The Sister

“Do what?” I asked.

“Your absence thing. You haven’t moved an inch for fifteen minutes.”

She was exaggerating, of course. “It’s not an absence thing, I was thinking.”

“I know, but it does seem like you’ve gone away sometimes. It really does,” Vivi said. “You need a back-in- twenty-minutes sign,” she joked lightly.

“I’m just concentrating.”

I have the best concentration of anyone I know. I can concentrate so hard that I block out everything around me. My family used to get completely flustered by it but it’s perhaps my only natural gift. It annoyed me when Vivi called it being absent. She would say she’d seen me stay as still as a statue for hours at a time but she always exaggerated. In fact I can only ever keep it up for a few minutes.

“I’ve got something to ask you, Ginny,” she said suddenly, as if it were another ploy to pull my attention back to her. “Are you there?” she asked annoyingly.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she continued. “I want to get married.” She said it quickly, almost as if it were a question.

I stopped, surprised. I’d already thought, over the last few months, that she might marry Arthur. It wasn’t what she said that came as a surprise, just that I hadn’t expected it right then, or that that would be the manner in which she’d say it.

“Oh, Vivi, that’s wonderful,” I said effusively. I tried my best to give her an uncustomary hug and sort of grabbed her around the middle.

“Oh, no, he hasn’t asked me, Ginny. We’ve just talked about it.”

I should have guessed she’d have found a complication. Vivi always managed to fill the simplest ideas with ambiguity. I should have trusted my instincts. Had she actually got engaged, telling me would have been a far more elaborate affair.

“But I can’t marry him,” she continued, squeezing her eyes shut. Only Vivi, I thought, could start you off assuming this was a happy event and, in moments, twist it into a sad one. Infuriating as it could sometimes be, her overflowing emotion was also part of her appeal, and I hated to see her sad. I could cope with pain and disappointment, but somehow Vivi wasn’t built to shoulder anguish. Her fragile body would crumble under its weight. She needed shielding. She should live free of suffering, and in return she’d give so much back in happiness and vibrancy and fun.

“I’m sorry, Vivi. I thought you were saying that you were getting married,” I said finally.

There was a long silence. A jay landed on a rusty tin barrel that had been discarded at the edge of the fence by the farmer. It hopped along to the end, jerking its head this way and that with robotic, watchful movements. I knew I wasn’t the most ideal comforter at times like this. I was a practical person, not well equipped to offer emotional support. I tried anyway. “So do you think he’ll ask you?” I asked cautiously.

“I suppose he has, sort of.”

“Well, that’s great, isn’t it?” I offered.

“But, Ginny, I don’t want to.”

I was certain that a moment ago she had wanted to. As always, with Vivi, I had to expect the unexpected. Often I saw no point in trying to understand her and the puzzles into which she tore her life. I watched the jay as it leaned down over the edge of the barrel, doubling back on itself to inspect the inside. Then it jumped to the ground and skirted warily round some fungus that foamed out from beneath, then hopped sideways and disappeared into the darkness within.

“Don’t you want to know why?” Vivi asked.

She’d buried her head in her jacket but I could hear a note of annoyance. “Why?”

“Why do you think, Virginia?” she barked confusingly. First she’d wanted me to ask a question, and then it was a stupid one.

“Because I can’t have children,” she continued. “I can’t have children so I can’t see the point of getting married. I mean, if you can’t have a family then it’s not a…It’s just not the life I’d want. I can’t think of anything more depressing than a childless marriage.”

She started to cry properly now and she looked fifteen again. I took her by the shoulders and supported her as she sat down on the icy grass, trying to pull her jacket under her bottom to protect it from the wet. Then I sat down next to her. Her not being able to have children wasn’t something we’d ever discussed properly. It had seemed such a small price for her life. I’d never felt any desire for them and had assumed she felt the same. I tried to take an authoritarian stance.

“Now Vivi, you might not be able to have children, but you’re alive, aren’t you? And you’ve found a man who loves you and that must be wonderful. You can’t have everything always,” I finished, just as Maud might have.

“Everything? I don’t want everything. I just want a child. I’ve always wanted a child,” she sobbed, “ever since I couldn’t have one.”

“Well, it’s not going to happen, Vivi, and that’s that. It’s pure biology,” I said. I didn’t want to make her any more upset but there was nothing else to say. It all seemed pretty miserably final to me. Poor Vivi, I thought. She’d be more stable with the security of marriage. She was the type who needed constant assurance that she was loved. “He loves you for you, Vivi, and not being able to have children is just part of you,” I said after some thought.

It stopped Vivi crying. “Rubbish. It’s not part of me at all, Ginny,” she rebuked me. “I wasn’t born unable to have children. It’s something I lost. It’s a part of me that’s missing, not the other way round.”

“I’m really truly sorry, Vivi,” I said, meaning it sincerely, and put my arm tightly round her. “You poor thing.” She sobbed loudly on my left shoulder. I was the stronger, self-sufficient sister and it was at times like this that Vivi really needed me.

When we’d been expelled from school Vivi and I had spent two hours crying in a lavatory cubicle in the kit room with Vivi’s best friend, Maisie (who’d apparently requested some bananas in the first place). We’d cried and cried, sobbing as if our lives had fallen apart, and Vivi scratched “Fuck Bananas” with her hair clip three times across the black and yellow harlequin floor tiles and declared she was an anarchist. But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t upset. I was just pretending. Instead I felt invigorated, revitalized and valuable. I was at the center of something with my sister. We were deep in it together. After a time I asked Maisie if she could leave us alone for five minutes because, I explained, she wasn’t in the same situation as us so she couldn’t fully understand what we were going through. Vivi had needed only me then, as she did now, and now, like then, my role as her elder sister suddenly felt crucial.

The jay finally hopped out of the barrel into the light, carrying a snail in its beak like a prize. Vivi looked up and stared at me. Her face had puffed up and—

“Will you have my baby?” she asked.

I laughed.

“No, I mean will you, you know, have my baby?” 

Chapter 14 Vivien’s Day Out

Vivien’s walked out. She’s gone. She didn’t tell me where she was going or when she was coming back. She didn’t tell me she was going out at all. It’s all rather odd, don’t you think? It’s almost like she sneaked out, and if I hadn’t been watching her I’d never have known. I happened to be in my bathroom, from where I could see her dark outline pass back and forth across her bedroom window. Then I heard her go onto the landing and down the stairs, so I ventured out myself and, halfway down the stairs, I glimpsed the back of her long winter coat as she shut the front door behind her. I wanted to follow her but I knew that by the time I’d changed into warmer clothes, of course I wouldn’t know which way she’d gone, so instead I hurried back up the hall stairs to my lookout on the landing and peered close to the leaded window so that I could see which way she was headed. Perhaps, I thought, I could hurry from window to window and keep her in view. I was surprised. I thought she’d retrace one of our old walks; I thought she’d skirt the house and go up the ridge or