The Sisters Mortland

by Sally Beauman

  There are also the poems, which break my heart, because they’re often bad poems, and they’re invariably long ones. There are the stories, which last forever and have a point invisible to everyone except Maisie. And then there are the nuns—I don’t even want to think about the nuns. Get Maisie started on that, and you’re there for the next century: saints’ days, abstruse rituals, niggly degrees of sinfulness, the Office of the Dead, subdivided into 350 million minikin particles, into psalms, nocturns, canticles, and more canticles… It’s pitiable, yes, but it’s also insupportable.

  I know how Maisie persuaded rich cousin Edmund to write that £2,000 check, I decide, looking at her bright, tight expression. Everyone else was astonished: But, Maisie, what did you say to him? How did you persuade him? You mean he handed it over, just like that? Pretty blind, I feel. I reckon Maisie just launched herself on a few lists. Half an hour of the stars, half an hour of Zeus and Calliope, ten minutes of Hiawatha or (her latest) Samson Agonistes, and anyone would cave in. Given how loaded Edmund is, and how desperate to escape he must have been, I’m surprised it wasn’t more.

  I know that Maisie is like a hermit crab, deeply secured inside an alien shell, scuttling about the seabed in frantic search of nutrition. I know she can’t help the hellish taxonomy that afflicts her. Classification is the only way she can impose order on a world whose chaos I assume she fears. I know that none of the medication, which keeps changing, ever works. They’ve now put her on some growth hormone, and that isn’t working, either. I know I ought to listen more, help more, simply be available and be kinder. But I can’t. I shrink from the task. Her lists inflict boredom so intense, it’s homicidal.

  There’s another problem, too: Sometimes, trying to attend to the strange deadpan linear stories, for example, those stories drenched with finicky details, I’ve felt my own grasp of the world start to slacken. Listen to Maisie long enough, and everything unravels. You start thinking, Hey, maybe she’s on to something; this is starting to add up now, maybe I should look at things the way she does.… And then you’re in trouble. The doors of perception open, and it’s eyeless in Gaza time. You’re as blind, as batty, as Maisie, and you can’t understand anything.

  I’m not going to let that happen again. My vision is twenty-twenty, thank you, Maisie: I trust my own eyes and my own viewing-screen way of seeing things. So I’m not going to get drawn into a discussion about the vagaries of English or the number of angels that can polka on a pinhead. I’ll help Stella wash up, and then—work to do—I’m out of here. There’s no point in remaining since Finn will be leaving shortly. Gramps is in charge of Maisie today. Stella and Finn, armed with lists of kitchen equipment and food supplies, are driving to London and will spend the day there. It’s a cookery school shopping spree.

  So, cut to the rear drive, and—I have to try to track the time sequence—it’s maybe half an hour later. “Soho, all those wonderful French and Italian grocers,” Stella is saying, approaching the prehistoric Wolseley. It’s years since she’s been to London, even longer since she had money to spend. She’s flushed with nerves, almost trembling with excitement. “Fortnum and Mason,” Gramps says wistfully, helping them into the car. “Watch the clutch, Stella dear, it’s getting a bit bolshie.”

  “Bye, Finn, safe journey,” I call, and the car jerks forward. In the passenger seat, Finn turns to look at me. Her face is imprinted on my mind, as she looked then, that bright morning. There’s no hint of duplicity: Her expression is frank and joyous, lit with anticipation. Her skin glows; her dark blue eyes meet mine; she blows me a kiss and waves her hand. My own Final Finn: I’ll never see her this care-free again.

  Behind us, Maisie stands in the hall doorway. She also waves. Her face wears its habitual fixed, alert expression. Did she know, then, what she intended to do later that day? Had she planned it already, selecting this date because, for once, Stella would be absent? Or was Maisie planning it then, as the car moved off down the driveway?

  Adjust focus. She appears to be listening to something I can’t hear. I ruffle her hair affectionately, and then, feeling repentant, I go to give her a hug. I draw back just in time: Maisie does not like to be hugged; even Stella is barred from embracing her.

  “Are you listening to the nuns, Maisie?” I ask; she probably is. Those nuns of hers are almost certain to be praying. It’s bound to be time for matins or whatever.

  “Oh no, my nuns have deserted me,” she replies. “I don’t have time for them anymore. They’re sulking. They’re angry with me.”

  “That’s not very Christian,” I reply. Then I ask the wrong question. Instead of asking why these nonexistent nuns are angry, I say, “Nuns shouldn’t sulk, surely, Maisie. Isn’t that a sin?” It’s my first lost opportunity of the day—and there’ll be others.

  She considers this, frowning. “If so, only venal,” she finally replies. “Not mortal. Ten Hail Marys, I should think.” She pauses. “Are you going down to the village today?” I tell her I am. “I hope Bella is feeling much recovered,” she says with studied politeness. “Please give her my sympathies.”

  And taking her grandfather’s hand, she trots inside the house to give him a natural history lesson. She’s launched on the survival of the fittest before they’re past the door. I watch her go through her ritual of crossing the hall. Today, on that chessboard floor, she’s a bishop. She swoops across on a black square diagonal and skids to a halt in the far corner. “Checkmate,” she cries to her eternal invisible opponent.

  Cut, and it’s still early, around nine. I’m leaving for the village; my footsteps crunch on the gravel path that leads from the cloister, past the refectory. There are walls of yew either side of me; the trapped heat bakes my skin and blinds my eyes.

  “Hi, Dan,” calls Lucas several seconds before I’m visible to him. When I round the corner of the refectory, I find him sitting outside on the step, sunning himself like a lizard. Next to him—and this surprises me because she rarely rises before noon—is Julia. They’re sharing a cigarette—no, a spliff, I realize as its scent reaches me. Have I interrupted something?

  I can’t tell. Both are immobile, sun worshipping; there’s no sign of furtiveness, yet I sense concealment and secrets—as I always do when I catch them alone. Julia’s position suggests abandonment. She is stretched out in a provocative, sun-sated attitude. I look at this miniskirted Danaë, at the lovely, luxuriant lines of her body: bare feet, bare legs, golden throat exposed, eyes closed, Rhinegold hair tousled; an arm weighted with silver bangles. In the distance, the combine drones. Did she spend the night here?

  Through the doorway, in the shadows of the refectory, I can just see The Sisters Mortland, propped against the wall. Julia’s painted double seems to beckon mockingly—I’ve felt that since the painting was first unveiled a week ago. That illusion—the painted Julia is not beckoning—angers me in some obscure way. “Want some?” Lucas inhales and holds the spliff out to me. Julia sits up: I’m inspected by two amused pairs of eyes.

  “No thanks, have to work,” I say. “It’s one of my earn-somemoney days.”

  “I’m impressed,” Julia says in a dreamy manner that may or may not mean she’s stoned. “Is it straw baling today or mucking out? Barman at the Green Man, doling out money to pensioners at the post office? Mending tractors?” She yawns. “You are just so fucking industrious, Dan.”

  “And you are just so fucking lazy, Julia,” I reply.

  And I hate her in that moment; hate her with an intensity that surprises me. I hate her for her unfailing ability to rile me. I hate her because Julia and I are alike in many ways, and we’re in the same predicament. We’re both eager to escape, both hungry for success; we’re both about to go to London, both about to seek work—and neither of us has any money.

  I hate her because I know I’m going to struggle while Julia will breeze past these difficulties. There were difficulties when she announced that she was taking that year’s postgraduate course at Berkeley. They didn’t check her then, and
they won’t check her now. On that occasion, the airfare was wheedled out of her grandfather’s dwindling savings; a friend of a friend found her somewhere to stay. The obliging friend was male and well connected; he was an editor on the San Francisco Chronicle, with valuable contacts in the world of journalism and media studies. He provided a rent-free room, gifts, and an entrée. Once she’s in London, once she’s a journalist, expect more of the same. When a woman is as beautiful as Julia, some obliging man will always help her on her way—and Julia will see nothing wrong in that. “Don’t preach at me,” she said to me once when I voiced a similar criticism. “Fuck off, Dan. If you think being a woman is an advantage, you’re a fool. It isn’t. I intend to play by my rules.”

  I angered her then, and I’ve angered her now. You’d have to know Julia very well to see that—but I do know her well. “Oh, come on,” she says. “You’re not that hard up, Dan. I know about your windfall. Have you heard about it, Lucas? Bella told me the other day—how Joe had been saving up all these years in a secret post office account, how he presented it to you last week, Dan, and made a speech wishing you well. I was touched: all those hard-earned shillings, twenty years of putting by. A hundred pounds, Bella said. I call that generous. That could keep one going in London for weeks. A month, if one was stingy. It would buy me at least four dresses. I wish I had a hundred pounds.”

  “Start charging,” I tell her, smiling. I walk on. The combine eats wheat in the distance.

  And cut, it’s around noon, three hours later or so—and I’m still aching with anger. My heart’s pumping some thick venom along my arteries. There’s a hot mist clouding my vision, and all I can think about is punishing Julia. I will not forgive her for what she said. Joe earns nine pounds seven and sixpence a week, with two pounds coming straight off the top for rent. I can remember how he looked, bashful and excited, when he handed me that post office book. I can remember the halting speech he made—and the guilt it induced. Joe has no concept of how expensive London is, and I’m not about to enlighten him. He doesn’t understand how long it may take me to get a job: I’ve written to thirty-five advertising agencies, and so far—nothing.

  To Joe, a hundred pounds is a fortune. To have that mocked by Julia, to have my dad ridiculed by Julia: I can’t stand it. I’ll make her regret those words, and I’ve spent three hours, maybe four, thinking how to do it. Meanwhile, wounded and vicious, unable to punish her yet, I’ve been punishing anyone and anything that comes into range.

  I’ve punished Gran by erupting into the cottage and yelling at her. “Just don’t tell Julia anything,” I’ve shouted. “Keep our private life private—is that too much to ask? For fuck’s sake, Gran, how could you do that?”

  And Gran, who’s just had the last of her teeth out, who’s used to men twice her size flailing their arms and yelling—she grew up with it; she married it—Gran doesn’t budge from her chair by the stove. The temperature in the kitchen is infernal. The tarot’s on the table; her swollen jaw is wrapped up in a white handkerchief. She looks ridiculous—and she’s in an evil mood. “Don’t you shout at me,” she replies with indistinct savagery. “I had enough of that from your granddad. He was a mean bastard when he had the hump—just like you, you ungrateful little sod. I’ll say what I like when I like. It’s something, one hundred pounds. My gums ache. Bugger off out of here.”

  Next I punish some windows. That’s what I’m doing today, cleaning windows. I wring out the shammy and imagine it’s Julia’s neck. I rub the glass panes; however hard I rub, Julia’s face reappears in them. The sunlight reflects like daggers. I clean the windows at the rector’s house, a grim, cost-efficient bungalow built by a failing Church of England on an economy drive. Then I attack the Marlows’: I lug a ladder out of the garage and punish it. I punish the bricks of the Old Rectory by slamming the ladder against them. I punish the bucket, the water, the sponge. The windows here are tall Georgian sashes, all with fiddly, stupid astragals. Anyone who admires them should try cleaning them. Twelve panes in every one of those twenty windows, inside and out. It’s as endless as Maisie’s Office of the Dead: 480 painful panes, and I punish every single one.

  I clean the drawing room windows—that graceful, faded room where I was dissuaded from Taboo. I clean the windows of the study, a room where the ghosts of yesteryear’s learned clerics still linger. I clean the dining room windows. It was at this oval mahogany table with its linen place mats, its bewildering array of silver cutlery, that I learned not to hold a knife like a pen, that salt belonged on the side of a plate, not sprinkled all over everything with Gran’s and Joe’s gay abandon. I clean the bedroom windows; I clean Dr. and Mrs. Marlow’s room—they sleep in neat twin beds, with no-nonsense candlewick bedspreads and fat cotton eiderdowns. Do they still have sex? Did they ever have sex? It’s unimaginable. I clean Nick’s room, two windows; it’s a corner room, like mine at the Abbey. It’s in stasis; there’s evidence that a man sleeps here, some of the books, for instance, but it’s still a boy’s room. Maybe Mrs. Marlow prefers it that way. It’s unnaturally tidy. The bed is freshly made up—and that’s because Nick is expected back today. He’s been working the night shift at University College Hospital for three weeks, Mrs. Marlow’s already told me. It’s the first thing she told me, but then she lives for Nick’s return and dies a little in his absences.

  Yes, he’s been on the night shift in Casualty, and it seems to spill over into the day shift, so he’s been working a twenty-two-hour day for three weeks, if you can believe his mother. Now he has two days off, and although he’d said he’d stay in London and catch up on his sleep, Nick has changed his plans. He will be on the four p.m. train; he’ll be here in time for tea. When I cleaned the kitchen windows, his mother was baking fairy cakes.

  Stuck in the bloody past, I think, starting to punish Nick’s windows on the inside. When Nick was six or seven, yes, he liked fairy cakes; so did I, always wolfishly hungry when I came here to tea. But for a medical student, twenty-five years old, suffering from fatigue, escaping too many close encounters with human misery? But then, who knows, maybe cakes are just what he wants. Maybe such routines are soothing. Nick appreciates home comforts; he’s good to his mother; he returns to Wykenfield at every opportunity.

  It’s three weeks since I’ve seen him. He went back to London the day the Mortlands went to Elde, the day Lucas took off for Cambridge. Why did Lucas take off for Cambridge? He said he was there to rent a room, for when he leaves the Abbey. He said he walked and thought and saw how to finish the portrait—but do I believe that? He did return two days later and began painting feverishly, but is that the whole story? Has he got some woman there? Is he screwing Julia or Finn or both of them? Why can’t I ask him? Because he won’t answer, and I’m too proud. I chuck the sponge in the bucket of water and rest my head against the burning panes. My head aches. My heart aches. I look at this museum of Nick’s past and my own: two bald teddy bears, annual school photographs, Nick instantly recognizable in even the earliest ones, the village primary ones. Who’s that black imp peering over his shoulder? It’s me, it’s that heathen Gypsy trash Danny—pikey Danny, the Gyppo boy.

  A shelf of Meccano models, Airfix and balsa-wood planes suspended from the ceiling—there’s a Spitfire, a Hurricane, a Dornier, a Stuka, and a Messerschmitt: I made that one. A bookcase laden with worn Biggles, Kipling, Ransome, Conan Doyle, and Just William, more poetry than I’d have expected from Nick and more novels, too. Numerous medical textbooks: I pull one out of the shelf; it’s an anatomy textbook. I open it at random. I’m looking at a colored diagram of the female reproductive system, and—what a piece of work is a woman—what a piece of sublime plumbing: scarlet womb, two black-ribbed ovaries joined up like headphones, navy blue vagina…

  Let’s freeze that frame. I can remember staring at that diagram, but what was I feeling? Anger—yes, the anger was still seething away. But there’s something else, too, and my retrospective eye can’t quite read it. Misery, probably, because optimism had
leached out of the day. Maybe bewilderment. Fear of the future, of not finding work, of failing. Confusion, hurt, and jealousy, sexual frustration, the usual rich stew… but there might have been something more.

  Looking at that explicit diagram, did I see a way to punish Julia? Or did I simply close the book and return to cleaning windows? The windows at the Old Rectory overlook gravestones.

  And cut, I’ve finished those 480 panes. Mrs. Marlow is tucking two ten-shilling notes into my shirt pocket; she finds it embarrassing to put money in my hand. “I’ve made some cakes—I expect you’d like one?” she says. “A sandwich and a glass of something cool, perhaps? I’m so grateful to you. What a splendid job you’ve done.” She hesitates. “You’ll be off to London soon. I’m going to miss you, Danny.”

  I stare at her. In the retrospect viewing screen, she’s wearing a tweed suit, because she usually was. But she can’t have been, not that day, not that last day—it was far too hot. One of her Horrock’s frocks, then: upper-middle-class summer uniform. I redress her in waisted cotton, full skirt, short sleeves, modest neckline, string of pearls, pale pink lipstick, graying hair, style unaltered since 1950. I’ve just understood something. This woman, this intelligent, mildly snobbish, and well-meaning woman, is lonely. Her family believes she married down and could have done better than a country GP. She’s a graduate who’s never used her degree. She’s aging; despite running the parish, the Women’s Institute, and the local Tory Party, she’s overqualified and underemployed, and she’s missing her son. She’d like to sit with me, in her kitchen, and talk about Nick. Since she can’t talk to him, I’m the next best thing. I’m her protégé. Here, as at the Abbey, I’m a surrogate son.