by Evie Wyld
‘There’s too much to think about.’ It is so typical of my sister to do that – forgive.
‘Look,’ she says, in the tone I have heard her use for travel agents and shop assistants. ‘Dom and I weren’t going to last. He’s a fuckwit. Which doesn’t make it all right that you did what you did, but I don’t want you going around thinking you were the only element that ended us.’
‘Should I have told you?’
Katherine shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter. This is how it is.’
I dig my back into the wall and we both look out at the deserted golf course.
‘I can’t settle on what to think about.’
My inner squeak is silent.
I pull up my knees and rest my forehead on them.
Katherine places her hand on my knee and moves it in circles. It is the kindest thing. The dog wanders in and lies underneath the piano.
In the night I spy on Katherine in the bed next to me – the bed Dad or Christopher would have slept in as children. Two sisters sleeping in the beds of two brothers. It’s like a riddle where the answer is something annoying like Romeo is a goldfish or they were killed with an icicle. I wonder if Christopher ever spied on Dad to make sure he was breathing. In the moonlight I see Katherine as stiff as a mannequin, thin fingers laced over her stomach, eyes open to the night air. In the morning she will be pristine, competent.
The funeral is at St Baldred’s, a strange little church with a large monkey puzzle tree outside, bearing a plaque to a vicar lost long ago to the sea. Inside, they have an empty coffin for show – John’s ashes are in the boot room at the house – Pauline asked that we look after them. They came in the purple plastic container, which Mum has put in a supermarket Bag for Life, a confusing message. The church is small and half filled, the only people I know are Pauline and Alistair, but I recognise a number of faces from town, mostly very old. John was eighty-three by two months. There are photographs of him up in the church; in one he is a child and stands with Pauline and his other sister Elspeth, Dad and Christopher’s mother, who died young from bad lungs. I get that creepy feeling – the one where you look at a long-dead woman and know that she has the requisite materials of creation within her to make your existence possible.
Christopher missed us at the house, and it’s not until we’re all settled in the church that he appears in the doorway. He and my mother kiss and then there is a moment of shyness from both of them. I wonder if it has been there all along.
He sits next to Mum and the backs of their hands touch on the bench. I catch Katherine’s eye and she raises an eyebrow, shrugs.
Maggie has come. She is sitting in the front row, even. She has been implanted within our family, and though, when I think about it too hard, it seems strange and unnatural, in general it seems correct. She is excellent at talking to Pauline, I can hear Pauline going on at her in front of me.
‘Alistair may go golfing later on this afternoon –’ she pronounces golfing to rhyme with coughing – ‘and then we’ve booked supper at the marina. We had Nigel’s wedding there – aeons ago now.’
‘Who is Nigel?’ Maggie asks, and it occurs to me Maggie is actually interested. They bow their heads closer to her. For them too she has slotted in.
‘Oh, our son,’ says Pauline, and with pride she adds, ‘a solicitor.’
Alistair arrives having parked the car; he lumbers somewhat. Maggie stands to shake his hand.
‘Trouble is parking around these parts now,’ he says loudly, over his deafness. He doesn’t let go of her hand, though he can have absolutely no idea who she is.
‘Oh, I know,’ says Maggie. ‘Did you try the seabird centre? They don’t check their pay and display tickets.’
‘Good tip,’ Alistair says, touching his finger to his forehead. These people I try hard to avoid are kind. I know that I will continue to avoid them. But there it is, they are nice. I think of them taking Dad and Christopher their sugar mice, so long ago. Something in a sea of nothing.
The vicar fluffs up by talking about Lazarus. Mum whispers, ‘Idiot,’ loud enough that I can hear and Christopher smiles. When the vicar has wrapped up his part by inviting us all to take a leaflet about the Alpha course after the ceremony, Christopher gets up and talks. I don’t hear any of what he says; instead I play back the speech he gave at Dad’s funeral.
‘My little brother,’ he said. ‘The wild man of south London.’ There was a murmur of amusement.
‘Oh yes,’ Pauline had confirmed.
‘Quite,’ John had agreed.
‘I remember the day Michael was born. I remember our mother, Elspeth, lying in a hospital bed, and she said, “Look what I’ve brought you.” And really at the time I would have preferred a copy of the Eagle, or a Dinky Toy.’ Another rumble of approval. ‘But then after she had left us, I came to see what it meant to have a brother. It was he who at seven years old suggested we might ride the pigs in the neighbouring farm in Dummer, and he who saved me a thrashing from the farmer, making him laugh by falling face first in the mud. We had some delicate explaining to do when we arrived home. Nanny was not pleased.’ Pauline had clapped her hands together. ‘And then later, he came to board with me at Fort Gregory, and though one would not call our years there happy exactly, they were always entertaining times with Michael. One rather feels this is not the time to bring up how he set Matron’s skirts alight, nor how he became a legendary thief, collecting cigars, measures of brandy and once the housemaster’s switch, which we ritually burned together.’
‘Mmmm,’ Alistair had said, as though being told of the specials at a restaurant.
‘A little further on he was a boy full of secrets. He weathered all kinds of contraband searches by making a false bottom to a can of fizzy pop. In there he hid at least an ounce of weed, and he was always good for cigarettes and of course his prized high-quality LSD.’
Christopher spoke with a smile. The vicar had laughed loudly and uncomfortably as Pauline, John and Alistair had nodded and mumbled agreeably.
‘Of course later in life he set his eyes on the birds, and never really took his eyes off them. His affection for the gannets of the Bass Rock, the white ghosts.’ Here Christopher had looked at Mum. There was something unknown to me there that explained the whole lot of us.
Christopher had straightened himself, wiped his eye with a red-spotted handkerchief.
‘And I like to think, although you will have to allow me a certain amount of sentimentality here, I like to think our mother has simply come to take back what she brought me that day in the hospital.’ There was a gust of emotion from someone behind me but I didn’t look. ‘My little brother Michael was a kind soul. He was a little broken from life’s eccentricities, but he was deeply humane and quietly funny, and I feel the loss of his presence in the world. I shall always think of him fishing in the rock pools at North Berwick with a net, a small bear, Wilfred, tucked in his coat pocket.’ There was a small movement to my left, which I took to be a cat streaking by, but when I looked I saw Mrs Hamilton, her face of bone and paper, a red handkerchief held up to her mouth.
There are drinks and what Aunt Bet would have called ‘a spread put on’ back at the house, but there are not many of us after Alistair has gone for his golf and Pauline for a lie-down. What is missing is John’s commentary on the buffet. Maggie takes around platters of vol-au-vents and disgusting curried eggs, and makes sure everyone’s glass is topped up. It’s as if she has become the good daughter and it means that Katherine can sit quietly and not fix anything. I find it hard to take my eyes off Mum and Christopher. I wonder if there was ever a possibility of a three-parent family. Whenever one of them has to talk to someone else, it is with effort they drag their eyes from each other. Christopher has the same eyes as Dad, as me. Mum leaves the room for a moment, and Christopher comes and sits next to me and seems as though he will say something profound. He is searching for the words. ‘Deborah quit,’ he says.
‘Oh – oh God, I’m sorry, was it—’
‘It’s absolutely fine, there are more estate agents than houses. I just had to give her a try, you know – she had such a rough go of it, what with Dad going off and leaving them.’ He draws breath to speak, but from the direction of the front door someone is calling my sister’s name. Bellowing it. The small party of us grow silent. Katherine is glued to the grey sofa. Dom stands in the open doorway.
‘Oh dear,’ says someone, like a child has spilled a glass of water.
In one hand Dom holds a hammer. When he sees me he smashes it against the wall, and the plaster falls onto the floor.
‘Dom,’ I say, but he doesn’t hear me, calls Katherine’s name again.
‘You WILL talk to me,’ he bellows. I feel my heart beat through my spine. He does not see me. He sees Katherine, she is small and dark on the sofa. He begins to stride towards her. Christopher stands, and my mother comes out of the kitchen. She moves to intercept him, Christopher moves to stand with her. Mum holds a knife.
Maggie walks quietly and calmly past us all, towards Dom. Too late I make a grab for her and she puts her hands on Dom’s shoulders and whispers something into his ear, and as she does it she takes the hammer from him. I can see she is speaking quickly, and Dom’s face changes, the colour drains from it, he is almost like a boy again, not an ape, and when Maggie pulls away, a light smile on her lips, he looks around him like he is seeing something for the first time, and he backs away, terror on his face. At the garden gate he starts to run. Maggie places the hammer on the tallboy, and on her way to the kitchen, picks up a spent tray of sandwiches.
‘What did you say to him?’ Katherine asks from behind me. Her face is white.
Maggie shrugs. ‘Just said it’s not the time or place.’ She winks at me. Through my tights I rub at the spot where my scab used to be.
II
Those first months after Antony died, and the birds came thick and fast to her window, Ruth had felt certain. She had known what she was there for, she was there to interpret the birds, just like the Pope was there as the mouthpiece to God. She had known this, and yet she had also known it wasn’t for her mother or father or even for Alice that Antony spoke through the birds, it was for her alone. She was the way in which his elements remained in the world. If she had a baby one day, it would be a boy and she would call him Antony, and then he would speak through the baby. In fact, it had become an urgent worry to her, almost as soon as he died, to have a baby, to create a life, to whisper into the growing child all the secrets of who he was and how they had been together. And one day the child would be able to answer back and would answer back in the voice of her brother. She felt certain of it. She was left with his secrets, told to her alone, and with him gone, they threatened to disintegrate like ash. She had tried first with the curate, who had when she was younger expressed an interest. But when she went to him at eighteen and suggested a union, he turned red, said, ‘Get away from me, I don’t know what you’re talking about, don’t come here again.’ Which had left her confused. She suspected he had been scared off by her boldness. Girls were supposed to be shy and retiring.
For a while she had tried to summon a baby within herself without a man. She sat and thought about Antony and about how the grains of his bones existed somewhere in the world and how they might blow into the sea, and be taken up into the clouds and rained back down, and all of it felt like a magic spell. When nothing happened, her belly sat there, skinny and white and silent, she took herself off to a country fair and met a young man with dark hair who manned the tombola. She picked a ticket out of the box and asked when he finished work.
‘Now, if you’re asking,’ he said, and took her to the hayloft in the next field. Having little idea of how it happened in nature, only that a man was required, Ruth put her hands palm down on the straw and tried to tell just by his touch what was going on.
‘Does it hurt?’ he kept asking, in a hoarse voice.
‘Not in the slightest,’ she said and noted her voice was flat. Perhaps it ought to mimic his a little more, but she found herself very tired, and so just let him do what he would. He seemed not to mind.
Afterwards, he asked, ‘Have you done this much?’
‘Just this once,’ she replied, and he nodded gravely.
‘Well, you’ll want to move about a bit more if you’re going to have a future.’
Perhaps it was a joke, but it didn’t particularly matter to her. She went home and waited. And nothing at all happened.
At the hospital in Edinburgh, in the weeks after the incident on the beach, the walls of her room were duck-egg blue. There was a dressing table, in case she should want to have a sit-down and a long look at herself. It was a different one from the room in which the baby had come out and made no noise, that terrible quiet. She had asked Peter to bring her a drink and he had misunderstood and sent for tea.
‘Can you bring me a bottle of sherry?’ she had asked, and the nurse had overheard, and said, ‘Not with your bleeding.’
A silver kidney dish by her bedside, in case of nausea. Next to that a framed photograph of her and Peter on their wedding day. Peter had brought it in to make the room more homely, he said. He came once a day, stayed until he could bear it no longer – she could see it on his face. And it was convenient to be in Edinburgh, she supposed. If all had gone well for her, the other baby would be a couple of months old now. She felt at times a genuine misery for Peter.
There was a grey television on a brass stand. Two dark blue lamps standing in diagonally opposite corners of the room. The one nearest her lit a framed oval photograph of a young woman in Victorian dress. Who she was wasn’t clear, perhaps that was what Florence Nightingale looked like. Ruth had never seen a picture of her. The image was small but the frame ornate. The table it sat on was covered with a white crochet, seemingly designed specifically for the table, and the table itself was there just to house the framed portrait and its crochet.
On another table, which would be wheeled around and slotted over her when time came to eat, was a squat yellow jug and a vase of chrysanthemums. The jug had hairline cracks in the glaze. There were two chairs in the room, one a pale pink easy chair, the kind that would not have looked out of place in their drawing room. It had, she suspected, a reclining back and also a footstool. The other chair was a modern blocky orange thing, rather more austere and less comfortable. When her parents had visited, her father was able to feel useful by insisting her mother sit in the pale pink, resigning himself to discomfort in the modern chair. Her mother had wept in that chair – weeping was the correct word for it. It made the noise, weep weep weep. And then later as her mother had screwed up her handkerchief, she was able not to weep, but ask instead, What on earth were you thinking, out on those rocks in your condition? and her father had shushed her mother gently. Her mother had left a light mark on the fabric, a weeping stain, where her tear-soaked handkerchief had bled into the grain of the material. Alice had come without Mark and used the modern chair as a surface on which to lay the hamper she had brought from Harrods, inside of it apparently a great list of delicacies, all of which turned Ruth’s stomach to such an extent she had to ask the matron to distribute it among the nurses after Alice had left. Alice had chatted a lot and then she was quiet a long time and held Ruth’s hand and said, It wasn’t meant to be, was it, Puss? When Betty came, she did not use the chairs. She bribed the night sister and came after dark with port and they talked it through, Betty standing at the side of her. They didn’t talk once of Jon Brown, and in fact neither did they talk of the baby.
Betty said, ‘When you’re ready to be at home again, I’ll give you all the help you need,’ and then she read out letters from Christopher, Michael and Bernadette, wishing her well, and hoping she would be home soon. She stayed long enough for two glasses of port and then she hid the bottle and Ruth’s glass in her bedside cabinet.
III
When I find them, Sarah is on top of Father so that I can only see the back of her head. She does not struggl
e. I wish she would struggle. Father’s eyes are closed. Something more than disgust wells up in me, something else. Disappointment run through with nails. I understood that he saw Agnes in her, but she has made him see Mother too.
We were to wed, to have children of our own. To keep Father in his dotage in a room off the parlour, like we had kept Cook. Sarah to pack his pipe for him in the evenings, a child sat on his knee by the fire, a pot steaming with good things to eat. I am ashamed to have had these thoughts, to have held her hand and thought she had them too. The softness of the skin of her cold arm. It is so like a witch to make a man fall in love.
The rain it patters off the leaves. The sky above the trees is lightening with dawn. Still I stand behind them undetected. The stick I hold in my hands is heavy and thick, the kind sawn down to make gateposts. I don’t recall where I found it. A small disgusting noise comes from them. Sarah moans.
The sound the stick makes when it comes down on her head is the sound of digging a spade into thick mud. She is torn off him, and with his eyes open wide in confusion, he scrambles to cover himself, to get away from what is happening.
Sarah looks up at me from where she crouches in the dirt and leaves of the forest floor. A white puckering of her skin at her temple, and then blood flows out, redder even than her hair. She keeps her eyes on mine, but they are not seeing me.
‘If she had lived she would have been just like you,’ she says, in a voice not quite her own. She keeps herself away from the ground, on all fours like she knows to lie down is to die, she sways there, as though in a body of water. I wonder how long she would live, left in this way – if she has some root or tincture she can apply to her poor broken head, some pleading, some suckling with the Devil.
I strike her again across the forehead, and she flips onto her back, surely she is done, but her chest rises and falls fast like a sick animal. Her hands find her belly and her lips move, her eyes as dead as a baitfish. I kneel next to her and put my ear close to her face, to hear the last breaths. All is clear now, I understand what the Brownings had seen in the pig shed. The breath hisses out of her in short bursts, and with the last of them she says, ‘Look. Look, it’s a baby.’ And then her face stills and her hand falls from her belly. I have set free the souls of countless men. I take the small wooden box containing the hare’s teeth from her pocket. When I open it there are the teeth, nothing more special than that, but I keep it, because I must be reminded of empty promises.
