A Tale of Two Sisters

by Anna Maxted

  This caused some disagreement, as Tim wasn’t keen on sitting blindfold, naked, cuffed to a chair for an hour as part of the trying-to-conceive process. He especially wasn’t keen when Sphinx tried to make it a threesome by jumping up and clawing his bottom. Nor was he keen when I made notes. He didn’t like that two hundred thousand young offenders and Aunt Edith would read about our horizontal exploits each month. Tough.

  Whereas I – not wishing to replace my lost baby like you might replace a burst tyre – could visit my doctor, obtain six months’ supply of the contraceptive pill, keep the information to myself, and everyone was happy.

  It didn’t quite work like that. I was happy. It was a strange relief to feel like someone else. It was a nice break from the pain of being me. Maybe Tim was right and I was abnormal for being unable to recover even after the enormous period of five whole months. ‘Where’s your blitz spirit?’ he asked me once, but the truth was, my life was stalled at the moment I saw my dead little girl, and in that sense, time had no meaning for me. The only way I could be, was to be someone else – and so my personality had fractured, the practical half splintering off from Poor Elizabeth Montgomery Did You Hear What Happened To Her in order to survive.

  I liked the reaction from readers – offers of marriage, requests for used knickers, etc. – even if I couldn’t quite bring myself to read the column once it was in print. (The photos exposed a little too much cleavage, the subject matter was a little too coarse for me to stare it in the face.) If I didn’t read it in the magazine, I could pretend it didn’t exist, that it wasn’t me, selling my private life for a bit of notoriety. But Tim wasn’t happy. I wasn’t pregnant. We’d remortgaged twice in six months. Meanwhile he was being nationally humiliated on a regular basis.

  ‘I don’t feel your heart’s in this,’ he said, as I slung on a T-shirt and switched on my computer. He scraped a baked bean out of his belly button. ‘Shouldn’t you be lying on the bed with your legs up the wall, giving the sperm a chance to fertilise?’

  I sighed. ‘Sure,’ I said. I walked back to the bedroom and assumed the position. It was a chance to file my nails, if nothing else.

  Tim watched me with narrowed eyes. ‘I feel this hostility coming off you, and I’m tired of it,’ he said. ‘It’s been five months now. You’re not making it comfortable for me to live in this house. I’m not your partner, I’m part of your job description.’

  ‘You’re not, though, are you?’ I said. ‘I protect your privacy. I change your name to Tom.’

  After this conversation, the sex waned, but that was ok. I did what all good journalists do. I made it up.

  Tim retreated into work, thank goodness.

  I was still angry with Cassie, but anger is like a log fire – it requires laborious effort to keep it burning. Secretly, I wanted us to be friends again. I missed her. I thought back to our childhood, and every recollection made me smile. Sometimes, to think kindly of a person, you have to scroll back a decade or two. We’d stay at Aunt Edith every Saturday night, and it was a joy because Aunt Edith was so very different from our parents. Her desserts – my God! Once she made this thing called a gala ring. It was a cake with a hole in the middle, pineapple at the bottom, and glacé cherries on top. It was soaked in brandy.

  Cassie didn’t eat much at home, but at Aunt Edith’s she ate masses, double quick. Then she’d lean over my plate and say in a tremulous voice, ‘Give a poor beggar something to eat!’ (She always timed it when Aunt Edith was in the kitchen washing up.) I’d sigh and push my plate towards her. It was less hassle that way. Then, Aunt Edith would sweep into the room – her dress sense was dramatic, a kaftan with red paisley print and silvery thread at the neckline, or a crocheted purple poncho with white trousers and stetson – and boom, like a prophet, ‘Cassandra! Is that Elizabeth’s food?’

  Cassie would deny it, but after two large helpings of the gala ring, the brandy spoke for itself: she shook her head, and fell off her chair. That night, Aunt Edith fed us ‘plain food’ – haddock poached in milk, string beans, and mashed potatoes. She sat with us, doing The Times crossword. Cassie nudged me, and I saw that she’d fashioned her mash into the shape of an enormous penis. I must have enjoyed being Cassie’s stooge – maybe because at least I was her focus. I tried to recreate that meal the other week (no mash, or penis, as both were against my diet), but the fish was off, and the milk burned. I made Tim taste it and he gagged and said, ‘That is wrong in so many ways.’

  So when Cassie came to see me – calling ahead to ensure I wasn’t planning a bath – I decided that I should give peace a chance. Cassie had decided the very same thing, because her first words were, ‘Lizbet, I need to tell you something.’

  She seemed different. Sort of deflated. She didn’t look like the woman who’d worked her builder so hard that he’d got sunstroke and had to go home early. She looked more like the little girl I’d bullied for the few years I had before she overtook me in wit. (There was a nice fairy, Bluebell, and an evil fairy, Primrose. I chose which fairy visited Cassie at bedtime. On Cassie’s fourth birthday, Primrose held Bluebell hostage, and might have killed her had Cassie not given me all her new toys.)

  I was full of saintly resolve, but Cassie hit a reflex. Because when she said, ‘George and I have been trying for a baby for eighteen months, but it isn’t happening for us,’ I wanted to hug her. I wanted to say, ‘So that’s why, now I understand!’ But all the hurt rushed back, and I said, ‘We all have our crosses to bear.’

  Cassie

  Chapter 17

  When Lizbet and I were younger, we argued a lot. And then Lizbet would say, ‘Oh, Cassie, we mustn’t argue. Let’s have a word that draws the line!’ We’d agree on the magic word that would command an immediate ceasefire, start to argue, and I would always forget the word. Now she had forgotten the word. It was ‘decency’.

  I grabbed my coat, left her house. I wanted to cry. I wouldn’t though, ever. I despise women who cry in public. A woman can’t mouth off about equality, wear a power suit, then burst into tears when things don’t go her way. It’s socially irresponsible, like jumping a red light. If one woman cries in the office, every man there thinks he’s better than all of us. I’m a barrister – crying at work is not an option – and, like a buffer zone, I apply the identical rule at home.

  Lizbet shocked me. I had no idea she was that bitter. It’s common sense that if someone’s furious with you, you confide your bad luck, and this makes them nicer to you. I’d never really cared about the psychological why, I just found it a useful tool with which to manipulate people. But, I suppose resentment is born of jealousy, and if you provide information that shows you are not an untouchable golden girl, the jealousy crumbles into a harmless pink powder of smugness, pity and guilt – with less attitude as a by-product.

  Lizbet was breaking all the rules, and I’d had enough. I was sorry, I’d shown her I was sorry, I’d explained myself – what more could I do? I wanted us to be close again, but she seemed determined to kill our relationship with spite, turn it into a grudge match. I’m all for the motto ‘Feel my pain’ (I regularly leave my spikiest shoes on the staircase when George has stayed too late at the pub, it’s called ‘communication’), but that comment she made was too cruel. Also, it wasn’t as if she was bearing her cross with any dignity or grace. She was using it as a battering ram, lashing out indiscriminately.

  I would have liked to talk to her about how she felt, but I wasn’t even sure she knew. Oh, the baby, sure, but to me her anger had an unfocused edge and I suspected there was more to it than she realised. That said, I had my own problem to consider: George. I couldn’t confide in my sister about disliking my own husband. It was embarrassing; it reflected badly on me. Especially as Lizbet had reinvented herself as Sex Expert to the Nation, and she and Tim were bonking for Britain.

  After that food piece, I could barely look Tim in the eye. I kept thinking of him with a chocolate-coated penis, whipped cream on his nipples, and a baked bean accidenta
lly stuck in his . . . well, I don’t want to put you off your lunch. I didn’t want to picture my sister having imaginative sex, or pollute my mind with her sub Sex and the City-style debates (‘Chocolate-coated grasshopper, or chocolate-coated cock, which is more palatable? And I realised it depends on the cock, because as a rule there’s less variable in a grasshopper . . .’)

  Every detail stuck in my head like a bad jingle. The writing was hair-raising – I didn’t like to think about what else it might be raising, but with the Ladz Mag readership I had a fair idea – and the photos bordered on soft porn. I think Lizbet had stopped eating (the Nil By Mouth, All By Ego Diet) and she was determined to show off her new figure. There she was in a fussy corset, astride a male model, tickling his chest with a pink boa. Thank God we were spared the sight of his pink boa. And there she was again, a foxy schoolgirl in black stockings (when I know for a fact that her uniform was frowsy: thick wool cardigan, skirt like a circus tent and brown socks).

  But plainly, she needed a distraction, and this was it. Don’t think I was envious of her cheap fame. I got to do my showing off in court. Lizbet was at that stage of regression where she believed it was better to be desired than to be respected. I suppose being desired is more fun, moment for moment. But in terms of satisfaction, respect is what lasts you. Lizbet – who had effectively sashayed into two hundred thousand men’s bedrooms and made a slut of herself – would realise that, eventually, when the tenth stranger shoved his hand down her top in a bar.

  All of which didn’t stop me wishing I could tell her about George. I was scared, an unfamiliar feeling. I didn’t want to start again, put myself years behind all my friends. I knew more about Ancient Egypt than modern dating. Pubic hair, for instance. I have no idea what people are doing with it these days. What’s the protocol? All off? Trimmed into a heart shape? I could just imagine getting naked with a new man for the first time, and him fainting with horror. Clonk!

  If I thought about what I might do, it felt like a cold green hand squeezing my heart till I gasped. You only have the one life – can you spend it with the wrong person and still enjoy it? Money helps. But not as much as you might think. George and I stayed at the Datai the year before last, on the Malaysian island of Langkawi. It’s a gorgeous and exclusive hotel built on the edge of a rainforest. It also has a private beach. We had a jungle villa, and fed bananas to the monkeys. It was perfect but for two details. First: one of the monkeys had a cough. Second: I was there with George.

  I watched George, flapping like a goose in the Andaman Sea, and felt a lurch of irritation. I’d squashed it down, thinking that it’s a rare man who looks his best in swimwear. Now it makes me think that the rot was there even before I found and lost Sarah Paula.

  I’d waved to George, ordered him a cocktail to assuage my guilt. But I still thought of Lizbet and Tim, who were holed up in a B&B on the Isle of Wight. I know it’s sacrilege, but I allowed myself to fantasise about Tim being with me, instead of George. (Nothing rude, you understand, just there.) Tim is funny. He’s also cute, boyish. He’s tall, tubby, with a freckled face, soppy grin, kind eyes, and this incredible hair. It’s gingery blond, all over the place in unruly tufts, and it’s quite beautiful. The colour is so unusual – pale orange here, white blond there – that the first time we met I asked him who did it. Nicky, I was thinking. Maybe Frederick in New York, even.

  ‘My parents,’ he replied. ‘Bastards.’

  George was very serious about himself, and it had started to bore me. Shoot me, but I thought his fussiness with food unmanly. What self-respecting straight male has ever said the words, ‘I won’t eat non-organic raisins, they’re pesticide pellets’? Also, he did yoga. Now that’s all very well in, say, LA. In fact, it’s probably law over there. But George is from Friern Barnet – it wasn’t right. And it was impossible to watch TV sitting next to him, as every time a person appeared on screen for the first time, George would exclaim, ‘He’s porked up!’ And if it was a newsreader he emailed the TV company to complain. At the start of our relationship I’d found that habit funny.

  It wasn’t just the little things, although anyone in a long-term relationship knows that the little things are merely symbolic of the bigger things. (God! I think I just quoted Lizbet without realising. Her next sentence was, ‘Except for cocks. In a cock situation, I’m afraid that symbolism becomes meaningless.’ This is the woman who called a penis ‘a winkle’ until she turned twenty-five.) The bigger thing was that George did not put his energy into the relationship. He was fanatical about the house, but there is a point at which being houseproud is no longer a reflection of your relationship – more a deflection from it.

  When we first got together, I thought that George was popular. However, I didn’t take into account what sort of people he was popular with. Now I saw that George fancied himself as a mentor to those of his friends who were bigger failures than he was. He spent four evenings in one week helping his idiot friend Kurt create a plausible CV. Kurt was his special project. (I thought Kurt would have been better off as Care in the Community’s special project, but I accept Social Services are stretched.) Kurt lived in a ground-floor flat, in a neat suburban road, full of front gardens with red flowers in terracotta pots – streets away from Lizbet, in fact. Kurt’s front garden was different.

  Kurt did occasional work from home (doing what, I have no idea) and spent his endless leisure time buying up old books, toys, china and other rubbish from charity shops. He’d arrange all of this junk in cardboard boxes on his garden wall, every day, unless it was pouring, with handwritten signs: ‘All Books, 20p’. If the neighbours said nothing, I’ll bet it was only because they feared that any squeak of dissent might prompt Kurt to exchange all the twenty pences for a chainsaw and murder them in their beds.

  There was no denying that George was a great, loyal friend – to everyone else. His other crony, Henry – a six-foot-four hulk of a man with a big moon face – was dating a petite paranoid psychotic drug addict who made his life miserable, and yet he refused to leave her. Instead he spent hours on the phone to George, whining and crying, and George never tired of having his ear bent and offering his wise and learned opinions on relationships. We all need someone to look down on, and I suppose that for my husband, Kurt and Henry fulfilled this role. I also suppose that George felt that I looked down on him. But if I did, I had good reason. He might give to others, but from me, he just took.

  When I reached home after leaving Lizbet, George was at the Lloyd (probably in the weights room trying to make the best of a bad situation). I was alone, and I allowed myself to think about Sarah Paula. If I wasn’t cutting anyone a break just then, it was her fault. Thanks to her, I was a loser – in the truest sense. I had lost, when I was used to winning, when my overriding drive in life was to win. I had lost Mummy and Daddy, as real parents. I had lost Sarah Paula even before I’d found her. I’d lost Lizbet as a sister, also. And now I was considering losing George, and my substitute parents, the Hershlags.

  Have you any idea how annoying it is not to take your parents for granted? Until recently, I’d treated them as a necessary inconvenience, like the dentist. I’d turn up to a Friday Night if I hadn’t seen them in three months and fancied showing off my new coat, bag, whatever. (Mummy never said but I know she was impressed with my salary and status. Money and power mattered deeply to her, more than being a nice person.) Now, I found myself at their house every week. I didn’t enjoy it. I was too chewed up with what might have been. Still, I needed to be there, sulk a little, be the focus of some cack-handed second-rate parenting.

  I surprised myself, because I was always a person who found it easy to cut off – even from those close to me. If you reject me, I reject you more, was how I operated, and it wasn’t even conscious. I would never have noticed, except that my ex-best friend, Natasha, moved to Madrid when I was twenty-four and – as she pointed out to me – I reacted like it was a personal betrayal. I didn’t visit, I didn’t write, I didn’t phone. In fact,
I lost her number. Natasha’s opinion was – when I finally emailed to request it after she left me the answer machine message ‘It’s my birthday! Call me, you cow!’ – that this was no accident. I apologised, but even now our contact is intermittent, a friendship that skims the surface.

  I sat in the lounge, flicked through a ski brochure. Or maybe I should go to New York for a long weekend. Perhaps a diving holiday would be good. In the last four years I had become addicted. In Mauritius, I saw a small shark. What a buzz – identical, in fact to how I feel in court when I outwit opposing counsel. I took Lizbet, instead of George, but she didn’t like it. Couldn’t equalise. ‘I am just not a diving person,’ she said. ‘I think, even if I didn’t get this horrific pain in my ears, I’d be twenty foot under water, think, oh my God, I’m twenty foot under water, panic, speed to the surface, get air bubbles in my blood, and die.’

  I chucked the ski brochure to one side. I wasn’t in a New York state of mind, and even the idea of diving was hard work. Instead I thought of my sister – she would always be my sister – sunning herself on the diving boat, smiling with her eyes half-closed, early REM on her headphones, as I toppled into the water. I felt restless and listless at the same time.

  I don’t really like it, loving people. It’s not something I’m good at. Lizbet went through a phase of saying ‘I love you’ instead of ‘good bye’ at the end of every phone call. ‘You too,’ I’d mutter. Once she said it, and I didn’t hear, and so she said, in an indignant voice, ‘I said, “I love you!”’ ‘I love you too,’ I said, but I was furious. How dare she choke the words out of me? It should be against the law to say ‘I love you’ in order to force a reflex response. She stopped saying it to me after that, but she joked about it once, when we were out with Tim and George. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Cassie can’t even spell love.’ It was true. On the rare occasion that I typed the word in an email, it always came out as ‘lvoe.’ I’d just leave it. People knew what I meant.