“Probably not,” Gloria said. “But we’ll do it anyway. We’ll do it as soon as we can after the funeral service. It will be just us. Who’s to know?”
“Where in the garden?”
“We thought under the buddleia tree by the summerhouse. She loved to sit there and watch the butterflies.”
I thought of Mother’s geraniums that flowered in the summerhouse so generously, of the apricots that never fruited for her no matter how much she tended them. They would fruit for me, though. Did I mention I have a way with plants, a gift, you might say?
There was something hyped-up about Gloria, and I didn’t think it was about Mother. She was shifting her weight from foot to foot, in the habit she has had since childhood when she’s bursting to tell you something. She’s hopeless at secrets.
“I know it’s terrible timing, but I just have to tell you, Betty. I just have to.”
“Tell me what?”
A pause while she bit her lower lip as though to smother a smile. “I’m pregnant!”
Oh God, of course she was. Despite her grief, she had that glow; there was a nascent sort of expectancy about her. No doubt her guardian angel, always on duty, thought it a good idea to replace Mummy with a baby. New life for old. Move on, Beloved.
“I never told Mummy,” she sniffed. “I wanted to be sure. Isn’t that the most wretched thing? It would have made her so happy.”
So now it was all about her. She must be protected, cared for, not allowed to grieve too much. I felt the fissure inside me widening. I couldn’t bring myself to congratulate her; I more wanted to slap her. I was put in mind of my tenth birthday, the treat of the film Annie and then supper at the Priory Hotel. There was my yellow silk dress, the promise of a chocolate cake, ten candles to guarantee a wish, ice cream. Not to be, though. Gloria’s near-to-bursting appendix put an end to that.
“Can we concentrate on the funeral for now?” I said.
“Of course. Yes, Oh God . . . of course, Betty. Poor you.”
She hugged me to her, and I smelled the figgy fragrance of her scent. I hugged her back forcefully, hoping more to hurt than comfort.
“Henry is being sweet,” she said. “But there’s nothing like a sister at a time like this.”
* * *
THE FUNERAL SERVICE WAS well attended. Mother’s friends from the Women’s Institute came, soberly dressed; there were members of the local Conservative Party that she dutifully leafleted for, plenty of our neighbors, as well as our postman, and an assortment of people who were strangers to me but who Henry and Gloria greeted like old friends.
Alice sat with us in the front pew, weeping quietly. Henry did a reading with glistening eyes and a shaky voice. Then Alice was called to the lectern. She spoke of how my mother had treated her as a third daughter since her own mother had died young, how she would never forget her kindness. She talked of Mother’s joy in her children, the wonder of her garden, which gave her such pleasure. When Alice returned to her pew, Gloria put her arm around her, and Alice lightly touched her head to Gloria’s shoulder. There’s a bit of the cuckoo in Alice, copycatting herself doggedly into our nest. It felt to me as though I were the third daughter, the one who hardly had a role to play.
And then the tea, spongy little sandwiches, cakes with butter icing, and wine for those who wanted it at four o’clock in the afternoon.
I took Gloria aside.
“It is just us tomorrow with the ashes?” I said.
“Yes, just us, and I thought Alice, too, of course.”
“It should be just us,” I insisted. “Just Mother’s real family.”
* * *
WE STOOD AROUND THE buddleia while Henry dug the hole. Gloria was holding the pot. It was round like her belly would be soon: brown earthenware with a white butterfly fired on its fat waist. It hadn’t quite worked, the lid was a little too chunky, not a good fit, and the butterfly wings had powdered in the firing. Little pins of paint were scattered on the pot like sprinklings of icing sugar.
“A couple of tiny faults,” Henry said. “But almost better that way, don’t you think? Perfection can detract.”
“Oh, poor Henry,” I whispered to Gloria. “He does try so, doesn’t he?” I savored the frown that my words stamped on her forehead.
I do think that Henry should have stuck to teaching; he is an average potter at best. If it weren’t for Gloria’s patients and Mother’s hand-outs, they’d be as poor as church mice.
I know plenty of men like Henry Bygone. They come to the gallery, calling themselves artists, incapable of making anything you would care to have in your home. They present their work, which is always a metaphor for something or other. They begin the story of the piece, and, believe me, every piece requires a story to explain it. They say “fundamentally” to add gravitas. They love the word sexy.
“It’s subtly sexy, don’t you think?” they say, in the hope that it will set up dollar signs in your eyes.
They confuse art with conception. I have given up explaining to them that conception is flower arranging, selecting wallpaper, hanging a painting where you think it will look good. Conception is the stuff of everyday life. Some are better at it than others, but it is not art. Art is bigger than conception alone. Conception is only the beginning. Art is actually painting the picture. It is something thrilling and wonderful that transmutes the conception through the artist’s hand, and only the artist’s hand, into something shattering. It is Nietzsche’s “inner anarchy.” It is not a toilet bowl bought at a bathroom outlet and exhibited as “Society’s Sewer.”
It speaks to the daft side of art that these incompetents find collectors to buy their trifling conceits. I once turned down a wire coat hanger with a torn shirt hanging on it, titled My Father. Not for Walker and Stash, but three thousand paid for it by an ego-driven collector. It is festering away in a warehouse now. Best place for it.
Bert is more open to the scam than me. He likes to go to the art college’s final shows each year, and he’ll talk to any young person about their work as though they are already famous. I tell him that the junk we are looking at is the monosodium glutamate of art, a gloopy thing that makes the piece seem tasty in the moment but will make you queasy later.
“Oh, some of it shows promise,” Bert says. “And the young are lovely, aren’t they? So full of enthusiasm, so vital. In any case, it keeps my eye in.”
Into what, I wonder. Bert is kind about Henry’s work, too. He says Henry has a light touch, that he is talented enough to leave things to the imagination. He says Henry will surprise us all one day.
When Henry finished digging his hole, he lined it with leaves and sprays of buddleia. He placed the pot in it tenderly and tumbled the dug-up earth carefully over it with his big hands. Then he stood, brushed his hands off on his trousers, and put his arms around his swaying wife. He gave a dry little cough and started to read the poem that Gloria had chosen but was too weepy to read herself.
“I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.”
“Manley Hopkins,” Gloria said, swallowing hard. “Wonderful, isn’t it.”
Henry bent to pull up some weeds at the base of the buddleia.
“Leave them,” I blurted out. “Mother wasn’t afraid of a few weeds.”
It was nothing to do with Mother, though. I did not like Henry’s hands messing around in Pipits’ dear dark earth. I would come back later and dig the weeds out myself.
3
OUT OF THE BLUE, and hardly a fortnight or so into my get-better stay at Pipits, Mother’s will has been probated and is finally ready. At last. I can hardly stop my smile from surfacing.
We agree to meet up in the hall on the day of the lawyer’s appointme
nt.
“Make sure Henry’s not late,” I say to Gloria. “You know what a poor timekeeper he is.”
I am there first, of course, out of good manners as much as eagerness.
“Ready?” Gloria says briskly, as though she is the one who has readied herself in time and is waiting patiently in the hall for me.
“More than,” I say.
I hear their bedroom door close, and Henry appears on the stairs. He wears a suit well.
“Don’t you wish he always looked like that?” I say.
Gloria winces, but she doesn’t answer. The pair of them look relaxed as Henry helps Gloria on with her jacket. I imagine they think the roof above their head is safe with me.
“I’ll drive,” Henry says. “We’ll pick up Alice on the way.”
“Alice is in the will?” I question.
“So the lawyer tells us,” Henry says. “I thought I mentioned it.”
“You didn’t,” I say.
“Well, it’s hardly a surprise. Mother loved Alice.”
Did Mother love Alice? Or was her care for her born out of duty toward a motherless child? It irritates me that Alice is mentioned in the will, even if she is only bequeathed a token of Mother’s affections, some sentimental little offering. Why should she have anything?
In the lawyer’s office, we sit all in a row facing his desk, Henry, Gloria, me—and Alice, a little apart from the three of us, as though she knows that her true place is not at our side.
The words fall into an attentive silence. Ugly words that will change everything for all of us. It is Gloria and Henry who are to have the house. They are to have the house. Mother says, and here the lawyer’s voice takes on a kindly note, that what with the baby coming, they need it more than me.
“Oh, she knew.” Gloria beams. “She knew, Henry.”
Only in the event of Henry’s and Gloria’s death will the house come to me. Mother says she would like it to stay in the family.
It takes all of my willpower to stop myself from wailing, from opening my mouth wide and howling like a wolf. I feel sick. A salty broth swirls around my tongue, and my throat has hardened as though it is closing up, as though soon I won’t be able to swallow and the broth will pour out of me in foamy waves of misery.
I don’t want the money she has left me, or her rope of pearls, or the painting that looks like a Miró but isn’t; shiny things given to assuage her guilt at ditching her firstborn. How could she not know that the house by all rights belongs with me? It is a terrible injustice.
She should have left the money to Henry and Gloria. With it they could have bought a cottage, a barn, somewhere more suited to them than Pipits. What difference is it to them where they live? Wherever it is, they will set about smashing it up until it resembles something completely different from what it was in the first place.
Third daughter, Alice, has been left five thousand pounds and a gold bracelet that she had always admired, along with a first edition of the original Harry Potter novel that Mother bought as an investment. Clever Alice, weaving her life so intricately into the fabric of ours.
The lawyer stands first. The reading is over, done and dusted. We follow him down the stairs. Henry and Gloria shake his hand; Alice murmurs a thank-you. I give him the briefest of nods. He half bows and opens the door to usher us out onto the street, where we stand around as though we have lost our bearings.
A rush of flirty schoolgirls plows through us, leaving the dewberry scent of cheap perfume and peppermint gum in their wake. They flutter by like a flock of startled birds: tweeting voices, short skirts, kohl-rimmed eyes, glossy pink-daubed lips. Bosky with sex and fertility, they lend heat to the pavement. I wish that I were one of them, pretty and posing, the world before me, waiting.
I rock a little on my heels after they have passed. I can feel my blood seeping like slush through my veins, my heartbeat thumps out of rhythm, my saliva has dried up, turning my tongue to sandpaper. If there were ever a chance that Gloria and I would grow to be closer, more loving sisters, it has gone. Mother’s will has divided us forever.
Gloria links her arm through mine.
“Such a lot of money, Betty. Mother was quite the dark horse.”
“A very dark horse,” I manage.
“You will look lovely in the pearls,” she says. “And you will always be welcome at Pipits.”
Oh God, save me from the mercy of my sister.
4
BACK AT PIPITS AFTER the reading of the will, I endure lunch with Henry and Gloria and Alice. The food tastes like dust.
“Congratulations,” Henry says, handing me a glass of wine. “Who knew Mother was so rich?”
“All from her side of the family,” Gloria says. “It was wonderful of her to give us the house. Lovely we can keep it in the family,” she says to me.
“Yes, lovely,” I repeat.
I am barely in control, and with the excuse of a headache I take to my room. It is a good room, probably the best bedroom in the house. It was my grandfather’s in his last years, the one where he lay on his deathbed. I don’t mind that. Seeing as how I am the only one who ever mentions him, the only one to give him credit for all he achieved here, it is fitting that it should be mine now.
I surrender myself to grief, to a pain like nothing I have ever felt before. I am without a shell, no carapace to absorb Mother’s final blow. Pipits’ walls are damp with tears; it has lost its voice.
I lie on my bed and pull to my chin the patchwork quilt that Mother made for my thirteenth birthday. She thought it odd that I wanted one sewn from the clothes I had grown out of. But they would only have been handed down to Gloria, and she had plenty of her own. I wasn’t about to let her take anything else from me if I could help it. I have a permanent reminder of those clothes now; my mauve cotton blouse, the pajamas with little cherries bouncing over the brushed cotton fabric, my primrose yellow party dress that Gloria once had hopes for.
My window is open, a trace of smoke from someone’s bonfire drifts through it, laced with the tart scent of brambles. I can hear a dog in the village barking in a loop, two brief yelps and a little howl, then the repeat. Dusk comes and the crows are flying, then the dark, and the bats and owls. Before my eyelids get heavy I hear Alice arrive, the sound of laughter and music and more laughter.
When I wake next morning my first thought is that I have lost House, and the second is of Mother’s betrayal. Rage seizes me. I cool it down in the bath, dress slowly, and tell my reflection in the mirror to give away nothing of how I feel.
Downstairs it is quiet, and there is a note on the kitchen table from Gloria. The long sleep will have done me good, she writes. She hopes my headache has gone.
She reminds me that Henry has gone into Bath to a committee meeting of his potter’s group. They are planning a Christmas fair in May Park. I picture home-knit sweaters, sandals, badly cut hair. Gloria is with a patient in the dining room, no doubt talking her usual psycho-jargon. I think about the word therapist in my head and split it into two: the rapist. I wonder if Gloria has ever thought of that.
I smell traces of bleach, and some horrible air freshener mimicking the scent of freesia. I’d forgotten that it’s one of Mrs. Lemmon’s days; she’s the cleaning lady Gloria feels the house needs. Only a couple months on the job, and already devoted to her employer.
She will have zapped the poor little silverfish, seen off the spiders. Despite her meddling, her sweeping and squirting, I feel the complex soul of the house, sense the arteries that run behind the skin of its walls, and hear the soft hushing sound of its lifeblood flowing. I smell the drydown lingering scent, of the lives that Pipits has known, damp tweed, notes of mothball, tobacco, and wax polish, and the gamey mold that rises from the cellar. It is all as one to me. Love is love, after all.
It comes to me that I must save House. Who else but me? Whatever it takes, I will have Pipits. I will overturn Mother’s legacy; she will not have her way. The dead will not be allowed to direct my future.
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Just five months to go before there will be a baby wailing. I can’t bear to think of a child here. Sticky hands that pull at things, stair gates, plastic toys, a baby-carriage parked in the hall. A disturbing picture comes to me of a swollen-with-pride Gloria. Mother earth dripping milk. The vision is intolerable.
* * *
I CANNOT SEEM TO tear myself away from Pipits. I am in stasis.
Bert is concerned for me. He drives down from London every Saturday, arriving in time for lunch. Gloria and Henry look forward to him coming, as does Alice, our chirpy little cuckoo. They laugh at his jokes, think him the sweetest man.
“What a delight he is,” Henry says. “Lucky Betty.”
“Yes, lucky Betty,” Alice echoes.
Bert leaves after lunch on Sundays, and it is a relief to me to see him go. He is a city chap, too urban for the country. Admittedly, some call our village “the weekend Notting Hill.” And it is true that there are a handful of sophisticated weekenders, but the planning laws in Cold-Upton are strict, building applications are always objected to and rarely approved, and there’s no destination restaurant in the village to draw the crowds. It is not yet a theme park of a village, more old-fashioned and solid and, if I’m honest, what with the council houses, a bit rough around the edges. We don’t take kindly to strangers here. Most of the families are at least third generation, and even the young are set in Cold-Upton’s ways.
I tell Bert that there is no need to come every weekend, but he doesn’t listen.
“We’re there for each other,” he says. “That’s the deal. But you could come home, Lizzie, and let me look after you. I miss you, and I’d make a good nurse, don’t you think?”
I always thought it would be Bert who needed looking after. I don’t like him feeling responsible for me.
“Soon,” I say. “I miss you, too, and the gallery, of course.”
Business at Walker and Stash seems to be picking up. The money from the Lichtensteins, sold to a Belgian collector, has allowed us to take a gamble or two on the lesser-knowns, which has paid off. We, or should I say Bert, have a show coming up for Tony Ward, an artist in the Bacon style, big canvases, meaty colors; it is hard to tell whether his twisted forms are human or animal. There’s a dark sort of power in them: rusty blood, the suggestion of demons, and sallow streaks as though he has mixed sulphur into the paint. They induce a hollow feeling in me.