The Sister (22 page)

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
,
PSO
₂
,
NO
₂
, 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.

T
HE 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.

C
LIVE 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 me.

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.

Suddenly the house is unbearably large. I feel as if I’m part of a huge continent but that chunks of it are breaking off around me and drifting away in all directions, and all that’s left of me is this little island, floating motionless in the center as the other bits of land move farther and farther off, like icebergs from a glacier in summer. All of a sudden I wish it were her, not me, who had to suffer this silence. I’d like to lie down here and die as well, as if by complete coincidence, so that someone else has to deal with the problem of clearing up the both of us. But I can tell I’m not about to die. The events of the past couple of days have had quite the opposite effect. I feel a new life force coursing through my body, ousting the years of lethargy and inertia that I’ve learned to live with, waking me from slumber, showing me the world more clearly.

I
NEED TO
get up. I need to concentrate, to think through my options in a methodical way, to devise a strategy to help me out of this blunder and follow it through to a logical conclusion. I elbow off my blankets and inch my legs over the side of the bed, bringing myself to sit up on the edge. It’s the first warm day of spring. The early light, which has just begun to pour through the window, is bright and hopeful. Thrown about by the movement of the creeper outside, it dances over the bare floorboards, daring to touch my feet. Through my bed socks, I feel a sudden rush of icy blood fill my swollen feet, feeding the pain that overflows. I find if I concentrate very hard, it goes away or turns into something less like pain, more like heat or pressure.

I lower my feet to the floor. They smart sharply as small needles race along them and up my lower leg. My feet and ankles are set solid as if, today, they have been carved together from a single block of wood. I turn my attention to getting to the bathroom, shuffling in the only way my body allows me, until I reach my halfway point and rest, leaning on the back edge of the nursing chair outside the bathroom door, supporting myself on it like a walking frame. No one can condemn me for lack of effort. I tried my best to rekindle our friendship. I tried to love her, to like her, to find her faults endearing and amusing as I once had by nature, to see them as Vivienisms, as Maud used to say, a statement of her free-thinking, fun-loving attitude, her breath of fresh air.

After a minute’s rest I summon the strength to continue my journey to the bathroom, concentrating on the pain of each slow step. Both my hands are screwed into cold fists that I know it will take me some minutes to open. Once I reach the washbasin I lean my elbows on the edge to take some weight off my feet, their marathon over. I look at my hands—witch’s hands, with their crooked fingers and swollen red knuckles—and try to straighten each in turn, rubbing them between my legs to work up the circulation. I feel it would be less painful to be rid of these joints for good, have them chopped off and the stumps wrapped up in soft bandages. This morning it requires an enormous effort of will to twist on the hot tap. Finally I have it running until it steams and put both hands underneath, soaking them. I can already feel the knuckles start to loosen for the day.

I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel like a murderer. After all, I only put it in her milk, I didn’t pour it down her throat. Then it was out of my hands. It’s almost as if I did it to get something off my chest, like writing a scathing letter in the temper of the night, only to burn it in the temperance of the morning. I hadn’t gone up to the attic for that reason. The moon led me up there. I hadn’t planned to pick up the cyanide or to bring it downstairs tucked up my sleeve. It seemed so natural, as if it was
meant,
one thing following another in a predestined way, as if somehow I were acting out of myself, the puppet for a force of something else.

After I’d put it into her milk I sort of believed that it was either meant to happen or not, and if it wasn’t meant to happen she wouldn’t drink the milk, or it would spill in the fridge. I don’t think I ever really believed that she would drink it or that, if she did, it would kill her. I’m not a real, cold-blooded murderer. It’s not as if I loaded a gun and shot her between the eyes or smashed a lead weight across her head.

I dry my hands and put on the black woolen mittens that I hung, as usual, over the storage heater last night so they’d be warm. I pull off my bed socks. My toes, like my hands, are peculiar. They’re driven to deform towards the middle, pushing together like the hoof of a single-toed goat. One by one I pick up the small scrolls of loo paper rolled carefully and left in a pile, for mornings like this one, and squeeze them between my toes, forcing them apart, a little trick I’ve developed to alleviate the constant painful pressure. Perhaps, I think, some cannabis tea would release the pain, and when I get back into the bedroom I turn on the kettle. Then I decide, quite irregularly, to forgo my normally stringent routine and go back to bed for a while. I feel thrilled by the deviance, like a naughty schoolgirl. I’ll wiggle my hands and feet, wait for them to wake up and listen for signs of life in the rest of the house.

It’s as I’m getting into bed that I notice my wristwatch, the digital one on my left wrist, is eleven minutes behind my bedside clock (it’s my habit to check them against each other as I get into bed and they are rarely out of time). I check my other wristwatch, my backup one, and I’m horrified to find that it stopped in the middle of the night—at half past two. I feel completely disoriented. I find it extremely distracting if I cannot at once get an accurate time reference, especially first thing in the morning. I need to know the time to start my daily routine or I’m thrown off for the rest of the day. (Although I’m not the superstitious type, I’ll admit I’m not completely immune to the coincidence that a watch that has never stopped should stop dead on this particularly haunting morning. I should think another, less pragmatic, less scientific sort of person would be spooked by the experience.)

I consider the facts: I trust all my digitals over any of my dial clocks. My bedside clock is my number-one timepiece, followed by my digital wristwatch. However, my bedside clock now says 8:08 and I’ve not yet heard the longcase in the hall strike the hour. If it were to strike in time with my digital wristwatch I’d be more inclined to trust those two than my number-one clock.

7:56 a.m. (by my digital wristwatch)

The longcase in the hall has just struck but my wristwatch is still a few minutes off eight so I’m no closer to knowing the correct time. I’m going to stay here awhile longer until I can get my bearings on the day.

9:55 a.m. (by my digital wristwatch)

I hear the start of Monday’s bell-ringing practice at the church, even though my digital wristwatch isn’t yet at ten. Apart from Michael’s irregular visits and the rare encounters I have with strangers coming to the door, all of whom I invariably check the time with, this Monday ten o’clock practice is about my only weekly time reference. It’s not very accurate, though. I’ve learned that they are in no way reliable. They do not normally start on time and it can be up to a quarter past ten before I hear their first peal. But rarely, if ever, do they start early, and because my wristwatch hasn’t yet reached ten, I suspect that this is the faulty one. I don’t know which is worse, trying to work out the time or trying not to think about Vivien. Did I really kill her? I’m not at all sure anymore that I actually did it. I don’t
feel
as if that was something I did last night.

I’m dreading the rest of today. I can feel its full weight on me now, pinning me to the bed, urging me not to participate in it any further. I’d like to freeze time right here and now. I’d be quite happy to be left alone, in eternal timelessness, comforted by the relief that I’ll never have to partake in the immediate future.

I wonder grimly how long it will be before I start to smell her. It’s a maddening thing to have entered my mind because now that it’s there I cannot dispel it, and because it’s there I can already smell her.

12:24 p.m. (by my bedside clock)

I think I’ve just heard a small cry, but I can’t be certain. I’m up, out of bed, pulling my dressing-gown cord round my middle to take the sudden chill off my spine. I move over to my door, which is closed. As I put my hand on the door handle I hear it again. A small, distant cry. I freeze. If I open this door, I face a dilemma. I will not be able to ignore the cries and will be forced to make a difficult choice: Should I go to her aid, or should I leave her and live with the knowledge that I could have helped her? It would be like killing someone twice. I couldn’t bear it. However, if I don’t open the door and block up the gaps around the edges I might not be able to hear any distant disturbing noises. I could sit and watch the plaster crumble and the creeper invade the room and concentrate on the pains in my joints. Then I would never be sure that the cries I might have heard were real or not.

The thudding of my heart is so strong that it’s making me rock slightly where I stand, back and forth, back and forth. I turn the handle and pull the door open by a hand’s width. And then I hear it. Scratching. Unmistakable desperate scratching, like a dog at a door. Now another cry, this time more of a whimper. Simon! He’s in the kitchen. I am instantly relieved, elated, even; I feel so thrilled I could almost giggle, like being in an accident that, just at the last moment, didn’t happen. But what do I do with Simon? I’d forgotten him, the dog that wasn’t going to last long. He’s lasted longer than Vivien herself. But surely he can’t survive independently of her—he can’t even walk. The quietest dog in the world is making noises he’s never made before. He’s probably hungry, I think. He’s not been fed today. I open my door and pad quietly along the landing and down the stairs, so as not to wake the dead, my bed socks soft against the wood.