The Bad Sister (9 page)

‘She was taking a cool drink to Master George, ma'am.'

The woman looked down at me in complete contempt. She was tired today, there would be no floggings. But she leaned down with the secateurs and nipped my ear. I let out a scream. It sounded like a pig's scream. At the same time, through the woman's legs, I could see Marie coming. She was running down the path, her black hair out behind her, her horrible dress, exactly the same as mine, beautiful on her body. I moaned for her.

The woman turned and shouted at Marie to get off the path. So Marie came the last hundred feet plunging through the waving grass. She was electric, the grass hissed as she ran.

‘Irish sluts!' the woman said. She left us, wandering down the path to the deepest red roses. Her hat was at a saucy, arrogant angle. I could have run behind her like a Japanese warrior, I could have jumped her from behind. She was so frail, half my size. But they owned everything. We were cramped, slave giants in their small, perfect world.

At last we were together. There, in the concealing grass, I searched her face anxiously. She was my sister, all my dark sisters. I had never needed her so much. I had never known her so well. We would never be enemies. We never had been. With our love for each other we would keep the rest of the world away.

We went the long way round, and climbed the locked gate. We crept in the back door, by the dark box hedges which smell of urine. The cook shouts at us – vague abuse.

Then we are up the back stairs, up and up against the brown paint worn to a shine by the backs and buttocks of beasts of burden, footmen and chambermaids and all those who wait on Mr and Mrs Aldridge and Miss Sylvia and Master George. All who serve the Manor and the enduring tapestry, although here and there it is wearing thin.

Our room, white and pointed, crammed under the eaves
like a house marten's nest spattered with white shit, has two beds narrow as shoe boxes and a round window that looks out onto the central courtyard. Marie and I are in the one bed now, and our black dresses, which we never take off, even to sleep, are up around our waists. With our fingers we give each other comfort. We are kissing and biting. Her black hair is in my mouth. I will die, float, never let her out of my sight again.

MONDAY. TONY HAD
a quick breakfast in the kitchen. I lay in bed. My body was aching, my back and thighs with pains like contractions, as if the expansion and shrinking they had undergone had simulated the labour pangs of my birth as another. I was more at peace. Tony had removed the photo of the girl while I slept, and I knew no one was waiting outside for me. Day takes away these shadows – sometimes at least. And my jeans and jacket were folded neatly on the bedroom chair, as if I had gone nowhere at all. These magic garments, which make you invisible because everyone wears them, which transcend sex and wealth and individuality – who had folded them like that when I came in?

Tony brought me a cup of tea in bed. I looked at him, wondering if I might ask. He sat down on the chair, on top of the jeans, and my heart missed a beat.

‘Looks as if we might get the girl who plays Emmanuelle as Flora de Barral,' Tony said. ‘She's very small and thin. It might be good.'

Poor Flora, whose life was recounted by three men, all equally determined on her helplessness and fragility. If she had had power, she would have turned their words into meaningless gossip by taking matters into her own hands and doing something so unacceptable they would have been unable to recount it. But she was impotent: while they inveighed against the feminism of Mrs Fyne she meekly followed the destiny laid down for her. I smiled at Tony and nodded my head. He saw I was laughing, and frowned.

‘Will she strip in the film?'

‘Don't be silly. Of course not.' Tony leaned forward and
put his hand on my foot under the bedclothes. ‘Well … I've got to be off really. And I'm going to Rome tonight. For a few days. It's to polish up the script. It's just come up or I would have told you before.'

‘With her?'

Tony looked at me with what seemed a purposeful stupidity. His eyes were like a cow's – or I could see that was what he was aiming for. They were shallow and vague, pupils wandering, smooth as polished veneer. She was for a moment reflected in them: a minute figurine of her, she was standing with a hand on her hip, in a 'fifties skirt, and she was smiling like a hostess in a TV ad. I winced at her and looked away.

‘Did you take her photo from the table here while I was asleep?'

Tony's voice was blurred in his new stupidity. ‘Honestly, Jane, I don't know what you're talking about. What photo?'

‘The photo that was in the kitchen drawer. For God's sake, Tony, don't start pretending it wasn't there.' I sat bolt upright. My thighs, stretched as bows made from wet wood, ached beneath me. I was weak today. Why did he have to go like this? My eyes filled with tears.

‘Oh, that. I'm not pretending it wasn't in the kitchen drawer.'

‘Well, never mind.'

What did it matter? I had my film review to write. I would go and see Stephen when I had finished it, he would calm me like a familiar blanket. For if Gala travelled sometimes too far, to the dangerous limits of her mind, Stephen remained always within the same ground. His ground was less tenable than hers – he was training to take Holy Orders, he ‘believed', and Gala would never understand what that could mean. But his madness was sanctioned, worn as cloister stones. Paradoxically, his belief in something unprovable and unseeable only seemed to confirm the reality of the palpable world. When I was with him I drank tea and whisky and ate biscuits and felt the small comforts and irritations of childhood. One of his rugs was
scratchy to sit on. His mugs were chipped. When I thought of him these things returned to me intensely, physically.

‘I won't be gone long.' Tony smiled and patted my foot. I moved it away clumsily, it felt as heavy as if it were wrapped in plaster. ‘Jane, give us a kiss, then. And I hope your hair grows!'

How charming Tony could seem! He stooped over me like a handsome doctor and his lips made a bulbous shape as they came closer. His eyes were still blank, and his lips were like the magnified image of an insect's eye, popping pink membrane, blind but feeling, probing. I met them. They were warm and opened up further, to a shelf of saliva and then blackness. They went into a final smile before he left.

‘Don't see too much of Gala! OK?'

Then he was gone. Tony wasn't as much of a fool as I – and he when it suited him – thought. He knew something. Just as surely as I knew the girl was still in his life, still part of his flesh, crawling in his arm hairs, moving in the packed cranium which must contain so many memories of her. I would always know this, however much he denied it. And now he knew about Meg. Perhaps he thought of Meg, but he had only seen her once. And for a time I lay back in bed, thinking of the girl, and killing her atom by atom inside me, tearing and fading her image until she was no more than a floating negative print in a pool of developing liquid, black as dark red blood. The dim light went out and I saw nothing. For a time I slept. When I woke, it was to realize that Tony had properly gone, and that I was alone.

I posted my review on the way to Stephen's. I was glad to be out of the flat. Once the feeling of Tony had gone, the shadows made themselves felt everywhere: Ishbel behind the doors as I opened and shut them in my nervous hurry, Marie in the kitchen, sticky and warm. And the girl, Tony's girl, was mocking there somewhere. They had taken over the place – it was as if, since my first journey and thwarted escape, they considered me out of this world and themselves, my ghosts, the legitimate heirs. I thought I wouldn't
go back until Tony returned. I would stay with Stephen – or with Gala perhaps. Then I thought of Stephen's spare room, its absolute colourlessness, the sense when confronted by the faded chintz bequeathed by his calm mother of a nothingness in the world filled by polite chatter, herbaceous flowers, newly baked cakes which already contained the smell of their staleness, and I knew I would go and see Meg. In Stephen's world, so much had been brushed under the carpet that although he hadn't lived the life of his parents for years, some of it was still his: sudden moments of embarrassment with him would come from the rush of involuntary thoughts, which all this concealment in his past made inevitable. The deadly, ‘good taste' Persian rugs brought pictures of women of fifty struggling to keep their heads above water, their blouses buttoned at the wrong button over rasping, red chests. The stiff Dutch tables were his father in the bathroom, a rustling newspaper, a bad gut, the lawn mower going outside as a life of dividend-supported, uneventful failure went by with the shit. Stephen was unaware of the climate of his house. But I couldn't sleep there now. And at Gala's it was trying to lie in another's spoor. There was no inch that she hadn't protectively covered with reminders of her worldly, and other-worldly identity: letters from solicitors, poems, childhood journals in different-coloured inks, hats with poppies stuck in the brim, long, spotted scarves. I would drown there. So I knew, by the time I got off the bus and walked up Stephen's street, that I would go and see Meg. I calculated I had three days before the next viewing of a film, and before Tony got back. In three days I might rise again. I could lose my shadows, and walk alone.

Stephen was in a white silk caftan, with bobbles swinging from the sleeves. He stood to greet me in his pale blue hall like a plaster madonna in a niche. He was plumper, and his gingery hair grew forward onto cheeks plump as a pigeon's breast, like pale flames threatening to consume the face. He was smiling, his small eyes were nearly shut. Stephen might be eaten, or licked, and he moved as if he knew this, like a
tempting piece of food being jerked always just out of reach by an unseen hand. He gave off a smell of orange water. It was three or four years now since the conversion – when Stephen had decided to study to join the Church. He was horrified by pain and injustice, and it was true that in his presence it seemed impossible to believe in such things. Perhaps that was why he added so greatly to the physicality of objects and surroundings – when one was with him he and everything round him seemed the only reality. Yet he led a spiritual life, as well concealed as the crimes and sadness of his parents' life: he prayed, and fasted, and felt the existence of God.

‘Have you been seeing that woman again?'

Stephen put his Jesus-robed arm round me and we went into the sitting room together. I flinched as I always did at first at the square chairs, the horticultural covers nibbled by long-dead dogs. I went to a sofa and went down with a bump. The ancient springs creaked beneath me. I had told Stephen about Meg, but some time ago. Now I regretted it. Since then, I had travelled. He would be horrified by my journeys, though.

‘Yes. At a party on Saturday night. She's sent me all over the place, Stephen. Don't ask me to give it up.'

‘Why should I ask you to give it up?'

Stephen looked surprised. There was a plate of cakes on the table, and a pot of tea. In heaven Stephen would have cakes and tea, as if resigned to an eternal station waiting-room.

‘Have some tea,' Stephen said. ‘But Jane, I'm not laughing at you – I'd like to know where you went. I've tried often, you know … to get somewhere,
anywhere
that would help me to understand the Divine mysteries. As so many doubters have said: just one glimpse of God and I'll be faithful for the rest of my life.'

‘This isn't about that,' I said. ‘This is about believing something different.'

Then I stopped. It seemed already that another voice had spoken from inside me. I mustn't find myself at war
with Stephen now, when I no longer knew what I believed.

‘You can hardly tell me you're going in for the fashionable demonology,' Stephen said with a laugh. ‘An emancipated woman gives birth to the Devil! I've seen the movie.'

Stephen was pink and fluffed when he was annoyed. I was frightened to see him like that, for it seemed I must have brought something in with me, a cobweb from the nocturnal branches of my walks. Did I seem changed to him, or utterly different? I had only seen Stephen like that once before, when we were in the park and a big boy had knocked a smaller one to the ground and stamped on his head.

‘My clothes stink of sulphur when I get back,' I said. I laughed – it was worth the risk. But I could feel my dark sister, my Bad Muse, stir inside me and object to my flippancy. However much I wanted to keep Stephen as a friend, I must not betray my new path. Of course – and here my heart sank – she was only speaking like that because she knew Stephen was one of the few people who could dissuade me from the course before it was too late.

‘You might be possessed,' Stephen said. He hadn't laughed at my reference to the sulphur. He looked serious. It occurred to me suddenly that he believed in all this kind of thing far more than I did, with God and Heaven and Hell. He might even think I had been to Hell. Perhaps I had.

‘Can I have a cake? Listen, Stephen, I really don't think all this is to do with religion at all. I think it's to do with people having power over others – I think Meg can control the lives and thoughts … and invisible movements, if you like … of a lot of people. I think … that she wants people to learn about themselves, to see the world below the surface.'

‘I see,' Stephen said. He watched me as I ate the cake, with his head to one side like a large bird. ‘And what are you supposed to give her in return?'

‘Well …' I said. I felt uncomfortable. ‘Nothing as far as I know.' I finished the cake, and looked at the last crumbs fall onto the Persian rug with the same fascination as I always felt at all the small manifestations of the ordinary in Stephen's flat. There was a silence between us, as I thought of Meg again. She was reversing science, translating the known into the unknown. With her power, the old magic that people had known would pour back into the world again. Because she believed so completely in her words, what she believed would come true.

‘Are you still thinking about that girl of Tony's?' Stephen asked. I felt uncomfortable again: Stephen was too close on my heels today. Yet I should confide in him, tell him how the shadows were always there now, one of them the girl, and the others …

‘Most of the journeys I've done have been penances,' I said to Stephen. ‘Don't think I've been
enjoying
myself.'

At this we both burst out laughing. It seemed ridiculous, even in a discussion on the possibility of a Second State, Another Reality, or whatever it might be called, that I was still anxious to give assurances of a bad time. The Puritan instinct is the hardest to die. And I wanted it to die, one of the reasons I would follow Meg wherever she sent me, for one day soon I would reach regions far removed from the Puritans and the black, clayey soil in which you must lie in unending suffocation for your sins.

‘No, I don't think about the girl all that much,' I said. I saw Stephen blink, he didn't believe me. ‘Tony doesn't see her any more, anyway.'

‘Oh, I thought you said he did.' Stephen looked hurt. The last time we'd met I had told him so much, and now I was curt and offensive. Despite his enjoyment of our laughter he was sad again now. He took another cake, predictably.

‘Why is the sea always connected with crime?' I said. I was thinking of the waterfront, where Meg had given me the first glimpse.

‘And madness,' said Stephen, giving me a quick glance.
‘The mad were put out to sea and they wandered rudderless. The ship might nudge into the coast of Holland and go up a canal. Think, if you were sitting in your garden …'

‘Surrounded by tulips,' I said, beginning to laugh again.

‘And one of these ships came along the canal a few feet away.'

‘With men with striped caps and bells, and people whose bodies had quite gone and only eyes and hair remained …'

‘The sea, mad and female, the criminal's punishment.' Stephen shrugged. ‘An inspiration to kill, perhaps, from the depths of the irrational, from the waves that hide all traces. I don't know. Seriously, Jane, is that where she sent you?'