The Sister

by Poppy Adams

  Clive recorded everything, and that, he told me many times, was the key to being a good scientist and especially a good lepidopterist.

  When the time (and the temperature, light and humidity) was right I spent many hours in the attic, waiting for the earliest signs so as not to miss the miracle. It starts as a vague movement deep within the chrysalis, the faint twitch of a shadow. And then the noises start. Cracking and crunching, like boots on dry leaves, or the snapping of twigs, unimaginably loud for such a tiny, tireless creature as it works its way out. When many were emerging at the same time, the chorus of noise was astonishing. It would keep me awake at night in my bedroom a floor below. Within an hour the lid of the chrysalis was detached and I’d have my first glimpses of the animal’s shiny wet head as it emerged through its trapdoor, wriggling, shouldering and heaving its way into the world. Once free, it crawls up the twig I’ve positioned for it with two small wet buds saddled across its back. At the top it stops and, like petals unfurling, the buds open and unfold, fanning out into large flat sheets. The newly awoken creature hangs them out to dry until finally they turn to delicate wings of light parchment. A moth is born.

  I’d record everything, just to be a good scientist.

  I walk through this room and then through the library, dusty reference books in perfect alphabetical order, and finally into the “laboratory,” a small dusty space with the far wall sloping down low to a round north-facing window. It’s a museum to time. A Formica workbench runs round the room at waist height and on it, side by side, are two relaxing trays crusty with dried chemicals. Next to them a scalpel rests on a dissecting board, dirty, as if Clive and I were still at lunch. A long rack, fashioned by Clive and holding small, delicate tools, stands against the back wall of the bench. Each implement slots neatly into a hole small enough to stop the bulkier handle dropping through it. In front of the round window is Clive’s homemade version of a fume cupboard. It’s just a glass box with the room’s window as part of its back wall. Clive would use his most noxious chemicals in it and then he could open the window behind to let out the fumes and aerate the tank.

  Lining the wall to my right are hundreds of brown and green bottles with glass stoppers on shelves that reach up to the ceiling, all labeled neatly across the front. As I look along them I begin to sense a deeper disturbance growing within my new person. Some of the bottles have short chemical names: TANNIC ACID, IODINE, AETHER, BORAX. Others have their empirical formula only: KCL, PSO2, NO2, and the rest have names that fill up the entire side of the bottle: salicylas antipyrini salipyrine, chloret hydrargyros merc.dulc. calomel, hydrochl. Ephedrine, hydras chlorali, salicyl. Nitric. C. themobrom-natrio loco diurectine.

  Beyond the chemicals is the fume-cupboard window from which I can see far down towards the village. I can’t stop thinking about Vivien at the graves today. I’m trying to recall every moment of her being there, her posture as she stopped at each one, her expression as she read the words, wishing I had been born with the understanding to decipher what each look or movement means, how it translates into feelings.

  I don’t care if Vivien hated Clive, and as I’ve said before, I don’t really care anymore how Maud got to the bottom of the cellar steps. It isn’t the cruelest thing I can think of. The cruelest thing is Vivien. It’s Vivien walking past her own son’s grave without noticing, not even acknowledging his lonely bones. It was that she didn’t walk by him on purpose, that she didn’t shun him but seemed to have forgotten he ever existed. That made it worse. In my mind’s eye I remember how her heel glanced carelessly off the corner piece of flint that Arthur had arranged there, pushing it just below the surface, a little helping hand towards the grave’s inevitable erosion. Arthur had known everything there was to know about his son. I knew two things about him: that he was purple and he was wise. Vivien knew nothing. I felt deep down that there was something wrong with that, that it was what Arthur was talking about all those years ago. It was why he wouldn’t try for another with her and why he saw in her someone he didn’t like.

  Arthur had wanted to talk about the boy and the birth, and keep his memory alive, and Vivien didn’t want to think about it but to try for another baby as soon as possible. Arthur would never let her try again, he said, because she hadn’t even looked at this one.

  “You can’t choose your children. You can’t take the best ones, the ones that survive, the ones that are born the right color,” I heard him arguing with her some days later. “If you’ve decided to have that child you must take it, whatever happens. You must claim him.”

  Back then I listened to Arthur’s tirade and nodded, saying little. At the time I didn’t really understand his anger with Vivien, or his disappointment at her reaction. But he thought I did, because I listened to him and didn’t argue.

  Four days after the birth Arthur and I were in The Angel at Hindon. He was driving me home from the hospital, which had kept me in to recuperate, and we’d stopped for lunch. We sat at a small round table by an open fire with old brass cauldrons and tongs hanging above our heads, waiting for someone to take our order. Our trip had been near silent. Then Arthur leaned towards me and put his hand on my knee. “Ginny,” he said, “I’m so sorry.”

  Sorry? Sorry they were slow to take our order? Sorry that Vivien had gone, distraught, back to London and not resurfaced yet? Sorry that he too would have to leave me and go back to London soon? I could think of so many sorries.

  Finally he clarified it: “I’m so sorry our baby died.”

  Our baby? I had spent well over a year conditioning myself that it wasn’t my baby. I had been trained to say, “It is not my baby, I will not be its mother,” and, quite honestly, I didn’t feel like he was mine in the slightest. Not for a moment. No maternal instinct kicked in to fight against giving him away. I had felt no bond with him and I had known he wasn’t mine. I didn’t even think about the biology. To me, I was the carrier—that was it—and now Arthur was looking to me to be the boy’s mother. So Vivien disowned him and he wanted to give him back to me. I hadn’t asked for a child, and I hadn’t asked for Vivien’s burden of grief when she’d got a dead one. If it survived it was hers; if it died, it was for me to mourn.

  So I tried, for Arthur’s sake, to be the baby’s mother, but I didn’t really feel it. We named him Samuel during that lunch in The Angel and Arthur had his gravestone designed at much cost and we both watched him buried alongside the freshly turned grave of his grandmother.

  Although at the time I hadn’t understood Arthur’s desperation for his dead son to have a mother, all that changed yesterday when I saw his mother step right over him. It was the strangest feeling: from that moment on he was not hers but mine, as if my latent maternal feelings were ushered out of apathy, pricked into life full of fierce revenge. How dare she throw away the son I had entrusted to her? If Samuel had grown up and not done as well as she’d wanted, if he’d been slow or retarded, would she have thrown him back to me then?

  Finally I understand Arthur and his anger. I understand that the words on the headstone—no less loved—have real meaning, and for the first time they don’t just apply to Arthur but to me also: it’s a yearning, heartbreaking love that I’ve never known before, a part-of-me-missing kind of love.

  I stare out of the laboratory window into the silver darkness and suddenly I feel him there, even though he’s been there all along. I think of the flints and the still mound of earth and I want to go back and, like a wild woman, desperately paw at the ground, dig him up and hold him, just hold his lonely bones, claim him, own him, be his mother, all because his real mother was too selfish to have him.

  I’d love to be able to tell Arthur my change of feelings now. I’d like to have all those conversations about Samuel he wanted back then, right now, nearly half a century too late. But, of course, Arthur will be nearing the end of a multitude of eras in his own life. The brief liaison with Vivien and me, and the birth of Samuel, will now seem such a tiny speck on the landscape of his past, hardly
of any consequence, while I see now that the very same speck—up close a perpetually deepening well for Vivien and me—has always remained the focal point of our lives, and for all those years we must have been only pretending to walk on into the horizon.

  After we had buried Samuel, I saw Arthur once more. It was five years later in exactly the same spot, when he turned up unexpectedly at Clive’s funeral. He said he’d come to see how I was. He hadn’t changed, except he was now remarried.

  Less than a handful of people—Arthur, two nuns from the Anchorage and I—watched Clive’s coffin lowered into place next to Maud’s and Samuel’s in the St. Bart’s graveyard extension. The nuns said Clive had eased himself towards death as earlier he’d eased himself towards madness.

  The bottles lining the shelves in our laboratory wouldn’t, to you, look in any particular order. They certainly aren’t alphabetical but, believe me, they have a very distinct arrangement, an order of use, those used most often the nearest to hand, rather like the QWERTY arrangement of keys on a typewriter. Those most frequently used in the same preparations are grouped together and those that have a similar function—for example, restoring colors in the wing, or relaxing a specimen from rigor mortis—are also assembled together. I scan the wall to take in the ones I recognize most easily: Sol. camphor. spirit, Boric acid, Bromet. Kalic., Naphaline, Carbolic acid. I like saying the names. I don’t mind admitting to you that I feel proud to know what they are and what each one can do. I’m glad I’m an expert and have all that knowledge that so many ordinary people don’t. My eyes wander to the bottles a couple of shelves up, set high on their own to the far left of the others. It’s the poison shelf, the anesthetics and the killing fluids. Each bottle is marked with a large white skull and crossbones, some with a red triangle too, and the bold red words CAUTION POISON in case the symbols haven’t given a clear enough indication of the potency of the fluid within: Sol. ammonia spirit anis, Potassium Bromide, Nuics Vomictincture, Sol.peroxyd. hydrogenii, Aether 1.5/5 g sol.

  I watch my fingers run along the front of the killing fluids, clearing a clean line across the names, a ball of dust gathering in front. The strangest thing of all is that for the first time in my life, I feel more like my true self than ever before.

  Clive used to say that to be a successful moth hunter you need not be a specialist, but many specialists: a biologist, a botanist, a chemist, an ecologist, a meteorologist, an expeditionist—and well versed in Latin.

  Moths can be extraordinarily fussy. Not only are they particular about which plants they feed from but also the specific habitat in which those plants grow. So, when hunting a moth, you must first uncover the correct plant in the correct habitat and for that you’ll need a good knowledge of the less glamorous corners of the country—for example, where ragwort grows in a low, dry and sheltered dell. The Dingy Mocha, which has been found only twice in Dorset, lives solely on sallow in low wetland, so you’d need to know the boggiest parts of Abbotsbury Heath where sallow scrub abounds, or some badly managed farmland in the wettest parts of the Blackmore Vale. If a couple of Vale farmers decided to clear their scrubland, one of those Dingy Mocha habitats would be wiped out forever.

  Once you’ve identified where to find it, you need to get to know the moth well enough to use its own habits to trap it. Should you treacle it, use a light trap or a pheromone lure? Each method has to be adjusted for each species—when they might be on the wing, what recipes for sugaring, which type of light trap and even the intensity of lightbulb to use within it.

  Finally, once the moth is caught, you must decide how best to kill it, and for that you need to be a chemist.

  Moths, you’ll find, are tenacious of life. You can squeeze their bodies, prick them with pins, even cut off their heads and they’ll live. You can dip a pin in nitric, prussic or oxalic acid, all deadly, stick it into their bodies and, unless you’re very accurate with the concentration, it might not finish them. Each poison has its disadvantages—the rigor mortis of cyanide, the discoloring of ammonia, the stiffening of wings with carbon tetrachloride—so each case must be considered individually.

  Tetrachloride is a clean, quick poison but, as I’ve said, it can stiffen the wings, so tetrafluoride is sometimes preferable but makes more mess and tends to alter the colors unless you can preserve them first. Chloroform is a useful poison and especially easy to take into the field, but use too little and it’ll only anesthetize, and too much makes the bodies too stiff. Oxalic acid and potassium cyanide are both deadly and a good choice when dealing with the larger moths. They can be stabbed directly into the belly or dropped into the killing bottle on blotting paper although, again, too much and the bodies will stiffen. Rigor mortis has always been the bane of the setter, as then the specimen has to be relaxed with many days of steaming and softening agents. Often I find a cocktail works best: for a good clean killing, I might stupefy with chloroform first, then stab them with oil of tobacco or oxalic acid. Undoubtedly ammonia is the most suitable for a mass extermination but, like cyanide, it discolors the greens. Ether, chloroform and formic acid will all sedate or kill quite suitably in the field, and crushed laurel leaves, which produce the deadly prussic acid, won’t stiffen the bodies so much although the leaves can’t be collected in damp or dewy weather in case of mildew. In which case prussic acid can also be made by adding a few drops of potassium cyanide to tartaric acid, with a suitable catalyst.

  Once you decide on the best poison for the termination, you must then work out the correct concentration. For instance, I know that five milligrams of cetratranic acid dropped into a bell jar with a single moth will take about three seconds to stun it. I know that seven milligrams will anesthetize it and ten is enough to kill it, providing the moth does not weigh more than 3.5 grams. I also know that to kill fifty moths you need five times the concentration or volume of killing fluid, but to kill seven thousand you’d need only two hundred times the concentration. I know that potassium chloride could never kill a larger moth and potassium sulphide would only ever be strong enough to anesthetize it. I know that cyanide kills anything. But what I don’t know right now is the precise amount I will need to kill Vivien.

  Monday

  Chapter 20

  About Monday

  7:07 a.m. (by my digital bedside clock)

  I must tell you something. When I woke up just a few moments ago I had the most alarming sensation. It was a feeling of instant alertness. Usually my mind lags vaguely behind my brain when it wakes, like the cranking up of an old lethargic engine, taking several seconds to gain full speed. But this morning I know something’s up, because when my eyes opened my mind opened too, eager as a young person’s, with the immediacy of a lightbulb once you’ve flicked the switch. It’s as if my body has sensed something before my brain has had a chance to work it out.

  Then, with a bolt of understanding, it strikes me: My little sister, Vivien, is dead.

  Dead right here in this house, fifteen yards away in her room in the east wing, along the landing and left through the glass-paned double doors. I feel a sick surge of dread rising from the core of my stomach, spreading menace throughout my frail body. Pricking it coldly. Smothering all my usual morning aches.

  Let me think now: I heard her during the night at five to one, when she got up to make her usual cup of tea, but I didn’t hear her again, as I have done every other night she’s been here, going to the lavatory at five, and I haven’t yet heard her this morning going down to get her morning tea, even though it’s now well past seven. Every other morning she’s been like clockwork, straight down to the kitchen at seven on the dot.

  I’m still in bed with the blankets pulled up to my chin and my hands locked by my sides. I haven’t moved a muscle since I woke. I don’t dare, for fear that somehow it might upset the delicate balance of life and death that has threatened the house this morning. If I strain my eyes to the right, I can just about see my bedside clock. It makes me feel safer, knowing that it’s there, looking after the time for m
e.

  I think I should tell you there’s a much more substantial reason for my knowing that she’s dead than not having heard her this morning. Did I tell you last night, when I found the poisons upstairs in the laboratory, that I took down a tin of potassium cyanide powder from the very top shelf? I secreted it up the left sleeve of my dressing gown (pinching the cuff around the bottom so it wouldn’t fall out) and took it downstairs to the kitchen. I put half a teaspoonful in her milk in the fridge, then hid the tin behind the bottles in the drinks cabinet in the library. And you know how she likes to take her tea milky.

  But, of course, the problem is that I can’t be absolutely, one hundred percent sure she’s dead, unless I go and check on her. What if she’s not dead? What if she’s just half dead? (You can never be sure of getting the correct concentration per pound of body mass.) I can’t have her being found half dead; she’ll be prodded and probed until they find out she’s been poisoned. I can’t think why it didn’t occur to me before—that I’ll have to actually go and check on her. I can’t possibly do that. It’s not within my boundary. I’ve not been in that part of the house for forty-seven years. I wouldn’t feel safe.

  I can’t get over it. It’s most unlike me—with my famously analytic and scientific mind—to neglect to think through all eventualities before I start on a course of action. I knew she would die but I’m astounded I never considered what would happen after that. It’s not that I’m afraid of seeing her dead (any more than anyone would be). Believe me, I’m far too levelheaded for that. It’s the dealing with it that scares me. Quite apart from making sure that she’s properly dead, I don’t know what to do next. I can’t call the ambulance; the phone’s not been connected for years, so I’ll have to go and find someone, and I’ve no idea where to start. Then I’ll have to find the time to sort through her room and all her clutter and I won’t know what to do with it. I’ll have to organize a funeral and make decisions like what I want her to wear and what her coffin should be made of, which patch of ground to put her in and what to carve on the headstone. I’ll have to find out who her friends were and invite them for sherry and canapés in a drawing room with no furniture and hear all the stories that, for whatever reason, she never wanted or bothered to tell me. It’s a shame she never got time to invite the entomologists to lunch on Tuesday. I was beginning to look forward to that.