* * *
MY SISTER AND HER husband have gone to Hampshire to visit Henry’s widowed mother, who is crippled with arthritis and rarely travels far from home.
As soon as they left, I hugged the house to myself, running my hands lovingly along its banisters, going barefoot so that I could feel its floorboards move under my feet. I stood motionless in the still air of the hall and listened to the house murmuring. We breathed as one. I sang out loud, “They are gone, it is just us.” The walls carolled the words back to me. Just us. Just us.
It was wonderful having Pipits to myself. I stayed up all night visiting every one of its rooms, reacquainting myself with every wall, every lovely curve, every odd little aberration, each bend and bump so familiar, so dear to me, that with every caress I felt flushed with a new optimism. I checked on my little hidey-holes, checked that my talismans were all in place. They had not been discovered, which pleased me. It just shows how little Gloria knows House. She only sees what is on the surface. Finding my charms intact cheered me up. I would save Pipits, whatever it took.
I spent a long time in the attic looking through a box of old family photographs, most of them creased and browning. My father is pictured in the early ones, sometimes holding the tufty-haired baby that is me. Mother is hardly recognizable: a trendy girl in a leather miniskirt, high boots, a long measure of dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. My parents made a fine-looking couple. Easy to see in those pictures where my sister sprang from.
In those careless three years before Gloria was born, I held center stage. Afterward, the camera sought her out, highlighted her no matter where in the family group she was placed. I was powerless to change things then. But not now, Gloria, not now.
Father’s gun bag was there leaning against the attic wall, sans gun but filled with old tennis balls for some reason. I looked around for the gun but couldn’t find it anywhere. Mother never liked having it in the house, so maybe she got rid of it when he died. Tsk!
His cricket gear was still in his broken sports bag. As I rummaged through it, the chalky smell of sweat wafted up, and for a moment I was again being held against the rough knit cable of his sweater. I remember Father favored me, his eldest. That would be natural, wouldn’t it? I believe it was so, but memory is a ragged cloth full of holes, not to be trusted.
Dusty and neglected, the specimen cabinet that houses my grandfather’s collection of bird eggs was wedged into a corner of the attic. It used to stand on the first-floor landing, where, when I successfully played sick to miss school, and didn’t have Gloria to bother me, I would open its drawers and study its treasures.
My throat tightened at the sight of it. Years ago I could have reeled off the name of every egg without a pause, but now I needed the neatly typed descriptions underneath each specimen to remind me of its genesis: the clean ocean blue of the starling’s, the ginger berries scattered like measles on the mistle thrush’s, and, oddest of all, the red thumb-like prints, looking as though they’d been formed from blood, on the chaffinch’s. There was the guillemot, the great tit, the collared dove, and the dunnock. It was a marvelous collection.
To my girlish eyes, they had shone like jewels. Dusted and placed in the right light, I am sure that they still would. I marked the cabinet in my mind. It, too, will be returned to its proper place. All in good time.
I looked around for spare rolls of the wallpaper from Mother’s bedroom but saw only her mink coat buttoned over a stout tailor’s dummy. It might as well have been her standing there in the flesh, plump and comfortable and holding herself a little away from me. I have always liked wearing fur, even though now people curl their lips if they catch sight of the tiniest little bit of it. I nuzzled my face into the musteline scent of the pelt before putting it on. It was surprisingly heavy. Mother never said, but it must have made her shoulders ache when she wore it.
I kept it on as I hauled the bag of Father’s cricket gear and the box of photographs down the attic ladder to store in my room.
For those blessed hours, alone in Pipits, I could make believe that it was only me who inhabited the house; with Henry and Gloria out of the way, I could indulge myself in its endearing eccentricities. House was babbling with excitement, emitting its sweet sounds, filling my head with its thoughts. I put on all the downstairs lights and lit a fire in the drawing room so that we could comfortably commune there.
I suppose Mother, as she had done before, would have put Pipits’ voice down to the gasps of the old boiler, or ghosts perhaps. What a dreary little woman she was. There may be ghosts wandering Pipits’ halls, although I have never come across one. But if they do exist, they have no voice, and must walk different pathways than me.
I finally took to my bed just after dawn, only to be woken shortly after by the laborers arriving to set about their pillaging. I knew that I had to do something to stop them, to slow down their mutilation. With Henry and Gloria away, I had my chance.
I put out a whole packet of Maryland Cookies that I found in the pantry, and made them their midmorning coffee with a generous dose of Temazepam. I’m getting better at dispensing the right amount. Ten milligrams will calm, twenty makes you clumsy, thirty slows you down plenty. I could tell the brew didn’t go down well, didn’t compare favorably with Gloria’s. They drank it out of politeness, and ate their way through the cookies.
To my joy, they downed their tools and left an hour or so before lunch.
“Some bug going around,” Terry said with a slight slur. “Bill’s cut his hand, can’t concentrate, he says, and Dave feels so out of sorts, he needs to get his head down. Apologies to Henry, we’ll be back soon as we can.”
“Drive safe,” I said.
It is dark by four o’clock now, which Henry finds draining but I find refreshing. Under shelter of the encroaching night, I set to the task of gathering up the workmen’s tools, which have been hastily shoved under a tarpaulin. There are hammers and screwdrivers, plastering boards, and spades; there are screw guns and a couple of power drills. Three hard hats, one dented, lie on top of a pile of high-visibility jackets on the workbench, alongside a spirit level. It will give me a special pleasure to get rid of that.
Terry has left a tin of tobacco, cigarette papers, and the little machine that he uses to form his roll-ups in his jacket pocket. I’ve watched him making them, smoothing the paper, packing it with tobacco. Apart from him being a nicotine addict, I can tell that he enjoys the ritual. He always has a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Very unattractive.
All in all, I have a nice little haul. I double up some tough garden waste bags and divide the tools into them so that I can carry them without too much effort, then I back my car onto the site and stack them in the trunk. It is exhilarating work, and good to be doing something physical for once.
For the first time in a long time, I find myself hungry, so to accompany a revitalizing measure of gin and tonic, I eat a bowl of the cereal Gloria makes up with oats and raisins and the odd wrinkled prune. I pick out the prunes and throw the horrible things into the waste bin. I finish off the last inch of gin from the old bottle and fill my flask from a new one. Then I drive out to a reach of the river where a narrow bridge spans the waterway.
It is a magical place, near to home, somewhere we often used to picnic when I was a girl. Since as long as I can remember, the river has been a favorite haunt of mine. Alice and I used to walk there through the meadows when we were teenagers. We would meet up with boys from the surrounding villages who had fixed a rope swing from the branch of a huge elm tree that is dead now from the Dutch disease. I would hold on tight while Alice pushed me beyond the bank, and then hurl myself into the water. It was risky, dropping into the deepest part of the river where the tow was strongest, but I liked the thrill, and I couldn’t let the boys see my fear.
Alice always held back, afraid of hurting herself. She wasn’t afraid of kissing those boys, though, of letting them pull down the straps of her swimsuit as they pushed her up against
a tree. I was ashamed of her and would swim around pretending not to see, congratulating myself that those lowborn lads knew better than to try it on with me.
These days you never see children playing by the river. Something to do with health and safety I suppose, and the modern-day fear of child catchers.
It is a quiet spot, off the towpath, down a deep rutted lane that, at its end, knits itself up with nettles and balsam. I like that it is unchanging, that it remains as unkempt as I have always known it.
I sit in the car for a while, lights and engine off, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark and checking that no one is around. When I am sure I am alone, I take a deep breath and a good swallow of gin to gear me up.
I haul the bags to the center of the bridge and drop them one by one into the black water. They sink almost instantly. I am reminded of another time long ago, when I stood in the same place on this bridge. I think of the mewling squirming sack I carried here when I was nine, tiny claws ripping through it, the way it floated for a moment or two before sinking. It must still be down there, wedged in the silt somewhere. I’ve heard that bodies dumped in the river never make it out to sea.
How quickly Gloria recovered back then from the loss of her pet: a cuddle from Mother, an extra kiss at bedtime, and me being made to help her finish her puzzle, to take her mind off her kitty. I didn’t object at the time. I was the secret winner of the day, after all, a payback to my sister for being the chosen one, for not being aware that she was the chosen one, for her creamy skin, her childish lisp, for bloody well everything about her.
People like Gloria think themselves guiltless, but they push you to do things that you wouldn’t normally think of doing; they glide along in their careless way through their fairy-tale lives, gobbling up the best bits in life, the biggest portions of everything worth having. Gloria has guzzled the lot: my best friend, my lover, our mother. And Pipits. Damn her to hell.
With the bags safely dumped, I sit on the riverbank, drinking my gin and watching the swollen river push downstream. The dark hushes the clamor in my head, releases the pressure that has been building in me ever since Henry’s workmen set about their destruction.
A light breath of wind stirs the grasses at the water’s edge. I feel it cool on my face, the gentlest of touches. I listen to the slurp of the river licking its banks, to the distant hoot of an owl, and feel satisfied with the day’s work. Above me a single star pulses in the night sky, on, off, on, off. The dark deepens, and suddenly, as though the star has been blinking a warning, the rain arrives.
* * *
IT WILL BE AT least a week before they can replace the tools, they say. They ask me if I’m sure I didn’t hear anything, and look bemused when I say, No, nothing, not the smallest sound.
Dave is the angriest. Apparently his tools were originally his father’s; they are irreplaceable, he says. What rubbish, hammers and screwdrivers are hardly things to grow attached to. Who would have thought that an oaf like Dave had a sentimental streak?
“He’s heartbroken,” Terry informs me.
Terry says that since they left everything easily accessible, it is unlikely the insurance will pay up. They hadn’t been themselves at all yesterday, they agree, shaking their heads, some bug had got them all.
“Down like ninepins,” Terry moans. “A twelve-hour thing, I guess. We all slept like babies.”
“Nothing like a good night’s sleep to put things right,” I say.
“We’ll be more careful in future,” he says. “The police say the thieves will leave it for a while, then most likely come back when they think we have forgotten about it. They won’t get easy pickings next time.”
“Ah well, easy to be wise after the event,” I say with a sigh.
Terry narrows his eyes and gives me a quizzical look. “Yeah, I guess,” he says.
I wasn’t going to intrude on Henry’s visit to his mother with the news, but Terry decided to do so. Apparently, Henry groaned at the thought of the delay. The interest on the bank loan is mounting.
“What kind of people would do such a thing?” he agonized to me over the phone later, as though he doesn’t live in a world where things are being stolen all the time, as though in some way he is entitled to escape what everyone else has to put up with.
“These things happen,” I say.
I can’t summon any sympathy for Henry. I know what I’m doing is for the right reasons. He and Gloria must not be allowed to go on smashing, and smoothing, Pipits.
Gloria took the phone from Henry to check on me, make sure I was okay. “Thank goodness he—they—didn’t come into the house,” she said. “That would have been awful with you all alone.”
“Yes, I would have been no match for the brutes,” I said.
* * *
THE HOUSE IS A bit down today. Its walls are clammy to the touch, its voice is sluggish, the air tearful. No doubt it has picked up on the gloomy mood that seems to have overtaken everyone. Gloria is not feeling well. Just a general malaise, she says.
“And Alice leaving us,” she simpers. “It comes out of the blue and hits me sometimes.”
“It is the same for me,” I say.
Henry is worried about money. He has had to pay for new tools, the sum is to be taken off the final works invoice, but the studio build is running late due to the tool situation—and to the weather, which has turned bloody awful.
“You wouldn’t believe what a week’s delay costs,” he groans.
Stirred by the theft, he has had an alarm fitted in the house. It had to be done, he says, but cost-wise, the timing is bad.
The rain has hardly stopped since it came on the night that I sat in my car by the river. The bottom of the village has flooded and turned the dip in the road into a lake. A couple of pioneer swans have claimed it.
Due to the flood, we are only able to leave and enter the village by the long way, up the hill and through the narrow road that winds through the woods. It puts five miles each way, on the journey in and out, for Terry and his boys.
He’s moaning about the extra cost of petrol.
“Near enough sixty miles a week. I’ll have to claim for it,” he warns Henry.
And now, overnight, the rain, which turned first to sleet, has given way to a snowstorm that has muffled all of Cold-Upton. We woke to its fall, big downy flakes the size of a dog’s paw. A dazzling white carpet morphs the roads and fields into one, so that, without the usual boundaries to guide, I am put a little off balance. It’s tempting to wear sunglasses against the white glare. Two days now and still it comes.
“It’s a whiteout,” Henry complains.
“But rather lovely,” Gloria says.
It is so cold that the floodwaters have frozen, and now the road looks silvery and quite beautiful. I saw children sliding over the rink of it this morning on their way to school. The swans have returned to the river.
Terry phoned to say the work will have to stop until the snow clears and things get back to normal. Impossible conditions to work in, he says. The news of the holdup has made me quite cheerful. It was worth throwing a wrench into their horrible works.
I helped Henry clear the snow from the drive this morning so that the postman and Mrs. Lemmon can get up to the house and he can get down to the road to take Gloria for her checkup. Henry is not afraid of work; it’s one of his good points I suppose. We shoveled until our faces turned pink and our lungs began to burn. The exercise put us both in better spirits.
So far the pregnancy is going well; the hospital visit is just routine. Apparently, the baby is the right size, and Gloria is only marginally over her preferred weight at this late stage. She looks huge to me. Meanwhile, Henry says she is more beautiful than ever, and she gives him that Oh you smile.
Their New Year’s resolution is to have more children after this one.
“Not right away, of course, but we want a clutch,” Gloria simpers. Her pronouncement makes me feel quite desperate. I can’t help thinking “heir and spare.”
“We’ll be all afternoon,” Henry calls as I wave them away. “The hospital, first, and then flowers to Alice’s grave, on the way back.”
I often walk past Alice’s grave myself. Not yet with a headstone, the earth needs time to settle, we are told. The sod on her patch is sparse, littered with never-ending gifts from her friends, of cut flowers lying in nasty cellophane wrap. They get shuffled by the wind, blown on to neighboring graves. I find the paraphernalia of death distasteful: those horrid garage flowers, and the little ornaments, and revolting tiny vases shaped like urns. The human blot of it brings on nausea. A simple carpet of grass should be enough.
10
I HAVE BEEN GOING THROUGH the family effects I found among the things of Mother’s that Henry wanted to get rid of. There’s a box secured with a blue ribbon, and in Mother’s hand, precious written on the lid.
In it are bundled dozens of school reports, both mine and Gloria’s; a velvet Alice headband Gloria loved so much that she wore it clamped in her hair for a year; a christening dress, white satin with pearl buttons, mine first, then Gloria’s, the right way round for a change.
There are letters, too, mostly Father’s to Mother, which he wrote to her in the early 1960s, when they were courting. In one of them, which he sent to her after he’d proposed, he addressed what clearly had been some concerns on her part. She was hesitating, if not exactly reluctant: they hadn’t known each other long, she thought she would like to travel, she longed to see more of the world before marriage.
“We rarely regret the things we do,” he’d written. “Only the things we do not. Marry me, and we will see the world together.”
The words flashed at me as though lit by neon. It is as if Father is speaking directly to me. Otherwise, why did I open that letter first, the very one with just the advice I needed? I must stop hesitating, get on with the doing.
The Beloveds Page 11