The Sister

lifetime, Michael bought a big motorcycle and a small tent, about the size of our hanging pantry. He hired it that first year to the Jeffersons at Christmas for mince pies and carols, and for some yearly gathering at the Liberal Club, then to Ethel Phelps in the gatehouse lodge to extend her conservatory for Stan’s seventieth. And then he bought another slightly bigger tent—about the size of the kitchen study. Throughout the following summer, he hired them out for events and parties in the neighboring villages, Saxton, Broadhampton and Selby.

I could swear Michael showed no sign of strategy, cunning or business, but now he has sixteen marquees, enormous ones, the size of the drawing room and library put together, with all the trimmings for weddings and funerals, and all of life’s ceremonies between. Michael never needed or cared for anything but that which he couldn’t have: a loving father. He still lives at the Stables, he still rides his bike and he still looks as if he works in the vegetable patch, but I know that he’s now the wealthiest man in the village. His late mother would have laughed and loved him just the same, but he would never have been able to make his father proud.

He had acquired some cannabis seeds from his biker friends and, with the expertise in tending plants that his father had drummed into him from an early age, he used the remaining peach houses in the walled garden to grow a celebrated line in skunk, as he calls it. Like me, he lives alone, and although I wouldn’t be so bold as to claim a friendship, Michael and I have a long-term connection. He visits me irregularly—about twice a month—to deliver my groceries, take out my rubbish, block up new drafts, tell me the briefest of village news and, if necessary, to top up my supply of his personalized brand of herbal remedy.

The second time Vivi sent Arthur to Bulburrow, he telephoned quite unexpectedly from Crewkerne, an hour and a half before his train was due in. I wasn’t ready for him. I’d had a long bath and scrubbed myself clean. I hadn’t yet peeled the potatoes for supper or finished rearranging the dried flowers in his room. I shoved aside the vase and the oasis I’d been piecing together in the back pantry, grabbed some King Edwards from the sack and threw them into the sink to remind me they needed to be sorted. Thankfully the place wasn’t in too bad a state. Recently, I’d been spending much more time on the housework than my moth work, much to Clive’s disapproval.

One of my biggest regrets is not talking to Clive about Maud at this time. If only I had, he might have done something before it was too late. I didn’t know to what extent he thought she was drinking. He’d seen her drunk, of course, but he couldn’t have known how badly she’d deteriorated. At the time I was trying to avoid the subject so that I didn’t find myself having to pretend I knew less than I did. Maud was relying on me.

Arthur was waiting for me by the station entrance as I pulled up in the Chester. The passenger seat was overloaded with Clive’s boxes and tools, so Arthur volunteered to squeeze in beside the apparatus in the back with his bag on his knees, facing the back windscreen.

“I’m sorry you had to wait,” I said.

“Not at all. I got an earlier train,” he shouted, competing with the full choke as I turned over the Chester’s engine. “So, how’s it all going?”

“Everything’s ready,” I shouted back. “I’m sure the timing will be right this time.”

“What?”

“I’m sure I’ve got the timing right,” I yelled, trying to throw the words over my shoulder while I watched the road. “Maybe this time is going to be it.” In the mirror I saw Arthur craning his neck round stiffly, apparently still aware that he was in a chemical factory, to look towards me in the front.

“I didn’t mean that, I just meant how are you?” He half-laughed. Our eyes met briefly in the mirror before I flicked mine back to the road.

“Virginia…,” he said, seriously now, like I was about to be told off. I wanted to move the mirror: it had brought him too close. “You do know it could take years?”

“Oh, no! I’m sure it won’t,” I said, a little appalled. I kept my eyes fixed on the road. I’d never imagined that these illicit meetings between Arthur and me would go on long. I’d never thought they might become less detached, less functional, that we might actually begin to get to know each other, that we might form a bond of our own, a friendship.

“Really? What makes you think it won’t take long?” Arthur asked.

The truth was I hadn’t thought about it. “Well, Vivi has worked out the chart really carefully and I’ve checked it as well. We think we’re right on timing so there’s nothing stopping—”

“Ginny,” he interrupted, “there’s more to making a baby than preparations and timing control.”

“Well, that’s if the sperm are—”

“I didn’t mean my sperm.” He laughed loudly. We were coming down the hill into the village, passing the new bungalows on the left. “Ginny, let’s go for a drive. Let’s not go up to the house yet.”

“Drive? Where to?”

“Don’t you have a favorite place?” I didn’t answer. “Somewhere with a view?”

“No.”

“Come on, Ginny. Anywhere…,” I slowed and took the right-hand turn between the ivy-clad stone pillars, into the corridor of yellowing limes that escorted visitors up the winding drive. “A beauty spot?” he added, with gentle impatience.

I had lots of favorite places: places I’d go caterpillar or moth hunting, places I’d walk and think and breathe and study. Or treacle the trees. But they’re rarely beautiful: behind the mobile homes on the cliff walk between Seatown and Beer, where at this time of year I’d hunt through the thorny scrub to find the Oak Eggar caterpillar hibernating in its hairy orange-and-black coat; the bog at Fossett’s Bar, where two streams meet and overflow, and marsh reeds grow in thick unsurpassable clumps, and I’d wade in to find the long silky cocoon of The Drinker tapered to the stems; the railway station, the one we’ve just left, to the disused square of land behind it, where the tall wire fence has fallen in so you can squeeze through and be in the company of some of the rarest wildflowers in the West Country; better still, the dump behind the Esso garage on the A303 at Winterbourne Stoke where, on a day of good fortune, I’d find the distinctively bulbous cocoon of the Elephant Hawk-moth tangled among the moss and litter on the ground, or Golden-rod Pug caterpillars, starting on a feast of ragwort. These were my favorite places, my beauty spots. Like the insects I studied, I’ve never been attracted to manicured beauty. To us, weeds are wildflowers and untended scrubland a rare and forgotten paradise. Dorset’s true wildernesses have quietly become the disused dumps, the unworthy wasteland, the boggy, the bleak and the barren. Certainly not a place to entertain guests.

“No,” I said again, “not really.” The truth was, I didn’t relish the idea of walking and talking with Arthur. I could cope with our monthly sessions being purely clinical, impersonal, but I didn’t want to get to know him. I was happy to have this baby for Vivi if Arthur remained a catalyst, an inert part of the process. I’d have preferred him to be a total stranger.

“So you don’t have a place you go to be alone sometimes,” he said, softly now, so that I had to strain to hear him. In the mirror I could see he was looking straight ahead, out the back window, but it felt as though he was peering right through me, inspecting my every secret.

“Or a place that you like to walk?” he suggested. We’d reached the final bend, just before the house came into view. “Come on,” he pleaded finally. “Let’s not go home yet. Let’s just stop here and walk.”

I pulled up at the side of the drive and turned off the engine. “We can walk to the brook if you like,” I said.

“I’d love to walk to the brook,” Arthur replied quickly, enthusiastically, and opened the rear door.

I smiled for the first time since I’d picked him up, but so that he wouldn’t see it. Something that was tight within me relaxed a little, something I hadn’t known had been tight until that moment. Much later I came to realize that Arthur had a wonderfully natural way of putting me at ease. Looking back now, I might have known—by the end of that first walk—that he was never going to remain, for me, an inert part of the process.

I led Arthur behind the line of fir trees that run along next to the fence marking our eastern boundary. The lowest branches reach a foot above my head and splay out over the top of the fence so that between it, the tree trunks and the dense layering of branches above us, a dark walkway has been created, which I’ve always called the Tunnel Walk. It was dim, but shafts of light collided through the trees in pretty spectacle and it was good to walk. I looked up, privately scanning the branches, increasingly taunted by the desire to stop and shake them and examine the fall. I’d not have hesitated had I been on my own, of course, but I knew it might seem an odd sort of