“She’s not well,” the nun said in a soft Irish voice, “she’d have liked to have come today, so she would, but she’s not a well woman. We’re all praying for her.”
“Sister Felicity is going to heaven soon,” Georgina said happily. She is twenty-six and has the mind of a backward two-year-old. No one knows why. Charlie put it best when he simply said that God left out the yeast when he made Georgina’s loaf. She’s beautiful, with an innocent face as heart-breaking as an angel’s, and a head as nutty as a squirrel’s larder.
“Sister Felicity’s not going to die,” I said, but Georgina had already forgotten the comment.
“I like it here.” She was still holding my hands.
“You look well,” I told her.
“I want to live here again, Johnny. With you,” Georgina said with a touching and hopeless appeal.
“I wish you could, my darling. But you’re happy at the convent, aren’t you?” The convent hospital specialised in the care of the mentally subnormal. Before my father’s death, and the subsequent collapse of the Rossendale estates, a trust had been established which would provide for the rest of Georgina’s life. It was ironic to think that the only family member who did not have money problems was the mad one.
“I like it here,” Georgina said again with a cruel lucidity. “With you.”
For the first time since my mother had died, tears threatened me. We were a rotten family, but Georgina and I had always been close. When she was a little child I used to make her laugh, and I sometimes thought that it would only take a small miracle to jar the sense out of the place where it was locked so deep inside her head. That miracle had never happened. Instead my mother had found Georgina’s presence oppressive, and so my younger sister had been put safely away, out of sight and out of mind, in her convent home. I crouched in front of her chair. “Are you unhappy?” I asked.
She did not answer. The bubble of sense had burst and now she just stared vacantly into my eyes. I doubted she even knew why she had been brought back to Stowey.
“People are very kind,” she said dully, then looked up as someone came to stand beside me. It was my other sister, my twin Elizabeth, but there was no recognition in Georgina’s eyes.
Elizabeth did not acknowledge Georgina’s presence. Like my mother, she had always been offended by having a mental defective in the family. Whatever, she ignored Georgina and waited for me to disengage my hands gently and stand upright. Elizabeth carried a glass of the hotel’s sherry. Her husband Peter, once my sailing companion, but now a failing Cotswold landowner, glowered at me across the room. I was the ghost at the funeral feast. They all blamed me for losing the family’s money and for bringing the disgrace of poverty on a lineage that had owned this patch of England since the first Rossendale had taken it with his bloody-edged sword. That man had come to Devon in the twelfth century, while now his twentieth-century descendants shuffled with embarrassment in an hotel’s drawing room. All except for Elizabeth, who had a superb if rancorous poise. She drew me away from Georgina’s chair. “I don’t know why she’s here,” Elizabeth said irritably.
“Why shouldn’t she be?”
“She doesn’t know what’s going on.” Elizabeth sipped her sherry, then gave me a long, disapproving examination. “I don’t know why you’re here either.”
“A vestige of filial duty,” I said, a little too lightly.
“You look disgustingly healthy.” Her words were grudging. It was an effort to be polite, to pretend that we were not bitter enemies.
“Sun and sea.” I was glib. “You look well yourself. Are you still riding?”
“Of course.” Elizabeth had very nearly made Britain’s Olympic team as a horsewoman. Perhaps, if that success had come to her, she would have been less bitter with life since.
A flurry at the door announced the arrival of Father Maltravers from London. Father Maltravers had been Mother’s favourite confessor and would now bury her. The sight of the priest made Elizabeth drop her small pretence of politeness. “Will you be taking Mass?” she challenged me.
“I don’t think so.”
“Mother would have liked it if you did.” She paused to look into my eyes as if she expected to read some message there. Elizabeth is very tall, just two inches beneath my own six feet. She has our family’s bright gold hair and more than her fair share of the Rossendale good looks. “Of course,” she went on with a very poisoned indirectness, “you’ll have to make your confession first. Have you made confession in the last four years, John?”
“Have you?” I countered feebly. The Rossendales are one of the ancient Catholic families. We’d been persecuted by the Tudor fanatics, but had tenaciously clung to our land and put the five oyster shells beside Stowey’s front door. That was the source of the line in the nursery song: ‘Five for the symbols at your door’; the five marks being a sign that the old religion was practised inside and that a priest could therefore be found to say Mass. Today the hotel delights in showing its guests a priest hole where the illicit clergymen had hidden from Elizabeth I’s searchers. The hotel’s priest hole was in what had been my father’s bedroom, and the guests were told that a Jesuit had starved to death in the hole in the 1580s, but that was a nonsense. The real priest hole was in Stowey’s stables, because a Rossendale would never have let a priest into the private rooms. The so-called priest hole was actually the low cupboard in which my grandfather had kept his riding boots, but the invention keeps the tourists happy.
“Did you see Mother before she died?” Elizabeth now asked.
“Yes.”
“And?” she prompted me.
I shrugged and decided the truth of Mother’s last words had better stay my secret. “She wasn’t in a fit state to talk.”
Elizabeth paused, evidently suspecting an evasion. “But you know why she wanted to see you?” she asked after a few seconds.
“I can guess.”
Elizabeth did not pursue the topic. I noticed how the other family members kept deliberately clear of us, as though making an arena for a fight. They must have guessed that Elizabeth would tackle me and consequently there was a sense of expectancy in the panelled room. They pretended to ignore us, fussing around Father Maltravers, but I knew they were all keenly alert to my confrontation with Elizabeth.
“Have you seen Mother’s will?” The question, like her earlier questions, was yet another probing attack.
“No.”
“There’s nothing in it for you.”
“I didn’t expect anything.” I spoke gently because I could sense the danger in Elizabeth’s mood. She had the Rossendale temper. I had it too, but I think the sea had taught me to control mine. Yet now, in Elizabeth’s bright eyes, I could see the anger brimming.
“She left you nothing, because you betrayed her.” My sister’s voice was loud enough to make the nearest relatives turn to watch us. All but Georgina who was solemnly counting her fingers. “She hated you,” Elizabeth went on, “which is why she left me the painting.”
The statement showed that Elizabeth had been unable to resist a full-scale assault. “Good,” I said carelessly, which only annoyed her more.
“So where is it?” she asked with a savage bitterness.
We’re twins, born eight minutes apart, and we hate each other. I can’t explain that. Charlie often said we were too much alike, as if that was the answer, but I can’t find the venom in my own soul to explain Elizabeth’s obsessive dislike of me. Nor do I think we are so much alike; I lack Elizabeth’s driving ambition. It was an astonishing ambition; so nakedly obvious as to be almost pitiful. She craved after a status in life which would reflect the past glories of our family; she wanted wealth, admiration and success, yet, like me, she had a knack of failure. I had accepted my lack of ambition, turning it into a wanderer’s life at sea, while Elizabeth just grew more bitter with every twist of malevolent fate. She had married well, and the marriage had soured. She had been born wealthy, and now she was poor, and that failure seemed to hurt her most of all.
“Where’s the painting?” she asked me again, and this time so loudly that everyone else in the room, even the uncomprehending Georgina, turned to watch us. Elizabeth’s husband, leaning against the far wall, seemed to sneer at me. Father Maltravers took a step forward, as though tempted to be a peacemaker, but the intensity in Elizabeth’s voice checked him. “Where’s the painting?” she asked me again.
“I’ll tell you once more,” I said, “and for the very last time, I do not know.”
