The Sister (11 page)

CHAPTER
11

Arthur and the Cannibals

I
TOOK THE REST
of the day off to look after Maud and straighten the house. After supper Vivi phoned. Maud was fast asleep on the sofa in the library where I’d left her, wrapped up in a blanket like a battered sausage. If Vivi had been here, I thought, she’d never have let Maud get into that state. She’d have confronted the issue early on. She’d have picked Maud up by the shoulders, given her a good shake and told her to pull herself together. That’s what a good daughter would have done.

Vivi was talking to me but I wasn’t listening. Had it been obvious? Had all the signs been there that Maud had started to drink so much? I must have been blinded by my own ambitions. It had suited us to be left alone to our work that summer. Then I remembered a promise I’d once made to Maud, after Vera died. She’d made me promise I’d hit her over the head rather than let her die a death like Vera’s. She’d said, “Ginny, I want to die quickly and with dignity. I want you to remember that.” I was sure that Maud would have applied “dignity” to how she wanted to be seen conducting herself in life too, and it was there that I knew I’d let her down.

Vivi said she was coming home the weekend after next. “And I’ve a little surprise,” she said.

I wondered if it could be anything like as surprising as the things that had gone on in this house recently. I wanted so much to tell her about Maud shouting at me that morning but I stopped myself, partly because I knew Vivi would storm in and make a scene about it, and partly because I knew I was to blame. I suppose I had patronized Maud, even though I hadn’t meant to. And I had failed to help her before she’d got herself into such a state, and for that I deserved a dressing-down. But Maud was wrong about my arrogance. I’d never thought of myself as arrogant.

“I’m bringing Arthur,” Vivi said. “Arthur. My boyfriend,” she added after my silence.

I
HEARD
M
AUD
stirring and decided that the news of Vivi’s forthcoming visit would cheer her up. As I walked in I was assaulted by the acute smell of rancid vomit. I walked across the room and folded back the shutters round the box bay window, allowing the day’s silver light to streak across the floorboards and leap onto Maud. She’d hardly moved. Her face was loose and relaxed, her mouth open and her cheeks sagging, temporarily released from the pressures of life. But she’d been sick in her sleep: a dried crust ran down her blanket, spilling over to scurf the yellow silk sofa and down, pooling in the gap between the floorboards below. I went to get a bucket and mop, and when I returned she was sitting up, looking bewildered.

“Hello, Maud. You’ve been a bit sick,” I informed her as I busied about, unable to look her in the eye. She stirred slowly back to the here and now.

“Oh. Oh, darling, how disgusting, oh, you are a sweetie. I must have…I don’t feel too well,” she said. She looked dreadful—old, even. She stuck out her hand, signaling to me not to clear up the mess, then grabbed my arm and held it tight. “What happened, darling?” she said. “I don’t remember.” Her eyes pleaded for comprehension. I led her gaze with mine to a Garvey’s amontillado bottle lying empty on the floor a yard away.

“Oh. Oh, yes,” she said and let go of my arm, leaving a little bleached band where her fingers had squeezed it bloodless.

“Vivi’s coming home soon—the weekend after next. And she’s bringing Arthur,” I said.

“Arthur?”

“Her boyfriend.”

“Vivien,” she said. “Oh, no.” She crashed back onto the sofa, defeated by the day before it had begun.

I knew what she was thinking. “Don’t worry, Maud, I’ll help you,” I said, putting my hand on her arm.

“Would you, darling?” she asked. “Would you really?” Right there and then there passed between us an unsaid secret. We both knew what kind of help she needed. If she was to keep her dignity, she must have an ally. She could no longer control the drink’s hold on her, so she needed me to do whatever was necessary to cover it up, to hide her ignominious habit. That I should know it she could bear, but that anyone else—most of all Vivi—should discover it would be too humiliating. So, not having found the courage to help her stop, I would become her accomplice instead, standing guard between her and the outside world, protecting her against giving herself away.

V
IVI AND
A
RTHUR
arrived just before lunch on Friday, a day earlier than expected. Vivi looked exhausted. She hadn’t been home for almost six months and it seemed that so much had changed. As soon as I saw her, I realized I could never tell her about Maud. It wasn’t only that I’d promised Maud not to, but also because of the unexpected wedge that lodges itself between people once one of them moves out of the house, as if they’ve swapped teams. Even though she was a daughter and a sister, Vivi was now officially a
visitor
and it seemed natural that the message should be we were coping just fine without her. So it was that the allegiances of the people within the house, however unstable, far outweighed all external bonds of love and friendship. When Vivi left Bulburrow, she had given up the right to be party to its authenticity; she had visitor status now, so that week I’d made sure I’d scrubbed the house clean and unreal.

When they arrived, I made soup with some courgettes I found in the pantry, and I dragged Clive from the attic and Maud from the library to sit and eat with us all: a pretend family.

I felt a heavy responsibility to everyone to ensure it went smoothly: to Maud, to cover up her secret; to Vivi, to make Arthur feel welcome; and to Clive, to translate for him between his own world and the real one. It felt like I was orchestrating a grand performance. I was protecting everyone from everyone else, and some of them also from themselves.

A
RTHUR
M
ORRIS WAS A BAKER
, or rather, he helped his father run a business that supplied bread to shops all over London. It was a difficult topic to talk about if you knew nothing much about bakeries or the new self-service stores that Arthur told us were coming from America.

Vivi had first mentioned him to me about four months ago, but I hadn’t appreciated until recently that they were actually stepping out together. Arthur had short wavy black hair and two overblown freckles on his forehead. Dimples dug into his face to frame his ready smile, and you could see that his teeth were a little crossed at the front. He was very enthusiastic, about practically everything, and he seemed extraordinarily appreciative to be with us, as if he’d won a golden ticket. He talked a lot, about shopping schemes and shoppers’ habits, although during lunch, Clive was patently more interested in the habits of a slothful hornet that had landed on a slice of bread near his elbow and was walking slowly round the edge of it. All in all I thought it was very lucky Arthur was helping himself to conversation because he wasn’t being offered any.

It struck me that none of us had any common ground with Arthur, not even Vivi. He had hardly ever set foot outside the city and she had only recently stepped into it. Arthur knew everything about convenience shopping and nothing about insects; Vivi knew little about shops and lots about insects. Arthur was full of optimism and eagerness; Vivi was forever finding obstacles.

I was clearing the soup bowls as Arthur set to with a lengthy description of his baking premises, which, he said, were out to the west on Wainscot Road. Clive sprang on the name as if it were the punch line to the entire luncheon conversation.

“Wainscot Road? How interesting,” he said, more animated than he’d been all day. “Why’s it called Wainscot?”

“I have no idea, actually,” said Arthur, tilting his head, giving the impression that now it had been asked it was an interesting question.

“You don’t know?” Clive said incredulously. “You work in a bakery on Wainscot Road—”

“I don’t actually work in it,” Arthur corrected him—politely and without arrogance. “I run it.”

“All the same,” Clive said, flipping the comment back at Arthur with his hand as if it were a fly, “you run a bakery on the road but you’ve never bothered to find out how it got its name?”

“Clive!” Vivi exclaimed, but he ignored her and went on to get assurances from Vivi’s boyfriend that he’d go back and find out the origin of the road’s name. Because, did Arthur know?, there was an entire family of moths called the Wainscots, so he would be extremely interested to discover if the road was named after these moths or—which he thought more likely—if it was named after the very famous family from whom the moths had also got their name. Arthur agreed cheerfully that it was important, as well as profoundly interesting, that he should find out how the street had got its name, but I had the impression he didn’t think Clive was being altogether serious.

Once that conversation was over and agreed on, I was about to prepare for an uncomfortable silence when Vivi saved the moment in one swoop, as easy as a stroll in the park. “Clive is very clever, aren’t you, Clive?” she teased.

“Well…,” Clive started seriously, missing Vivi’s playful sarcasm.

“But the thing, Arthur, that he’s particularly clever at is bringing absolutely any conversation round to moths. Most people find it incredibly difficult to put anything about a moth into a conversation, but Clive finds that most conversations naturally come to moths in the end, don’t you, Clive?” It was only when Maud and I started to giggle that Clive understood he was being gently teased and braved a small smile. Arthur was gazing at Vivi adoringly.

“Clive,” Vivi continued bossily, “why don’t you show Arthur some of your specimens? He’d love to see them.” She turned to Arthur. “Clive’s got moths from all over the world. Some are bigger than your hand.”

I relaxed a little, letting my responsibility lighten. Vivi was taking control. She was pure, fresh air, and slowly she was filling up the house with it, resuscitating the space and pulling us all back together.

C
ARING FOR CATERPILLARS
is like caring for the young of any animal. They require constant attention. Our attic and our drawing room and, incidentally, much of our south terrace were full of larvae boxes housing our self-created plague of Brimstone caterpillars. Once we’d given Arthur a tour of the museum, he volunteered to come on our rounds of the caterpillars, helping to clean them out, give them fresh food and check them over.

The Brimstone is a shady brown caterpillar tinged with green and spends much of its time clasping a twig with its back legs, sticking its body out in front of itself, rigid yet crooked, looking uncannily like the twisted twigs of the bramble it’s most often found on. To complete the general effect, it has two growths midway along its back that look exactly like a pair of buds. It took Arthur a while to find one, but once he caught sight of it he was so thrilled that he made a game of seeing how many others he could spot in each cage. He asked a torrent of questions with boyish enthusiasm so we were spurred into explaining to him the basics of their daily care. Clive gradually assumed his lecture voice, giving Arthur tips—their leaves should be fresh but not the youngest and most succulent in case the richness gave them diarrhea.

“The onset of diarrhea spreads through a box of larvae like a virus and it’s nearly always fatal to the whole batch,” Clive informed him. I could see he was beginning to warm to Arthur. “You also need to check for flu, fleas, parasitic flies, wasps, mites, and, because caterpillars are little more than a bag of fluid, they’re particularly susceptible to desiccation, drowning, sweats, salt—”

“The odds don’t sound good for a caterpillar,” Arthur interrupted gamely.

“And their worst enemy—
earwigs,
” Clive replied.

“Earwigs?”

“Terrible. Terrible,” Clive said, shaking his head vehemently. “If I could destroy an animal species on earth forever it would be the earwig. They manage to invade even the most indestructible box to ravage my caterpillars—”

“What’s this?” Arthur interrupted him. He’d picked up a jam jar of leaves and was peering into it, searching it for a less upsetting subject than the earwig one.

“Why’s this poor fellow all on his own?” Arthur asked once the occupant had been spotted.

“He’s a cannibal,” said Clive, almost proudly, a parent blind to his offspring’s antisocial habit.

“Oh?” Arthur said, regarding the jar now as if he might drop it.

“Some are born with a taste for their brothers and sisters. All of them eat their shells once they’ve hatched, but some then carry on and eat through their siblings.”

“That’s quite disgusting,” Arthur said definitively, placing the jar down carefully.

“Well, it’s all good protein,” Clive reasoned. “Some species, like the Privet and the Death’s-head, the whole lot of them are cannibals and will never let up on a chance to gnaw into each other, but with the others you might get just one or two in a batch. The trick is to spot them before they start because once they get going that’s it, they’ll finish off all the others pretty quick.”

“So you have to sit and watch them once they’ve hatched, at the ready to pick out the cannibals?”

“Well…yes.”

“But how long do you have to watch them for? I mean, how long before you know they’re
not
going to start eating the others?” Arthur asked, obviously worrying that too much time was spent on this one exercise.

Clive looked at me and smiled wearily. I knew he was thinking that such details were a little tricky to explain.

“No,” I butted in abruptly, “you don’t really need to watch them at all. You can usually just guess—instantly—which ones will be cannibals.”

Arthur raised his eyebrows and I realized that wasn’t a sufficient answer for him. He was genuinely interested.

“You just
know,
” I tried to clarify. “They’ve got a look about them.”

“Vivi!” Arthur shouted playfully to her in the next room. “You’re going to have to clear this one up for me.”