The Sister

habit so I refrained. Instead I guessed at the fall; mostly needles and cones, with a smattering of beetles and bugs. I’d look for any wasp apples, preferably without an exit hole so I could watch the wasp emerge in vitro back in the lab. But what I’d really be hoping to spot was the Puss Moth chrysalis, cocooned on the tree trunks and expertly disguised within the surrounding bark.

I was proud that Clive had taught me to see the world around me without the blind ignorance with which most people must wander it. Where others see a small, dreary spider crawling up a fence, I might see a wingless female Vapourer; where I see an exquisite, harmless Bee Hawk attracted to sugary jam, others swat a pestilent wasp coveting their picnic; where I see a hibernating Eyed Hawk, others might step on an old dried-up leaf.

At the end of the Tunnel Walk we emerged into the glare of daylight beside the brook, which languished thickly through the mud. Four ancient crack willows stood woven together, huddled at the water’s edge. I picked up the end of a wispy branch that stuck out a little over my path, holding it up first above my head and then Arthur’s, as though I were disentangling his path. But my expert eyes had already scanned the underside of the leaves for the fresh-feeding signs that told me the Eyed Hawk had already hatched.

I led Arthur over the beech tree bridge—a weeping copper beech that had split down the center of its trunk, sending one side to traverse the brook.

“You must have had great fun growing up here,” Arthur declared, his arms outstretched as he walked across.

I’d never thought about it as a particularly unusual place to grow up. He followed as I jumped off the beech onto the narrow footpath, overgrown with brambles, which follows the brook to St. Bartholomew’s church.

“Where did you grow up?” I asked.

“Lancaster Gate,” he said. “Pure Londoner.”

“Lancaster Gate sounds exciting.”

“It’s beautiful. The houses overlook Hyde Park. But this is the place for children.” For the first time I wondered what sort of childhood my child would have, what sort of space it would find to play in and how different its life would be, compared to mine, if it lived in London. It was as if Arthur was thinking the same.

“I think children should be brought up in the country, with all this,” he said, waving an arm in the air. He was in the lead now, picking his way. Whenever he came across a bramble that spanned the path he untangled it and held it back for me, like a gentleman opening a gate, then let the thorny sentinel spring back after I’d passed. It was just a little endeavor, I know, but it made a big impression on me. No one had ever shown me such courtesy before.

“Do you think you might move out to the country, then?” I asked.

“I’d love to, but Vivi’s such a city girl, isn’t she? I don’t think she’d ever want to move out. She’d go crazy.”

Vivi, a city girl? Did he know Vivi had hardly stepped into a city until five and a half years ago? Did he know that she knew as much about the country as I did? That she knew the name of each bird that sang outside her window, and whether they sang for a mate, a territory or as a decoy? That she knew which animal had eaten a nut by the way the discarded husk had been opened? Did he not know how quickly she’d assumed a city personality and denied the country one?

We reached the tiny graveyard, bound by the brook on one side and the church on the other. It was another of my favorite spots, but I didn’t want to let on that I frequented the local graveyard, so I stepped among the headstones looking, as if for the first time, at the inscriptions, names, dates and epitaphs, that I knew already by heart. Since its first occupant, PAULINE ABBEY CLARKE (Forever Remembered, Forever Missed), died in 1743, I should think the tiny graveyard was filled pretty quickly with Pauline’s family and friends. In any event there had been so much pressure from the village that the rector had had it extended into a section of his garden next door. All the new dead now went through a gap in the hedge to the garden extension, but even that seemed to be filling up fast, leaving the elderly with the great dilemma of vying to outlive each other, yet at the same time competing for a spot in the ever-diminishing allotment.

But—as I was telling you—in that original bit of graveyard that Arthur and I were in, there were no gravestones as late as the twentieth century, so neither Pauline Abbey Clarke nor any of the other dead there had actually been missed or remembered for an awfully long time and, luckily for the wildlife, that meant nobody had taken too much care of the place. In spring it was a refuge for unruly weeds and insects, and on a warm evening, the moths emerged from their winter capsules in such abundance that although a moth is near silent, the air would shudder with the throbbing of fresh wings.

“I love graveyards,” Arthur said, to my surprise, as we stood side by side reading Pauline’s inscription.

“Do you?” I wasn’t surprised he loved them but that he admitted it so easily. I’d never allowed myself to say it for fear of what people might think. I knew that the villagers had spotted me there at dusk. Sometimes moth hunters need to be nocturnal, like their prey. But when I was spotted after dark in a rarely visited place, not least an eerie place like St. Bart’s graveyard, clutching a halogen lamp, a tin of treacle and a rug to keep me warm, I knew that the next day Mrs. Axtell and her friends conjured up all sorts of sinister stories. I could tell from the way the children looked at me that they had been scared at bedtime, their eager imaginations fed with tales of the numinous qualities of my character.

But Arthur was an outsider and didn’t come with prejudice. He was a townsman and didn’t think like the neighbors.

“Do you want to see inside the smallest church in the country?” I offered.

“Yes, please. I love churches too”—he paused—“but I can’t explain why.”

He didn’t need to. I’d stopped going to church for services, even though as a child I’d never missed a Sunday, but now and then I’d go in secret, on my own, just because I liked that eerie, nostalgic, adrenaline-fueled feeling that you can’t help sensing, after a childhood of churchgoing, when you walk into a spiritual place and wonder whether you’ve made a terrible and timeless mistake in rejecting God and letting down your soul.

It was more a chapel than a church, tiny but disproportionately tall. It had three rows of wooden benches either side of the aisle and windows so high that they didn’t shed much light on the proceedings far below. At the front stood a simple wooden altar and behind it, screwed into the brickwork, was a near-life-size painted carving of Christ wrapped lithely round his cross, crowned with a gold wreath, his pink skin shredding off in long thin flakes down his legs. At the back, on the dusty floor, there was a small stone bowl used as a font, and next to this, taking up a disproportionate amount of room, St. Bartholomew, carved in stone, rested in a coffin pose, hands crossed on his chest, eyes closed and peaceful, robe perfectly arranged and sandals pointing neatly to the roof. A wooden pew was pushed up next to his feet. When Vivi and I were children the prime spot to sit was right beside him, so you could rest your elbow on his toes.

“Look over here, Arthur.” I was sitting in the prime seat and Arthur joined me. “The sole of St. Bartholomew’s left sandal.” I nodded towards it.

He leaned forward across my legs to peer more closely at the effigy’s foot, and I was uncomfortably aware of his chin brushing my lap.

“V…I…V,” he read slowly, then laughed, pulling himself up. “Naughty.”

“It was my hair clip, though. Over many Sundays,” I informed him. “She had short hair then. Sometimes I wonder if she grew it only so she could have her own readily available supply of hair clips for desecration.”

“Really? Did she do it a lot?”

“Oh, she’s left her mark everywhere around here.”

“I’d like to follow that trail. It would be fun.” He opened his palms, as if they were a book he was reading. “An insight into the life of the young Vivien Stone through her vandalism,” he read dramatically. “Nobody’s going to file down St. Bartholomew’s feet now, are they? Her mark will be here forever. There’ll be children in two hundred years time saying, ‘Viv used to sit here,’ and trying to imagine what sort of person she was.”

I had the vague impression that Arthur himself was trying to work out what sort of person she was. As we sat in the church, thinking and talking about the one person we loved so much, studying the marks she’d once inscribed, sitting upon the seat she’d once touched, I felt as if the sister I’d known so intimately all my life was becoming less tangible, less obtainable, that she had evaporated into an ethereal, almost divine presence to be remembered and worshipped. For a surreal moment I imagined that the altar and the hymn books and the small