The Sister

beleaguered by unanswered questions. Vivien is sleeping in her room just along the corridor through the double doors ahead. I feel suffocated for an instant, just knowing she’s there, and it’s here, now, with sudden understanding, that I realize I don’t care about the answers. Did Clive kill Maud or didn’t he? Was it for me or not? It doesn’t matter anymore. It makes no difference now. The past itself is not important. The only thing that counts now is my memory of it. I feel an uncharacteristic flash of anger, a surge of heat through my cheeks: How dare Vivien come home and steal my safe, delicious memories? Three days ago my memory of life was of a complete and happy event—a blissful childhood, a warm, loving family, a blossoming career—but Vivien’s walked into my head and littered it with doubt and anger and turbulence. The past I used to know has melted before my eyes into something writhing and fluid, with no structure, no scaffold. I can never again think of my parents, my childhood or my life without the stains she’s spilt all over them. All I see now, as my father nurses my mother’s hands back to life, is the water turning red in the bowl.

The moon greets me again as I reach my lookout at the far end of the landing. It creeps furtively from behind a sparse and smoky cloud, as if beckoning me to follow. I like the moon and its cycles. I like the way that, although it seems to ebb and flow and come and go at will, it connects with the sun and the earth and the tides in a constant, rigid relationship. In reality there are no erring boundaries, no diffusion of loyalties.

Has Vivien really come home to torment me, to point out that I have been living in the wrong history, to push me into the correct scene of the correct painting? I have always had her interests in mind, especially when I have kept things from her. She had in mind no interest of mine when she taunted me with her twisted secret.

The thin cloud scatters, the moon’s rim sharpens. What is it that has changed in this silent still night? Everything feels different, not just the past. I see the moon—and the world—more clearly now. I look down with my new eyes at my matted wool socks and toeless slippers. Is this really me standing here at this window, in these old slippers?

I move away and come to the dark oak door behind which the spiral staircase twists up to the attic rooms. I don’t know why I’m easing the wooden peg that stoppers the latch in place. It needs wiggling back and forth a few times before it comes loose in my hand and the door swings open towards me. I watch as the moon’s blue light tumbles dimly in the dust up the stairs and, I don’t know why, I’m feeling my way in through the oak door and along to the outer wall of the spiral staircase where the treads are at their widest. Just to my right there’s a thick rope for a handrail but I don’t want to trust it. The stairs are steeper than I remember, so I’m leaning forward, using my hands on the ones above, as if I’m scrambling up a mountain. But I’m going slowly, one at a time, feeling and checking for splits and cracks and, although it’s just a short distance to the top, it feels like many minutes before I’m swallowed in total darkness and I can straighten, the door to the attic rooms—to the collections, to my life’s work—in front of me.

I know, somewhere to the right, there’s a switch that will light the room behind the door, and I’m feeling for it now, a bulky dome-shaped casing with a square lever in the middle. I find it and pull down. Light flickers into life behind the door, sharp knives of warmth cutting above and below it, accompanied by muffled movements. Disturbed wings.

There’s something about moonlight that makes you feel safe to entertain dreams and fantasies, something about its grim coolness that lights a somnolent path without adding color, and wandering in it can make you feel you are still in the realm of sleep, journeying through a different plane from the living. But the warm orange hue outlining the door in front of me invites me to wake properly, shows me the colors and shades of my world rather than merely its outlines. For a while I stand in the comfort of the darkness, knowing that answers are illuminated within. Vivien has never had the same trouble opening doors.

I sweep my hand through the thin shaft of light piercing the slit by the side of the door, splitting it with my fingers into individual rays, playing with it. Vivien would have been better to tell me nothing, because now I see more than she wants me to. I see myself in the past, as a child, as a woman, and I see how mildly I looked at life. But I also see her. I see her differently now. Once, I’d seen the charm and childlike simplicity in a young girl dreaming of our futures together; once I thought of a schoolgirl who loved her sister in a way that was inexplicable, twinlike, a visceral connection standing in a wall of solid granite that a lifetime of elements and abuse couldn’t scratch. But now I see the granite crumble before my eyes, disintegrate, like a cube of sugar in tea, letting out a little puff of steam that was once a driven bond of unshakable love. Could our entire sisterhood have been a farce, years of complicated deception, of endless assurances of love, charm and manipulation, all so that one day she could take what she wanted? To ensure she could have the use of my body, and tear from it the one thing she couldn’t have without me: a child?

And when she couldn’t have it, she abandoned me in the same way that, only yesterday, she had accused Clive of discarding Maud, like a specimen that was no longer needed.

I unbolt the door and push it open, and am blinded equally by resentment and fluorescent light. I resent Vivien for shattering my illusions, not only of my parents and my life but of her, for making me question her, her love, her loyalty, everything she has ever told me. As I cross the room I’m assaulted by decay, old memories and the ammoniac stench of bat droppings. Four pipistrelles hanging from the rafters above me shift uneasily. Caterpillar houses line the walls, exactly as they always have, mainly homemade glass containers, some tin, a few giant glass cider jars and a dozen or so old ammunition boxes, which Clive always claimed made the best caterpillar cages. A layer of rotten humus has collected at the bottom of some, made up of twigs, leaves and crusty discarded skins.

You might have expected the moths to take over, but there are no moths. This isn’t a chosen habitat for moths. It’s now home to bats, spiders and a pod of hornets, which have made a vast and beautifully constructed papier-mache home right under the eaves, added to and undisturbed year after year. I’m left with just one question and it’s not how Maud ended up at the bottom of the stairs. It is simply whether Vivien has ever loved me as I have loved her, ever since the day the evacuees left and I saw that she was special. A beam in the far corner has collapsed with the weight of the roof above, opening a section to the sky. Some slates lie shattered on the floor below and insulation wool clings desperately to its plaster, hanging to the floor in a matted clump. And if she’s never loved me, if she’s only ever needed me, what is it that she wants from me now? Why is she here?

I move through this room and into the next—the emergence room—a corridor lined on both sides with muslin-clad breeding boxes, some still with sticks and mounds of earth and dried moss in them. It was to here that, each spring, we’d carry the pupae up from the cool warren of cellars that run beneath the house, where they’d wintered on trays or in boxes. We’d separate each species into these banks of cages so that they could breed on emergence, laying their eggs on the muslin. Each type of moth would need twigs from different plants, each emerged at different times and each required species-specific conditions.

Above several of the tanks are still pinned some of Clive’s meticulously devised care instructions. PUSS MOTH reads the first, and underneath is a list of chores to be carried out each day without fail.

1. Ensure willow twigs are always upright and stable

2. Replace willow twigs every two days

3. Check if the chrysalis reacts to touch (3 days to go)

4. Temperature must not exceed 66.2°F

5. Mist twice a day with water spray

6. On emergence offer 2.5cc sugar solution on cotton wool

Clive typed out the instructions for each species, then pinned them around the room so that there could be no mistakes and no excuses. At least four times a day one of us would check that the strategically placed thermometers, barometers, electric heaters, dishes of water and ultraviolet lights were providing the exact conditions necessary for the time of emergence. It was our spring rota. Vivien found it a bore and didn’t necessarily subscribe to the miracle that Clive would have us believe was about to ensue. But I took my duties very seriously and would hurry back to Clive to report that I’d found one tank had been a degree too warm or too cool, or that I’d felt a draft blowing on the back of another. Together we’d record the findings in his Observation Diary and look forward to seeing if it had any effect on the moths’ emergence.

Clive recorded everything, and that, he told me many times, was the key to being a good scientist and especially a good lepidopterist.