‘Hey, what d’you know?’ she called over to Mac. He was lying on his back in a patch of grass; nice big thistles all round him. ‘My Great-Aunty’s died. Passed away.’ She giggled. ‘Popped off.’
‘Wow.’
‘Isn’t that just something? Poof! Just like that. One moment she’s there and the next …’ She couldn’t stop giggling. She looked down at the paper, crumpled yellowish paper with the writing all dancing. The letters just wouldn’t stay still. ‘I think she needs a proper burial, don’t you? A little ceremony is called for at this juncture, right?’
From the thistles came: ‘Mmm.’
Carefully, very slowly, she smoothed out the paper on her knee. It slipped but she could keep it there if she tried very hard. Then, her fingers like rubber, no bones in them somehow, she started to tear the telegram into strips. She was so careful and slow. It took a long time because it was interesting seeing just how narrow she could make them. Sometimes they broke and that made her giggle. Sometimes they didn’t and that made her giggle too.
Slowly, with her fingers she scraped out a hole in the soil. ‘Down she goes! Farewell, Aunty Josie.’ In the hole she laid the pieces of paper side by side, very, very neatly. ‘Jolly Josie, rosy Josie …’ She scattered the earth over them and heaped it up so that it was a nice neat little dome.
‘Farewell,’ from the thistles.
She started putting little flowers on the dome but somehow she felt she hadn’t quite grasped something. Aunty Josie, she was sure, wasn’t rosy, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what she was like. It was so difficult to get hold of … but soon she’d feel better and then she would remember.
‘I’m so sorry, Aunty Josie,’ she said, smiling at the dome, trying so very hard to concentrate. ‘I’m so very, very sorry that I can’t quite remember exactly who you are. I do apologize for my pitiful state –’ she felt quite moist-eyed here ‘– and I’m sure I’ll be able to remember very soon. Extremely soon. Definitely extremely soon.’
She smiled at the little dome. It looked so pretty with all its dancing flowers; they seemed to be jumping all over the place. Aunty was in there somewhere.
The second telegram arrived that night. DUE FUNERAL COINCIDING HALF TERM HOLLY ARRIVING BRISTOL 11.15 TRAIN 18 JUNE. RETURN NEXT DAY.
Laura started. Holly coming to stay! Her head was almost clear now, and with a rustle and a thud all this afternoon’s events settled down in her brain. Great-Aunt Josie was dead.
Dear Aunty Josie! She hadn’t thought of her for years. Fresh out of storage, pictures and smells appeared. For a start, that musty pepperminty scent – somehow it was both – of her cottage at Windermere. Aunt Josie lived alone, and when they were younger Laura and Claire would take the train up to visit her. At Josie’s, things they couldn’t do at home seemed fascinatingly allowed. There was the glass of thick sweet sherry to be wickedly drunk by them when they were only thirteen; there were the olives which were swallowed in handfuls because in some mysterious way they were adult; best of all, there were the shelves and shelves of books whose covers showed chisel-faced doctors and nurses with long eyelashes, that sort of thing. Aunty Josie had lots of books like that; they read them all but they never borrowed them to take home. Instinctively they knew that their father wouldn’t actually forbid them; it was worse than that. He’d just look pained.
Aunty Josie sometimes came south and took them out to lunch, just Laura and Claire. Once she’d mentioned, casually, that it was one mile from their house to the restaurant. That fact stuck, as some facts do. Walking to lunch was therefore one mile exactly, and all distances after this became multiples of that one stretch of road – high hedges, low hedges, a shop with bread in the window (nowadays called Safeways), a shop with vests and clothes-pegs in the window (nowadays called Young Mods Boutique). Even now, though she was nearly twenty, this strip of Harrow had wedged itself in her brain and re-emerged usefully when her calculations needed it.
Illness, too; Aunt Josie was connected with that. She was a most satisfactory reader-aloud. Satisfactory meant she went on and on; to quench their shrill demands she even read the same book all over again, because sometimes if one was feeling really awful it was reassuring to listen to a story one knew backwards. Preferably Noddy. Long after feebler souls would have given up and said they had to cook dinner or something, her voice would be droning on. A good performer, Aunty Josie. The memory of her was still connected with being comfortably tucked up in bed at the wrong time of day.
Still is, actually, thought Laura, lying on the sheets, queasy from cannabis and longing for that stout figure. Not to read to her or even talk, but simply to be there and not to be dead. She could see her in the armchair, her sturdy legs slightly apart and, when Laura was older, embarrassing her when her friends were there because then she’d notice that Aunty’s stocking-tops were showing. It didn’t matter when they were alone, of course.
‘What’s it say, then?’
Laura jumped. Mac had come in. ‘Oh, that my younger sister’s coming to stay tomorrow. My parents have to go up to Windermere for a funeral, and it’s her half term, so she’s coming here instead.’ It was no good starting to tell him all about Aunty Josie; he’d never known her and now he never would. Of Laura’s small rooms, one closed its door to him. Just for a moment she longed for Claire; there was simply so much they had in common. Again Mac seemed flimsy.
She gazed at the stack of books she should be reading. How would her psychologists classify Aunt Josie? Unfulfilled? Frustrated? Someone unable to cope with men except between the covers of Mills and Boon romances, someone even with latent lesbian tendencies? It made Aunt Josie quite different to think of her like that. Psychology did spoil things sometimes.
Speculatively she looked at Mac. ‘Where shall I put you, then? You can’t sleep here with Holly around.’
‘Why not?’
‘Honestly!’ she answered primly. ‘It wouldn’t be right. Anyway, she’d tell my parents.’
Mac thought for a moment. He rubbed his hair thoughtfully, for he’d just had a bath. ‘You could put me on the roof,’ he said at last. ‘I like it up there. I can bring your binoculars and see what the neighbours are watching on telly.’
He looked so helpful, and his wet hair stuck up around his face so funnily, and his body looked so lovely and clean that her heart quite turned over. She sat up, childhood forgotten, and held out her arms. ‘Come here,’ she said.
Laura always felt unreal when she kissed Mac goodbye before she went off for a lecture or before he went off for a day’s work. The little doorstep ceremony, so nearly conjugal, deepened her suspicion that they were only playing. It was all so easy; a game of Mothers and Fathers financed (she hated to admit it, but it didn’t seem to lose Mac much sleep) by her father. The fact was, Mac hardly made enough to keep him in beer, the amount of days he missed work, and so she paid the rest. Or to be accurate, her father did. Since she’d seen his paintings this had started to disturb her. Somehow it seemed more valid to keep a good artist than to keep, well, not quite such a good one.
It was the next morning. ‘Are you sure you’ll recognize her?’ she asked Mac. She hardly ever asked him to do anything; it was seldom, in fact, that they had any outside complications. But today Holly was coming.
‘’Course, my sonner. She gave me sausage rolls at that party; in fact, I got her to fill up me pockets with ’em.’
‘And it’s the eleven-fifteen train. I’ll be back soon after twelve.’
‘Trust old Mac. Bye-bye, my love.’ He kissed her. She walked down the street, past the houses of all those neighbours she’d never met, busy family houses with Hoover noises coming from them. She arrived at the psychology department.
She had got to the stage where, as somebody who has once visited a far country likes to hear news bulletins about it, she had to have confirmation once in a while that such a thing as psychology still existed. And today of all days she had to go because there was a special lecture sh
e couldn’t, she mustn’t, miss. Holly would just have to be met by Mac, that was all. It seemed inappropriate for him to do something practical and familified like this, but she had the desire to involve him.
Outside the lecture hall she bumped into Mike. ‘Hello stranger,’ he said. ‘What have you been doing lately?’
Lying tranced in the rumpled sheets, she wanted to say.
‘Oh, this and that,’ was what actually came out.
‘Come down to Hall tonight. I’m auditioning for my play.’
‘What play?’
‘Something I’ve written. I want you to be in it. I’ll audition you with marvellous bias.’
‘But I can’t, I’m afraid. My little sister’s coming down to stay the night. With us;’ she added.
There was a pause. ‘You’re getting very domesticated,’ he said, looking at her, making her feel shy. ‘How is he, by the way?’
‘Fine. He’s a bus conductor now.’
Another pause. ‘Anyway,’ said Mike. ‘It would have been nice. Lots of people have been asking about you. But nobody ever sees you nowadays. Shame, really.’
The words hung in the air. She looked at his bony, clever face; then he left and she watched him as he crossed the street. A faint sense of loss, but she ignored it.
The hall was crowded. She sat alone at the back, looking at the rows of listening heads in front of her, thinking of all that information going into them and all that information already there. Her own head felt quite empty, a clear pool round which swam, lazily, train times and bits of shopping lists. Panic rose; she tried to concentrate.
And as they all shuffled out she noticed, for the first time, how all the others seemed to know each other, and greet each other, and disappear into the Berkeley Café or the library with each other. And yet all she could do – or all she wanted to do – was to bundle her books under her arm and hurry away up the street, back to that charmed room.
Back to Holly, too. Squeezing past the pram in the hall she strained her ears for sounds from upstairs. Perhaps Mac had taken her out for a walk; perhaps they were sitting on the floor and Holly was helping him with his Airfix plane. In tender detail Laura could picture it. Mac was so easy with children; so childlike himself. In advance she smiled, loving them both.
Up the stairs she clattered two at a time and flung open the door.
Mac sat in the armchair reading Beano.
‘Well, where is she?’ She looked round the room.
Mac shuffled his comic. ‘Couldn’t find her.’
A silence.
‘What?’
‘She wasn’t there, my sonner. At the station.’
‘She wasn’t there?’
‘No. I looked.’
‘What d’you mean, you looked?’
‘I looked. She didn’t come out of the train.’ He looked down and fiddled with the Beano – the Beano she’d bought specially. Could she trust him with nothing? Did they have no claims on each other at all?
‘Oh God!’ she cried. ‘You fool! I told you she was waiting in the train. With the guard. You had to go in and fetch her!’ She flung down her books and rushed to the door. ‘The train must have left ages ago!’
She slammed the door. She heard him calling out after her! ‘Shall I come?’
‘Don’t bother!’ Out of the front door she ran, down the road, round the corner and down the steep lane that led on to the main road.
Fifteen minutes later she was at the station. Her heart beat fast. The platform was empty. She looked wildly around, visions racing through her head – Holly raped, Holly murdered, Holly abandoned with the left luggage in some mid-Wales shunting yard.
‘Hello.’
A door marked RAILWAY STAFF ONLY was open and there she stood.
‘Oh, thank goodness!’ Laura rushed over and flung her arms round the small stolid form.
‘What’s the matter?’ Holly gazed up, unmoved. ‘I say, steady on.’
‘I thought you were lost. Ra – I mean, murdered. All sorts of things.’
‘Of course I wasn’t. What a silly thing to think.’
Inside the staff room a man put a teapot back on a stove; then he came out to Laura. ‘Glad to see you, miss.’ He patted Holly’s head. ‘I told the little lady you wouldn’t be long. She was –’ he gave Laura a significant and sage look over Holly’s head ‘– a touch, you know, anxious at the beginning.’
‘I wasn’t!’
‘All right, Duchess. You wasn’t.’
‘I wasn’t really, Laura. He gave me a cup of tea. And –’ here she looked polite ‘– he showed me an engine. It was very interesting; he told me what everything did.’
Laura turned to the man. ‘Thank you so much. I’m terribly sorry. My friend got, well, a bit confused.’
‘Not at all, miss. We had a nice little chat.’
They went home, the bus rumbling up the hill and Holly gripping the seat in front and glueing her nose to the window. Despite the bravado she had been frightened, Laura could tell. That stolidness had been a bit too stolid.
She looked out at the passing shops that now and then, jokingly, froze. She would never marry Mac, she suddenly realized. Even if he wanted to, which she doubted; she couldn’t quite picture that scene. She loved him but no, not marriage. Not for life. She couldn’t spend her days rescuing Hollies; so to speak.
After lunch they crossed over the Suspension Bridge and went to explore the woods on the other side, with their giant trees and surprising wildness. Up a bridle path the three of them straggled and into a darker part. Holly dawdled behind, pulling off grass heads and practising her whistles. Mac strode ahead, hunched but jaunty, his curly hair rising and falling, rising and falling with each step.
All of a sudden the whistling stopped and Holly piped up: ‘Celery raw develops the jaw but celery stewed is more quietly chewed.’
Laura laughed. ‘Gosh, did you make that up?’
‘No, it’s Ogden Nash. I know lots more. We learn them after lights-out in the dorm.’
‘In the dorm, eh?’ Mac’s voice floated back. He’d put on a silly grand accent. ‘In the dorm?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘With your lakky sticks and your Angela Brazils?’
‘What’s that?’
‘And your Mummies and Daddies coming down in their Rovers and eyeing each others’ hats –’
‘Oh shut up!’ Laura said this with surprising venom. It left Mac, she could see, unrattled. She looked over her shoulder at Holly who, despite the renewed whistles, looked rather solitary amongst the tall grasses. Why did Mac sometimes feel he had to say things like that? Funny. Funny, too, how sisters pulled one’s loyalties; more than men did. Blood was thickest.
The path darkened; the trees closed overhead; the ground grew muddier and midges hung dancing in the air. They picked their way around the puddles. Tranquillity restored, Laura became conscious of squelching behind.
‘Holly, what on earth are you doing?’
‘Breaking in my shoes. They’re new, you see.’ Holly stood still to explain, ankle-deep in the blackest of mud. ‘You must get them Experienced. First they need mud, especially smelly mud like this.’ She squelched around a bit. ‘Then you’ve got to stick ’em in water. Get them properly soggy.’ She waded out of the mud and into a tractor rut brimming with oil-filmed water. She stood still, reverently. Lines shot through the oil and it separated into silken squares. ‘Shake ’em around a bit.’ She did this, thoroughly. She stepped out. ‘Then they really should have some cow’s mess, but they seem all right already.’
Laura inspected them. ‘They certainly look full of experience now. So do your socks.’
She glanced at Mac. Perhaps he thought that only a spoilt private-school girl, used to an unending supply of new shoes, could indulge herself like this.
Ah, but she could never predict. His teeth showed white in a grin, and with a grunt he jumped into the middle of the water. Holly stared, then she giggled.
‘Ha!’ h
e shouted over the splashes he was making. He was stamping up and down. ‘Now your mum can get at both of us for our dirty shoes!’
With a suck and a plop he pulled his feet out of the muddy water and started to run in great striding leaps, hair rising and falling, up the path and into the distance. Soon he turned off into the trees and Laura, who had taken Holly’s hand and was running, laughing, after him, saw his wild figure flickering between the tree trunks.
They caught up with him eventually. He had thrown himself down on the dead leaves and lay, arms outstretched and the hair round his face dark with sweat, beside an inky pool.
‘Lo! A Narcissus!’ cried Laura, not expecting a reply to that, and with a crackle of leaves flung herself down beside him. Holly stood next to the pool and prodded it with a stick; Laura just leant on her elbow and contemplated that outflung arm with its faint miraculous veins. After she’d gazed at that for a while she undid, very gently, two buttons of his shirt to reveal a triangle of chest. She contemplated that.
He was such a mystery to her. Sometimes, that is. Despite misgivings and disappointments, despite the times he irritated her, he could still startle her with his strangeness. As an animal would startle her. She gazed down at his muddy plimsolls. Or like a child.
Holly’s presence made it altogether an odd sort of day. Laura had seen so little of her lately that she couldn’t predict at what stage of maturity Holly had arrived. At home Holly never seemed to change or get older, but that was probably to do with the backcloth. Hard to appear different in the same old nursery. It would take the sullen heavings of adolescence to shake up that fabric, and Holly hadn’t reached adolescence yet.
But what stage had she reached? Laura tried to picture her suspended in limbo, a young female, and wondered what sort of day she should provide. A jolly day exploring and mucking about, or was she too dignified for that now? A gentler day, cutting things out of felt? A more adult day, gardening and chatting, perhaps even exchanging confidences about clothes? And should she, Laura, tidy up the room for her as she would for an adult, or leave it messy and explorable as she would for a child who would muck it up in ten minutes anyway?
You Must Be Sisters Page 19
