The Sister

down through the meadows to the copse. But she didn’t. Instead I’ve just seen her stride off boldly down the middle of the drive, headed for the village, straight into the arms of its whispering houses.

Here’s a strange old thing: I didn’t want Vivien to go, and as I watched her walking away I was desperate not to lose sight of her. The farther she went, the more I hoped she might suddenly turn round or go right and follow the brook, where I could see her from the house. But—and this is the unexpected part—now that she’s gone and I’ve finally lost sight of her, I’m not craving for her to turn back at all. To tell you the truth, the twisting anxiety that has wrung my stomach ever since her arrival has evaporated, and now I’m overtaken by a delightful sense of relief and freedom. It’s the same feeling I had when I watched Bobby driving away, the furniture and all that clutter disappearing down the drive in his van. I have respite from her being continually in the house, and a reprieve from my constant vigilance. I can wander about without worrying where she is, and what I should do or say if I come across her. I can shut a door and know it will stay shut. I can put my tea blends back in the right order in the kitchen cupboard and throw out the greasy butter paper she’s been saving in the fridge.

I walk downstairs into the hall, in part to exercise my newfound freedom but also to check she hasn’t left any doors open to the empty rooms. I don’t like them open. For me they’re not part of the house anymore. It’s like leaving the front door open. Luckily I find them closed, but it’s as I wander through into the kitchen that I notice that Vivien’s left her handbag on the counter by the Kenwood mixer. It’s a soft green leather one with heavy brass buckles and no zip or fixings so that, as it lies in a saggy pile, the top flops over, showing me through its wide- open mouth, the contents of its belly. A lipstick and a book of stamps peep out near the entrance and, as I come closer and lift up the edge, I see inside a messy world of receipts and slips and paper clips and safety pins, a nail file, the face of a wristwatch with the strap broken off…. I am distracted briefly by the inside lining, a thin loose material, unattached to the leather. It is light gray and evenly punctured with tight rows of pinprick holes. Its recurrent pattern mesmerizes me; I can see the dots as rows or as columns, or diagonals, triangles or squares, and then as shapes with depth, stretching away from me until I’ve lost perspective entirely. Eventually I have to reach out and touch it to feel how far away the material really is and bring me back from my wildly distorted visual field. It feels silky and, as I caress it, it shimmers in the light—like silk, but I know it can’t be silk because it catches on the rough dry skin at the tips of my fingers, sending a queer shiver down my back.

I lift the handbag and pour it out, its contents spinning and skating over the smooth Formica work top. I don’t know why I’m looking in here or what I think I might find. Perhaps an insight into the new grown-up Vivien or a clue as to why she’s returned. I collect up her things, one by one—three pens, her mobile phone, a bunch of keys (what for?), a pocket sized London A–Z, six loose bobby pins—and put them back into the bag, aware that she could come back at any moment. There’s a lipstick, a powder compact, a fold-up comb, a magnifying glass, three safety pins that I pause to look at (I’d like to add them to the eight I have on my bed to keep the top sheet from shifting against the blanket, but I wouldn’t dream of taking them).

I try to put everything back randomly, messily, as chaotic as I found it, but my natural disposition is to order things—it’s the scientist in me—and I find it terribly difficult to resist. Once or twice I look the other way, shove my hand into the bag and whiz it around to mess it up more than I am capable of doing deliberately. I envy her the bobby pins and it’s as I’m trying one out, sweeping some fringe hair into a parting, that I spot the gold brooch that must have skimmed to the far edge of the counter and come to rest under the shadow of the wall cupboard. It’s about the size of a small bird’s egg, a similar shape too, oval, but flattened. As I pick it up I see there are small colored stones encrusted in the gold on the front and, in the center, a large bloodred ruby. Its heaviness surprises me. I weigh it in my hands, rolling it over and over. On the back, under the big pin, one edge is beaded with tiny decorative gold hinges, and opposite these is a small catch. I ping the catch open with my nail and catch my breath. It’s an old photo, scratched and faded, of Vivi and Arthur gripping each other tightly. They are sitting on a low stone wall and Vivi is holding one hand splayed protectively across her rounded tummy. I peer more closely at the photo. There’s no doubt: Vivi looks pregnant. They appear to be a beautiful example of an adoring young couple, a new baby on the way to bond them into a family as well as to each other. I bring it closer to my eyes, trying to fill in the scratches and faded parts as best I can. Vivi is looking at Arthur. Her happiness is transparent. It makes me smile to see it, and she’s clinging to Arthur with her other hand as if she’s worried he might fall off the photograph. He is upright, stiff and sober-looking, and stares straight at the camera—a proud new parent perhaps? But I find it baffling. I can’t remember seeing this photo. I don’t know how on earth it could have been taken.

I snap the brooch shut and plop it into the green handbag. I decide to go to the landing, to my lookout, and wait for Vivien to come home, but I can’t get the image of her and Arthur out of my head. That young, spirited Vivien was the one I had clearly remembered for all these years, before she turned up again yesterday and started to replace it with the older, less recognizable version. But it’s seeing Arthur again that’s thrown me. I’ve never forgotten the snatched time we spent together, but over the years my memory must have distorted his appearance. I’ve been remembering a fully grown, self-assured man, as if his image had grown old with me, but I’m mistaken. Seeing that photo has made me realize that the only man I’ve ever been intimate with was little more than a boy.

I remember clearly the first time Arthur and I had sex.

Nineteen sixty. An easy, breezy summer’s day, almost two and a half months after Vivi and Arthur were married, Arthur was sent to me by train to try to make Vivi a baby. I watched him alight from the far end of the nearside platform at Crewkerne station. It was only then, while he walked the length of the platform and I studied his long slim legs striding boldly towards me, hugged in corduroy, that I felt a small slight panic of reality: I was going to have sex with this man and his long slim legs. Arthur didn’t mention it—and neither did I—as he greeted me, or during the fifteen-minute car ride home from the station, or when we parked the car in the drive, or as he greeted my parents. We didn’t mention it while I showed him to the small burgundy spare room off a half landing in the west wing of the house, with its high single bed and pretty window overlooking the sunny silky meadows below. But, of course, all that time it was the only thing I was thinking about.

In 1960 people hadn’t started to admit freely that they couldn’t have children. The boom in fertility treatments, which changed all that, didn’t happen for another twenty years. If you were married and couldn’t have children, you either said you didn’t want them or you got them from somewhere else and often no one was ever the wiser. It was always a private affair, at times a dirty little secret. It wasn’t that surrogacy was a bad word; it wasn’t even a word yet, though up and down the country private agreements along those lines were being forged, as they had been for generations, among close family or friends.

I was never going to disappoint Vivi up there on the ridge that day, however much her suggestion had surprised me. It wasn’t so much that I’d decided, out of compassion, to give my sister the baby she so desperately wanted. I didn’t even consider turning her down. She’d made me feel so honored: Vivi had chosen me to be the mother of her baby. In the same way that I’d never have stopped her sharing my bed this morning, despite the intrusion and discomfort, I wasn’t going to turn down the chance of securing that everlasting kinship with Vivi by having her child.

Vivi was adamant that the surrogacy must be kept secret from everyone—apart from the three of us—so that there could be no possibility of the child stumbling across the truth of a lifelong lie and hating us for it, or of anyone else finding out for that matter. She said that having a secret from your child for their own good was one thing, but for a child to grow up amid a secret that everyone else knew was wrong and unkind.

Vivi especially didn’t want Maud and Clive to know yet. Of course, they knew she couldn’t have children but, for reasons I have never understood, she felt they’d be opposed to the idea.

“I said they might be against it,” she corrected me, as we huddled together in the cold on the ridge that day. “I don’t think they would necessarily,” she said quickly. “I don’t know what they’d think.”

She wanted us to get pregnant, before we let them in on the secret, in case they tried to stop us. She said at best they’d give us lots of opinions that would confuse us, and it should be for us, and us alone, to decide.

“I can make up my own mind, Vivi, and I’ve told you already that I’ll do it,” I assured her.

“Thank you, sweetie, I love you. You’re my best friend as well as my best sister,” she said in a pure rush of love that made me feel dizzy. “I just want it to be our secret to begin with, Ginny,” she said pleadingly. “We’ll tell them as soon as anything happens.”

“As soon as I get pregnant?”