The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  “Where have you put us? Where are we?” Maisie said after a long, silent interval—she was the first to speak. The room stank of turpentine.

  “In my imagination,” Lucas replied kindly. “And there you will stay,” he added.

  Someone must have shown him the Squint, I think. Who showed him the Squint—where, and why, and under what circumstances? And then, pace Nick, all the chemicals do kick in, and it’s like mainlining rocket fuel. My mind is off and away. Boy, it’s fast. It’s like a greyhound, like a bloodhound. It’s following the scent of those summer weeks; it’s loping up stairs, nosing along corridors, through anterooms. It’s rewriting the maze of the Abbey’s interior, it’s re-examining the placing—the very precise placing—of the three sisters inside this frame, and it’s noticing for the first time that the unearthly light falling across the sisters’ hair comes from a source I recognize. It comes from one of the Lady Chapel’s windows. The middle window, to be exact: the window next to which I was born. The window where—if you can trust Bella, which you probably can’t—my mother looked out at the world for the last time and saw something terrifying. The window where Maisie jumped, or slipped—or, I suppose it’s feasible, was pushed—and fell thirty feet onto the flagstones.

  “What happened? I have to know what happened,” I say out loud. At least, I think I say those words, but maybe I don’t, because suddenly, without warning, all the air molecules decide to disobey the laws of physics, and they start rushing about, so the gallery atmosphere begins whirling and gusting. I’m getting a private view of chaos theory: I’m watching all those strings of the universe unraveling. Don’t touch the canvas. Move back, says a voice, and I swing round to see the uniformed guardian of the gallery approaching fast, and he’s definitely not pleased, he’s definitely agitated. He’s red and irascible, but—curious, this—the faster this troglodyte runs at me, the less progress he makes, so instead of advancing, he begins to recede farther and farther away into some dim and tunnelly distance. I watch him vanish at giddying speed, and then, just as I realize that this room is insufferably hot, hellishly hot, and I’m about to tumble out of the heat into some cool, dark, welcoming emptiness, I feel Nicholas Marlow, doctor son to a doctor father, grasp my arm and retrieve me.

  Some while later: I discover I’m outside, in an unstable city, on a wavering pavement. I’m sucking in great gulps of megalopolis carbon monoxide. I’m sitting on steps, with my head between my knees; Nick is holding my briefcase and bending over me. I straighten up: I can’t wait to explain, to spell it out to him. The words refuse to be said in the right order, so no doubt I sound a bit emotional, a tad irrational, but I’m pretty sure I manage “Squint” and “Lady Chapel.” I stumble on “perspective,” but I manage “suicide.”

  And then I stop: Nick’s expression, faintly embarrassed, concerned, anxious yet irritated, has finally registered. “Breathe in—slowly,” he says. “Are you okay now? Dear God, what the hell are you on, Dan? When did you last sleep? When did you last eat?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  “Think.”

  “I recall a kebab. With chilies. With onions.”

  “A recent kebab?”

  “Fairly. Five days ago? Six? Who cares? Nick, listen, this is important.…”

  Nick refuses to listen, though I grab his lapels and gibber furiously. He spends a couple of years inspecting my eyes, checking the pupil dilation, no doubt—and his readings don’t appear to please him. He raises an arm, and next minute we’re in the back of a taxi. I weep for a while—this happens, I’m used to it, nothing to worry about. I trance out and surface around Euston Road. I demand to know where we’re going.

  “I’m taking you home with me,” Nick replies. “I’m going to feed you and try to talk some sense into you.”

  “Home?” This is alarming. I’m already reaching for the door handle. “Home with you? No way. You’ve got to be joking. Let me out of here.”

  Nick sighs. “It’s okay,” he says, sounding infinitely tired. “Julia’s out.”

  “You swear?”

  “I swear. She won’t be back before midnight at the earliest. She’s at some awards thing.”

  [ thirteen ]

  At the Palazzo Julia

  The lights are on upstairs; gold spills from the fan-light; the front door’s been repainted a glossy black; there’s a gleaming brass dolphin door knocker, and—can this be true? Yes, it is—there are window boxes. So there’ve been some changes since I was last here—not surprising given the fact that I’m banned and haven’t set foot inside this house for—how long? Nine years. For once, I can be exact. I was last here nine years ago, the occasion being the christening party for Nick and Julia’s second child, Tom. I was Tom’s godfather (a brave choice on Nick’s part, ferocious opposition on Julia’s). Finn was his godmother. Nine years ago. Finn went to work abroad immediately afterward, and I haven’t seen her since. She sends a card at Christmas. The last one had a robin on it.

  I stand on the front steps while Nick pays off the taxi. Its engine chugs, a curious blurry mist is drifting around this now desirable area of Islington: du côté de chez Nick. Welcome to the Palazzo Julia.

  When Nick unlocks the door, I can hear a violin being practiced upstairs, up and down the scales. A dog, also upstairs, woofs a greeting but doesn’t appear. I last saw Tom when he was five—Nick contrived that meeting, as he’d contrived all the others; we took Tom to the zoo. We had to pretend that we’d bumped into each other, in case interrogator Julia discovered who had bought her son an icecream, who had watched the penguins with him and his daddy. I haven’t seen my godson since, though I’m very fond of Tom, a melancholy little boy: a world expert on dinosaurs—I used to ply him with plastic dinosaurs; I raided London for new dinosaurs.

  Four years since I’ve seen him, and I’m not to see him now. He’s upstairs with the nanny, and it’s nearly his bedtime. Nick will just pop up to say good night, then he’ll join me downstairs in the kitchen. He’s ashamed to meet my eyes when he says this. We stand awkwardly in the hall. I feel sorry for Nick—and I don’t blame him. I don’t want to cause trouble, and if Julia finds out I’ve been here, there’ll be fission. Besides, I can imagine what I look like—some vagrant, some crazy person.… I’d only frighten Tom. No, better absent myself.

  I scuttle downstairs. There have been changes here, too—this kitchen, this temple, now takes up the entire basement floor. It’s the size of… well, a modest ballroom. Limestone underfoot, lighting so complex that you could play with it for hours. I twiddle a few halogens and dimmers. No doubt about it, I’m in la Julia’s domain: It’s horribly sumptuous.

  Nick doesn’t keep me waiting long. He’s soon back: overcoat off, jacket off, tie removed, sleeves rolled up. Now he looks less like the distinguished oncologist he is and more like my friend of yesteryear, the one I used to share a flat with when I first came to London. Nick has always been everything I’m not—disciplined, principled, reserved, for example. He’s always been practical, too—it helps being married to la Julia, I guess. So the promised meal’s under way at once: I’m seated at a huge table, with a glass of Delphic Spring, the best-tasting mineral water I’ve ever had, and Nick is preparing food for the prodigal.

  He’s opening a fridge—it’s magnificent, it’s morgue sized. He’s extracting a megaefficient plastic container; it has a handwritten label. Julia’s homemade soup, and what a treat that will be. He’s putting the nourishing soup in a kryptonite saucepan on the gargantuan Aga (of course there’s an Aga, there had to be). There are—can I believe this?—three kinds of bread: something round and Italian, spiked with rosemary and garlic; something homely and lumpy that looks vaguely Irish; and—the pièce de résistance—a huge, yeasty-smelling, crusty brown loaf. A nutritious trinity that Julia presumably knocked up in between being a perfect wife and mother, running her empire, and accepting her latest award as TV’s ultimate alpha female.

  Nick can sense my eye on that loaf. He may suspect s
atire, or he may simply have remembered that my bread of choice is springy snow white Eternaloaf—a wonder that doesn’t develop mold for a month, even in my kitchen. “Wholemeal,” he says on a faint note of apology. “Julia’s special. It’ll do you good. Organic. Stone-ground, I expect.”

  Oh, I expect so, too, Nick. I know where the wheat for this bread came from: from Arcadia, from the fields of our Suffolk childhood, that’s where. The rain that watered it was acid-free, and the ground that nourished it was manured, not doused with chemicals. It was sheltered from the wind by ancient hedgerows that provided havens for little birds, beasties, and butterflies. It was harvested by hand, not some monster gas-guzzling combine. It stood in gold stooks, where it was dried by God’s own sun, and my dad, granddad, and great-granddad—they were responsible for its threshing and winnowing. My gran gleaned the stubble, singing a Wordsworthian song, and I’d lay money she sewed the sacks at the mill where some Chaucerian type ensured it was ground to the correct nutty consistency. This bread is England. It is my past—and Nick and I are the last generation for whom that’s true. As small children, we watched the ending of Arcadia. It’s now vanished forever.

  A depressing thought. Still, the young’uns can always catch up, I remind myself. They can always read Thomas Hardy, or—if that’s too much of a strain, which these days it probably is—there’s always la Julia’s TV cookery programs.

  What must it be like, I think, watching Nick whisk eggs—what must it be like to live with such perfection? What would he think if I brought him back to my place, that other London that’s only a mile or so away: two-week-old doner kebabs and chicken tikka masalas and Big Boy burger takeaways festering in the unemptied kitchen bin; a sink full of unwashed dishes, because the dishwasher had a seizure several aeons ago? What would he make of sour milk, green bread (yes, even Eternaloaf sprouts mold eventually)? What would he say to cupboards groaning with Nicey-Spicey sauces—I did their campaigns, and the punishment was several centuries of the stuff—and a million dusty jars of prehistoric Herby Toppings, all heavy on the monosodium glutamate and additives? Would he decide I was well past my use-by date, like them? Or would he throw himself down in a sagging armchair, accept a stiff drink, eat cod and chips out of newspaper, smile that old wondrous smile—and talk: talk for hours, until midnight, two, three in the morning, both of us as happy as kings, the way we once were, pre-Julia?

  I watch him narrowly. He’s pouring that nourishing soup into two elegant bowls, and the soup smells good. He’s putting plates of good things on the table—salmon that has never seen a fish farm, salmon that’s never been fed pink dye, salmon that’s swum gloriously free in unpolluted oceans. The eggs are from happy hens—Stella’s happy hens, I feel, the ones Finn and I used to feed for her. The cheese is from Flora McIver’s dairy, my dad grew the lettuces, and the ham came from some orchard-rooting, mud-wallowing porcine princeling—one of those 260-pound Heavy Hogs that Colonel Edwardes (formerly Indian army, now retired) used to breed in that land of lost content, aka my childhood.

  It’s a feast. It’s kind. It’s magnificent—and it’s tragic. Because watching Nick make these preparations so deftly, efficiently, and quietly, I’ve seen the expression in his eyes, and—he can’t disguise it from me, I know him too well—I’ve seen that he too is afflicted with joylessness. He’s a fellow sufferer—it shocks and pains me to realize that. When did that happen? I think. When did Nick change; when did the optimism of our youth get wiped from his face, like an equation wiped from a blackboard?

  Obvious, really. If I hadn’t been running so fast for two decades, I’d have seen it long ago: about ten minutes after his marriage to la Julia.

  “Are you happy, Nick?” I ask him somewhere midfeast. I don’t know why that question suddenly pops out. I’d been meaning to ask him about Finn, I was working my way around to Finn—I know she stays in touch with him and sister Julia. What a foolish question to ask: Are you happy? Who’s ever going to answer that one honestly? “

  Intermittently,” he replies—which I think is pretty honest and certainly more truthful than I’d have been. If he’d asked me, I’d have said, Sure, had the odd setback recently—but I’m over that now, and things are on the up.… Or something similarly fatuous. But I have a compulsion to lie about my own well-being. No one will ever get me to admit to feeling low, let alone anything worse or more permanent. Depression, deep-seated gloom, black misery, loss of all self-confidence, inability to sleep, alcohol dependency, a burning knowledge of my own failures and stupidities, a dragging sense of the world’s essential pointlessness, a weird preoccupation with dope, rope, razors, and barbiturates? Not me, squire. As one door closes, another opens—that’s my motto.

  “When were you sure of being happy, truly happy, Nick?” I ask, and to my surprise, because I’m expecting him to change the subject, Nick actually gives the matter some thought—as if the issue’s been on his mind lately. He sits opposite me: late forties, dark haired, handsome, grave, measured, considerate, and innately well mannered. He’s graying at the temples, and that enhances his good looks. The good man, the good doctor: I can imagine how relieved his patients must feel the first time they set eyes on him. The women would be attracted to him; women invariably are. And no matter how ill you were, he’d inspire hope. Even if a cure eluded him, you’d know the care would be exemplary, right to the end—an end he’d ensure was both gentle and dignified.

  Nick frowns. “Well,” he begins, “we were both happy as children, obviously.”

  I let the “obviously” go. Nick grew up in a large Georgian house, with devoted, cultured parents. He took a scholarship to an illustrious school where he excelled. He took another scholarship to Imperial College, London, where he gained the top first of his year in medicine. He always had clean clothes, clean hair. His father healed the sick. His mother ran the Women’s Institute, the local Tory Party, and the parish. They listened to concerts on the wireless. They possessed books. They knew the difference between right and wrong. Mrs. Marlow, for example, knew that it was wrong for a lovesick fourteen-year-old boy to buy a bottle of Woolworth’s scent as a birthday gift for Finn Mortland. No, he must make the right choice. It must be something impersonal and appropriate. I took that advice. I bought a book token. Thirty years later, I still regret it.

  Dr. and Mrs. Marlow didn’t drink, other than a glass of sherry or wine on high days and holidays. Unlike Gran, they didn’t overdo the Mackeson’s, and unlike Gran, they didn’t believe in corporal punishment—so demeaning. High-minded and superb: no five bob a week put aside for a decent funeral, no blowing half Joe’s weekly wage on a flutter on the horses. No ducking or diving or buying on tick; no filching, nicking, scrimping, and saving. No tiny, pinching, wheedling, tyrannous Gran; no sad, mourning, isolated father. No nits, no ringworm, no agony over the accent, the clothes, the table manners… Shall I remind Nick that our childhoods, however golden in retrospect, were somewhat dissimilar? I stay silent. Nick is dear to me. He is loyal and always has been. I think of sitting by that lake at the Abbey, Nick fishing for perch, me fishing for shark. Yes, Nick, we were happy then. We were. Definitely.

  “You were ‘happy’ at Cambridge. I was, at Imperial. It’s a devalued word, anyway.” Nick is still working his way through the waste of decades. His frown deepens. “And after that, when we shared a flat. At work… well, at work, I’ve always been…”

  “Dedicated” is the word he’s looking for. He doesn’t use it. Instead, with customary modesty, he gives a shrug. “Work helps,” he continues awkwardly (Nick doesn’t like talking about himself and must be out of practice, living with Julia). “I can make a difference to people’s lives, at least sometimes I can. When I’m working, I’m absorbed, I have to be—so happiness or unhappiness are irrelevant, really.”

  I can’t bear to look at his face. I stare at the table. Have I made a difference to people’s lives? Well now, I’ve written words that are lodged in people’s brains, words they’ll never get rid of. Ye
s, I’m there, in the lumber rooms of people’s minds, muddled up with snatches of Shakespeare, dirty songs, comedy catchphrases, Wordsworth’s daffodils, and football scores; huddled up with Elvis and the Fab Four and that obscenity “My Way.” I’m there in the rubble, along with movie clips, wise saws, quips, quotes, politicians’ lies, porno pix, and royal scandals. Sorry, but no one who’s heard it will ever forget the Nicey-Spicey jingle, however devoutly he or she may wish to—and guess who wrote those immortal lyrics? You’re never alone with a Strand; naughty but nice; Vorsprung durch Technik, as they say in Germany. You’ve been Tango’d; That way/This way; Labour isn’t working; go to work on an egg; shall I show you fear in a handful of dust?

  Yes, along with my peers, I’ve contributed to the collective cultural soup. Oh, and shifted a lot of product, kept the global economy ticking over, obviously. Who put the consumer in the consumerist society? Who helps you shop till you drop? Who reignites your desires when they’re in danger of dying? I do. Or I used to do, until I just couldn’t fucking well go on, because it was such shite and so shaming.

  “And apart from work?” I prompt, because it’s necessary to keep Nick talking. If he stops, he might start questioning me, we might get round to the subject of me—and that’s the last thing I want.

  “When I married,” he says, rising to fetch some fruit and turning away so I can’t see his face, can’t read his eyes. “When my children were born…”

  His sits down again. There’s a silence. Nick’s two children are separated by a gap of years that may or may not be significant. His daughter, Fanny, was born seven months after his wedding and must now be about twenty. There were some problems with Fanny, though I’m vague as to the details. She dropped out after a year at Oxford, went abroad, found herself again while in Sudan or Yucatán—this seems to be the modern way—and then returned to university. Yes, she’s now at one of those universities women like Julia consider safe substitutes for Oxbridge, universities such as Durham or Edinburgh. Then there’s nine-year-old Tom. So, does Nick’s remark mean that he was last happy nine years ago—or does it mean nothing? I notice he skipped past his marriage pretty fast—and that doesn’t surprise me. No doubt he had good reasons for marrying Julia, but I’m certain—I’ve always been certain—that they didn’t include being in love with her.