You Must Be Sisters

  ‘Yes, but you yourself were telling her that it was a bit silly –’

  ‘I might tell her, but I’m her sister. I’m allowed to. You’re not.’ She shrugged. ‘She knows what she’s doing.’

  Geoff gazed at her, astonished. ‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘I’d better be pushing off.’ He got into the car. ‘I didn’t know, well, you’d get like this. Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said. Her voice faltered but the door was closed now.

  She watched the tail lights disappear down the street and leant against the wall, exhausted and angry. Angry with Laura for spoiling everything with Geoff, for surely he would never come back after this. Angry with herself, and angry with Geoff for saying things that she as a sister could say but he, an outsider, couldn’t. Yet he wasn’t an outsider; she didn’t want him to be. And of course he was quite right, dammit. Loyalties pulled at her from all sides.

  She sighed and went indoors.

  But Geoff drove away exhilarated. This was marvellous. Angry looks, confidences, family secrets, a real live quarrel. Lovely not to be polite for once; what a relief. How close they’d come to each other, shouting. He knew her better than twenty, thirty well-mannered evenings would have made him know her. When he phoned her up, which would be tomorrow, they would be breathlessly apologetic, real.

  He was involved now; that was it. And he’d found it so very difficult to be involved with anyone before.

  nineteen

  I SHOULD BE doing my Jung, thought Laura. She should too. There in front of her lay the notes, lit by a ray of sunshine. Every day she would reshuffle them, hoping that something would happen, a stirring in her brain perhaps, a click and a whirr and the whole mechanism would start up as it hadn’t started up for several weeks now. And then perhaps the essay would get written.

  But nothing clicked, nothing stirred and ah! how nice it was just to lean out of the window and let the warm spring sun seep into her skin. She lifted her arm to her nose; already her skin had that warm biscuity scent of summer. Time stood still. Since Mac’s arrival she’d found herself caught in a trance of inactivity.

  Down below she could see her garden – their garden – half-dug but nevertheless satisfying, its dandelions starring the grass and peeping out from the coils of rusty iron, its square of earth already showing the broad beans she’d planted. Stout greyish plants; more real, somehow, than Jung. Soon perhaps Mac would dig the rest of the garden and she could plant some more things. She had plans, but nothing seemed to get done.

  The room, too, was still only half-finished. Mac, when prodded, said he’d finish painting the walls with her but he never did. She could do them herself of course, but something stopped her, the need perhaps for them to be more of a couple, for them to do ordinary tasks together, solid workmanlike everyday tasks. After all, she thought, heaving about under the sheets binds us together very nicely, but so would painting side by side, our hands speckled with emulsion. In its different way.

  Not that he didn’t try to embellish the room. Sometimes he would bring home strange objects to put on the mantelpiece – bits of curly wood or an intriguingly knobbled potato. Nothing useful, just little treasures that he brought to her as a child would.

  When he left the gardens and became a bus conductor he still found objects, though of a more urban nature – matchboxes with camels on perhaps. It pleased her, his way of noticing things. Most people at university only noticed things inside their heads. Her parents, on the other hand, only noticed things that had to be done. A pile of leaves in the gutter meant, for them, a blocked drain. For Mac it meant a nice pattern. Sundays with her parents were an exception; Sundays were holidays and one was then at liberty to lift up one’s eyes to admire the trees or cast them down to remark how pretty the snowdrops were and how early for this time of year.

  But Mac noticed things. She liked wandering about with him. The fluster of life – telephones ringing, cars hooting – meant nothing to them as they ambled along the pavement. Perhaps they’d stop to watch a dog, purposeful and jaunty, trot past; perhaps an old man sitting on a bench, rustling inside his carrier bag while the pigeons waited. Small things, nice ones.

  In fact, he often didn’t go to work at all and spent all day just doing this. Now she didn’t disapprove of this – heavens no! It just might be nice to see him get down to a painting, perhaps, for wasn’t he an artist? Or at least help her with the garden. Sometimes he did look rather aimless in his frayed plimsolls. Content, though.

  During the last weeks of the spring term he was put on to the early shift. That meant getting up at 5.30, and for a few days he was actually quite good. Laura had bought him an alarm clock. With a grunt and a moan he would roll over, thump his fist on it, roll further and land on the floor with a thud. Laura would stretch out an arm, switch on the light and just lie there, bathed in her tenderness for him and the warmth of the sheets. Who couldn’t love him now when he looked so utterly at a loss, all bare, searching amongst the trail of clothes across the room (he’d had a few last night) for his underpants? So young he looked from the back, with the skin stretching over the necklace of his spine as he bent down (ah, he’d found them). So slender and classical he looked, such a perfect animal, as he stood poised. He scratched his head, bemused, wondering where he’d left the next item; then he turned round, focusing on her.

  ‘Hello, my love.’ He smiled. How she longed for him to come over and kiss her, but he was rummaging in his pockets, now he was dressed, for a cigarette. Then he looked at the clock.

  ‘Wow, it’s getting on. Never make it in time, my sonner.’ He was wandering vaguely round the room. ‘Anyway, can’t find me hat.’ He lifted up books and looked under them, he looked behind his latest little heap on the mantelpiece. ‘Hmm.’ He lifted up the saucepan lids. Then he straightened up and she knew what he was going to say. ‘Hmm, hardly worth going in now, is it.’ He wrinkled his brow. ‘Anyway, don’t feel up to it. Me brain’s sore.’

  She looked at him in his uniform, his crumpled jacket and those unbelievable regulation trousers she’d tried to taper. Now he was dressed he looked quite comic. Then she looked around the room, at its overflowing ashtrays and its half-painted walls. She looked at it all with a familiar, faintly sinking feeling which she was trying not to define. Even his moustache had never really grown.

  ‘It’s not that late,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you.’

  The most sensible thing to do was to ignore the feeling, ignore those walls and ashtrays, find his hat, struggle into her raincoat which slapped her skin with its chill, and drive him to the bus depot. Which she did.

  But they had some beautiful days; they did. One really sunny morning they took the day off – yet another day off – and drove to the seaside. How marvellously free they were, speeding along in the Morris! Claire had refused her turn when Laura had brought it to London; the reason, perhaps, was not unconnected with Geoff’s ownership of a car.

  It was April now and the last day of term. Laura would soon go back to Greenbanks just for a while, to put in a holiday appearance. She didn’t want to stay in Harrow longer than the minimum necessary.

  ‘But listen, Mac,’ she shouted above the rattle of the engine. ‘Why don’t you come up? My parents are going away for a weekend, they’ve just written and told me.’

  ‘Me come to London?’

  ‘Well, why not? Apparently they’re having some dreadful cocktail party that they want me to come to, and the next day they’re taking Holly off for the weekend. It’s Easter, you see. They’re going to some posh hotel in the country.’ She glanced at his profile as he scratched his hair. Mac in Harrow! It would be amazing. ‘So why don’t you come? When they’re away that weekend. We can have Easter together in that great big house.’

  And why, thought Laura, don’t I ask him as a normal guest when my parents are there? Because she knew exactly what would happen. The gin-and-tonics in the drawing-room, the polite questions about his background. In dreadful detail she could ima
gine it. Under such a grilling he’d start shifting about in his chair and being deliberately stupider than he was, tremendously stupid, saying things like ‘People with more than one car ought to be shot’, though Laura knew he’d seen the double garage outside. And then he’d not have cleaned his nails, and he wouldn’t stand up when her mother came into the room, and Laura would feel that of course it didn’t matter but slightly wishing he had, and then Daddy would ask him about jobs and there would be that slight pause, no, that long pause, when Mac had told them … And then of course the tentative little enquiries about him after he’d gone. And her father’s cardigan shoulders. Oh dear me, no.

  The sea. The beach. They slammed the car doors and ran down towards the waves. The pebbles clunked and rolled underfoot. Laura flung herself down on her back. She swept aside those complicated thoughts. She just lay there and felt the sun seep into her face, hearing nothing but the suck and rattle of pebbles at the water’s edge.

  She heard Mac sitting down beside her. She sat up and looked at his ankles. In the gap between his jeans and his plimsolls she could see the bare skin, just a narrow band of it. She had a strong impulse to cover it up.

  She picked up some pebbles and heaped them over his ankles. He squirmed. ‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to move.’

  He lay flat on his back, smiling, the sun in his face. She hesitated, hand poised. ‘It’s so fascinating,’ she said. ‘Let me do more.’

  ‘Go ahead.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Don’t be shy.’

  She began logically at his feet and very gently heaped the pebbles on to them. His feet pointed skywards; she had to heap the pebbles in two large mounds to cover them up. Then, very gently, she began to scoop the stones and heap them on to his legs, higher and higher. The undersides of the pebbles were cold and damp, she could feel them as she picked them up, and she was touched that he didn’t complain but lay there for her, his eyes closed. His outstretched hands looked helpless, their pale palms and pale fingers. They didn’t flinch as she covered them up.

  It took rather long. Stones kept sliding off and revealing pieces of Mac. Doggedly she replaced them and patiently he lay. She liked the way he didn’t question her.

  Finally only his head remained. She hesitated. ‘What about your face?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re very gentle, my sonner.’

  Carefully she began to place the pebbles one by one on his face. It twitched, it couldn’t help it. With fascination she watched the warm and loved skin, his living face, disappear pebble by pebble. The pebbles themselves were skin-smooth.

  ‘Can you breathe?’ she asked, before she covered his mouth.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said the mouth. It looked exposed.

  With the utmost care she placed the last few pebbles over it and he was sealed up. Cancelled out. Just like that. Her doubts cancelled out, all her uneasiness about him sitting in the Greenbanks drawing-room cancelled out. As simple as that. Just a longish mound of pebbles amongst the other mounds of pebbles that stretched down the beach as far as the eye could see. She stood back to look at her workmanship. Mac obliterated. Her darling Mac gone. Why did it give her such strangely mixed feelings?

  After a moment she began to feel uneasy in the silence. She leant over the tomb-like mound. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ she whispered. What was he thinking under his mantle of stones? Was he smiling perhaps? Was he at peace there under his primeval hood?

  ‘It’s nice,’ she heard him mumble. ‘But dampish.’ He shifted himself; the stones slid off. He sat up, white-faced as Lazarus, his hair sticking up round his head in wet spikes.

  He looked at Laura. Yes, he said, he would like to bury her.

  So he did; then they drove home, their clothes sticking to their bodies and their shoes full of pebbles, just little ones. And what, thought Laura, would Jung think of all that?

  twenty

  ‘THEY’LL NEVER EAT all this,’ said Laura.

  ‘But it’s nice to have little nibbly things,’ said her mother. She laid out the specially small and specially dainty sausage rolls on a plate. ‘And it’s so much more welcoming, don’t you think?’ Her mother always made these most obvious statements with great emphasis, as if she were the first person ever to think of such things. ‘It’s so tiresome when the car breaks down,’ she’d been known to say, as if everyone else in the world found it first-rate entertainment. Sometimes the family found this pleasingly naïve and sometimes they found it annoying, depending on mood.

  Laura arranged slivers of gherkin on slivers of egg. ‘How many people are coming?’

  ‘About fifty.’

  ‘Heavens.’

  ‘Some of them haven’t seen you since you were so small.’

  ‘Um. They’ll have a shock. I say, this isn’t real caviare is it?’

  In half an hour the guests were due. Together Laura and her mother took the trays of food into the drawing-room. It was full of flowers, large red tulips and large yellow daffodils. On the tables bowls of nuts and ashtrays were placed. The french windows were open and a carpet led out into the garden. For those who wished to sit, chairs faced each other in confidential circles. And in the midst of it all stood her father polishing glasses.

  Laura gazed round. ‘Wow, it’s all so organized!’

  ‘Compared to your parties, I bet it is,’ said her father. He was in a good mood. ‘It’s not just a crate of beer and an open door here, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that.’

  ‘I do like to make an effort,’ said her mother. There was a tiny apology in her voice; very occasionally this appeared, but Laura chose to ignore it.

  ‘The thing is,’ said her father, ‘all you lot – you young lot – you’re afraid for things to look as though you’ve taken any trouble. You think you’d look silly.’

  Laura opened her mouth to argue then shut it again. She shut it because the room really did look rather nice – glittering and expectant. Beer-puddled Bristol kitchens … she remembered her lost feeling at that party. Somehow such parties didn’t make one feel exactly cherished. This room did. She could almost forgive things like that hideous cocktail cabinet.

  Her mother spoke. ‘If only that man would come and fix the verandah light, everything would be perfect. It’s a beastly curse; he promised he’d come before five and it’s nearly six now.’

  Just then Claire, who had been upstairs changing, came into the room. She wore a soft red dress, very simple. Dan smiled.

  ‘You look very nice,’ he said. ‘Er, what are you going to wear, Laura?’

  ‘This, of course.’

  A silence.

  ‘But Laura,’ said her mother. ‘I mean, it’s covered with repairs. I can see the stitches.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Laura. ‘It’s tremendously old.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  ‘It suits her,’ said Claire quickly. ‘Jolly evocative. She looks like somebody out of “The Great Gatsby”.’

  Dan said: ‘Actually, that was before our time.’

  Rosemary looked at Laura. ‘Oh dear, I wish you could have made an effort. Just for our friends, so I can feel proud of you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s one of my nicest dresses.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘She has made an effort,’ said Claire, being loyal. ‘It’s Laura’s sort of effort, that’s all.’

  Laura tossed her head. She stopped thinking the room looked nice. Pretentious chandeliers. Stupid, false cocktail parties.

  ‘As if it’s important what I wear.’

  ‘Ah, but you think it’s important too,’ said her father. ‘Else you wouldn’t have worn that particularly extraordinary dress.’

  Laura paused. ‘Oh,’ she said, and then she laughed. She thought of her mother in her cocktail dress hating looking odd; and herself in her tatty one, liking it. She shrugged cheerfully. She could never decide which way she was going to feel. Couldn’t she even rebel consistently?

  The moment was over; t
he irritation subsided. The four of them stood, poised in the room that was fragrant with flowers. They could hear the clock ticking.

  ‘Well,’ said Dan at last, rubbing his hands. ‘There’s no reason why we shouldn’t start. Shall we?’

  ‘Let’s!’

  Dan poured out their drinks. Holly walked in and was wordlessly handed a cider. Usually she had to argue to get a cider but tonight was special.

  Drinks in hand, they sat down and looked out of the front window.

  ‘Do you feel we’re doing something forbidden,’ said Rosemary, ‘having this little drink first?’

  ‘If somebody knocks on the door,’ Claire replied, ‘I’ll leap up as if I’ve been caught smoking in the lavatory.’

  ‘Or reading under the bedclothes,’ said Dan.

  ‘Reading “Young Marrieds”,’ added Laura. Dan looked at her and chuckled, remembering.

  They sat in a companionable silence. They hadn’t been all together like this for ages, just sitting still in one room.

  Rosemary said: ‘I have a sneaking wish that nobody was coming at all. Even though I love parties. Wouldn’t it be fun!’

  ‘We could stuff ourselves with all the caviare.’

  ‘And then watch the telly all cosily.’

  ‘Or play Scrabble …’

  ‘… in our nighties.’

  ‘We haven’t played Scrabble for years. Wonder where the board is …’

  The doorbell rang. The spell broke. They tensed; they looked at each other.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Rosemary. She got up and smoothed down her dress. She cast a last look at her girls sitting in a row on the sofa. She wished she saw more of them but they only seemed to meet for functions nowadays, never for Scrabble.

  She cast a quick glance at herself in the hall mirror. She straightened her brooch; then she opened the door. The first guest.

  When Geoff got there, the room was full. He’d deliberately come a bit late because it was such a strain, being one of the few. Mrs Jenkins greeted him warmly, he thought; someone put a drink into his hand and he launched himself amongst the heads, searching for Claire. How very impatient he was to see her! He really could hardly bear it – he, Geoff, usually so calm.