The Sister
Page 23
“Vivien,” I say, gathering my resolve, “I have to tell you something.” She doesn’t answer, but gets up, slides her footrest over, and sits on it beside me. She’s very quiet and I know she’s ready to listen. What I am about to tell her will be a shock, a revelation to her, and I close my eyes so that I don’t have to see it on her face, the disbelief, the anger, or whatever else it might cause.
I say it fast and plainly: “Your mother was an alcoholic. That’s why she thought it was the kitchen door. She used to get so drunk that she didn’t know what she was doing or where she was going.” I keep my eyes closed, waiting to hear what she will say or do. But she’s utterly silent. Then, after a long pause, I feel her hand on my arm, squeezing it gently, willing me to open my eyes. She looks sad, defeated, even, and for a moment I think she’s about to burst into tears, which, I admit, is not a reaction I was expecting. But what she says next is far worse.
“I know that,” she says simply. “That’s why he murdered her.”
That is it.
“Stop it, Vivien, just stop it!” I’m shouting. “You’ve spent your whole life ripping this family apart and you waltz back here and start doing it again, even when they’re all dead.”
“Me? Ripping the family apart? I spent my life trying to hold us together.”
It annoyed me that she could switch our roles like that. “That was me, Vivien. I was the only one trying to hold us together. You fell out with Maud and then you fell out with Clive, and then you didn’t speak to me for forty-seven years. How can you dare think you tried to hold us together?”
“I fell out with Maud because I was trying to stop her beating you.”
“You knew?” I’m incredulous.
“We all knew, Ginny. Arthur told me what she was doing, and that you were too ashamed to say anything. And it had taken Clive too long to face up to how bad it had got. He couldn’t bear it. None of us could, and we’d all agreed we had to stop her.”
I’m struck dumb.
“And I fell out with Clive because in the end the bastard went for the most convenient solution. He pushed her down those steps to stop her beating you. Because she nearly killed you, because she probably would have killed you. But he didn’t have the patience or the time to sort out her drinking. He discarded her as if she were a specimen he didn’t need anymore.”
The whole world is flying round my head. Nothing seems to add up. How does she suddenly know all these things I thought she never did? I have so many different reasons as to why this is nonsense, but they all want to be shouted at once. They won’t line up in order and wait their turn.
“But—But, Vivien, even Clive didn’t know how bad her drinking was,” I stammer.
She shakes her head.
“And,” she continues calmly, “I fell out with you because I couldn’t help thinking it was all your fault. I couldn’t help thinking you’d ruined my life, all our lives—whether you knew it or not. But I wasn’t allowed to think that. Oh, no. Clive never allowed us to think that. You were always above blame, exempt,” she says. “We couldn’t rock the boat. We weren’t allowed to upset your delicate equilibrium because you might not be able to cope with it. Too much emotional disturbance wouldn’t be good for you. You had to be made to feel as normal as possible to build your confidence. We could never make any mention of your…peculiarities. Well, I think it’s all rubbish. I don’t blame you, no, but I think they were wrong about you. I think you can handle a little truth. It’s about time you knew, so you can accept some of the responsibility for her death.”
Responsibility? Vivien’s either gone mad or she’s trying to make me think I’m mad. I’m amazed that she’s believed this for her entire life. Poor Vivien. I can’t move a muscle. My back is resting against the wall, my hands making fists, pale and bloodless. I can’t even blink. Instead my eyes focus on the thick air in front of them, following the floating black specks reflected from the retina that dart back and forth through my vision. I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to have to listen anymore. I start to run, run away from here, away from myself, down the tunnel with the ball of muddled words rattling behind me, gaining, faster and faster I run, pursued by questions and words and torment until I reach the door to that place in my head. I heave it open and skip behind it, just in time to shut out the thunderous ball of noise and squall and disarray behind me. I know that Vivien is still talking, but it doesn’t matter anymore because I’m not with her. I’m slamming the bolts on the door into their catches. Alone at last.
* * *
I don’t know how long it is before Vivien comes over and puts her arms round me.
“Sorry, darling,” she softens. “I’m sorry. I do understand that it isn’t easy for you to find all this out suddenly.”
She says it as if there is no dispute, that the facts are clear; it’s just a matter of me getting used to them, assimilating them. I want to scream my frustration right into her face. She’s completely and utterly misunderstanding my point of view: she has no evidence for anything she’s saying. I’m a scientist. I need hard evidence. It’s just as likely—more than likely—to have been fabricated during years of bitterness in her own head.
I walk away from her, tired, suddenly overcome by the need to sleep. Besides, I’ve got other things to think about. I’ve got to prepare myself for Tuesday’s lunch with the entomologists. I have to check that our collections are in order and perhaps make a display of some of my most important findings.
Chapter 19
The Moth Hunter
I don’t know what it was that stirred me but I can see the moon outside, low and resplendent, drowning the stars with its brilliance. Has it been sent to wake me? Its stark light floods the valley so that, from where I’m lying in my bed, it seems that night has settled only within the house. I close my eyes wishing innocent sleep to come and take me back to abeyance. But I know it can’t. Welcome to the endless night.
My bedside clock says twelve minutes past midnight. I shift myself heavily to a sitting position and check instinctively that my wristwatches agree on the time, which they do. It’s then that I feel the burning within my wrists and hands. I look at my distended thumb knuckles, the covering of skin pulled papery thin, taut and shiny round the swelling. Spring is here. Spring is painful. I think of Clive filling the blue plastic washing-up bowl in the kitchen, testing that the water is warm but not too hot, then laboriously carrying it, sloshing from side to side, up the stairs and into this bedroom, to this bed, where Maud would be lying stiff with this pain. He takes her hands in his and eases them lovingly into the water, bringing them back to life with warmth and tenderness and massage. Both of my parents are silent, the silence of shared pain, but I can see Maud’s eyes, needy and afraid, finding refuge in Clive’s unfaltering dependability. He looks into the bowl, concentrating on her hands with sedulous care, and she relinquishes herself to the sanctuary of his silent strength and determination, placing all her trust in him. Safe, delicious memory.
I’m sitting in bed steeling myself to exercise my hands through their pain. It’s like a cramp when you know you have to stretch it out, however much it hurts to do so. First I try to curl my fingers into a fist, but the knuckles are so swollen they can hardly bend. It’s as I’m trying to straighten them, flattening my palms as far as they’ll go, that the events of yesterday glide back to me, uninvited. I feel something like dissent rising through my body, boring its way out, as I remember in a hum of voices Vivien’s accusation: that my father murdered my mother in calculated cold blood, pretty much under my nose. I forget, or rather forgive, for once, the pain dissolved in my fingers and in my feet, in their matted woolen socks, and in this private starkness I allow myself to add it up, just to see if the signs are there that it could be true—that Clive did kill my mother, and all because of me—and I find myself searching desperately for the ones that will prove it couldn’t possibly have been so: I saw her with my own eyes at the bottom of the steps and I saw Clive’s devastation
. I felt her hands still hot to the touch, her neck soft and warm. I smelt the blood running through her hair and the stink of sherry on her. I phoned Dr. Moyse myself. I tried to save her myself. I’d seen Maud in the weeks and months before, in her drunken stupors, falling over chairs, walking into wardrobes and, once, into the pond on our upper terrace. I never suspected anything except that she’d had her final drunken accident. But I know I didn’t see it.
I hadn’t seen the fall.
I slide myself out of bed and ease my feet into my toeless slippers, which wait like sentinels by the bed. I shuffle slowly across the sloping wood floor, drenched silver by the moon, to the door and out onto the landing, beleaguered by unanswered questions. Vivien is sleeping in her room just along the corridor through the double doors ahead. I feel suffocated for an instant, just knowing she’s there, and it’s here, now, with sudden understanding, that I realize I don’t care about the answers. Did Clive kill Maud or didn’t he? Was it for me or not? It doesn’t matter anymore. It makes no difference now. The past itself is not important. The only thing that counts now is my memory of it. I feel an uncharacteristic flash of anger, a surge of heat through my cheeks: How dare Vivien come home and steal my safe, delicious memories? Three days ago my memory of life was of a complete and happy event—a blissful childhood, a warm, loving family, a blossoming career—but Vivien’s walked into my head and littered it with doubt and anger and turbulence. The past I used to know has melted before my eyes into something writhing and fluid, with no structure, no scaffold. I can never again think of my parents, my childhood or my life without the stains she’s spilt all over them. All I see now, as my father nurses my mother’s hands back to life, is the water turning red in the bowl.
The moon greets me again as I reach my lookout at the far end of the landing. It creeps furtively from behind a sparse and smoky cloud, as if beckoning me to follow. I like the moon and its cycles. I like the way that, although it seems to ebb and flow and come and go at will, it connects with the sun and the earth and the tides in a constant, rigid relationship. In reality there are no erring boundaries, no diffusion of loyalties.
Has Vivien really come home to torment me, to point out that I have been living in the wrong history, to push me into the correct scene of the correct painting? I have always had her interests in mind, especially when I have kept things from her. She had in mind no interest of mine when she taunted me with her twisted secret.
The thin cloud scatters, the moon’s rim sharpens. What is it that has changed in this silent still night? Everything feels different, not just the past. I see the moon—and the world—more clearly now. I look down with my new eyes at my matted wool socks and toeless slippers. Is this really me standing here at this window, in these old slippers?
I move away and come to the dark oak door behind which the spiral staircase twists up to the attic rooms. I don’t know why I’m easing the wooden peg that stoppers the latch in place. It needs wiggling back and forth a few times before it comes loose in my hand and the door swings open towards me. I watch as the moon’s blue light tumbles dimly in the dust up the stairs and, I don’t know why, I’m feeling my way in through the oak door and along to the outer wall of the spiral staircase where the treads are at their widest. Just to my right there’s a thick rope for a handrail but I don’t want to trust it. The stairs are steeper than I remember, so I’m leaning forward, using my hands on the ones above, as if I’m scrambling up a mountain. But I’m going slowly, one at a time, feeling and checking for splits and cracks and, although it’s just a short distance to the top, it feels like many minutes before I’m swallowed in total darkness and I can straighten, the door to the attic rooms—to the collections, to my life’s work—in front of me.
I know, somewhere to the right, there’s a switch that will light the room behind the door, and I’m feeling for it now, a bulky dome-shaped casing with a square lever in the middle. I find it and pull down. Light flickers into life behind the door, sharp knives of warmth cutting above and below it, accompanied by muffled movements. Disturbed wings.
There’s something about moonlight that makes you feel safe to entertain dreams and fantasies, something about its grim coolness that lights a somnolent path without adding color, and wandering in it can make you feel you are still in the realm of sleep, journeying through a different plane from the living. But the warm orange hue outlining the door in front of me invites me to wake properly, shows me the colors and shades of my world rather than merely its outlines. For a while I stand in the comfort of the darkness, knowing that answers are illuminated within. Vivien has never had the same trouble opening doors.
I sweep my hand through the thin shaft of light piercing the slit by the side of the door, splitting it with my fingers into individual rays, playing with it. Vivien would have been better to tell me nothing, because now I see more than she wants me to. I see myself in the past, as a child, as a woman, and I see how mildly I looked at life. But I also see her. I see her differently now. Once, I’d seen the charm and childlike simplicity in a young girl dreaming of our futures together; once I thought of a schoolgirl who loved her sister in a way that was inexplicable, twinlike, a visceral connection standing in a wall of solid granite that a lifetime of elements and abuse couldn’t scratch. But now I see the granite crumble before my eyes, disintegrate, like a cube of sugar in tea, letting out a little puff of steam that was once a driven bond of unshakable love. Could our entire sisterhood have been a farce, years of complicated deception, of endless assurances of love, charm and manipulation, all so that one day she could take what she wanted? To ensure she could have the use of my body, and tear from it the one thing she couldn’t have without me: a child?
And when she couldn’t have it, she abandoned me in the same way that, only yesterday, she had accused Clive of discarding Maud, like a specimen that was no longer needed.
I unbolt the door and push it open, and am blinded equally by resentment and fluorescent light. I resent Vivien for shattering my illusions, not only of my parents and my life but of her, for making me question her, her love, her loyalty, everything she has ever told me. As I cross the room I’m assaulted by decay, old memories and the ammoniac stench of bat droppings. Four pipistrelles hanging from the rafters above me shift uneasily. Caterpillar houses line the walls, exactly as they always have, mainly homemade glass containers, some tin, a few giant glass cider jars and a dozen or so old ammunition boxes, which Clive always claimed made the best caterpillar cages. A layer of rotten humus has collected at the bottom of some, made up of twigs, leaves and crusty discarded skins.
You might have expected the moths to take over, but there are no moths. This isn’t a chosen habitat for moths. It’s now home to bats, spiders and a pod of hornets, which have made a vast and beautifully constructed papier-mâché home right under the eaves, added to and undisturbed year after year. I’m left with just one question and it’s not how Maud ended up at the bottom of the stairs. It is simply whether Vivien has ever loved me as I have loved her, ever since the day the evacuees left and I saw that she was special. A beam in the far corner has collapsed with the weight of the roof above, opening a section to the sky. Some slates lie shattered on the floor below and insulation wool clings desperately to its plaster, hanging to the floor in a matted clump. And if she’s never loved me, if she’s only ever needed me, what is it that she wants from me now? Why is she here?
I move through this room and into the next—the emergence room—a corridor lined on both sides with muslin-clad breeding boxes, some still with sticks and mounds of earth and dried moss in them. It was to here that, each spring, we’d carry the pupae up from the cool warren of cellars that run beneath the house, where they’d wintered on trays or in boxes. We’d separate each species into these banks of cages so that they could breed on emergence, laying their eggs on the muslin. Each type of moth would need twigs from different plants, each emerged at different times and each required species-specific conditions.
1. Ensure willow twigs are always upright and stable
2. Replace willow twigs every two days
3. Check if the chrysalis reacts to touch (3 days to go)
4. Temperature must not exceed 66.2°F
5. Mist twice a day with water spray
6. On emergence offer 2.5cc sugar solution on cotton wool
Clive typed out the instructions for each species, then pinned them around the room so that there could be no mistakes and no excuses. At least four times a day one of us would check that the strategically placed thermometers, barometers, electric heaters, dishes of water and ultraviolet lights were providing the exact conditions necessary for the time of emergence. It was our spring rota. Vivien found it a bore and didn’t necessarily subscribe to the miracle that Clive would have us believe was about to ensue. But I took my duties very seriously and would hurry back to Clive to report that I’d found one tank had been a degree too warm or too cool, or that I’d felt a draft blowing on the back of another. Together we’d record the findings in his Observation Diary and look forward to seeing if it had any effect on the moths’ emergence.