David's Sisters

by Forsyth, Moira;

  Moira Forsyth was born in Kilmarnock and educated in Aberdeen. She has lived in London and Morpeth and now in the Scottish Highlands. She has published three other novels and a collection of poems.

  Also by Moira Forsyth

  Fiction

  Waiting for Lindsay

  Tell Me Where You Are

  The Treacle Well

  Poetry

  What the Negative Reveals

  DAVID’S SISTERS

  Moira Forsyth

  Published in Great Britain and the United States of America

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  Dochcarty Road

  Dingwall

  IV15 9UG

  Scotland

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This edition published by Sandstone Press in 2014

  First published by Hodder and Stoughton in 2000

  © Moira Forsyth 2000

  The moral right of Moira Forsyth to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

  ISBNe: 978-1-910124-21-5

  Cover design by Cover by Raspberryhmac Creative Type

  Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore

  For Dorothy

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  ‘See this photograph? There, that’s my mother, Faith, coming up the path between the lilac trees. It’s not a good photograph – the sun is behind her, so you can’t see her face.’

  Eleanor was kneeling amongst packed cardboard boxes, with the helpless expression of someone who has meant to get through a lot today, but has instead spent the morning re-reading old letters, trawling the past.

  She looked down at the photograph in her hand. ‘She’s so small and slender you might think she was a boy in those trousers, with her open-necked shirt, but it was how she dressed. All the other mothers wore skirts and jumpers.’ She spread out the faded snaps like a fan on the floor. ‘It’s the garden at Pitcairn. I found this packet of photographs tucked away in an envelope at the bottom of a box of books. Look, here’s one of all of us – all except my father. He must have taken it. I look about nine or ten, don’t I? My fringe is too long, and I’m frowning. That’s Marion just behind me, and David of course. Two well-behaved sisters, standing together staring at the camera, and David, refusing to be the right way up, trying to walk on his hands.’

  Eleanor gathered up the remaining photographs, tapping them together like a bunch of cards. ‘I associate that day with Aunt Alice, for some reason. And the fire – did I tell you about the fire at the Mackies’? In the barn? That was the big drama of our childhood – well, it seemed like it at the time. I must have told you. Anyway, it had been really hot, and I think this day, the day the photos were taken, it was thundery. There was a storm in the afternoon, and everyone said, if only it had happened the night before, the fire wouldn’t have taken hold. Maybe it was Alice’s camera, she doesn’t seem to be in any of the pictures.’

  She picked out another, looking at it again. ‘Here we all are on the bench at the back door – Aunt Mamie too, so Aunt Alice must have been somewhere about. And David, hanging over the edge, spoiling it again.’

  She sat back on her heels, dreaming, thinking how strange it was that a photograph could tell the truth about a single moment, and yet was no more than another lie in the tight weave of their lives. The false picture.

  ‘What?’ She looked up, startled out of memory. ‘No, you’re right. It’s not a good idea, to go through old photographs at a time like this. It’s only a house move or a death that makes you do it, eh? When there’s more than enough disturbance already.’

  Eleanor tucked the photographs back in their yellow envelope, faded with age, one corner torn.

  ‘Right, that’s that. I’ve had enough of stirring up the past – let’s put them back in the box.’

  1

  Old houses move in the night, attempt to flex tired muscles, creak and crack and moan a little. There is nothing in this, it does not matter; it is even, in its familiarity, reassuring.

  Faith woke from a dream she could not catch as it fled. Something of it was left, a taste in the mouth, a feeling of dismay. John still slept, whistling through his teeth. In a moment, he would begin to snore, and she would nudge him over on his side. The house, the room, were very cold. She listened, wondering what had wakened her – the dream, or a child’s cry? If it were one of the children, another call would come, ‘Mummy,’ thin along the landing, and she would get up and go to see what was wrong. But there was nothing. Only the faint crack of a floorboard, the settling of a window frame, a draught lifting the edge of a rug. Cold, she edged nearer to her husband, but could not get back to sleep. After a moment or two, she slid out of bed and reached for her dressing gown. She would check the children, to set her mind at rest.

  In the girls’ room, Marion lay on her back straight as a soldier, a curly-haired doll on either side. A gap in the curtains let moonlight in, so the children were visible, but Marion was quite still and made no sound. Faith leaned over the child’s bed, to hear her breathe. How often she had done this, especially in babyhood, those first terrifying nights when the new infant seemed fragile as glass, a whisper away from birth, from death.

  Eleanor was curled round tightly, the bedclothes rumpled, books and teddies fallen on the floor. Faith straightened the bed and eased Eleanor’s thumb out of her mouth. A few seconds later, as her mother left, Eleanor tucked it back in, sucking vigorously in her sleep.

  In David’s room, the curtains were wide, as if he had got up to open them after bedtime (hoping to catch sight of the fox), and on the edges of the window panes frost glittered. Since falling asleep, David had flung off his blankets and lay at right angles to the mattress, one leg hanging over the side. He gazed at her as she settled him again, dark eyes wide but not seeing. ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered, ‘go to sleep.’

  He closed his eyes, and she crossed to the window to draw the curtains. In the garden, moonlight moved among the trees and over the grass. You could imagine you were seeing things in this clear, bluish light under the thick-starred sky. Shadows moved and separated and a thin figure seemed to float over the lawn. Faith thought of the tinker woman who had appeared a few weeks ago, standing at the back door in pouring rain. She had carried a baby, a strong black-haired boy of a year or so, who pulled away from her arms, and kicked. Despite her thin face and bony ankles, she was clearly pregnant, her belly swelling beneath the cord tied round her coat.

  Faith had taken the woman into her warm kitchen, where she had nothing to sell but a few pegs. The boy, set down on the floor, made for the cat, and then the hot oven, ignoring his mother’s whine as she tried to restrain him.r />
  ‘Have you somewhere to stay?’ Faith asked, heart sinking as she saw them out, the woman warmed by tea, a half dozen scones wrapped in greaseproof paper tucked in her bag that was made of sacking, and already wet.

  ‘Aye, we’ve gotten a van,’ the woman said, and made, to Faith’s surprise, a sign of the cross in the air. ‘God bless you, mam, God bless,’ adding some words that were torn away by the wind howling across the yard and whipping up her coat. Underneath she wore a skirt of some thin material that clung to her bare legs. Faith made out only the word ‘bairns’, and nodded, glad her own had stayed in the living room where they were playing, unaware of the tinker woman or her child.

  Later, John said Dan Mackie from the Mains had told him the woman passed this way every year. Her eldest child had died of pneumonia, and there was a man with her, who was rough, but did some labouring work on the farms.

  ‘Dan says he doubts they’re real travelling folk – they mostly stick together. This pair’s on their own.’

  ‘And she’s having another bairn.’

  ‘Aye, well, that’s the way of it.’

  ‘In the town, folk like that …’ Faith hesitated. ‘There are plenty of them, I know. But they don’t come to your door, as a rule.’

  ‘A fine easy time you had of it,’ her husband teased, planting a kiss on her dark head as he went to get in more coal for the fire. ‘Growing up in the fancy West End of Edinburgh.’

  ‘Ach,’ she retorted, ‘it was you wanted to live in the country.’

  They did not pursue this: they had agreed to leave Aberdeen, at the same moment, and for the same reason.

  ‘We want to bring up our family in the country,’ they said to all their friends when they sold the house in the city and found Pitcairn. It was not the real reason.

  Faith sighed, and pulled David’s curtains together. It was not the tinker woman who had crossed the garden, only a shadow. Or perhaps the fox was there, as David believed. Dan Mackie had said there was one about just now. Thinking of her chickens, she was more afraid of this than any tinker, any ghost. There were no ghosts at Pitcairn. The house had lain empty for a year before they moved in. It had damp, and mice, and a pigeon nesting in the loft, but Miss Sutherland, the last of her family to live in the place, had died in a nursing home, leaving nothing of herself more sinister than a wheelbarrow and an old coat in the shed, and in the pantry a dozen stone jars her nieces had not thought worth removing. Faith and John had bought some furniture with the house, not having the means to fill such a large place at once, but all of it was empty except for a button or two in a chest of drawers. So they had started afresh at Pitcairn, cleaning it all the way through, ready for their family.

  Faith turned to look at David asleep and quite still now. She tucked the blankets under him more tightly, then she went out, pulling his door to behind her.

  Along the broad landing, moonlight fell from the open doors of the spare bedrooms. If you did not shut these doors firmly, the handles turned of their own accord, the doors moved across linoleum, and stood open. Empty rooms, chill and sparsely furnished with Miss Sutherland’s mahogany and oak, lay behind these doors. Two years after moving, they could not fill this house, or afford to furnish it anew. Faith knew everyone thought it was she who had chosen the place, insisting on a big house. She was the one brought up in an Edinburgh suburb, sent to a private school, a lass with a talent, a future, who had stooped a little, in marrying John Cairns. But John had wanted this house, he had found and chosen it, wanted the ground that went with it, space, quiet, the distance from both their families. She would rather have stayed in the city. Aberdeen was not Edinburgh, but it meant town life; it was prosperous and busy.

  She stepped across the landing, moving, as she occasionally did even now, like a dancer, placing the ball of her foot down first, turning out her leg from hip to ankle, the instep facing the ceiling, her whole body controlled. Play acting. She pulled her dressing gown round her, and went back to her own room. But as she reached the door, something caught her eye and she halted, drawing in a fine breath. The shadow again, thin and dark, moving down the stairs into the deeper darkness below, where the hall had no outside light but what slipped through the cracks in the closed doors of the downstairs rooms. It was no more than a movement of the heavy curtains over the landing window, vanished into blackness, lost. I know who you are, Faith told the shadow. You’re too late.

  A decision had been made, with which everyone agreed. There was no going back, for the shadow in the garden, or the one on the stair, or for Faith herself. She closed the bedroom door and got into bed again.

  Once, when Marion was eleven and Eleanor and David nine and seven, Aunt Mamie and Aunt Alice came to look after them. Their parents were going to be away for two nights.

  ‘Why do they always appear at the worst possible moment?’ Faith cried, dusting flour from her hands when Marion came to tell her that the Ford Anglia was coming up the drive. It was a new car, but Dad said the gear box would wear out in six months, the way Mamie drove. ‘Go and help them take their bags in.’ Faith was making a pie for them all to have at tea-time, when she and John had left. I’ll be through in a minute.’

  Marion and Eleanor went out of the back door and ran round the side of the house. It was mid-summer, and the tubs at the front door were full of red geraniums and trailing lobelia, lavender and white. The breeze that drove thick clouds fast across the sky swept up Mamie’s scarf as she emerged from the car, breathless with the effort of getting the pair of them safely all the way from Aberdeen.

  ‘Now then, let me see you?’ She stood Marion and Eleanor back to back. ‘What a pair – grown six inches every time! And where’s Davy?’

  ‘Out with Stanley. Stanley’s his best friend,’ Marion amplified.

  ‘In the woods I bet,’ Eleanor added.

  Mamie had a cream leather suitcase and several other bags, including a hat box. Alice had a brown suitcase, and that was all. There was a pot plant still to come from the recesses of the Ford Anglia, a box of biscuits, a parcel from the butcher Mamie favoured (a little slimy, a drip of blood through the brown paper – Eleanor would not carry this), a Dundee cake in a tin and a box of chocolates.

  ‘I’ve plenty here for them to eat,’ Faith said, offended, when Marion and Eleanor deposited all this food on the kitchen table.

  ‘Ach, I’m sure thae bairns eat you oot a house and hame.’ Mamie came into the kitchen and took off her hat. Under it, her fluffy hair had gone flat, so she ruffled it up again, standing in front of the tiny mirror pinned to the wall by the back door. (This was the glass they got on a stool to glance in to see they were ‘tidy’ before they set off for school.) ‘Dearie me, what a sicht.’

  ‘You’re fine,’ Alice said. She had come in silently, unnoticed in all the commotion. She and Faith looked at each other and nodded, but did not hug or kiss. Alice was not a hugging sort of aunt. Yet the girls were drawn to her and followed her about, watching, listening, asking questions. Davy hung around Mamie, who always had sweets in her pockets. This time, he made off as soon as he’d got his packet of Smarties and chocolate bar, to share them with Stanley, down in their den beyond the apple trees.

  Later, all three children stood at the front door with their aunts, and waved as their parents drove away. They too, had a new car, and what the children envied most of all was this journey in the blue Morris Oxford. They had not been further than Sunday School yet.

  ‘When will they be back?’ Eleanor tugged Mamie’s sleeve.

  ‘Sunday,’ Alice said, ‘before tea-time.’ David picked up the stick that went everywhere with him, and ran along the side of the house, scraping it on the wall.

  Mamie put her arm round Eleanor’s shoulders and squeezed. She smelled of sweet perfume and of the mints she sucked because of her heartburn. ‘Dinna you fret. You’ve got your aunties to look after you – we’ll hae a fine time, eh?’ Eleanor wriggled away, and Mamie popped another mint in her mouth. ‘Oh my, it’s gie
in me gyp the day.’

  ‘You eat too fast,’ Alice said.

  ‘What’s heartburn anyway?’ Eleanor asked, following Mamie along the hall to the kitchen. She imagined Mamie’s heart bursting into flames inside her, then settling down to a deep red glow. No wonder it hurt.

  ‘It’s my auld enemy,’ Mamie said. ‘Now then, who’s going to be a help getting these dishes done? Where does your mother keep her apron?’

  Alice had unhooked it from the back of the cupboard door, and made a start already. Marion stood by with a tea towel, Eleanor behind her to put things away. Mamie sat down at the kitchen table and took out her cigarettes.

  In the afternoon, Alice weeded the front borders, showing Marion what to do, and Mamie lay on a deck chair on the lawn, reading The People’s Friend. Eleanor sat beside her, making a daisy chain.

  This is the longest one I’ve ever done.’

  ‘Right you are.’ But when she held it up a little later, to show how she was getting on, Mamie had fallen asleep with her mouth open, and her knees had moved apart, revealing a pink petticoat with lace, and the tops of her fat thighs where the stockings ended. Eleanor tried not to look.

  On the first night, Mamie told the bed-time story. David came into the girls’ room and sat on Marion’s bed, leaning against Mamie’s comfortable bulk, rubbing his face on her fluffy cardigan. Her stories, like her conversation, were about herself.

  ‘Och, I canna mak things up,’ she said. ‘It’s Alice has the imagination for a that. I’ll tell you about when I was married, will I?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marion and Eleanor, although they had heard this before. The story was full of descriptions of Mamie’s wedding clothes, and Uncle Tom Marshall, whom David had never met and Marion and Eleanor could not really remember. Mamie was soon in full flight, and did not, fortunately, hear David muttering ‘Not that again.’