Weird Sister (14 page)

‘I got shot. In the line of duty.’ Like in an American movie, Graeme thinks. He laughs his bitter laugh.

‘Did it hurt?’

Graeme turns to look at his sister-in-law. ‘Fucking right it hurt. It hurt like bloody hell.’ Part of him hopes he has offended her.

‘Fucking right,’ Agnes says softly, as though considering. She smiles her smile, seductive and sweet. ‘Shall we go home?’

On the street Graeme’s long coat flaps open as he walks, his cane emerging from the folds with every stride. A well-cut grey wool coat; sometimes he uses his disability pension to buy clothes in London, spending the whole month’s money on one item. He is partial to good coats and leather boots. He thinks Karen doesn’t know, but of course Karen knows, and of course he knows Karen knows; marital deception is a multi-layered thing. He is a vain man, he is not ashamed of it, he needs these clothes. He deserves them.

When they get back to the house it is quiet. Robert is long gone, Karen put Martin to bed and retired, so did Jenny. They go into the sitting room where the last embers of the fire are dying. Graeme uses his cane to give the ashes a poke and puts on another log. He asks Agnes if she wants a drink and when she nods, he pours her a shot of whisky. Agnes buys the whisky in this house now; Jim Drury claims to have given her tutelage.

Agnes sits on the big settee, but Graeme can’t settle, so he paces up and down in front of the fire. He wants to communicate something to this woman, he isn’t sure what. With Robert out of the house he feels liberated, but it is a liberation coupled with urgency. He comes to a stop in front of Agnes and sits down next to her. She rolls the whisky around in her glass and breathes deeply of the fumes.

‘I’m not doing what I’m meant to be doing,’ he says.

Agnes turns and looks at him coolly.

‘I’m not supposed to be stuck like this.’ For Graeme this is an enormous admission. It’s not something he has articulated before, not even to himself. He examines his hands, large and elegant. ‘It’s not right. Robert –’

Agnes clears her throat as though she is about to interrupt. Graeme looks at her. He is sitting slumped to one side, leaning in her direction. He can smell her, she smells spicy, gamy even. He puts his hand on her knee, on her tights just below her skirt. He looks into her eyes and thinks that what he sees there is openness, willing. He moves his finger along the hem of her skirt.

‘Robert,’ he says pausing again, ‘Robert is a wimp.’ He laughs out loud; he knows he’s a little drunk.

Agnes doesn’t respond. Her gaze is level. She is letting Graeme set the pace. He moves closer, his body radiates heat. Agnes does not move away. He lowers his face, slowly, slowly, until his lips are brushing against her throat. Her skin is soft, so soft, and pale, he can taste how pale she is. He lets his breath release and it’s as though his lungs fill with desire, not air. He begins to kiss her neck again and as he does, he feels her body stiffen, like a cat whose fur has suddenly stood on end. He looks up and sees her eyes are black with anger, real anger, he can feel it. She is edging herself away from his grasp. A moment later she stands and leaves the room without a word.

Graeme is alone on the settee. He sits back, his cane in one hand. He is unsure whether the victory is hers or his. He has been spurned but he is not sure how completely. He raises his glass and toasts the recently departed Agnes. He looks forward to what will happen next, whatever that might be.

Later, after a couple more drinks, he climbs the stairs to Karen. She is accustomed to Graeme coming to bed long after her, she is accustomed to finding him boozy and weary. When he gets into bed tonight he is randy and he wakes her, insistent. They have sex, he is strong and demanding and she responds to his ardour. Afterward he lies beside her and she strokes his back, careful not to touch his leg. She knows that he aches and he likes her to soothe him. She lies awake and thinks.

Karen doesn’t know what happens to her days. Time slips by; its pace is dismaying. She feels that she is finally emerging from the baby-fog of the past four years; neither of her boys has been quick to learn to sleep through the night. Sleep deprivation has altered her character; where she was quick she is now rather slow.

It’s a challenge to get everything done every day. She has in her mind a vision of the perfect housewife and mother, someone who does everything right, someone who has time to paint pictures and sew baby clothes and bake scones, someone who makes gooseberry jam and elderflower cordial at the weekend, who dispenses love and advice. It’s an impossible dream, one she knows is not even of her own making. Instead she is nanny and scullery maid and, for Martin, a nurse. There is no time to do anything well, there is no time to do anything. She wonders how her own mother managed, working full-time as well as everything else. Karen knows she’s only just holding on, despite appearances, despite the fact she has chosen to live this way. Last time she baked she burnt Francis’s birthday cake. Graeme had to go out and buy one. This felt symbolic of something, Karen isn’t sure what.

Elizabeth freaks out

Elizabeth thinks she is calm, she thinks she looks casual, she thinks she’s got the situation under control. She has her new job, she has her new life – it’s not like her old life but, she says to whomever asks, it will do. Simple. Straight-forward. She doesn’t have to listen to other people’s trouble all day, she doesn’t have to listen to anyone at all. She lives in her parents’ cottage. There’s a little gate overhung by a rose arbour; a short footpath leads through the tiny overgrown garden, the front door hidden behind a mass of clematis in summer. It’s a small house, mid-Victorian, a worker’s cottage that – when her parents bought it – was cold and stony and mean, with an outdoor toilet and open coal fires for heating, the bath a tin tub in the kitchen. Her parents moved the plumbing indoors and put in central heating when Elizabeth was a baby. The walls are thick and the windows are small and lead-paned, the original glass bevelled and distorted so that looking outside is like gazing through a film of milky water. Unlike the Throckmortons, her parents were obsessive collectors and the house bristles with features, both original and fake, impossible to tell which is which – picture rails, tiled fireplaces with cast-iron surrounds in every room, open oak beams on some ceilings, mouldings and rosettes on others, a gas-powered Aga in the kitchen, cubby-holes and nooks in unexpected places – and it is stuffed to the gills with stuff, furniture, china, pictures, tea services, silver toast racks, porcelain bed warmers. Downstairs, two rooms, a sitting room and a dining room, a kitchen in the back extension her parents added, upstairs two bedrooms, the bathroom. Compact, charming and a little damp, the house so laden with climbing vines that from the street it looks as though it is sinking beneath the weight of prettiness, so much quaintness.

All this belongs to Elizabeth now. And none of it feels like it is hers.

Tonight she rattles around the sitting room, picking up objects – the fire poker, the tea cosy, the newspaper – and putting them back down again. There is a terrible restlessness in her. She lifts the bottle of red wine she opened earlier and takes a big swig, not bothering with a glass. She puts it down, rattles around some more, comes back for another drink. It’s a good red wine, strong-smelling, thick. Elizabeth knows a bit about wine. I’m a woman who knows about fine wine, she tells herself, good wine, not the crap Barbara sells in her shop, not the crap they drink down the pub. She rattles around thinking, what’s missing, what’s missing?

She stops in front of the CD player, one of the few things she imported into the cottage. There’s an old favourite of hers lying out on top, she bought it in London, an old band that’s been through several revivals of late: Hot Chocolate. She puts it on. Errol Brown’s voice is black and creamy. She starts to sing.

The song makes her think of Robert. She can’t help it, there’s no connection between him and the song, but she can’t keep him away from her thoughts. Errol Brown sings on but Elizabeth stops hearing. She sits down and takes hold of the bottle of wine. Her heart is breaking. It is breaking.

She’s going to keep up her public façade of stoicism and generosity and getting on with things. She knows she can do it, she can do the stiff upper lip thing. I will survive. But behind closed doors the going is rough. It’s when she is alone that it hits her. And she is often alone, too often, she thinks no one should have to be alone as much as she is. It should have been me; her mind is a morass of old songs now, Errol Brown started it. It should have been me.

Now that he’s gone, she sees what she has lost. Before, she had assumed he’d be around. He’d be there, he always was. She hadn’t thought it through properly – she laughs at that, me, a therapist, not thinking things through – but now she knows she had assumed they would end up together. It was inevitable. It was right. Ten weeks ago if you had asked her how she felt about Robert, how she really felt, she would not have said, it’s a great and blinding passion. If I can’t have him I will surely die. There is no one else on this planet for me. But now that’s exactly what she would say. A great passion. It was meant to be. These are the words that Elizabeth mouths as she slumps on her parents’ furniture and drinks a bottle of wine from the cellar that her father laid down over the years. When she went through the house after her father died she found four cases of champagne and she knew, without asking – there was no one to ask – that he had been collecting them for her wedding. They had never discussed marriage, weddings, but now she thinks on it – yes – they must have assumed it as well. Elizabeth will marry Robert. It was always going to be that way.

She sniffs the wine and swills it around her mouth like the expert on TV. Her heart is broken and this cosmic shift has produced an excess of energy. What’s she going to do, what’s Elizabeth going to do, how is she going to stay sane?

She goes out through the kitchen and into the back garden for some fresh December night air. The garden is small and old-fashioned with a hedge and, in summer, dahlias, columbine and drooping poppies. The houses nearby crowd in, warm light spilling out of their windows; there are people in there, Elizabeth thinks, families, and they are happy.

I’m out here, aren’t I?

A great and blinding passion. It should have been me.

This she says out loud, waving the bottle over her head. Drops of red wine escape and rain onto her hair. She knows her neighbours, but they are acquaintances, not friends. I maintain a firm distinction between the two, I think it is important. I hate people who meet you once and then refer to you as a friend, as if they’ve known you for years.

She is babbling now, she is saying all this and more, out loud.

Next door they are watching TV, next door on the other side they are doing the same. Two doors along, a different programme, three doors, they have satellite. No one is listening to the night sounds. No one hears Elizabeth talking.

Elizabeth screams.

It’s a small scream, but it is profound and satisfying.

She screams again, warming up. The noise that escapes from her mouth is surprising. Her throat hurts a little. She swigs the wine. Glug, glug, glug, goes the wine down her throat.

Elizabeth screams and she screams and she screams and she screams. And then she stops and goes inside.

The neighbours pick up their remotes and lower the sound. ‘What was that?’ they say to each other. They listen. One goes so far as to turn off her TV and stand by the window, peering out. But there is silence. Nothing moves.

In her bedroom Elizabeth takes off her clothes and stands in front of the mirror. Look at me, she says, look at my body. He doesn’t want me, she thinks. He does not want me. Before she knows it, she is weeping.

Robert

The problems started with the renovations.

Workmen stomped through the house day after day. Work upstairs was scheduled to take four weeks, which I knew was optimistic. After four weeks both the bathroom and the new sitting room still looked devastated. With every step forward the builders discovered something else that needed to be done. Work on the ceiling revealed a leak in the roof. Work on the flooring revealed dry rot in the joists. Work on the plumbing revealed lead piping throughout the wing. Costs escalated. Every day involved more decisions, more money. Only our bedroom was finished, the work on it cosmetic. At night after Agnes and I had made love and she had fallen asleep, I stared at the walls, at the ceiling, and wondered what lay behind them, what the careful paintwork concealed. Sometimes I worried that if I leaned against the wall it would crumble to powder beneath my weight; if I knocked in a nail to hang a picture the whole structure would collapse. It was as if this part of the house, this oldest part of the house, neglected for so long, had decided to give up the ghost. As if it couldn’t stand the thought of the twenty-first century, coming as it does from the sixteenth.

I was struggling to meet the costs. I know now that I’d taken on too much, spurred on by my desire to make things nice for Agnes, good enough for Agnes. I thought it was a case of juggling payments, when in reality, we were beginning to get into trouble. But I wasn’t ready to accept the truth.

The real nightmare was the room below, the small ballroom with the carved plaster ceiling, a section of which collapsed on Graeme’s head the day of the wedding. Finding the solution for this room was Agnes’s job. She arranged for a man from the National Trust to come and look. When he arrived he was very dour and as he inspected the house he gasped and muttered under his breath, ‘Oh no, oh dear, oh dear me.’ In the ballroom he stood on a stepladder and stuck a thermometer into the patch where the plaster came down. He looked at it, shook his head and clucked. He looked at me over the rim of his spectacles, pointed upward and said ‘Lime and goat’s hair, that’s what’s up there, lime-and-goat’s-hair and wooden lathes. Original. Late sixteenth century, early seventeenth.’