The Sister

peer through a small gap in the leaves, I’m looking at her back, less than five feet away.

Her tweed jacket, a loose weave of sludgy colors, is pulled taut over her shoulders as she hunches down at Maud’s grave. The small slit in the back of her mid-length skirt has opened and ridden up, showing me, through the sheer nylons, the raised purple veins, just like mine, on the backs of her knees. She stays like that for a while, displaying her veins to the laurel and me. I can’t see if she’s fingering the grass or if she’s reading the words on the headstone she designed—just Maud’s name and dates, no more, no other small clue about her for future generations. Death snatches so much substance. All of a sudden Maud became a label on a stone, the nuances of the individual no longer important—her thoughts and desires, her grievances and her passions, the wisdom, knowledge and understanding slowly assimilated throughout her life, all gone.

Vivien rises shakily to her feet and I glimpse a crumpled white handkerchief in her right hand as she steadies herself, leaning on her mother’s stone, almost embracing it. She moves to the next grave, Clive’s, and stands at his feet, reading the headstone she never saw placed, the one that the nuns at his retirement home chose for me. It’s half the size of Maud’s, made of imported, highly polished black granite, which they’d insisted was smarter and cheaper than the local stone. It reads RIP at the top, then simply CLIVE STONE underneath. They’d forgotten the two honorary doctorates, his fellowship of the Royal Society and all the other accolades he’d meticulously collected for his memorial throughout his life. Vivien stays at Clive’s feet long enough to read the three letters and two words, then leaves.

I am now expecting her to stop at the third family grave, the tiny one on Maud’s other side, a small rectangular plot bound by the spiky pieces of flint I’d watched Arthur put round it to mark the edges. Within the flint boundary you can still see, even now, a sharp swelling in the earth, the poignant little hump of a small body shape, as if he’d not even been given a box, as if he’d just been laid on the ground and covered with earth, which was patted down over him, the way children bury themselves on a beach. It looks as if the grave digger, quite understandably, reasoned that as such a small space was needed, it wasn’t worth taking away any of the soil. What soil came out would all go back in and eventually compress over time. As if nothing had ever gone into it at all. But this little knoll was rebelling: it had refused to pack down, to give back the soil its place, and it refused to look as if nothing had gone into the ground at all.

Arthur had designed the gray headstone himself, in the more expensive local stone. It was blatantly outsized for the grave it heralded. He’d had a pattern of zigzags cut all the way round the edge, with three rows of smaller zigzags carved decoratively round the front face to frame the letters, rather like a frieze you might find in a nursery. Engraved in beautifully curly writing he’d had written:

Samuel Morris

A Little Life No Less Loved

But, for all its decoration and the distinctive rise in the earth, I watch appalled as Vivien walks straight past it. She doesn’t even notice it. She knows it’s there somewhere, she must, she was told all those years ago, but she doesn’t pause to look. This isn’t a calculated reaction—there is no furtive glance or dismissive scan, not the snub she has just shown to Clive’s memorial. It is much worse. She’s forgotten about it, about him. She’s forgotten he’d ever been born.

Vivien is walking quickly now towards the graveled church path and I need to get back to the house. Besides, I can feel it’s about to rain. The sky has darkened and a new crisp wind is pouring over the valley lip, offering to sweep out the sluggish heat from the bottom of its bowl. The wind is edged with a sharp and angry current and the season’s warmth is laced with a new chill. It’s my feeling entirely. An unexplained edge of anger and an unrecognizable chill creep through my body, and I’m ready when I hear the faint sonorous roar from far away, the grumbling beginnings of thunder rolling up the valley.

Thunder gets trapped in this valley as anger can get trapped in a person’s mind. It’ll get louder and louder and then fade away only to roll back again, and again, like a perpetual echo, building and fading, building and fading, as it rolls round the Bulburrow basin, unable to drag its weight out over the valley’s lip. When thunder gets trapped, it can last all night. When I was young I was terrified by it, but now I find it a comfort to have those old memories return, of my fear, the security of my bed, Maud’s soothing voice, Vivi climbing in beside me and entwining her fingers in mine.

With my foot I shift some loose earth over the ant-dependent grub to hide it from the birds. It might seem a hideous and ruthless creature now, but in time it will emerge transformed into a stunning iridescent blue butterfly, one of our rarest and most beautiful, and will be greatly admired as it shimmers in the sun with no knowledge or burden of guilt for its obscene past.

I trundle home besieged by the weather. A blackbird skitters along the ground in front of me and at intervals cocks its head, as if beckoning me on. How friendly it is, how trusting, I think, until it lets me come right up close behind it and I find it isn’t a blackbird at all but a crisp winter leaf, rolled up at the edges and pushed along by gusts of the new wind. Once I know it’s a leaf, I’m stunned that I’d seen it as anything else.

Samuel Morris did indeed have A Little Life. It was twenty-four long minutes. His birth had been protracted and painful, and both Vivi and Arthur were at the maternity hospital with me, as planned. Vivi clenched my hand and whispered encouragement in my ear, while Arthur paced the corridor outside, listening helplessly to the torment of labor.

The baby was purple when he finally slithered out with the cord wound too tightly round his neck. I glimpsed the shiny livid color, like that of a fresh bruise, as he was whisked off to a table by the window. Vivi froze with panic and stood with her back against the opposite wall, waiting for the baby to turn pink, so when the door was opened and Arthur ushered in, she ended up behind it and at first made no effort to come out or to close it. Arthur walked straight over to where the doctors had taken the baby and were thrusting what looked like straws into his mouth and nose. He watched as they tried to open his airways, pinched his toes, and finally put an oxygen mask over his tiny face. Arthur said that when he held his tiny hand, his little son saw him. He said he didn’t just look at him but he saw him. And Arthur said he looked wise. That was all he said, that the baby looked wise, and now, now that I’m walking home pursued by the roar of thunder, wise doesn’t seem good enough. I’m wishing he had remembered more, that he had said more. I wanted to see his face, Samuel’s face, I wanted to know what he really looked like, not that he looked wise, but what shape his tiny eyes were and if he had fat or thin lips, if he had worry wrinkles like some babies have, or sticky-out ears, or jet-black hair like Arthur’s own. At the time I’d just accepted wise as a description but it wasn’t enough. It didn’t tell me anything. If only I had seen for myself, if I’d had one little look. But then again, he wasn’t my baby. He was Vivi’s.

After fifteen minutes, the doctors took up the puce child and offered him to Arthur to hold, the oxygen mask still attached to his tiny features. I knew it wasn’t a good sign. Arthur cradled his baby and looked up towards Vivi.

“Do you want to hold him?” he said.

“You hold him,” she said quickly. She hadn’t moved away from the comfort of the wall and she looked terrified. Arthur then turned to me. I shook my head with exhaustion.

“Okay. So I’ll hold you,” Arthur said softly, in a singsong baby voice that I’d not known was within him, and he held him and looked at him and held him and looked at him and held him and looked at him, until well after the end of his life. The baby grew more and more purple but Arthur just smiled at him. He told me later he’d forgotten he was purple. He’d said that when you really looked at him, you didn’t see purple at all.

But I only saw purple. I only ever remember purple, and what I really want to see, what I really want to remember, is wise.

By the time I reach the house April’s downpour is in full flow. Black rain lashes the earth violently, digging up the dry dirt, spitting and bouncing it about the drive so I’m wet through when I get to the safety of the porch. From here I watch the puddles form, fill and flood within seconds in front of the house, and a web of runaway canals are sketched and carved and deepened all over the driveway as fierce little heads of water push loose earth and leaves and stones out of their way to make channels that run over and spill into each other, feverish in their single-minded pursuit. I’m watching them combine into a central artery down the drive and push onwards to meet the runoff from the fields. Soon they’ll blend into a torrent and surf along the clay half-pipes beside the lane to join