to be filling up fast, leaving the elderly with the great dilemma of vying to outlive each other, yet at the same time competing for a spot in the ever-diminishing allotment.

  But—as I was telling you—in that original bit of graveyard that Arthur and I were in, there were no gravestones as late as the twentieth century, so neither Pauline Abbey Clarke nor any of the other dead there had actually been missed or remembered for an awfully long time and, luckily for the wildlife, that meant nobody had taken too much care of the place. In spring it was a refuge for unruly weeds and insects, and on a warm evening, the moths emerged from their winter capsules in such abundance that although a moth is near silent, the air would shudder with the throbbing of fresh wings.

  “I love graveyards,” Arthur said, to my surprise, as we stood side by side reading Pauline’s inscription.

  “Do you?” I wasn’t surprised he loved them but that he admitted it so easily. I’d never allowed myself to say it for fear of what people might think. I knew that the villagers had spotted me there at dusk. Sometimes moth hunters need to be nocturnal, like their prey. But when I was spotted after dark in a rarely visited place, not least an eerie place like St. Bart’s graveyard, clutching a halogen lamp, a tin of treacle and a rug to keep me warm, I knew that the next day Mrs. Axtell and her friends conjured up all sorts of sinister stories. I could tell from the way the children looked at me that they had been scared at bedtime, their eager imaginations fed with tales of the numinous qualities of my character.

  But Arthur was an outsider and didn’t come with prejudice. He was a townsman and didn’t think like the neighbors.

  “Do you want to see inside the smallest church in the country?” I offered.

  “Yes, please. I love churches too”—he paused—“but I can’t explain why.”

  He didn’t need to. I’d stopped going to church for services, even though as a child I’d never missed a Sunday, but now and then I’d go in secret, on my own, just because I liked that eerie, nostalgic, adrenaline-fueled feeling that you can’t help sensing, after a childhood of churchgoing, when you walk into a spiritual place and wonder whether you’ve made a terrible and timeless mistake in rejecting God and letting down your soul.

  It was more a chapel than a church, tiny but disproportionately tall. It had three rows of wooden benches either side of the aisle and windows so high that they didn’t shed much light on the proceedings far below. At the front stood a simple wooden altar and behind it, screwed into the brickwork, was a near-life-size painted carving of Christ wrapped lithely round his cross, crowned with a gold wreath, his pink skin shredding off in long thin flakes down his legs. At the back, on the dusty floor, there was a small stone bowl used as a font, and next to this, taking up a disproportionate amount of room, St. Bartholomew, carved in stone, rested in a coffin pose, hands crossed on his chest, eyes closed and peaceful, robe perfectly arranged and sandals pointing neatly to the roof. A wooden pew was pushed up next to his feet. When Vivi and I were children the prime spot to sit was right beside him, so you could rest your elbow on his toes.

  “Look over here, Arthur.” I was sitting in the prime seat and Arthur joined me. “The sole of St. Bartholomew’s left sandal.” I nodded towards it.

  He leaned forward across my legs to peer more closely at the effigy’s foot, and I was uncomfortably aware of his chin brushing my lap.

  “V…I…V,” he read slowly, then laughed, pulling himself up. “Naughty.”

  “It was my hair clip, though. Over many Sundays,” I informed him. “She had short hair then. Sometimes I wonder if she grew it only so she could have her own readily available supply of hair clips for desecration.”

  “Really? Did she do it a lot?”

  “Oh, she’s left her mark everywhere around here.”

  “I’d like to follow that trail. It would be fun.” He opened his palms, as if they were a book he was reading. “An insight into the life of the young Vivien Stone through her vandalism,” he read dramatically. “Nobody’s going to file down St. Bartholomew’s feet now, are they? Her mark will be here forever. There’ll be children in two hundred years time saying, ‘Viv used to sit here,’ and trying to imagine what sort of person she was.”

  I had the vague impression that Arthur himself was trying to work out what sort of person she was. As we sat in the church, thinking and talking about the one person we loved so much, studying the marks she’d once inscribed, sitting upon the seat she’d once touched, I felt as if the sister I’d known so intimately all my life was becoming less tangible, less obtainable, that she had evaporated into an ethereal, almost divine presence to be remembered and worshipped. For a surreal moment I imagined that the altar and the hymn books and the small dim windows high above us had all been designed for Vivi, that unattainable
of gods. Also, in our shared silence, I thought of how at ease I was feeling with Arthur and how, in so many ways, we were similar—our love of the country and of churches, his genuine interest in Clive’s and my research.

  We made our way home and he continued to ask questions about Vivi, and although they weren’t particularly probing, something made me wonder if I ought not to be answering them. Somehow I felt that if she knew about our walking along the brook and talking about her in the graveyard, and finding her graffiti in the church, she would have added them to the list of things that were very much not allowed.

  “Right,” Arthur said, as we approached the house. “It’s about time you told me your family secret.” Although I could see he was smiling and I should have guessed he was teasing, I thought for an awful moment that he was going to question me about Maud’s drinking. “I want to know,” he continued authoritatively, “how you can tell a cannibal caterpillar? That look you were all talking about.”

  “Oh, that,” I said, relieved, and I had to think for a moment how to put something I’d only ever known by instinct into words. “Well, they’re usually a lot less hairy than their brothers, and sort of…”

  “Sort of?”

  “Twitchy,” I decided finally.

  “Thank you,” said Arthur, courteously holding open the front door for me.

  As I said, that was only the second time Arthur had come down to try to make a baby for Vivi, and after our stroll to the church, I relaxed in his company. More than that, I began to enjoy it. Neither Maud nor Clive questioned why Arthur came, or how long he was staying, and for the next few months his visits melded calmly into the pattern of normal life. With Maud drinking more heavily each week, and Clive and I up to our necks in research, Arthur’s visits became, for me, a respite from the predictability of Bulburrow life. I thought of him when he wasn’t there, and looked forward to his arrival, counting the days until he broke the interminable cycle of routine. When he came, as well as our baby-making sessions, we’d walk and talk and I even felt him inch into some of the space that, until then, Vivien had always filled in my small circle of life. And, to tell you the truth, I believed, even though he never said it and I never asked, that he looked forward to seeing me too.

  At the same time I increasingly despaired that my days had become embroiled in deceit. On the one hand I had the baby to keep secret from Maud, and on the other, I had Maud to keep secret from the rest of the world. My life took on the form of a treacherous board game, the people within it the counters. But I was playing on my own, for and against myself, discreetly moving the counters, making sure each one was winning while ensuring that none of them were aware that they were being played.

  During the seventh month’s visit the trouble started.

  Arthur and I had sex twice that day and I went to bed early. It was around ten o’clock in the evening when I woke up thirsty and went, sleepy-eyed, down to the kitchen to get a drink of water. I switched on the dim kitchen light and moved to the cupboard for a glass. As I bent to reach for one someone grabbed my hair, jerking me backwards. I yelped, doglike, as I was dragged away from the cupboard and onto the floor. I was still half asleep and slow.

  “You little whore!” Maud shouted. “You fucking little whore! What do you think you’re doing? How dare you? You slut.” She was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing all week—her green wool trousers, which were designed to have a stiff crease down the center, and a sloppy blue jumper of Clive’s, now heavily stained.

  “Whore!” she shouted again, as she tried to rip out my hair and punched my head.

  “No.” It was all I could manage to say. I tried to tuck my head between my legs.

  “You’ve ruined my life and now you’ll ruin your sister’s too. Oh, no, you won’t!” she screamed. “I’ll kill you first! I’ll kill you!” She pulled me by my hair towards the Rayburn.

  “No,” I said again, weakly, groaning at the pain in my scalp. But she didn’t mean it: her mind was distorted. It was the drink talking.

  “Whore!” she yelled again. I’d curled up into a ball, burying my head into my body, but she was kicking me, I think as hard as she could, big, unrestrained swings aimed for my head and stomach, but instead striking my hands, forearms and shins as I protected myself. She was shouting throughout, but I didn’t hear any more of her words. I was focusing on the blows, each adding pain to the last, and ensuring that she didn’t break through my defenses to my head. It seemed to last forever and then, all of a sudden, the lights went out.

  Maud stopped kicking.

  “Look! I’ve something to show you!” I heard Clive’s urgent and unusually enthused voice. It was pitch-black. He was in the room and I heard him moving towards us.

  “Everybody, look,” he continued. “Can you see it? Virginia? Maud?”

  Neither of us spoke.

  “Is it not glowing? Can you see it glowing?” Clive urged. I’d grown a little more accustomed to the light and could now make out the figures in the room. I was sitting up on the floor in front of the Rayburn, leaning on my right hand with both legs casually out to the side, as if I had been caught at story time. I congratulated myself on my quick recovery and repositioning. Maud had slunk at least fifteen feet away from me, near to the pantry door. She had her back to the wall and was relaxing heavily against it. Her hair was bedraggled, her face rouged with anger and, in the dimness, she looked little more than a wayward child.

  It was then, as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I began to make out what she was holding. It was the heavy iron skillet, which she must have picked up from the stove just before Clive had walked in. She was holding it downwards in both hands, arms extended, resting it on her knees. I’ll tell you now, when I saw that skillet in her hands, I truly believed that had we not been interrupted she might well have carried out successfully her earlier death threats. Clive was in the middle of the room, by the table, thankfully between Maud and me. He was holding something at eye level, a test tube. He had his back turned slightly to me and directed himself at Maud.

  “Maud,” he said gently, “can you see it?”

  Maud said nothing. She wasn’t looking at him but at the skillet.

  “I said, ‘Can you see it?’” he repeated vehemently, and when she didn’t answer he said, “Maud, I’d like you to concentrate on this for a minute.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Look up!” he demanded.

  Maud lifted her head slowly, but as soon as she saw him, she dropped it again. She couldn’t look at him.

  “What is it, Clive?” I asked, intrigued.

  “Well, Ginny, my dear”—he turned to me—“I thought it was the Brimstone fluorescence, although it doesn’t seem to be working now,” and it was easy for us all to see that not a glimmer of hope radiated from the test tube. He’d failed, poor Clive. But—now here’s something that might surprise you—Clive should have been bitterly frustrated, angry, disappointed even; months and months of pedantic work and effort, all for no result. Instead, he said glibly, “Oh, well,” and then, “Shall I take that, Maud,” as he removed the skillet from her hands, “or are you about to cook us some steak?”

  I would have laughed but I didn’t. It was rare for Clive to make a joke, although he’d probably thought she was about to do steak.

  It was the most merciful coincidence that Clive appeared when he did, not a moment too soon, although quite what he was doing there at that time with his tube of nonfluorescing fluorescence I have not been able to fathom to this day. Inadvertently, he had saved me from the skillet in Maud’s grasp and yet he still seemed oblivious to the tension in the room.

  “Lights!” he barked, as if we’d just finished a rehearsal, and they flicked on, whipping away the secretive screen of half-light and flooding us with stark reality. There was Arthur at the entrance to the kitchen, stage-managing the switch. Arthur too? What was he doing in the room? I thought. And when had he arrived? I was confused. I can’t put my finger on why, but
the whole episode had an air of performance.

  I started to fumble around on the floor, pretending I’d been interrupted in looking for something I’d dropped. I needn’t have worried; nobody seemed to think it odd that I was down there. Then I saw Clive throw the skillet into the sink and along with it—to my utter amazement—his test tube of precious nonfluorescing fluorescence, then go to Maud, who still looked fixed to the spot. I watched as Clive put his arm round her waist, lovingly, I thought, and half escorted, half carried her out of the room.

  “Good night,” he said cheerily, but I was a little disappointed. I couldn’t believe that Clive, of all people, would throw away half a year’s hard work on a whim in the middle of the night. Perhaps we just needed to purify it further. Perhaps the Woods glass was set incorrectly? I was looking at the sink and deciding whether or not to go over there and save what I could of the substance when Arthur strode up to it and ran the cold tap. That was it. Anything that might have been saved a moment ago had now been washed away. I had to stop myself thinking about it.

  Arthur helped me up from the floor.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I replied, but I had to bite back the pain that shot through my legs and arms, all the while pretending to search the floor anxiously, dreading him asking what I was looking for, knowing that if he did I’d be completely flummoxed. My face was hot and stung, my cheek tight with swelling below my left eye.

  “But poor Clive,” I continued. “He’ll be really disappointed, after all that hard work. It didn’t even fluoresce.”

  “I’m sure he’ll get over it,” Arthur said rather dismissively. “Would you like a glass of water to take to bed?” he asked, holding one out to me.

  “Yes, please.” I took it and, looking down intently, wished him good night into the water.

  Later, in bed that night, I understood that I should have told Maud about the surrogacy. Either that or I shouldn’t have presumed she’d be too drunk to notice. Of course she thought I was a whore. What else could she think? It was my own fault.