The Sister

death, it was as if he’d already guessed his future mental state and booked himself into a suitable institution in advance.

I stopped visiting him. Sister Vincent, his supervisor, said she thought it best for both of us. Best to remember him how he’d been before his mind was too diseased to be recognizable, she’d said. And when Clive died five years later, she revealed to me that by the end he had been beleaguered by demons. I think, in a roundabout way, she was trying to make me feel better by suggesting his death had been an escape from a sick and troubled mind.

I cross the new slatted bridge—thankful it’s replaced the log—to the footpath that rambles beside the brook, past St. Bartholomew’s church. The edge, once wild with brambles and undergrowth, has been neatly shorn by newcomers, ignorant of the damage they do and the wildlife they endanger by taming their countryside.

I walk past the stone humpback bridge that takes the lane over to Hembury and towards the church. As I approach I can hear a collection of rasping voices, and although I cannot catch every word, I recognize the General Confession and join in the incantation in my head: “…We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts…”

St. Bartholomew’s graveyard is tiny, bound by the brook on one side and the church on the other. I stop several yards away, crouching as best I can behind a laurel hedge so that I will be well hidden when the congregation comes out. I wonder if Vivien is sitting in her favorite spot, next to St. Bartholomew’s toes. I wonder if she’ll remember that her name is scratched onto the sole of his left foot.

I hear the low drone of the rector’s voice and I fill in the words I can’t quite catch from recollections of a distant past when Maud would lead her family to church on Sundays, and afterwards invite everyone to Bulburrow for coffee. I can’t understand why the sounds of the service release a sadness in me. Perhaps they remind me of when I was part of a family. When Vivi and I heard the bells we’d rush upstairs, knowing we had twenty minutes to get ready—find some stockings, wash our faces, brush our hair. In the hall we’d meet Maud, heavily perfumed and doused in jewelry, and Clive in his gray suit, fraying at the elbows, his mind not on the matter at hand. Then we’d walk, like a picture-book family, one parent to one girl, hand in hand, down the drive, through the stone pillars without their gates, along the single lane of the hamlet of Bulburrow to the tiny church. And I’d spend the next hour staring up at the small windows in the eaves and wondering not how we should behave in the house of God, but why anyone thought there was a God at all.

“…that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous and sober life, to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.”

The church’s small, high windows meant that even on the brightest day it was always gloomy inside. When you were eventually let out into the world you were blinded by fresh air and sunshine, which left me with the distinct impression that the outside world was the more spiritual of the two places.

My eyes shift to a flurry of red ants on the compacted earth beside me, hurtling over one another in their eagerness to get to and from their nest, a hole at the base of a birch whip. Peering closer, I see they are workers heaving neatly cut pieces of leaf into their nest, but I can instantly sense there is something amiss, something I can’t quite put into words. They seem a little too frantic, even for ants, breaking rank a little too often, almost out of control in their frenetic rush to feed their offspring. They’ve lost their sense of order. I dig my finger partway into the nest’s entrance and scoop away the top and there, at the back of the enclave, writhes a huge pinkish- white larva, squirming in its ugly embryonic form. My hunch has been validated and I click my tongue in a conceited tut. For a moment I wish someone was here to witness my intuitive expertise. I might have a poor understanding of people, but I have an instinct for insects. This isn’t the ants’ larva but an impostor that has ambushed the gentle partnership between ant and tree, where normally the ants feed off the tree’s leaves while fertilizing it with their droppings. But they have been tricked by this bulbous parasite. It’s taken command of the nest, tapping into the ants’ chemical signaling system, instructing them to fatten it up for summer while it rests up lazily. They tend the great white larva without realizing it and, in a few weeks, not satisfied with a vegetarian diet, it will also help itself to the ants’ own neglected larvae. It will gorge itself to immobility, but when it needs to move to its next victim’s nest, it will simply direct the ants, like little robots, to pick it up and carry it.

All the while I am listening to the church service I am also studying the ants, whose furious activity takes on a different meaning when set to Christianity. I see the inequity of life, the immorality of nature. I consider a larval god controlling the fate of ant and tree, seen by the ants but unseen too, unrecognized for His actions. I hear part of an address about a deaf music teacher, I see the slavery of ants, the isolation of the teacher, the ignorance of an ant, the total domination of a larval god, the acceptance of workers, a tyrannical grub, the solitary teacher, unquestioning ant, a gluttonous writhing larva, a hymn…. It’s one of my favorites:

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes…

After the hymn I hear the rector bidding us to pray. Abstractedly I think of Vivien leaning forward so that her head is right next to St. Bartholomew. Perhaps it’s only now she’ll notice her name on his foot. Is it making her smile, I wonder, or is she embarrassed by it? Does it fill her with happy memories, as it does me, or sad ones? Last week I would have sworn I knew the answers, but now I am a lot less certain.

I’m not particularly attentive to the service. It’s become a background for my reflections on the saint’s effigy and my musings on the ants’ subjugation, but I register wafts of sentences that drift towards me, like hearing the comforting drone of a party downstairs while you’re dozing in bed.

“We pray for the poor throughout the world…in our own parish, the elderly, lonely, sick…in particular we ask you to remember…Win Readon, Alfie Tutt, Fred Matravers…Virginia Stone. We pray that you grant them the grace…”

Virginia Stone…? I’ve been watching the industry of a single ant cutting a neat circle round itself on a leaf, and marveling that such a preprogrammed creature has the wit to move out of the circle before it’s detached from the rest of the plant, when I hear myself prayed for—or think I do. I can’t be sure. As I say, I wasn’t really concentrating, but I quickly recall the voice again in my mind and it seems clear, unmistakable: Virginia Stone. I’m astounded. Why on earth are they praying for me? I’m not sick or lonely. I can only think that Vivien has made an excuse for my absence in church.

Let me tell you—because there can’t be many people who’ve experienced it—it really is the most unusual feeling to hear your name prayed for in church, the rector asking for help from a God you don’t believe exists. If only they knew that I’m right here, listening from behind the laurel just beyond the graveyard. I briefly imagine that this is my funeral, that Win Readon, Alfie Tutt and Fred Matravers have somehow got better but I have died, and I’m watching them pay their last respects, Win, Alfie and Fred, who have never met me but had, apparently, been ill with me.

When the service is over the door opens and five dour elderly people file out after the rector. I was expecting the whole village to flood through in a harangue of noise, but there is no throng of shouting children, no Sunday bests, no hats. Vivien emerges deep in conversation with another elderly woman, and they walk along the path to the road. I’m about to leave my hiding spot, anxious to get back to the house before her, when I notice that she’s stopped. She says something quietly to her companion and turns back, walking purposefully and directly towards me, looking straight at me through the stiff, waxy leaves. How on earth did she know I was here? What do I say? She passes three rows of graves and I’m sure our eyes meet. I look down at the ants’ nest again, and at the Maculinea larva, hoping to look studious when she reaches me. But the seconds grow longer and she doesn’t arrive, and when I look up again I see she’s turned right and gone through the gap in the hedge to the graveyard extension, that bit of rectory garden expropriated by the surplus of dead, the bit where our own family is buried. I don’t visit the graves, so it hadn’t occurred to me before that that’s where Vivien is headed, and now it dawns on me that she’s probably not seen me after all. She doesn’t know I’m here squatting on my haunches.

Vivien’s just out of my view, but if she’s at the family graves, she must be standing very close to me, just the other side of the hedge to be precise—but a little behind and to the left. I shuffle back on the dry earth as quietly as possible and stop. I think I can hear her breathing. I rotate a fraction, still crouched, and find that as I