You Must Be Sisters

by Deborah Moggach

  ‘Looking for something?’ he asked politely, waiting for her.

  There was a pause. ‘I was just thinking,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t bother. Thinking, I mean. It’ll be all right, you see.’ He smiled a bright smile in her direction, not meeting her eyes. In the neon light she could see his face clearly, an unmemorable face trying to keep its dignity. It wouldn’t happen again. Whatever it was, whatever he had been feeling, was over.

  ‘I’d like some coffee,’ she said.

  The café was blindingly bright. Her relief was soon replaced by a helpless feeling of exposure. Behind the counter stood a pimply youth. He was staring at her chest; she could see him working out, with his eyes, exactly where her nipples were. She looked down at the rows of plastic packets of food. She couldn’t move.

  ‘Do you take milk?’ the man asked. He was waiting at the urn.

  Yes, she’d like milk. On her tray she placed a roll, some butter and some honey, for she should be hungry. With an effort she could remember her day and recall that she hadn’t eaten.

  The man, still nameless, paid for it and they went over to a table. ‘You’ll get back all right, will you, once we get to Birmingham?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, I expect so.’

  ‘When we arrive you can tell me where to drop you. What station and so on.’

  ‘That would be very kind.’ How odd for them to sit here so politely when her face must still be blotchy with tears!

  ‘On my calculation, averaging about sixty we should make it in half an hour. No one will be expecting you?’

  ‘No, no one.’ She fumbled with the honey, trying to open it. Being such a sealed little sachet it was difficult. 100% Pure, she read. Grade 1 Honey. Granada Catering Ltd. But it was sealed, laminated, hygienically and hermetically soldered. Precious honey, labour of bees. Patient bees, their secret toil had been sucked up into the Catering Ltd division of Granada. Priceless honey entombed in plastic.

  Her eyes blurred with tears and she put the little packet back on the table. Tears of pity ran down her cheeks, tears for the bees, for the embryo inside her, for things she couldn’t put a name to. With her sleeve she wiped her eyes.

  The man must be noticing but he pretended he wasn’t. Instead he unwrapped his sandwich, unwrapped the sugar for his coffee and began to eat. Mindlessly Musak played; beyond the windows the motorway traffic hummed; at the next table someone pushed aside his refuse of packets. Laura tried to sip her coffee but her mouth was bleary with tears and it tasted glutinous. She put down her cup, more desolate than she imagined possible. She was helplessly alone. But then so were those countless millions being swept along the motorways just as she was, swept through the windy corridors of high-rise cities and round wastelands of flyovers. Everyone was alone; silly to pretend all these years that they weren’t. Alone but just occasionally one of them would reach out and touch a human thigh.

  ‘Er, have you finished?’

  The man was looking not at her but at her uneaten roll. He never looked at her. ‘It’s just that we ought to be pushing along, I think. Don’t want to hurry you, of course.’

  ‘I don’t want anything to eat, actually. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. Perhaps you don’t feel well.’

  The pimply youth watched her as she crossed the café. She wanted to put her hands over her stomach, hiding her womb. Nothing was safe.

  They were outside now. He opened the door for her, polite to the last. They drove across to some petrol pumps where they were served by a muffled shape to whom they were but an empty tank and a proferred note. The shape was in a Texaco uniform; Marlboro, declared two patches, one on each side, dead over the lung. Laura shivered.

  Even the man, by this time, was silenced by her behaviour, and they drove the last stretch to Birmingham in a quietness that was lulled, rhythmically, by the windscreen-wipers. In the car all was darkness but for the winking lights and wavering dials of the dashboard.

  Just once the man leant over. Laura froze. But he was only switching on the radio.

  Hush now, don’t explain,

  You’re my joy and pain …

  It was Billie Holliday singing. Not those words, not that voice. ‘Could you possibly turn it off please?’

  The man leant forward; with an apologetic little cough he turned it off.

  When they got to Birmingham he took her to the railway station. He passed out her suitcase, polite to the end, then he hesitated. Was he going to ask her something? Two lost souls, they were. Between them there was a bond of some sort; one of them, or perhaps both, had passed through so much. But he said nothing, and she must have thanked him for now he was leaving.

  When the tail lights had disappeared, swallowed up amongst the others, Laura set down her suitcase. What, exactly, was she going to do now?

  The station clock said 10.30. A few people wandered about. She’d never been to Birmingham before; New Street Station was glassy and modern. She took her case and sat down on a bench facing the Departure Board. A train for Euston, it told her, would leave in seven minutes and she had easily enough money for the ticket.

  She sat there, suitcase in lap, hands on suitcase. She could see the ticket office over to her right. The hands jerked. Six minutes.

  In six minutes she could be settling back in her seat, speeding out of the station towards London, towards her sister. Claire! Claire wouldn’t mind how late it was; she’d hug her and tuck her up on the sofa and listen, and help, and laugh, for by then she, Laura, might feel like laughing. With Claire there, she might.

  But she was too late, for Claire was married now. Of ceremonies none could have been more normal. For Laura, though, none could have been stranger; in front of her people had moved, smiled, raised glasses, but silently, as if on a television screen with the sound off. All of them, even her darling sister, moving like tiny robots, distanced and dwindled by her worry. Now ten days had passed and Claire would be lying beside her husband in her new house. What right had she, Laura, to disturb them? Something was stopping her; perhaps the need to go through a certain amount of this alone. Perhaps the fact that Geoff would be there. Strange to sit here, caught in a spell of desolation, unable to break it. She felt more lonely than she’d believed possible, but oddly enough strong too. She’d go to Claire tomorrow; Geoff would be at work then. She’d get through tonight on her own; in this spell-like state she actually wanted to.

  And then, of course, there were her parents. And never had she needed them more, them and that warm, known house, them and that soothing suburban normality. They’d welcome her, too. Seeing her in such a state they wouldn’t fuss or ask the wrong questions – not tonight, anyway. They’d be at their very best. They would make her some Horlicks like they used to.

  She looked up. The clock had jerked four times. Three minutes to go; she could still just make it. She thought of them in their shared and legal bed where with clear minds they’d be slumbering. No, she couldn’t upset them. She’d upset them so many times.

  The loudspeaker boomed and a few last figures hurried towards the platform. She could see the train. In Bristol, of course, Mac waited. She could imagine him, bemused, wondering if he’d missed something she might have said about going out; totally unsuspecting. Their bed, his and hers, waited. The most welcoming place in her universe; the centre of it. Mac, who made the most barren of places come alive! How clearly she could remember that first day in the supermarket, the way he’d dawdled and larked about. He’d understand so well what she’d felt in the M5 café and why she’d cried over the honey. He wouldn’t think that was silly.

  Darling Mac, darling sweetest Mac – she could call him these things now, after all those months of longing to whisper them but not daring to because she’d been too selfconscious and he’d never talked like that – darling dearest Mac, who made faces at the faceless. Such a rattler of the old baccy tin against the railings of the vast and the impersonal. Attached to nothing, committed to nothing, least of all to
responsibility; better at Airfix kits than driving a car three yards across the road. Her sweetest, maddening Mac, bringing home a rabbit when he’d actually produced a child.

  She shivered. She couldn’t, wouldn’t go back. A whistle blew and she could see the train backing out. It was the last one for London. She got up and walked to the Ladies’ where she changed into her warm jeans. She put on two pullovers. She’d long ago stopped caring what she looked like – blotchy face, streaked mascara most likely, and now lumpy jumpers one on top of the other. Who minded?

  She bought her ticket for the next day, then for a long while she sat in the station café, ‘Sons and Lovers’ propped up against her empty cup of coffee. Some of the time she thought, and some of the time she read her book, which told her of firelit parlours. She shivered again. She was chilly even in two jumpers and no doubt would get even chillier. Such a long night it was going to be. Minutes passed so slowly; each time she looked up the clock hands had hardly moved.

  When centuries later the hands told her it was 12.30, she returned to the Ladies’ and washed her face in the cold water. The basin lacked soap; nevertheless the water soothed. The roller towel hung down dampish and grey, but pressing her face into it comforted her. My body, she thought, rubbing her face; what will happen to it? What’s it done?

  The Waiting Room was down by the London platform. It was a bare, glassed-in box, its seats polished by the bottom sides of thousands of waiting bodies. No one was there. She closed the door and settled down on one of the seats. Some clothes she spread under herself; some, once she’d lain down, she spread on top. Her slippery silky dress she rolled up and used as a pillow. In her hasty exit from the room she’d forgotten her fur coat; something else to read, too, for she’d long ago finished ‘Sons and Lovers’. It hadn’t been a practical getaway, but then nothing had been very practical about the last few months.

  It was uncomfortable and it was tedious. Though the platform outside was deserted, she felt exposed in her glass box. Being unable to sleep or read, all that remained was to lie on her back and gaze at the ceiling. Or she could turn on her side, padding her hip bone with another handful of clothes, and gaze at the row of seats, imagining those countless people who for ten minutes or one hour had stared at this same convector heater, shared this same space. On the wooden seat someone had tentatively scratched his initials, rather wavery ones, as if he’d felt impelled to fix his personality somewhere, just once. An Inter-City network map hung, framed, on the wall; on the dusty glass someone had drawn with a finger a stick man with a blank circle for a head; no features. The whole room in fact was curiously anonymous. Those thousands with bodies like her own who had sheltered here today, yesterday, a year ago, and who would no doubt be sheltering here tomorrow and next year – this unseen multitude had left little trace. Just as she, Laura, as unremarkable as any of them, would leave little trace. Not even a fag end, for she’d stopped smoking.

  She gazed around the room in which she lay, for once unembellished with all those accessories with which she’d once had to fix her personality. She no longer felt she needed them. Bare room, bare facts, simple facts that she was only just recognizing. That she was neither more nor less unique than anyone else, for a start. Under their clothes they had bodies like hers; inside their heads dreams. How dismissive she’d been! Snobbish and stupid. There was nothing to distinguish her from the others who had sat here, blown their noses and followed with their eyes for the hundredth time the Inter-City lines between Birmingham and Crewe, Leicester and London, London and Bristol.

  She lay back, oddly humbled. Things settled into place. Funny to feel suddenly comfortable inside one’s skin when outside it one’s more uncomfortable than one has ever been in one’s life. The buttons of her pillow-dress were nudging her cranium; she readjusted it, and before she fell asleep she remembered Mac in his shelter in the Rec. Daffodils and someone else’s Burgundy; the most playful of exiles, that had been. What a contrast to this one! Which, she wondered as she closed her eyes, which is the most real?

  The rungs of the seat digging into her spine told her that it might be this one. Was it this one?

  twenty-eight

  THE NIGHT PASSED; two days passed. Now it was morning and Claire was putting out the milk bottles. She straightened up. Nobody could call their street remarkable, she thought, looking at it. They had taken Laura’s advice and moved in as far as they could afford, but one had to admit that they were still on the wrong side of Kilburn. Queen’s Park, to be precise. Who cared? She loved it, the way it started as red-brick villas and ended as semis, the way it dazzled after all that rain yesterday, the way that number 12 was theirs. When Laura saw it, what would she say? She’d be bound to visit soon; wouldn’t she be bound to sneer?

  Claire walked back down the hall. She felt a particular fondness for the hall because Geoff kissed her here every morning, a swift, fresh, aftershave-and-toothpaste kiss, not at all like the deep dark kisses of upstairs. Until the evening and his arrival home, his presence lingered around the area of the coconut mat. She liked that.

  Claire went back into the sitting-room. They had only moved in last week and already the room looked settled, Geoff’s stereo speakers like monuments on each side of the fireplace, his pipes on their rack looking as if they’d been there since the Romans. They reassured her, those pipes, of his solidarity. She liked his things settled in with hers, his records slipped in amongst her records, his toothbrush sharing her glass; small unions throughout the house. Upstairs their clothes still lay in trunks, and it pleased her to rummage amongst his shirts for her jumper; as the days went by the clothes got more and more untidy, his entwined with hers, an embrace of weaves. At this moment she was wearing one of his shirts; it satisfied her, and though it had startled him at first, no longer did he grunt with surprise when he found her wearing such things. He was learning; they were both learning.

  He was back at work now, but ahead of her stretched summer weeks. No more Roys and Lances until September. Her holidays already seemed to have lasted ages. A few days ago they’d been in Scotland; before that the hectic days of the wedding. Holly had been bridesmaid and it had been necessary to insert darts into the bodice of her dress for she was now thirteen years old and no longer flat-chested. One era ending; another beginning. Claire had surprised herself by feeling damp-eyed at her own nuptials; she’d had to scrabble for her mother’s handkerchief – damp already, of course.

  With a thump the letters arrived; Claire went into the hall. She liked seeing Geoff’s mail. Addressed at times to G. Hair, J. Here and G. Hore, it was usually something boring from the Diners’ Club or a brown paper copy of Drive, The AA Magazine. Still, even to Drive a frail mystique clung, the mystique of the past, Geoff’s previous twenty-five unknown and Claire-less years. Drive had to be turned over in her hand and inspected. She was very much in love with Geoff; anything unknown about him tantalized.

  She was picking up the letters when the doorbell rang. Ding dong; yes, it was one of those. What would Laura say when she heard it? Claire opened the door. It was Laura.

  ‘Good grief,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, Claire.’ Laura smiled, but why did she look so pale? ‘I say, what’s the Morris doing out there?’

  ‘We got it from the garage yesterday.’

  ‘It looks lovely. All different.’ Laura looked different, too. Not at all as she normally did; she looked almost dowdy in those thick jumpers.

  ‘It purrs along now,’ said Claire. ‘All overhauled and refurbished.’

  ‘Like me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I say, Claire, its roof looks new too.’

  ‘I thought it ought to have a treat while the rest was being done. Like a hair-do when one’s undergoing surgery.’

  Laura burst out laughing. She looked better then. She gazed about ‘So this is your street. I’ve been longing to see it’

  ‘Pretty suburban, eh?’ Claire answered brightly. ‘It’s not exactly scintillating; all
lollipop men and mums pushing prams and learner drivers creeping round the corners at one mile an hour.’

  ‘I think it looks cheerful. Cherished.’

  ‘Goodness, Laura! I didn’t think you’d approve. I mean, it’s what you always thought was worse than death, this sort of place.’

  ‘I don’t think I do now.’

  Claire looked at her curiously. What had happened to her? She wasn’t being polite; she could tell by something relaxed in Laura’s voice that she was telling the truth. Why was she so gentle all of a sudden?

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said Claire. She inspected her. ‘It’s marvellous to see you but why are you here? Anything happened? Come into the kitchen. I’m just starting a pie. We’ll have it for lunch.’

  ‘I’m starving. I haven’t eaten for days.’

  ‘Laura, what has happened?’

  ‘Can I sit down first?’

  Claire drew a chair up to the kitchen table. She started rolling out pastry. There was a silence; she kept quiet, waiting for Laura to speak, but this meek, washed-out girl seemed to be keeping it all inside. She, Claire, must wait; whatever it was, it was too big for the usual proddings.

  ‘You’re so deft,’ said Laura. ‘I can’t make pastry.’

  ‘I love it Kneading and rolling, big wholesome pies. All floury and bosomy it makes me, such a fertile feeling.’ She looked up. ‘You know, I think I’m pregnant already.’

  A silence.

  ‘What?’ asked Laura.

  ‘I can sense it, somehow.’

  Laura was staring at her. Why was she staring like that?

  ‘Heavens,’ Laura said.

  ‘Quick work, eh?’ Wasn’t Laura going to smile?

  Laura stared at Claire, standing there so serenely and acceptably pregnant. The pie was finished and Claire was picking the dough off her fingers and putting it into her mouth. Laura watched her picking round her wedding ring, peeling the dough off it How could she tell her such botched and untidy news! Now, of all times. She might long to unburden herself, but what about Claire? How distressing, how hopelessly inappropriate her news had suddenly become. She watched Claire sucking the gold ring, then putting her fingers under the tap. The gold glinted as she dried her hands. Her married sister.