The Sister

Vivien stands up and walks past me into the house and up the stairs, instructing the driver to follow with her bags. I’m still in the porch and I’m starting to wonder so many things at the same time, like a small child beginning to question the world. I wonder if she’s as immaculately dressed every day; I wonder why she wants the east wing; I wonder if she too is plagued by arthritis; I wonder if she’ll remember to miss the second from last stair, which squeaks (Vera had once told us it was groaning in complaint after a century of being trodden on, and we’d made a pact to let it rest for a generation); I wonder what Vivien’s left behind in London; I wonder if this is the start of another special bond, like the one we had many years ago. Most of all I wonder why she’s decided, finally, to come home.

From the doorstep, I look up at the east windows on the first floor. Vivien appears and stares out disconsolately, without seeing me. Beautiful, warm, fun-loving Vivi. Finally she’s back at Bulburrow.

I’m still outside when Vivien comes downstairs, followed by her obedient driver. “Darling, what happened to the house?” she asks reproachfully.

“Oh, it’s beginning to fall down,” I say, feeling wonderfully at ease with my sister.

“I mean all the furniture. Were you robbed?”

I’d forgotten she hadn’t seen it like this. Selling the furniture has been such a gradual process. Bobby came once every few months and took another load in his transit van. I met him first when he worked for the water board and had been sent to fix a series of leaking pipes on our land. Three days later, when he’d finished the work (and all my biscuits), he told me he owned an antiques shop in Chard and suggested he sell some furniture for me. When he’d got rid of it he came back with an assistant and loaded some more, the heavier oak pieces, and then, a few months later he took more, until his visits became fairly regular over the last ten years or so. Each time he paid cash for the items he’d sold. It was an excellent system and it suited me. I converted assets into grocery money without having to use a bank or go to town. I lived amid my own cash pot! I laugh out loud at the thought, still giddy with exuberance from our doorstep hysterics, as if I’ve become tipsy on a single sip of wine.

“It’s become my pension,” I quip, readying myself to laugh again.

But Vivien isn’t laughing. “You sold the lot?” she gasps, her darkly rimmed eyes widening in disbelief. The change in her throws me. Alongside the makeup, I find it impossible to judge if she’s being serious. I look at Simon, who blinks, incapable of offering any clues.

“Well, I’ve kept all the clocks and barometers that work, and Jake’s head,” I say, motioning to the stuffed pig’s head on the wall as we walk in. (To tell you the truth, Bobby had said he didn’t want it, but now I’m glad. Jake was Vivi’s pet pig when she was about six, and she was so upset when he died [of unnatural causes] that Clive had his head mounted for her so she could see that he was smiling happily when he died.)

I smile myself at the long lost thought of Jake, but Vivien can’t hide her disappointment. “But Virginia, do you realize”—she says this like Maud would have done, slowly and emphatically, Do…You…Realize—“you needed only to sell the Charles the Second chest in the hall for your pension? Or the settle, or the sideboard, an Aubusson tapestry, a few caquetoire chairs…” Her voice rises until it cracks. She sits heavily on the porch seat, as if the very idea has whipped her legs from under her. “Or a fucking painting,” she half shouts, half cries. “But everything?! The house was crammed with furniture, Ginny. Furniture,” she says again, waving her arms in front of her, as if painting it back in its place. “Furniture, rock-crystal chandeliers, dressers,” she rants, in a senseless naming game of anything that springs to mind, “carpets, canteens, silver, vases, mirrors”—she pauses for breath—“porcelain, that, that oyster mirror just there”—she points at the bare wall in front of her—“the William and Mary…” She puts up both hands to cover her face. “Priceless furniture, Ginny.”

I assure you I am now in no doubt of her seriousness. I understand that it’s been a shock, and one she had never expected, but I’d never have guessed it would affect her so deeply. Why is it that as people grow old they cling to possessions and let go of knowledge? After all, it’s only furniture. Each generation has spliced down Samuel Kendal’s original estate, first the land, then the estate houses and the outbuildings. Surely the unnecessary hordes of contents are a natural progression? Besides—and this is just between you and me—I don’t think Vivien’s thought it through. She thinks there’s a legacy to continue, poor woman, but it’s all over now. Vivien and I are the end of the line, there is no future generation. It would have been split up and sold off after our deaths, free money for the government, if it hadn’t been sold already. Perhaps she’s slightly doo-lally— our own father went demented much younger than this. I try to reassure her, as I used to when we were little. I always enjoyed comforting her.

“But it’s completely, absolutely, entirely empty,” she complains, as if there are recognizable degrees of emptiness. “No pictures, no clothes, no photos. I mean, you’ve wiped out every reference to our past. Our family might not have happened. There was no point in its existing for the last two hundred years if it’s got nothing to show for itself.”

It is an interesting view but not one I share. Is it really necessary to record your life in order to make it worthwhile or commendable? Is it worthless to die without reference? Surely those testimonials last another generation or two at most, and even then they don’t offer much meaning. We all know we’re a mere fleck in the tremendous universal cycle of energy, but no one can abide the thought of their life, lived so intensively and exhaustively, being lost when they die, as swiftly and as meaningless as an unspoken idea.

“I don’t mind, Vivien, really I don’t. I never used all those things and I don’t want the clutter. I feel far better off without it,” I say softly, sitting next to her. And I mean it. I found the furniture stressful. I didn’t want to look at it for fear it needed cleaning or I’d discover a scratch that I’d not noticed before. Since it’s gone so too has the constant tightness in my stomach, and I find the house and the space much more manageable. Vivien drags her hands down her face, smudging her eyes some more, and pushes her lower cheeks up with her fingers, making her mouth a duckbill. She seems to come to some sort of resolution.

“Oh, darling, Ginny.” She sighs, more relaxed now. “That was our family’s…our ancestors’ entire collection of furniture, of belongings, of everything. It’s taken nearly two hundred years to accumulate.”

“I haven’t sold any of the moth books. Or any of the specimens, or the equipment,” I say quickly, a little too defensive. “The museum and the lab and the other attic rooms haven’t been touched.”

Vivien nods slowly.

“I forgot. You’ve always been hopeless with money, haven’t you?” she vituperates. “You should have phoned me about it, you really should,” she says wearily. She speaks as much to the flagstones on the porch floor, smoothed deliciously wavy with wear, as to me. I don’t reply, not because I agree—I don’t even have a telephone—but because it seems a good place to end the conversation. And, believe me, I desperately want it to end. I want to salvage our laughter, the excitement and euphoria I felt all too briefly. It’s irrelevant, anyway. The furniture has gone because I wanted it to, and I needed the money. It was my choice, and that’s that.

Now I’m irritated with myself for becoming defensive. After all, she left all those years ago and she invited herself back, and now she’s disappointed with a decision I made and says I should have phoned her for advice. I remember now how Vivi sometimes patronized me, but I used not to mind. I always accepted that she was worldlier than I and, actually, I quite liked it, as if she was looking out for me. It was part of her color, part of her quality. Now that I’m self-sufficient, now that I’ve achieved my own goals in life, I find her criticisms more difficult to stomach. I force myself to stop thinking about it. I don’t want to ruin our reunion.

I tell her I’m going to make us a cup of tea, then go inside to put the kettle on the Rayburn to boil. We are going to forget about the furniture. We are going to drink tea and talk, reminisce and laugh, and she will tell me funny stories about her life in London. I will sit, listen and relax, live them all through her and we’ll laugh again. We are going to catch up, and what a lot of time we have to catch up on! Vivien was right. She was always right. The kettle starts its whistle, faint and hesitant at first. It was her idea for us to live together again and it feels natural that she is back as we near the end of our lives, companions and soul mates, devoted and inseparable. The kettle is now screaming at full steam, shrill and desperate. I slide it off the hot plate. 

Chapter 4 Belinda’s Pot