The Alphabet Sisters

by Monica McInerney

  Lola noticed something, Carrie knew. And perhaps Bett suspected something. She tried not to spend too much time with her sister, needing to keep the distance. She had one awkward conversation with Matthew about her.

  “Are you still sleeping with her?”

  Matthew looked uncomfortable. “I can’t. I want it to be you. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  It made her feel better, for herself, even while she felt sorry for Bett. But it just seemed out of her control, out of their control, as though it was fated, and destined, and all the magical things.

  Matthew felt the same way, he told her. “It’s different with you, different than it has ever been. With Bett, it seemed easy, like we drifted into it. But with you …”

  Carrie was torn between wanting to know about his relationship with Bett, and feeling it was best she knew nothing about it. “We can’t talk about her. We have to put her out of our minds when we’re together, until we work out whether this is real or not.”

  He rang her the night before they were due to go to the agricultural college again. “I’ve made a decision, Carrie. I’m going to break it off with Bett. I can’t live like this, feeling one thing with you, talking about the wedding with her, feeling like I’m lying.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “If you are.”

  “You know what it will mean.”

  “I’m still sure.”

  Remember the first time you made love …

  That conversation had been the turning point. The next morning he collected her from the motel as usual. Bett had left for the newspaper office early. Carrie was glad of it.

  They barely spoke as he drove, but she found herself unable to take her eyes off his hands on the steering wheel, feeling the lightness of her own dress against her thighs. He turned in to the forest clearing they had first visited five weeks earlier. There was no one else there. The air was as hot and still, the sky as cloudless. They climbed out of the car. He took her by the hand, and they started the slow, erotic dance again, his hand tracing her body, her hand tracing his, no words being spoken until they were both nearly faint with desire. “Are you sure?” he whispered.

  She nodded.

  From that moment they wouldn’t have cared if there had been rows of cars around them. He slowly undid the buttons of her dress, exposing her breasts in the bra she had chosen so carefully that morning. She unbuttoned his shirt, touching the brown skin, the muscles on his arm, then unbuttoned his jeans, moving her hand until she was touching him at last.

  He kissed her again. The kiss went on and on, his hands holding her body tight against his. They moved up against a table and had fast, passionate sex, both of them still partly clothed, the sweat covering their skin, their hard, fast breaths and moans the only noise around.

  Carrie knew she shouldn’t have done it. She knew it the moment they had finished, the moment the tension passed and the two of them were holding each other close, his head against hers. But then he held her even tighter, whispered, “Thank you,” and she felt that it had been the right thing. And that they would be able to face Bett together. Which was exactly what they did that night. Matthew called her, arranged to meet in the motel. They had both broken the news to her.…

  Remember your wedding day.

  Quiet, without fuss, everyone trying to ignore the fact Anna and Bett weren’t there.

  Think back to the early days of married life.

  The first two years they lived in a rented unit in one of the smaller towns in the Valley. Carrie worked in the motel, Matthew finished his study and started working in the vet practice in the town. On weekends they met friends, looked at houses, occasionally went away when her days off allowed them, or he wasn’t on call.

  It was in the past twelve months it had started changing. She started noticing things about Matthew that either hadn’t been there before or had just become apparent. He wasn’t exactly mean with money, but he seemed interested in every little thing she spent. “It would make more sense if we cut down on things like that for the first few years when we’re saving for a house,” he said one night, when she arrived home with three bunches of expensive flowers.

  “Matt, come on,” she laughed. “You’re running this marriage like it’s some kind of business.”

  “It is, when we’re talking about buying a house. See, Carrie, look at these figures.” She gave them a glance, trying not to stifle a yawn too obviously.

  He was the same about the flowering plants she bought for the garden. She’d come home with a car boot full and spent an afternoon planting them, delighted with the effect. He came home late, left early the next morning. It was the weekend before he was able to see them. She blindfolded him and took him outside.

  He wasn’t impressed at all. “How much did they cost?”

  She gestured vaguely. “A fair bit, but isn’t it worth it? See how brilliant they look.”

  “They’re all flowering though.” Matthew frowned. “They won’t last. You’d have been better off buying seedlings or seeds. Otherwise it’s a waste of money.”

  She stood there, debating whether to burst into tears or make a run inside. In the end, she did a combination, stalking to her car and driving off in a temper of showering gravel, making sure he could see her crying face. She drove straight to the motel, looking for sympathy.

  Her mother stopped preparing the salad, patted her on the hand, then went back to her lettuces. “It’s part of married life, Carrie. We all have rows.”

  Her father asked how much the flowers cost and then laughed when she refused to tell him. “Too much, then, by the sounds.”

  Lola listened to the whole story, then said, “I see. Now, go home and say sorry.”

  “Why should I say sorry? It’s his fault I’m upset. He should have been pleased I did the garden.”

  “Perhaps he would have been if he’d had a say.”

  “He’s not my keeper. I won’t apologize.”

  There was a three-day standoff, until the night he came to the motel, walked into the kitchen, took her by the hand, and practically dragged her out to the car.

  Outside, he said just one thing. “I miss you.”

  It was all she needed to hear. “I miss you, too.”

  “Will you come home again?”

  She nodded. He was driving home when he took a turn off to the park they both knew. Without words, they reenacted their first time together. In the hot night of a summer, they stood in the open air and made love.

  The passion lasted between them for nearly two years. Longer than most, from what Carrie could gather from talking to her friends. One girlfriend said that once their three kids had come along, she and her husband had both lost interest. “Honestly, if he wants to go off and have a mistress, it’s fine with me. Between the kids and work, I haven’t got time for sex.” Another friend had warned her even before they were married. “The spice will go out of it now, you know. Now you can actually do it whenever you want. So don’t be surprised when a TV program seems more interesting than his crotch.”

  Carrie pretended to be shocked. The same friend, a little later that evening and a lot drunker, had gone further. “Can I ask you a blunt question?” How much blunter could she get? Carrie wondered. “Has Matthew ever compared you and Bett? You know, said anything about what you were both like in bed? Don’t look so outraged, Carrie. He must have thought it. Haven’t you ever been curious?”

  Of course she had been. But of course she had never asked. She’d told her friend to mind her own business and tried not to think of it again herself. And there had been plenty of consolation in their lovemaking—surely it hadn’t been like this for Matthew and Bett, or he would never have left her.

  Can you pinpoint when things started going wrong?

  Easily. When Lola started obsessing about having Anna and Bett home again. When Carrie started feeling guilty about the marriage. Started wondering whether perhaps it hadn’t been a love match written in the stars. Started noticing more t
hings wrong with Matthew. Started picking on him, deliberately wanting him to fight with her, to prove that he loved her. Except it had backfired, hadn’t it? She’d picked on him so much he’d been glad to leave.

  Are you sure things are as bad as you think?

  She realized she was crying, and roughly wiped away a tear. They were, but she wished they weren’t. She missed him, really missed him. Their talks at the end of the day. The funny impressions he used to do, especially the ones of Frank Spencer and Basil Fawlty. She loved hearing his plans for the house, going furniture hunting with him. She loved being in bed with him.…

  Sometimes it can be as simple as sitting down and talking about things. Don’t be afraid to be the first person to say sorry.

  Sorry? To who, though? Matthew? Bett? Anna? Lola? What was she supposed to do—hire a stadium and make a PA announcement? Get it over in one fell swoop? Stupid magazine. Didn’t they realize things were never that simple? She was about to hurl it across the room when the phone rang and her heart leaped. Matthew? She snatched it up. “Hello?”

  “Hello, this is the Sports Weekly subscription service calling from Sydney. Is your husband at home please?”

  She burst into tears. “No, he’s bloody well not.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  In Anna’s room the following night, Lola and Ellen sat side by side on the single bed, both wearing dressing gowns. They had towels wrapped as turbans on their heads, and their feet were soaking in basins filled with steaming, fragrant water.

  “So, Madame Lola, you’d like which treatment today?” Anna said in an excellent French accent.

  “The full works, thank you. I’d like to look twenty years younger by eight P.M.”

  “No problem at all, madam, even if it will involve a little plastic surgery. I have a very sharp knife, and I enjoy using it. And you, little madam, what would you like done? The full treatment?”

  Ellen nodded. “I would like to look twenty years older, please.”

  Lola hooted with laughter. “We’ll meet in the middle yet.”

  Anna gently tucked in the turbans around both their faces, giving Ellen a little stroke on the nose for good luck. “What I shall be doing today is applying my finest products in the most gentle way, giving you both the full pampering treatment. So sit back, relax, and let Anna of the Magic Fingers do her best work.”

  She had applied the first of the creams to their faces when there was a knock at the door. Bett poked her head in. “Anna, message from—good God, what is this? A cult meeting?”

  Lola and Ellen looked out at her through faces covered in thick white cream, their eyes pandalike. “We’re seeking eternal youth and beauty, as supplied by Madame Anna of the Magic Fingers,” Lola said. “Would you like to join us?”

  “I’d need a full construction team, not Anna of the Magic Fingers.” She sat on Anna’s bed so she had a full view of the proceedings. “A message from Len the butcher for you, Anna, to say that the set designs are nearly finished and he’ll have the last one done by this weekend.”

  “All those years of cutting up chops have finally come into their own,” Lola said.

  “Enough talking, thank you, Madame Lola,” Anna said. “You are supposed to be relaxing.”

  “How can I relax when my musical is at such a crucial stage? Tell me again, I know Carrie is Juliet, but who is playing Romeo? And the man playing General MacArthur—are you sure he has the right gravitas?”

  “What’s gravitas?” Ellen asked, her voice muffled as Anna started wiping away her first layer of cream.

  “It’s another word for seriousness,” Bett said, as she picked up a magazine from the bedside table.

  “Ladies, please.” Anna stepped back. “I won’t be held responsible for the consequences if my attention is diverted.” She pretended to remove Ellen’s nose. “Please, a little quiet.”

  “A little gravitas,” Ellen said.

  “Exactly. Oh, Anna, I can feel the years slipping away,” Lola purred like a cat as Anna gently stroked the cleansing cream away with soft cotton wool and sure fingers.

  There was quiet for a little while, and then Ellen spoke up. “Mum, is it true that Lola was raised by the fairies in Ireland?”

  “Of course I was, Ellen,” Lola murmured.

  “Lola, tell Ellen the truth.”

  Lola crossed her feet in the water bath and gazed across at Ellen, all shiny-faced. “Once upon a time …” Then she stopped. “I can’t tell a story and have a facial at the same time. Bett, can you tell it for me? That way I can hear it, too.”

  “Of course.” Bett put down the magazine and made herself comfortable on the bed, sitting cross-legged. “Your great-grandmother was born in Ireland, Ellie, on the other side of the world. Over there they have counties, and she was born in a county called Galway. Her father was a businessman, and her mother was a very elegant lady, and they lived in a beautiful big old two-story house covered in ivy, with a long drive leading up to it, surrounded by fields and streams and black-faced sheep.”

  “Did you have a pet sheep there when you were a little girl, Lola?”

  “Hundreds of them, Ellie.”

  Bett continued. “Lola went to boarding school, where they taught her to be a fine lady, and how to ride horses and arrange flowers and be gracious and good and kind. And then in the school holidays she would come home and have parties and they would dance and listen to music. At one of these parties she was introduced to a handsome young man called Edward, who was the son of a friend of her father’s. Before six months had passed, Lola and Edward were engaged to be married. How am I doing so far, Lola?”

  Lola’s eyes were shut. “Perfect, darling. Keep going.”

  “Edward’s father had business interests in Australia, and to Lola’s great excitement, he suggested that Lola and Edward spend a year in Australia. Within four months of their wedding the two of them were living in Melbourne.”

  “Did you fly in an airplane, Lola?”

  “Oh no, Ellie. In those days we traveled by ship. It took four weeks to get here; imagine that.”

  “Edward’s job was to keep an eye on the wool and the wheat and other crops that were being produced on his father’s farms, and while he did that, Lola stayed in Melbourne, making the house beautiful.”

  Anna stopped applying the second cream, waiting for Bett to tell the next bit of the story.

  “Around this time World War II broke out, and Edward, your great-grandfather, volunteered to join the Australian army. He trained to be a soldier, getting to see Lola only once every few months, before he was sent away with the rest of the troops. And then something very sad happened. Edward was killed on the very first day of fighting.”

  “He was killed?”

  Lola had told the lie so many times the words came easily. “That’s right, Ellie. The soldiers told me afterward he had been very brave. That I should be proud of him.” Far better than the truth—that her husband had not been a brave soldier but a weak, bullying drunk.

  Bett took over again. “And two days after Lola got word of that, Ellie, she discovered that she was having a baby. And that was James, your grandfather.” She had always found it so heartbreaking that Edward had died without knowing he was going to be a father.

  Beside her, Anna was quiet. She always imagined Lola, so young, away from her family and her own country, discovering she was not just a widow, but about to become a mother, too.

  “Why didn’t you go back to Ireland, Lola?” Ellen asked.

  “I wasn’t well enough to travel, and it was wartime. There were no ships available for passengers like me. And by the time the war was over, I had started up the guesthouse, and Jim was nearly ready for school. I decided I liked Australia. I loved the sunlight and the birds and the plants. So we decided to stay.”

  “Wasn’t that brave of her, Ellie?” Bett said. “All the way across the other side of the world, with a little son to look after?”

  “If you had gone back to Ireland, would
I be an Irish girl now?”

  “I don’t know, Ellie. Because if I had gone back to Ireland, your grandfather might not have met your grandmother, and they might not have had three daughters, and you might have been born into another family altogether.”

  Ellen seemed to take all that in. “And have you ever been back to Ireland?”

  “No, I haven’t. My own family are gone now, and it’s too far away for a creaking old woman like myself.”

  “But I visited Lola’s house when I was in Ireland, Ellie,” Bett said.

  Anna looked over. She hadn’t known that.

  “And were there still sheep and ponies and parties?” Ellen asked.

  “None that I saw, but there might have been some behind the walls.”

  “What did it look like?” Anna asked.

  Bett remembered the day she had gone across to Galway on a day trip from Dublin. She had rung Lola the night before to get directions, surprising her. “Would there be family left that I could speak to?”

  “Oh no, Bett. The family would be long gone,” Lola had said.

  It had taken Bett a whole morning to find the house, following Lola’s directions. It had been different from what Bett had imagined, much smaller, the drive not as curvy as she remembered Lola telling them. The front entrance has been spoiled by a small clump of pine trees, she thought. She had taken a roll of photos and sent them back to Lola. She’d been a little disappointed with her reaction, she remembered. Lola had seemed grateful, but not all that interested. As she described it to Anna and Ellen now, the thought that had been niggling at the back of her mind since the slide show at Lola’s party came back. It was about the trees.

  “Lola, that slide you showed at the party, that was of your house, wasn’t it?”

  “It was.”

  “And what tree was out front?”

  “A huge oak tree.”

  Bett clapped her hand to her forehead. “I can’t believe it. How stupid was I? You know how I got so lost that day I went looking for your house, trying to follow your directions? That weekend I went to Galway to see if I could find anyone who remembered you and Edward? I was sure I’d followed your directions perfectly, but the house I went to had pine trees out front, rows of them, not an oak tree. No wonder I couldn’t find anyone who knew you. I was at the wrong house the whole time, wasn’t I?”