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To Archie, Lollie, Sophie, and Danny, with my love
Acknowledgments
MY HEARTFELT THANKS TO each and every one of those generous colleagues and friends who helped The Beloveds on its way to publication. I am truly grateful to them. They are: Heather Lazare, Jackie Cantor, Jill Marr, Patricia Callahan, Derek McFadden, Thao Le, Sara Quaranta, Jennifer Kim, Jamie McKenzie, Jenny Parrott, Clive Lindley, Julia Gregson, Jane Ridley-Griffiths, Stevie Lee, Trina Middlecote, Richard Gregson, Liberty McKenzie, Chris Murray, and Lisa Litwack and the talented art department at Gallery.
Prologue
MY DEEP DISLIKE FOR my sister first struck me at the age of nine, when I shut her in the linen cupboard. We had been ordered by our mother to play hide-and-seek, and I told her to close her eyes and count to a hundred before coming to look for me, and then I quietly left the house. I wanted to go swimming alone in the man-made pool we call the water hole, in the field at the back of our house. I would be in trouble later, for swimming without permission, and for not taking her with me. Nothing I couldn’t handle, though.
Gloria was only allowed to swim when I was in the water to care for her, to keep my eye on her and make sure that she stayed in the shallows. I knew that she would want to come, that in her company I would become her nursemaid and have no fun myself. She had been following me around all morning, whining that I was walking too fast, that I wouldn’t play her stupid games.
“You be mummy, and I’ll be your baby.”
I was particularly annoyed with her that day, for trailing her jammy fingers along my bedroom walls, and for howling when she stumbled as I shoved her out my bedroom door, bringing our mother running. I must have told her a hundred times to stay out of my room.
“She’s only six. Please be extra kind to her today,” Mother pleaded. “Her kitten is missing; you know how she loves it.”
In some secret part of me, I waited out the anger I felt at the look in my mother’s eyes as she bent to comfort Gloria. Revulsion overtook me at the sight of their petting, at the tears, and the “there, there, don’t cry.” It is true, you know, that eyes light up when they focus on the one they love. Mother’s did for my sister. For me, though, the light was at best occasional, and never as bright.
“Shut up,” I hissed at baby face out of our mother’s hearing. “Stay away from me, you little creep.”
The water hole is bigger than it sounds. More like a small lake than a hole. It was scooped out by my grandfather, Arnold Stash, at the junction where a gushy stream suddenly dives underground. A mini army of ash and alder half circle the water, creating in their leafless season the illusion of a man-made ruin; there is a cloistered feel to the pool—some secret, delicious, hidden quality.
The day was cool. A sharp little breeze agitated the air and set the water lapping. I stood shivering on the creaking wooden jetty for a minute or so before diving in. A brief submerging, then surfacing with a whooping intake of breath, a complaint against the frigid water.
I swam to the middle, raised my arms above my head, and allowed myself to sink slowly to the pool’s muddy bed. Spongy pondweed brushed against my body on the way down, causing a small panic. I hugged the panic to me. Then as now, I like the feeling I get when I do something daring, something with risk attached.
Such a silence down there in the deep, a strange sort of hush that wraps itself around you, brings the relief of being completely alone. I have always wanted to be an only child, but I think that I could have borne a brother more easily than a sister. A boy who would have followed his own path, not bounced about on mine, a brother who would have looked out for me. Why, little sister, if you had to be at all, why could you not have been a boy?
It was early in the season to be swimming, but in the cool depths of the lake where nature has set pale plants that drift toward the light, my heartbeat slowed, I felt at peace. My breath was running out, but I didn’t want to surface. Then as now I am at home in the shadows, those dusky places where Mother held the devil lurked. I have never been afraid of the dark.
When I broke the surface again, the weather had changed. A sulfurous yellow stained the sky, the clouds had clumped together, and lanky shadows stalked their way through the trees. And there, on the jetty in her little pink swimsuit, was the thorn that was my sister, waving and calling and jumping up and down, and I knew suddenly that it wasn’t simply irritation I felt. The loathing I experienced at the sight of her pulsed in that part of me, somewhere middle chest, a dark liverish thing that’s still there after all these years.
Her hair had escaped her plaits and was whipping about in the wind like corn in a storm; her narrow legs were white and straight, her fluttering arms those of a ballerina. She was nearly as tall as me already, not yet beautiful, but its promise loitered around her, waiting to settle. Even then I knew that her loveliness was unfair: the gift of her golden hair, her sunny nature, her popularity, accepted without a thought of what it might be like to be without those things. She had the angel’s share, but I was the one who understood beauty, who valued it beyond the usual limitations of a child’s senses. It came to me in a flash, a “lightbulb moment,” as they say, that life was not fair, that it picked its favorites, soft-padded their lives; the rest of us are expected to make the best of being satellites to their stars. Not me.
In those days, people often remarked on the family likeness between us, yet I was not on my way to beauty, I was already made pretty, beauty’s poor relation. If the resemblance was ever there, the grating years since have muddied it.
I closed my eyes and trod water. I hugged to myself the secret knowledge of where her cat had gone. Nasty little thing—peeing in all the wrong places, scratching the furniture, always yowling for food—untroubled in its watery grave now, the river a pleasant enough resting place.
I played dumb, pretended not to see her, pretended not to hear that trilling voice. I turned from her, pressed my hands together as though in prayer, and sank to the bottom of the pond.
* * *
I HAVE HEARD IT said that a woman is never completely free to be herself until after her mother dies, until the maternal strings are cut. We are supposed to rise, like the phoenix, from the ashes of our mothers’ lives, stretch our wings, and fly alone for the first time. My freedom has not been so easily won. I have found nothing easily won.
I rarely think of my mother without memory dragging me to the remote scape of childhood, to those flashes of toddler recollections, the denied plea for ice cream, the outrage of that stinging first slap. More usually, though, I am taken back to my nine-year-old self, when, regardless of what others thought, I knew that I was already formed, sharp as a lemon, and the brightest in my family, yet the least appreciated. My intelligence has rarely been recognized; in childhood it was not to be spoken of, unless to warn me of the sin of pride.
“Pride angers the gods,” Mother would caution. “Top of the class doesn’t make you the best person.”
Even then I knew Mother had chosen her favorite child; it was, and would always be my annoying little sister, Gloria. Pouty, shiny Gloria, a scene-grabbing enchantress of a child. Then as now I was alone in noticing her faults, the way she manipulates with sweetness. Others would enthuse on what a darling girl she was, a little sunbeam who paid back t
he smallest kindness with a smile and a hug.
I was forever in my mother’s bad books for not sharing, for being too rough with Gloria. Despite that yesterday I pulled a single gray hair from my head, the first one to show itself, those memories still offend.
On my sister’s behalf, Mother would step out of her placid nature to lecture irritably on sibling rivalry. I shouldn’t resent her, she was younger, I should make allowances, her nature was more sensitive than mine. She accused me of being thoughtless, of holding grudges. She never, though, accused me of not loving my only sibling. The thought perhaps had not occurred to her. We were family, so it was a given that love for each other swam in the current of our blood, was set deep in our bones.
Mother was generally a bit of a Pollyanna, but she had her faults and could be ruthless. Kind to others, she was behind glass to me: don’t touch, keep your distance. Perhaps she sensed that was how I wanted it, that I wasn’t one for cuddles and hair stroking. I have never experienced those sentimental feelings that others lay claim to. Some would say there is something missing, I suppose, some melting, saccharine quality. Nothing is missing. It is simply that I have evolved more than most.
1
THE CASUAL GRABBING OF what should be mine, if only by first-child blood rights, has gone on long enough. It is time to act. I have borne the pleas of poverty dripped slyly into Mother’s ears by my sister and brother-in-law, borne their tortuous presence until it can be borne no longer. Watch out, dear Gloria, darling Henry: I have cause and there will be consequence.
How I will go about it is just the tiniest shoot of an idea at the moment. I will cultivate it diligently, as you might a bonsai, shaping it with attention to detail, encouraging every little leaf.
My sister, Gloria, is standing at the Aga stove, wearing that childish apron of hers with the smiling duck on it, a smile she echoes as though full of good intention. She spears me carelessly with her know-it-all air.
“I don’t think the doctors have it right,” she says, speed-reading their report.
“Oh, you’d know, I suppose,” I say mildly, without the malice I feel. “So what do they mean by objectophile?”
“Well, it’s someone romantically in love with an object—a car, say, or a building. There is actually a woman who married the Eiffel Tower, one who is engaged to an oil rig, or so they believe. And you must have read about the artist, Tracey Emin?”
“No, what?”
“Married herself off to a rock.”
“He won’t be helping with the housework, then,” I say.
Gloria gives one of her full-throated laughs.
“It’s ridiculous, I know,” she says. “But that’s hardly you, now is it?”
“Hardly,” I say.
I wish now that I hadn’t told that puffed-up doctor about Pipits, our family home. My family home. He obviously made up bits of this and that and tagged a label on it. How they love labels. Truth is, all I gave him were fragments, small memories from my childhood that he asked about. I told him that Pipits was named in 1760, after the birds that lived in the meadows around the house. There were hundreds of them then, not so many now.
I did give him a description of the house, and I think that he fell a bit in love with it himself. It doesn’t surprise me. Who could not delight in Pipits’ beauty, its flowing contours, the spicy scent of logs burning in its fireplaces, and its dark wooden floors that are soft underfoot? I didn’t tell him much of that, but I did confess that to be alone in Pipits is never to be lonely. I shouldn’t have confided that, though. Easy to tell that he was not a free thinker; feelings must be raked over, run to earth, named. Ordinary people like him are blind to the intricate maze of feelings that binds me to Pipits, and it to me.
Not wanting to invite his closed-minded opinion, I didn’t speak of the house again after that first time. I chose not to tell him of the day the house spoke to me, the day that saw the commonplace leave my world forever. The memory of it is too precious to be shared with people who play mind games, think they know more of me than I do myself.
Twenty-five years may have passed since that moment, but you don’t forget something as seminal in your life as that. I remember the tiniest details of it, everything.
The day had begun as Saturdays did in our household, with Mother sleeping in, so that breakfast was served an hour later than on weekdays and leisurely eaten by her and Gloria in their pajamas. I had woken at the usual time and was dressed and in the garden when I saw Mother open her bedroom window. She gave me a little wave but didn’t smile. I think it irritated her that I made my own way, didn’t join in with hers. I knew that she would quiz me later about what I had been up to.
I was ten, almost eleven years old. It was a fine morning; the sun had returned after a long absence and was high in a pallid sky. The air was moist and warm, bees had arrived in the garden, and our fields gleamed brown-gold in the sunlight.
Mother and Gloria were going into Bath to shop. I didn’t want to join them, to suffer feeling left out in their girlish company. They had an exclusivity about them, a shared silliness that bored me.
At first Mother denied my request to be left at home.
“What will you do all day by yourself?” she fussed.
“I’ll read,” I said. “Sit in the garden, in the sunshine.”
“You’ll go to the river; I know you’ll go to the river.”
“I won’t, I promise.”
She thought that it might be against the law to leave a child of my age alone. In the end, though, my stubbornness held firm against her better judgment, and she caved in.
“Mr. Beard is coming to mow the lawns,” she said. “I’ll ask him to keep an eye on you. Go to him if you are worried about anything.”
I said that I would, knew that I wouldn’t. Mr. Beard was old, and deaf, and could hardly have been of any help to me. All he wanted to do was to sit on our mower, to follow the lines of his last cut, and smoke his disgusting old pipe, which was crusted with spit.
Why it happened on that day in particular I am not sure. Perhaps it was because I was alone, relishing the silence. My mother and sister’s intrusion into my life has never been welcome. Their incessant chatter frequently had me running to my secret place by the river to get away from the sound of them and from their sickly displays of affection. Mother knew it, I think; I often caught her looking at me as though I were an impostor, a changeling smuggled under the cover of darkness into her true baby’s cot.
I had dozed off in the sitting room while reading, and came to in that dreamy state that often follows sleep. I was aware of the distant sound of the mower cutting the rides through our woods, and saw that the light had changed, so that everything—tables and chairs, vases and lamps—was surrounded by a shimmering halo. At first, I thought it was the spring sun in my eyes causing an illusion, but then other things began to happen; sounds and colors seemed more intense than ever before, the floor appeared to swell under my feet, inducing a touch of vertigo that was not unpleasant. I fancied that I wasn’t alone. And then Pipits’ familiar shape expanded; the room I was sitting in seemed bigger, the ceilings higher. A rush of warmth ran through me, and I suddenly felt lighter, freer, as though by some strange chance I had stumbled into ecstasy. Minutes passed, during which I felt exquisitely alive, and then a high whine, like that of a mosquito, vibrated through the house, vibrated through me.
I shut my eyes and attempted to understand this novel, wordless language, one of chants, and rhythms, nature’s voice, quick and exciting as a spark of silver. Slowly some secret, unexplored part of me opened, and then as though I had always known it, I recognized the sweet drumroll of Pipits’ voice calling me.
Elizabeth, Elizabeth.
For hours after I was dizzy with the ecstatic feeling of being adored, of being chosen. It was as though lightning had struck and changed the shape of things forever. Straw to gold. Let Mother and Gloria have each other. I had my beautiful house.
I was so excited that w
hen Mother returned, I gushed out the news that the house could speak, that it loved me.
“Oh, silly girl,” she said, laughing. “It’s an old house. The boiler rumbles, floors creak. It’s just an old house. What an odd child you are.”
Her response instilled forever in me the need to hold my secrets close.
It draws blood to have your confidences dismissed as nonsense, to be laughed at as though you are a fool. I was angry at Mother and told her that if Pipits had wanted her to know that it could speak, it would have spoken to her, chosen her instead. When I accused her of being the silly one, I was sent to my room to think about my rudeness. I went with my head held high, visiting her bedroom on my way, to blow my nose on her favorite dress.
Since that lovely shimmering day, I have never been truly happy away from Pipits. Life, marriage, and work have intruded, stilled that inner voice that tells me I should have stayed, stood guard.
I question now whether the half-hearted choices I made in life have been worth anything; marriage is too dull a thing to stir my blood; work interests me, but does not enthrall.
Now, when we are not together, I prefer to think of Pipits’ rooms empty without me. The house should be mine alone; instead, there is Gloria and her husband Henry’s life impinging itself. Henry in the shed at his potter’s wheel is bad enough, but Gloria’s dispiriting patients traipsing through the halls are an outrage. It’s a disgrace that Mother allowed her to work from the house. Who knows what kinds of strangers we are letting in?
I’ve marked my territory, though, hidden something of myself in every room; a lavender pouch, a lock of my hair, ribbons and childhood toys. They nest behind the furniture and under the floorboards, little favors, gifts of devotion.
When I was young, I had a secret hiding place outside, too: an abandoned badger set screened by a thick laurel hedge. Brambles and stinging nettles barred the way to fraidy-cats like my sister. I kept a tin box there with things filched from Gloria and Mother. Gloria cried for hours over her money box shaped like a pig with two pounds fifty in its stomach, while Mother searched for and fretted about her missing silver christening spoon. There was pleasure to be had in the satisfaction of having sway over their moods.