Vivien and I haven’t spoken to each other since our dispute about the furniture. I’m focusing intently on the tea-making process so that I do not have to look up and see her walking back and forth past the open kitchen door talking on her mobile phone, or her driver carrying her boxes and bags from the car into the house and up the stairs. I’m impressed that Vivien has such a phone, that she’s kept up with the times like that. I pour until the teapot is a quarter full.
Out of the corner of my eye I see Simon, the small dog, trotting presumptuously into the kitchen. He stops next to me and wrinkles his eyes, ingratiating himself. I ignore him frostily and, accepting that he lacks the skills required to change my opinion of him, he takes himself off to lie by the Rayburn, first circling over his chosen resting place, then flopping to the ground.
Holding the handle in my left hand and moving it in a small circular motion, I swish the water inside the teapot while my right hand cups the outside, high up, waiting to feel the water’s heat through the bone china. I study the pattern of small, prettily entwined wildflowers that ramble up from the base to the lid, while willing the swirling water to gain enough momentum to reach up the sides in its circuit inside the pot. To be honest, I have no idea why the china must be warmed or whether the tea really does taste better for it, but it’s those little tenets your mother teaches you from an early age, which her mother instilled in her at a similar age, that become the most difficult to let go of in old age.
The teapot is an elegant one, tall rather than fat. Although it was Maud’s, we’ve always called it Belinda’s teapot. I don’t know the details—I never knew the old woman—but the story went that Belinda had left it to Maud in her will as a way of thanking her for whatever help, advice or listening time Maud had given her, as my mother was naturally predisposed to do. During her lifetime, Maud came to fulfill the role of village consultant and appeaser. It was she who wrote, for instance, requesting more prisoners of war to help bring in the harvest at Peverill’s farm and later, she who quelled the uproar when Charlotte Davis’s horse was found trampling the graves in St. Bart’s churchyard and later still, she who deflected the bloodshed when Michael gave the Axtells’ youngest daughter a cannabis cigarette. Maud would counsel, correct and court-martial. She’d offer coffee at Bulburrow after church on Sundays, give a twice-yearly drinks party and open her garden for a week in the summer. Maud loved people. She understood them and liked to surround herself with them, whether to entertain or to help them. Vivi always joked that our mother wouldn’t survive without doing things for other people.
All in all, I’d say Maud was a near-faultless woman. She had just the right amount of wisdom and wit and charity. Taller than her husband, she was also the sort of woman who looked elegant in whatever she wore, from her gardening clothes to her dressing gown. She had rows of mid-length floral dresses in her wardrobe, full-length sequined evening wear, long and short boots and hats and gloves for every occasion. Maud loved occasions.
Clive, on the other hand, was neither sociable nor well groomed, but he was not allowed to hide himself away. He trailed along to all the local events and gatherings and would smile wryly when Maud introduced them playfully as “the lady and the tramp.” As I said, Maud would be dressed immaculately, while Clive would walk out in one of his two lifelong gray suits, which hung off him from the days when he ate more and were frayed at the collar and cuffs. Sometimes it seemed as if he dressed shabbily on purpose. Once—and I can swear to this—he wore his slippers to a luncheon in the neighboring village. He said there were fewer holes in them than in his shoes, but Maud teased him all afternoon as if she was enjoying his deviance from the social etiquettes she observed so stringently herself. After a few drinks, Maud became the soul of the party, and sometimes I’d see Clive watching her adoringly from afar, entranced by his wife’s charm and vitality. But Clive himself—who never drank because he said it gave him gout—was also surprisingly popular, especially with the ladies who mistook his inadvertent nonconformity to be furtive antiestablishment, which excited them in 1950s Dorset society.
I put two of the new pyramid-style tea bags into Belinda’s pot. Michael bought them for me instead of leaves two weeks ago, explaining that the extra effort required in dealing with the loose stuff was unnecessary, these days. My immediate instinct—as you can imagine—was to resist the novelty, but I tried it and found the bags so much easier to handle with the poor grip control I have in my fingers. I used to have such trouble, especially on those mornings when my fingers curl up with pain, in keeping the leaves on the spoon rather than shaking off and skidding all over the counter. Then, when I’d maneuvered as many as I could into the infuser, the trap that stops them free-roaming the pot, I’d fiddle about for several exasperating minutes trying to close the catch to shut the little devils in, only to be given yet more trouble hooking the tiny link over the pot’s rim. In the end the strength of the tea was more dependent on my deftness for delivering the leaves into the tea trap, rather than consistent with my own preferences to taste, and often I’d have to start all over again. Now that I’ve tried the bags I’ll never go back to the loose. Michael is trying now to convince me that teapots aren’t necessary. I’ve been pretending I agree with him, to avoid having to discuss it, but between you and me, Michael knows nothing of the satisfaction in the ritual of making tea.
I fill Belinda’s pot with boiling water and put on the lid to let it brew. Perhaps today it would have been better to deal with the leaves. I’d have had a longer task to concentrate on, to take my mind off what Vivien is doing and thinking. She’s now upstairs making shuffling noises and wandering between the room directly above me and the one over the pantry that used to be her childhood bedroom. Her driver is carrying up the last of her belongings.
I take down two cups and saucers from the dresser and fetch the milk from the fridge, arrange them by the steaming pot and wait. I won’t pour the tea until she comes down, or it might get cold.
I’ll tell you a strange old thing that I’d never have predicted. I can feel the start of Vivien’s and my relationship re-forming again, but—and this is what is odd—it’s
Those sisterly boundaries shifted when, two years after Vivi’s accident, we were sent to Lady Mary Winsham’s School for Girls. Maud gave us a little talk the night before we left for our first term. “I want you to look after each other so that if either of you gets into any sort of difficulty,” she said, looking at us sternly, one after the other, “you know that you can go and find your sister and talk about it.” As I was the eldest, I was sure she was asking me, especially, to look after Vivi.
Our parents thought that if we started at the same time we’d be a support to each other, but as it turned out, Vivi didn’t need my support. While she started at ten in the lower fourth and found herself instantly popular with the forty other new girls, I was the new girl at thirteen, looking for a niche in a long-assembled year group where friendships and alliances had been brokered for three years already.
The school was an hour’s journey away, and at the start of each new term, Vivi and I were squashed up with our trunks in Clive’s light blue Chester, which he’d converted into a mobile moth-setting station. He’d ripped out the backseats to make way for a setting table that he’d bolted to the floor, so Vivi and I squeezed in on either side of it and worried that our heads might bump if the road got rough. Bottles of bromide, cyanide, ammonia, sodium nitrate and other noxious potions rattled casually in the back, loosely tied into a rack, while nets, traps, pins, scalpels, water baths, corkboards and other essential mothing equipment were arranged neatly in boxes and strapped down elsewhere. By today’s standards, Clive would be vilified for carrying such vast quantities of poisons alongside his children on bumpy country roads, but in 1950, Clive’s mobile setting station was the envy of his colleagues. It had everything required for killing, anesthetizing, relaxing, color fixing and setting moths when they were fresh from the field so he was able to prepare them before the common problems of wing damage, color change and rigor mortis had time to set in.
Lady Mary’s was where well-brought-up girls might “acquire manners, posture and conversation” and a little bit of education. Each week our MPCs (manners, posture and conversation) were graded and suitable punishments set if they were found to have a low average. Even so, during my time there, I never found any evidence of manners in that school. Instead, I was severely subjected to the underhand taunting of an all-girl environment.
The first small incident took place during my second week, when I challenged Alice Hayward who was squishing flies for fun, flies that were desperately vying for freedom through the 5B windows, and I appealed to her to let me open one for them. Within seconds she’d managed to get the whole class laughing at me. The incident instantly marked her out as a leader and sealed my fate, stamping out any hope I might have held of
