The Bad Sister (22 page)

In Robina Sandel's opinion, the phenomena undoubtedly witnessed could be laid fair and square at the door of her niece, Tilda. Not necessarily known as a superstitious woman, Robina was soon talking of poltergeists; and if Dr Freud had been brought into the picture as well, he would probably have been the first to agree with Robina's other diagnosis, that Tilda's psychic state was due to her recent shock in the basement (where, it went without saying, she had left her clothes untidily herself, the mess being in no way the responsibility of the prowler or other invader) and that the state in which she now found herself was in all likelihood due to an innate guilt on the subject of untidiness, imbued in her by a mother who suffered from ‘Housewife's Neurosis'.

However it was looked at, Robina stressed, Tilda came up those stairs from the basement as white as a sheet and shaking. Robina followed with a few of the pizzas she had been able to rescue. It was as if, she said, Tilda's shaking whiteness had been translated to some denizen of another world – for as she came in, the candle flame swerved wildly and went out (the electric lights had been extinguished by Monica Purves at an earlier point in the fireside chat) and a ‘white thing', as Tilda screamed on first seeing it, appeared outside Robina's long windows overlooking the gardens of Rudyard and Nightingale Crescents.

Mara's film shows us at this point the appearance of Mrs Hyde – on the evening of Monday, 9th of February at 6 p.m. at least – and should prove an invaluable aide to the police in their search.

Mara's desire to film Mrs Hyde, and, as she said, some kind of weird instinct, led her to go out in the gardens at the most unpropitious time and aim her Video 8 at a path and shrubbery turned almost upside down by a seemingly unending squall. Her hair was standing on end, she admitted – and the sight from the garden of the women in Robina Sandel's drawing room, wide-eyed and open-mouthed – clearly seeing something she had not seen herself – was hardly reassuring. She'd heard, though, that Mrs Hyde on certain evenings would make a tour of the gardens in the hope of catching the man who had for so long held the neighbourhood in terror; she would avenge her sisters, Mara had been told; and this was an essential face for a new photo-montage devoted to women's resistance to oppression.

If Mara hadn't seen the woman approach, the camera had.

Robina Sandel, I believe, best summed up the responses to the apparition of Mrs Hyde on that stormy evening, and perhaps it's because they're so much at odds with each other and with what the viewfinder actually saw, that we should listen to her.

Tilda, of course, saw a ghost. This white ‘thing', which humped round the gardens in a drench of rain so fine it was almost a steam, came straight from the subterranean world. Clinging to her aunt, she cried that she wanted to go home.

There was certainly nothing homely about the sight of Mrs Hyde that evening. Disgusted, possibly, by an unwelcome combination of the familiar and the unknown – for the ‘thing' wore nothing more alarming than a white mac, one of those plastic, half-transparent coats with a hood that sell in millions – Jean Hastie commented that ‘it was odious that a woman should disport herself in a respectable area such as this' – and was oblivious, apparently, to the unsuitability of the weather or the possibly unhinged state of mind of the walker. For Jean, the sartorial appearance of Mrs Hyde – for she wore nothing, it was true, under the diaphanous white plastic – was alarming and all-important, blinding her to anything else.

For Monica Purves disgust and alarm are expressed in economic terms. Her view is that women like Mrs Hyde could easily support themselves ‘if they really wanted to': that ‘making an exhibition of yourself' by parading in cheap and common clothing on a night such as this is done to draw attention to your straitened circumstances. If her wish was to catch the rapist, Monica Purves said, she would be unlikely to succeed. He would hardly be tempted out in a storm of rain by Mrs Hyde's unattractive get-up, to pounce in full view of other residents of the gardens.

Carol Hill's response differs drastically. She has heard from Mara that by now Mrs Hyde is shortly to be evicted from her premises in Ladbroke Grove. Her two small children are frequently ill (all this information passed on to the susceptible Mara by ‘the
tricoteuses
', as Robina Sandel nervously describes those women who have banded together in the wake of the rapist's attacks to express their rage and dissatisfaction with society). Carol sees a woman hounded to the limits of her sanity by the brutality of everyday life.

Only Frances Crane and the camera are equally silent on
their view of Mrs Hyde that night; both, perhaps, are equally revealing in their silence.

The lens shows us a face that seems almost to have stopped being a face altogether. It's as if a once wid-boned, generous face, a beautiful face, even, to go by the high bridge of a slender nose and the curve of the jaw, has in some indescribable way been pulled sideways and downwards – so that an evil, spiteful face, a nose hooked like a witch's in the old pictures, eyes baleful and peering in a cloud of rain that's like the rising mists of a Hell that lies always at her feet – looks back at us in Mara's version. Robina Sandel is right, I think, when she says that the extreme unease experienced by all the women in their different ways when confronted by this spectacle is due to there being something ‘unnatural' about Mrs Hyde. Possibly, as a doctor, Frances Crane feels that comments on physical appearance due to evident malnutrition, stress and (although not proven) advanced alcoholism or drug-taking, would not be ethical in the circumstances.

It was after Mara Kaletsky had come inside once more that the argument resumed – its subject having gone round the gardens for the last time and disappeared in the direction of Ladbroke Grove.

The weighing of the disadvantages of this woman's situation against the advantages of a woman like Eliza Jekyll, in present-day society, went on until the small hours, for the simple reason, Robina thinks, that the women in her house that night were ashamed of their earlier fear and wanted to exorcize it with a strong, political discussion.

As Robina commented, it would be hard to know quite where Jean Hastie stood in the dispute over the ‘new values', for, while she appeared to disapprove strongly of Mrs Hyde and the predicament in which the ‘feckless' woman had placed herself, the solicitor from Scotland seemed almost equally disapproving of some aspect of another kind relating to Ms Eliza Jekyll. As the argument raged, the storm moaned outside with a tedium that
made Robina think – and here she is wandering way off track again – of a reputedly haunted room in a castle in Jean Hastie's country, where card-players, gambling till dawn with the Devil, are all of a sudden whisked off to eternity, the sound of their laughter and revels remaining behind on wild nights to frighten poor sleepers. She would gladly have locked all her women guests in her sitting room until such time as the Evil One came to get them, Robina goes on, laughing. But, however that may be, there wasn't a soul there – professional, independent, self-reliant though all (with the exception of poor Tilda) indeed were – who had not been scared out of their wits that evening.

To discover further some of the reasons for Jean Hastie's ambiguous attitude to her old friend of student days, Ms Eliza Jekyll, it is necessary to read some at least of that good woman's journal for her stay in London while researching a book on the Gnostic Gospels and the origins of sin.

Tuesday, Feb. 10th

I consider myself a feminist. And I hope to contribute, with my work of gynocriticism
In the Garden
, to the controversy surrounding the very roots of the phallocracy in which women have been forced to live since the beginning of recorded history. Painstaking historical research, I believe, is the only sure path away from prejudice and towards a new state of equality at all levels between the sexes.

I must say here, therefore, that I am quite painfully shocked by the atmosphere and general behaviour of old friends and acquaintances as I have found them in London after a period of five years away. A combination of emotional insecurity and extreme aggression appears to be the norm here; and as for the possibility of efforts being made in a balanced manner to redress the economic-social disadvantages which remain, for women, all traces of an
attempt at this appear to have been replaced by my own particular bugbear – monomania.

I hadn't met Monica Purves before – and it's possible that I'm simply out of date when it comes to lesbian activists, their aims and means of expression. And Carol Hill, the youthful Capability Brown of the Crescent gardens, seems as easily swayed by one opinion or the other as she would be if offered varying fashions in the laying out of a parterre or pergola.

But Mara! – I am sad indeed to see the degeneration into bathos of one of the brightest sparks one was ever likely to know. I was literally horrified yesterday to see the outpouring of hatred and desire for vengeance in the canvases at the Shade Gallery. What can have overcome her? (There are still traces of the old Mara there, of course, and on our walk in Holland Park after the fracas at the gallery I was briefly allowed to savour them. She and I were reminiscing about the old days, when we shared the big flat in Elvaston Place – Mara was experimenting with colour then and great daubs appeared on the walls – ‘That's a Rothko and that's a Frank Stella,' Mara would say laughing, before sponging them off again. And we had a laugh remembering Andy, who used to come round too often in pursuit of Mara and one night got drunk and ate the dog's bowl of Chum before passing out.) There was something more innocent about those days, I suppose … anyway, we were having a good time remembering all this until we got to Robina Sandel's and last night's chilling and absurd little melodrama was played out.

No doubt I am extremely fortunate to have a kind and loyal husband in Fife, two happy children, and a good income coming in from Paul's work in Edinburgh, where he commutes every day. And I know, from Mara's letters over the past few years – and sometimes we've gone a whole year without corresponding, Mara caught up in the internecine politics of Women's Agitprop and Art of one sort or another, and I sampling the exhausting but rewarding fruits of childbearing – that I'm considered by now a bit of a
fuddy-duddy. Mara's view is that because I trained as a solicitor I should practise still as a solicitor, whether I have a young family or not. I should be helping women in their legal battles – against absconding, non-maintenance-paying husbands, against wife-batterings, in rape cases and the like. I'm seen to have let down the side, I fear, and Mara's letters, friendly but increasingly exasperated, accuse me of being a Women's Institute type who makes home-made preserves and crochets table mats for the church sale.

Mara is right there and I'm sorry to say I can't feel apologetic about it. I prefer to raise my children in the calm, sane atmosphere of the countryside rather than in the frenetic drug-ridden inner cities. And I can't see anything wrong with making our own produce: both Karen and Allan enjoy our bilberry-picking expeditions and enjoy it, too, when covered with purple stains at the time of making the jelly.

Paul was quite happy to make arrangements in Edinburgh so that I could come south to visit the British Library for a week. I miss the bairns, of course – but I would feel that I was not making my contribution to the women's cause if I allowed the contingencies of motherhood to take me away from my work more than absolutely necessary.

Then, too, I have to admit that I was intrigued to receive a letter from Eliza Jekyll just a few weeks ago.

It really is centuries since I last saw Eliza. Those days in Oxford seem to belong to another age altogether. So it was particularly surprising to be asked a favour – as Eliza put it. She hinted that my legal training would in some way come in useful. But I was mystified as to what a woman in the centre of metropolitan life – and a woman who, as I heard last night, had married and divorced (and all without my legal aid) – could want of me when solicitors, barristers and influential friends must abound in her life.

I was most concerned when, arriving off the Edinburgh shuttle at Heathrow – to be met by Mara in her same old bashed-up Beetle car – and taken directly to the gallery in Portobello Road, Eliza took me aside and told me the nature of her request.

Now, my view in these matters is that, while the State should on no account be expected to provide lesbian play centres and the like out of tax-payers' money, and that prevailing attitudes towards a self-help ethos are highly commendable, the limits of philanthropy of an individual nature should also be carefully guarded. Charity may come in the wake of a cutting back of Government support for those unable or unwilling to help themselves. But it should not, most emphatically, fall into the trap of the quixotic.

This was just how Eliza struck me last night at the Shade Gallery – and that was before the appalling revelations which followed the opening. She had a superficial air about her that I don't remember from our student days – but, I must say, she looked remarkably unchanged since then, as if the cares and wrinkles that beset the rest of us, had, magically, eluded her. She seemed a bit jittery, too, but I put that down to gallery opening nerves – and I gathered from Sir James Lister that the place has only just been renovated and launched as a picture gallery; and that it's the first time he has employed Eliza, who a few weeks ago he didn't know at all. Certainly I had a slight feeling that the young woman I'd known when a student of Art History was less in touch with the banalities of real life now than she, very clearly, had been at Oxford. (For if Mara, for example, had always had this wild, romantic side to her character – a true ‘artistic personality', I suppose you could say – then Eliza, despite her good looks, was always extremely down to earth.) Her only fault, as I remember it, was generosity – she once gave her entire term's allowance to a student who was down on his luck, and worked at the Cardrona Tea Rooms to pay her way through her studies.