The Sister Read online

I dared myself to take up the book again; perhaps I had got it wrong, misunderstood. But there it was all over again: Rosy’s self-importance … Patience, I told myself; but HaHah! it was Rosy’s patience that was so irritating about her.

  Dear Henry, Is that your true feeling? Do you wish that I, like Rosy, would explode, or dance a jig, or pull out my hair, or yours … rather than persist in my long-suffering, stupid, martyrish patience?

  But our father had praised our mother for it.

  And William had praised me for it.

  I was trapped.

  Or was it Henry who was trapped having to look after me?

  ‘Paul Muniment ‘had his sister to keep – she could do nothing for herself; and he paid a low rent because she had to have doctors, and doses, and all sorts of comforts. He spent a shilling a week for her on flowers.’

  I was sick all over the place. I tried to get the image of Henry adding up what he’d spent on me out of my head, but could not. I loosened the collar of my nightdress and tried to slow my breathing. I could run away, I thought but where? And anyway You, run? Someone was pointing at me, laughing, gabbling more words from the book: ‘You cannot go, you are ill. Who should know better than me? Besides, it’s lucky you are ill; perhaps if you had your health you would be all over the place.’

  But if I were not ill, came the thought, would I have been ‘all over the place’? What did that mean? The thing that rankled more than anything was having my own and Rosy’s politics, or lack of it, conflated. Rosy Muniment was a wretched reactionary. Oh, she would like to make things better for the poor but was not for redistributive change and therefore would not pull anything down; whereas it was The Princess who saw the chance for hemmed-in humanity, who was the true radical, who was prepared to do … anything. But Henry had scrambled us up like a deck of cards: ears from this one, nose from that one, feet from the other. Indeed, the more I thought about it, I saw that there was more of me, plain as I was, in the Princess herself. Which made me wonder if, in creating The Princess, he’d actually imagined me, his own sister, and how it would have been had I been beautiful and powerful and rich. Was she an improved me? Or, rather, had he re-created me whole and well and therefore ‘all over the place’; that is, how I might have behaved had I not been plain and ill, etc., but with my radical ideas intact? In other words dangerously incendiary?

  Re-reading Henry’s note, I made a brave attempt to separate book from brother. The Princess was not me; nor was Rosy. The book is like a map, I told myself: it represents the land but it is not the land itself. But to be written about, even half or a quarter written about, was still distressing. Was I a radical, romantic Princess – or a repellent stick insect? Should I be flattered or appalled? It was too confusing.

  ‘The little person in the corner had the air of having gone to bed in a picture gallery.’

  There, I thought gratefully, he has allowed her to rest. I savored the image. I could see it quite clearly, the thick impasto, the room about her an enveloping, chocolatey darkness, only the figure’s face a bright mask as she lies in bed, the eyes alarmed but the body quite still, almost stiff, the book she holds painted in a slash of red.

  I drew the duvet over my chest, arranging my arms on top along two perfect parallel tracks, my face fixed in a smile of fierce contentment. There I remained, unmoving, until Mrs Smith found me. ‘‘Miss! Miss! Are you allright? Shall I call the doctor? Miss!’’

  *

  There is light at the window and a commotion outside the room. A knock at the door. The Smiths, not knowing what to ‘do’ about me, have summoned Wardy.

  ‘‘Poor Miss, you have suffered another relapse.’’

  ‘‘So it seems.’’

  ‘‘I came as quick as I could, only my Aunt wasn’t well.’’ She begins tidying the bedclothes, babbling. ‘‘But you aren’t right yourself, are you? You have had a bad siege with your head. Never mind, Miss, we’ll get you cleaned up and you’ll be as right as rain.’’

  Is rain right?

  ‘‘Aunt thinks you have improved me very much, Miss. She says that I am much more intellectual than I was.’’ She reaches under the bed, blushing. ‘‘Yes, Miss, I made several remarks about books the last time I was at home.’’

  I dare not ask what books or remarks.

  ‘‘Yesterday,’’ she reports, ‘‘I visited my friend Becky, she nurses at Wandsworth Infirmary, and do you know what I saw there but a girl of twelve dying of consumption so thin and shriveled she looked five or six at most, and her mother’s in a madhouse from drink and her father died the week before in a drunken fit, and there she lay trying to smile over some biscuits and … .’’

  On she goes babbling and sponging. Is that me mooing?

  ‘‘That’s right, Miss, just let yourself go.’’

  She is kind, I think; but how can she fail to distinguish between worthless me and those brave, wasted children? How can she bear to touch me?

  Because her job is to care and that is what she does.

  She rubs my back with some strong-smelling stuff. ‘‘Eucalyptus oil,’’ she explains, given to her by Becky.

  ‘‘In my dream,’’ I tell her, ‘‘Henry is dictating a passage to his secretary.’’ I make my voice go deep and flat: ‘‘‘The poor creature is quite grotesque; in short, a pathetic female invalid.’ He is writing about me, of course.’’

  ‘‘Mercy!’’ she cries: ‘‘Mr James would never say such a thing about you!’’

  Is that me mooing?

  ‘‘Come,’’ she encourages, ‘‘we’ll get you a fresh nightdress on. The doctor should be here shortly.’’ Another animal-like noise. What use another gladiatorial encounter with another great man, I think, and then the fierce struggle to recover one’s self-respect? But he’d been called, was already on his way.

  Thirty-eight

  I was sitting propped up hugging a stone-cold ceramic hot-water bottle when there came a knock on the bedroom door: ‘‘Another package for you, Miss. It arrived yesterday, but you were in no fit state to receive it.’’ She held the thing to my ear and shook: rattle rattle. I pushed it away. Was I such an inconsolable child that I must be distracted with a rattling box?

  ‘‘Dare we open it?’’ Her voice quailed in the way of a distressed stage-actress.

  ‘‘Oh, get on with it, Wardy.’’

  I watched as she cut the string, lifted paper and sealing wax, parted the cardboard wings as if they were the flesh of a flayed horse, and dipped in her hand. A shriek followed. She flung up the sash and would have hurled the contents out if I hadn’t ordered her to stop at once. ‘‘You’ll bash someone’s skull in, you silly pin – give it here.’’ I took up the box, pointing to the return address:

  ‘‘Look, it’s from my sister-in-law Mrs James, who is no anarchist, I can assure you.’’

  ‘‘Oh,’’ she whispered, daring to peer further into the box: ‘‘but whatever can they be?’’

  I held one up for demonstration: ‘‘They be sweet potatoes. Have you never come across one before?’’ I offered it for examination but she hid her hand behind her back.

  ‘‘Go on,’’ I encouraged, ‘‘it won’t (wishing it would) explode.’’

  ‘‘I declare, I have never seen such a strange potato in my life. It’s quite the wrong color.’’

  ‘‘That,’’ said I, ‘‘is because you have never been abroad.’’

  ‘‘Foreign,’’ she muttered, ‘‘I should have guessed.’’

  ‘‘American to be precise,’’ I corrected: ‘‘or does that count as foreign?’’

  ‘‘Humph,’’ said she.

  ‘‘By the way,’’ I asked, ‘‘what is the date today?’’

  ‘‘Sunday, the 19th, Miss.’’

  ‘‘Then on Thursday it will be our Thanksgiving.’’ I gave her a potted history: ‘‘The white settlers stole land from the natives, then had the arrogance to invite them to a harvest meal the natives had taught them to grow. There was also Lincoln fancying a
ritual to unify the country after civil war and …’’

  She cut me off (get to the denouement!): ‘‘But how do you celebrate, Miss?’’

  ‘‘Oh, by eating ourselves silly. Families get together to consume vast quantities of turkey along with stuffing, cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes – and end up barely speaking to one another, I managed not to add. Then came a brainstorm:

  ‘‘Why not have our own celebration?’’

  I read her doubtful look: ‘Surely you are not well enough and besides on your own you do not constitute a family and what have you got to be thankful for …’.

  ‘‘Perhaps on this occasion you and the Smiths will join me as ‘family’?’’

  That only seemed to mortify her further – she couldn’t – they wouldn’t … . She was on her way out when she stopped:

  ‘‘How are they prepared, then, those strange potatoes?’’

  ‘‘Peeled and sliced,’’ I explained, ‘‘layered into a baking dish, dotted with butter and bathed in maple syrup until it’s ‘candied’.’’

  ‘‘What syrup, Miss?’’

  ‘‘Of course – I’m forgetting – no maple trees, no maple syrup.’’ (But Katharine had promised to bring some back with her.) ‘‘Well then, corn syrup.’’ Not that either. ‘‘You have treacle, I presume, golden syrup?’’

  ‘‘I suppose so … yes, Miss.’’

  ‘‘And the turkey …?’’ But The Mrs, I knew, knew all about turkeys having grown up with them. The box also contained a sack of corn meal for making cornbread and muffins. ‘‘So,’’ I said, ‘‘it looks as if we have all the ingredients for a real American Thanksgiving just like we had back home.’’

  The James family is gathered: Father, Mother, Aunt Kate; William, Henry, Wilkie, Rob, and Alice. The two younger soldier brothers, Wilkie and Rob, are on leave from The War, for which the family will be giving Extra Thanks. But for Alice, who has recently turned thirteen, it is her recently married cousin Kitty who most interests her. Alice gazes across the table over the rising bone of the turkey’s breast as if over the ridge of a glorious but impassable peak. Married, she whispers to herself, the very word gilded and garlanded.

  ‘‘Pass the cranberry sauce, please, Alice.’’

  There is something not right in the atmosphere, like a stagnant pool, she thinks, which looks sparklingly clear until you stir it up.

  ‘‘Oh dear,’’ says the Mother, ‘‘Cook has used too much maple syrup on the candied sweets.’’

  It’s true, bits of the hard ‘candy’ are sticking in Alice’s teeth … and she has seen Wilkie poking between his with a toothpick. ‘Henry would never do such a thing,’ she thinks, turning to gaze at him beside her. He is looking extremely handsome with his hair parted and waved.

  With all the people present there should be a great tumult, a babble of news and excitement, but there is only the sound of carving and serving, of knife sliding against fork, of Father’s leg snapping and thunking, of jaws and teeth working more or less thankfully away. There is discomfort, Alice senses, among her brothers. Before the war she’d had four brothers, but now she has two brothers and two brothers. ‘Two and two equals four,’ she tells herself, but the truth of it will not hold.

  William clears his throat. The chewing stops, the knives and forks pause in mid-air. ‘He is going to tell us a story,’ thinks Alice excitedly, listening hard, and she is right. The story is about a recent encounter in Cambridge with a lady reformer: ‘‘Her bonnet was all askew, her gray hair escaping in all directions, her spectacles slipping down a near non-existent nose … altogether a sort of drooping, dissolving effect …’’.

  ‘Henry,’ thinks Alice, ‘could not have described her more vividly, though less cruel.’

  ‘‘But what,’’ entreats cousin Kitty, ‘‘did she want of you, William?’’

  ‘‘Oh, she was terribly wound up, insisting I attend some lecture or other, on Art Anatomy I believe it was, by a Dr William Rimmer …’’.

  Here Father interrupts: ’’A f-f- fraud! Elizabeth P-P-P-Peabody,’’ he spits out. His anger makes him stutter, breaking his words apart. ‘‘Do n-n-not go near her or any one of her circle, Willy-boy. Why, she’s one of the most d-d-dissolute old biddies that ever walked the earth!’’ He points a finger at the turkey’s scavenged carcass, as if it were the poor little woman herself about to rise up and pull at his own sleeve.

  Now it’s Mother’s turn: ‘‘Calm yourself, my dear. Your sweets will be getting cold. They don’t keep, you know.’’

  The family goes on with its eating. But Alice is rattled. She cannot fit the word ‘dissolute’ to a little old lady reformer.

  ‘‘Pardon me, Uncle,’’ says cousin Kitty, as if reading Alice’s thoughts, ‘‘but I have met her and found her to be quite, how shall I put it, endearing, and certainly well-meaning. She has a sweet radiant little …’’

  All eyes are on Father. He has begun to imitate the lady’s mincing movements, her beseeching face and droopy garments; and while everyone except Kitty and Alice find amusement in it, he adds insult to injury by making her lack of stylishness in dress come to symbolize loose reasoning and a lack of discrimination.

  Alice is longing for Henry to object but he does not. ‘Yet he will be imagining her secretly,’ she decides, ‘and that is a kind of sympathy, is it not?’

  Aunt Kate is impatient with the whole subject.

  Alice and Kitty regard each other. That is the end of Elizabeth Peabody, they understand. The message is quite clear. Wearing spectacles, especially ones that slip down your nose, is to be avoided at all costs.

  By now the servants are bringing in the dessert, a compote of fruits, and a Thanksgiving cake made from a recipe handed down by Catharine Barber James. Alice is helping Aunt Kate to clear away the dirty dishes which are smeared with a brown gravy and red cranberries, and cluttered with bits of orange ‘candy’. William, Alice can’t help noticing, is glaring across the table with one of his cross-eyed looks, like the one in the self-portrait he recently sent her signed with the inscription, To my loveress, Alice. But now it’s Henry he’s got in his sights:

  ‘‘I have been reading some letters of yours recently published in The Nation,’’ he announces. Henry, emerging out of his silence like a deep sea turtle from its shell, replies: ‘‘Indeed.’’ ‘‘Yes … indeed,’’ echoes William menacingly, ‘‘and I have to say, Henry, they show a disconcerting tendency to over-refinement and – he makes a rotating gesture with his wrist – curliness. If you ask me …’’

  ‘But he has not asked you,’ thinks Alice.

  ‘‘… you should cultivate a more direct style.’’

  ‘‘I see,’’ says Henry. There is a pause; then: ‘‘And what of delicacy, subtlety and ingenuity?’’

  ‘‘Oh, to hell with them, and all that fencing you put in the dialogue. What you want to write is straightforward action with no twilight or mustiness in the plot. A good story, I’m sure you can do it.’’ He sits back, the wise older brother giving the younger the gift of his wisdom. For his own good.

  Henry mutters in French under his breath.

  ‘‘Oh, and that’s another thing, your constant use of French phrases – absolutely maddening!’’

  Wilkie and Rob are starting to titter and Aunt Kate and Mother are looking anxiously at each other. Then Father’s leg begins vibrating under the table. ‘‘Come,’’ Mother turns to Henry, ‘‘tell us how you are, dear.’’ She is trying to distract him, thinks Alice, so he won’t make Willy look a fool. ‘‘Have you quite recovered from your wound?’’ she now asks.

  Uh-oh, thinks Alice.

  ‘‘I am quite well, Mother,’’ he replies tightly, regarding his plate as if noticing for the first time that it contains more pudding than he can possibly eat. The sound of tittering into napkins is heard from the other end of the table. Father raps at his glass. Henry, as they all know, does not like his ‘wound’ mentioned. It is not, like Wilkie’s, a wound to be proud of; that is
, a War Wound with capital letters. Their Mother has once again ‘put her foot in it’. But their Father will rescue them with a speech on the occasion for which they are gathered. He is good at that. He rises. ‘‘Let us Give Thanks,’’ he begins, ‘‘for all our brave boys, in this time of national crisis.’’

  Cousin Kitty and Alice stare at each other. Aunt Kate and Mother are used to being left out, so they do not mind.

  Father drones on about self-respect and good and evil and manly resistance, and duty and etcetera.

  Alice knows that Bob has been homesick, and that their Father has had to send him rousing letters (‘My darling Bobbins’) about the Prodigal Son and the fatted calf, and so on, so that he will stay fighting like a man and not come home with his tail between his legs.

  William and Henry are excused from The War. It must be, she thinks, because they are older and wiser.

  ‘‘The crucial thing,’’ their Father is coming to the end of his speechifying (while the custard is congealing on their plates), ‘‘Is not to do good for the sake of worldly success, but to hate evil, to feel disgust at it, and to turn from sinfulness to God’s perfect love. Let us Give Thanks.’’

  Chatterchatterhowlhowl, Alice hears. She bites her knuckles.

  Henry has eaten the least of all of them. ‘‘Poor Henry,’’ says Mother, ‘‘are you sure you’re quite allright? Have you lost your appetite? Really you are too thin, dear.’’

  William’s eyeballs roll inexorably towards one another. ‘‘What can you mean, Mother, when he has all the world looking after him. Poor Henry, indeed! I should be so poor!’’

  Cousin Kitty has reported how all the young women of Boston have been clamoring to meet the young writer.

  ‘‘Leave him alone,’’ says Alice, coming to Henry’s defence. ‘‘Anyone can see his mind is his battleground; and if any one of you can match it for wit and prescience, speak out now.’’

  Silence. Aunt Kate whispers to her sister, ‘‘That child is too precocious for her own good.’’