A Sister’s Gift (33 page)

‘A dangerous occupation crossing these medieval bridges…’ Christine joins me at the table. ‘But without them, I guess the “other side of the river” must have seemed as far away to your average peasant as the moon is to us.’

‘I think it’s what Hollie’s scared of, you know: the possibility that if she reaches out far enough and long enough to get the thing she wants, that there might be some very unlovely things waiting there for her, too,’ I hint.

‘Aren’t
you
scared of that?’ Christine looks at me curiously now. I shake my head slowly.

‘I’ve been right to the other side of the world, Chrissie. And I’ve come to the conclusion that the most scary things are often the ones we leave back home.’

Well. Maybe it’s about time my sister stopped going around as if everything in life came straight out of a Disney movie. Maybe it’s time she woke up to how things really are, to how I’m really feeling about this whole rotten set-up – to what
really
went on between me and her husband that day up on Bluebell Hill.

Before they have their sweet little reconciliation tonight, I think she really needs to know.

‘All ready for your date?’ Scarlett peers at me from her favourite position up on the coal bunker. She’s almost hidden behind the wisteria right now; it’s climbed so high this year up the old pear tree it’s made a whole curtain but I can just about make her out there behind it. I knew I’d find her down here. It’s where she always comes to lick her wounds.

‘Lettie…’ How to put this? ‘I’m really sorry…’

Sorry that Richard won’t see you any more because of what I asked you both to do; sorry I ruined the familiar and comfortable relationship you two had with each other; sorry I’ve caused you to stay away from the work you love; and sorry that you can’t come with us tonight.

‘…For everything,’ I add, because there is such a long list of things to be sorry for. ‘I feel I haven’t treated you right.’

‘Ha!’ Her eyes range darkly over mine. ‘Never mind, Hollie.’ She swallows, as if making an effort to gain control of herself. ‘Look, just go now please, go and have your dinner with Richard. I want you to go away before I say anything I’m going to regret, all right? Go away and have a nice evening and…talk to Richard.’

‘Why don’t you invite some of your mates over to…?’

She shakes her head fiercely.

‘I’m not in that kind of mood. Look, stop worrying about me. I’ll be fine here with Chrissie.’ She turns away to look back over the fence. I pick my way delicately over the grass towards
her, my heels sinking into the long grass as I go. I’m meeting Rich at the gastropub in Rochester High Street in half an hour, then we’re planning to spend the weekend on the coast.

‘I just wish that…that things were different at the moment, and I could invite you out with us tonight and we could all celebrate the pregnancy like you said – but I can’t.’

Scarlett doesn’t turn round. She’s staring at the static barge the engineers have set up on the river; there’s a guy manning a small crane that’s busy manoeuvring sediment into place even at this hour.

‘They’ve been there for weeks now, haven’t they?’ She deliberately doesn’t answer me. ‘Makes you wonder how bad the problem under the bridge could have been, really.’

‘They’ve got to shore up the abutments,’ I tell her distractedly. ‘With the weight of all that water that’s flowing by all the time, it’s a delicate operation…’

‘Just think. It might just have collapsed one day when all the traffic was on it. Imagine the mayhem that would have caused. Might have brought on a few headaches back at the office, don’t you think?’

‘It’s already been the cause of a few headaches, Lettie. Many of them mine. Look, we need to talk, don’t we?’ I put in suddenly. ‘I know you’re mad at me because Richard’s cut you out of his life. He’s pretty much cut me out too, can’t you see that? It isn’t just you. If I don’t do something about the state of our marriage…’

‘They’ve torn down most of the old buildings that were part of that business complex along Strood Esplanade – have you seen that?’ Maddeningly, she’s still batting away my every attempt to have a proper conversation. She lifts the pendulous lilac blooms of the wisteria so I can see the river better and she points towards the opposite bank.

‘I’m not interested in the buildings, Scarlett.’ I want to make our peace, but she keeps bringing in red herrings. Reluctantly, I
rise up on my tiptoes and pretend to peer out over the wall. I’m not going to look where she wants me to. I can’t. ‘OK,’ I breathe.

‘How does that feel?’ she says after a while. Then, when I don’t answer her: ‘Like an old wound you never wanted to look at, eh?’

‘Look, let’s not go there, shall we?’ I look at her entreatingly. I’ve got twenty minutes before I meet up with Rich. I need to concentrate on the here and now, put right the things that have gone wrong again. That’s the most important thing just at the moment.

‘Lettie. I want things to be OK between us. I want a truce. The atmosphere in the cottage this last month has been pretty unbearable. It must have been for you, too?’ I take a step nearer to my sister but she crosses her arms and legs, keeps her distance.

‘It’s always been like this though, hasn’t it?’ she observes.

‘What d’you mean, always? It hasn’t
always
been like this.’

‘It has for me,’ she says shortly. ‘I feel stifled here. I’ve always known I wouldn’t stay.’

‘You’ve always had ants in your pants,’ I agree. I lean my elbows up on the coal bunker and point at the line of ants making their way along the wall. She doesn’t smile back. ‘Do you remember that time at Flo’s birthday party…? It must have been her fiftieth. A whole group of us went down to that hall at Aylesford. It was such a beautiful evening. The river was so calm and flat and…’

She frowns at me now. Maybe she doesn’t recall? She couldn’t have been much more than four at the time.

‘When the sun went down,’ Scarlett continues, ‘each of Flo’s guests wrote a special wish on a piece of paper for her.’

‘Ah, so you do remember…’

‘Then we made little paper boats out of them and put a candle inside each one and set them off down the river.’ My sister’s eyes narrow. ‘I ran along the riverbank after the boats. I ran and I ran, trying to keep up with them and then I got to
that bend in the river where there was a fallen tree trunk and you wouldn’t let me follow them any more.’

I take in a breath, because she still remembers how I held her back. She doesn’t remember – even now – the reason why.

‘I’m not like you, Hollie,’ she says softly now. ‘I never will be.’

‘I understand that. Really I do. I know how hard it’s been, remaining cooped up here for all these weeks. And even though I’d do anything in the world to make you stay here – at least until you give birth – I know I can’t make you. And maybe it would be unfair of me to try.’ I hesitate, glancing at my watch. ‘I’ve got to go to Rich now. I know things have been…hard…recently, but all that’s going to change, I promise you. Things are going to be all right.’

My sister gives a pained laugh then. She shakes her head disparagingly. ‘Things are not going to be all right, Hollie. It’s gone too far for that. Don’t you know that? Can’t you see
anything?’

‘What is it?’ I hesitate, torn between needing to make a move and not wanting to leave her like this, feeling sad, words left unspoken.

‘Do you honestly want us to be real with one another? I don’t know that you could take that, Hollie. I mean, properly real -instead of just glossing over what’s actually going on?’

‘Go on, then.’

‘Well for one thing.’ She looks at me painfully. ‘I’m not going to give birth in December. I’m expecting for November. That midwife was on the money about my dates being wrong.’

‘She was?’ I look at her, startled. ‘So – you’re further ahead than we thought? That’s…that’s wonderful,’ I say resolutely. ‘It means we get our baby all the sooner.’

My sister shakes her head at me in disbelief. ‘Is that all you can say about it? Hollie, why won’t Richard see me?’ She’s watching me closely.

‘He feels awkward and uncomfortable, I guess. Oh, we’ve been
over all this, Lettie. You know how shy he is. When I asked him to be with you,’ I swallow, ‘it must have been unbearable for him.’

‘He won’t see me because – that day up on Bluebell Hill – I told him that I was in love with him.’

I can barely breathe. It feels like the whole world comes to a stop for a moment.

‘Well – why on earth did you go and say a stupid thing like that?’ I stutter. ‘No wonder he’s feeling so bad about being around you. Hell, Scarlett…!’

‘Why did I say it?’ Scarlett’s face has gone white, her fists clenched into a ball just like when she was a kid. ‘I told you to just bloody go away and have your dinner, didn’t I? All this…this pretend intimacy between us sisters, all this gratuitous honesty and you’re so…so bloody stupid you wouldn’t see the truth if it were emblazoned on the front of a high-speed train that was about to hit you.’

‘Scarlett, I have no idea what you’re on about.’

‘No, you don’t. Because you don’t want to know. Go away, all right? Just go!’

‘No, I won’t. I can’t, not after what you’ve just said to me.’ I step closer to my sister, put my hand on her arm and she flinches away as if she’s just been bitten. ‘Why did you feel the need to say to Richard that you were in love with him? I can understand – under the circumstances – if you might have needed to get some sort of role play going on in your head, but you didn’t need to say it out loud to him.’

‘I said it,’ she puts in through gritted teeth, ‘because it is true.’

I swallow. ‘You do not love my husband, Scarlett. Please – just
stop and consider what you’re saying for a moment because words…they last a lifetime. You can’t take them back afterwards. Oh God, Lettie – what did you say to him?’

‘I told Richard that I loved him,’ she says, high-pitched now. ‘That I have always loved him.’

‘My Richard?’ I feel the blood drain from my face now. Why did she – oh, God, she’s just told me she’s expecting in November, not December. Does that mean she was already pregnant in February when the two of them slept together? I’m shaking, unable to think straight. It’s too much. Too much to take in, all at once.

‘Mine first,’ she says, almost inaudibly. ‘I met him first.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I met him. That day out along Rochester Esplanade when Ruffles got run over, have you forgotten? He came over to me. He wrapped Ruffles up in his jacket and he walked with me down to the vet’s. He didn’t take his car because he said I should never get into a car with a stranger. He made me call you,’ she gulps, ‘to say where we were.’

‘So – he took you to the vet’s? What’s that got to do with anything?’ My voice is rising though I’m trying hard to keep it level. Scarlett is…she’s obviously fraught and upset and hormonal and conflicted and saying lots of things that she doesn’t really mean. She
can’t
mean them. She’s talking rubbish. She’s got to be.

‘You can’t know how I felt about him all that summer. When we were teaching each other to dance…’

‘In the vet’s old cow shed you mean? Oh, Scarlett! Are you talking about the time I came in and found you two dancing together?’ I search my memory and all I can come up with is that I thought she looked so sweet. And…so happy and I was glad she’d found a hobby that would take her mind off all the bad things that had happened that year.

‘But there was never anything between you. You were thirteen,
for pity’s sake.’ Her face looks like thunder but I continue on regardless. ‘So you had a crush on him? Maybe you did. I’m sorry I didn’t notice. I had plenty enough on my own plate if you recall – I was only twenty-one myself, and I’d had to take on the house, looking after you, everything.’ I had to leave my creative arts university degree at Canterbury unfinished so I could look after her -has she forgotten? I lost it all! Not just Flo – the only person who’d ever been a parent to me, but the education that would give me a shot at the fashion career I’d always dreamed of.

‘I was due to have gone away to do my year abroad.’ I stutter now at her white face. Does she remember any of that? If she was ever even aware of it she doesn’t care.

‘I wanted you to go abroad, don’t you know that?’ she shoots back. ‘I was looking forward to your going. I never wanted you to stay behind and ruin everything for me, make the sacrifice, be such a bloody
martyr

I stop. She is distraught, my sister. She is hysterical. Is this what the pregnancy is doing to her? Filling her so full of hormones that she can’t think straight anymore? I have to be the one who stays calm here. I
have
to.

‘I’m sorry if…if I didn’t notice how you felt about him, but let’s face it, that was over ten years ago, Scarlett. You’re a grown woman now…’

‘You didn’t notice because…everything I ever did back in those days was always put down to me “going through some teenage phase”. You and Beatrice used to sit in the kitchen for hours on end discussing me, don’t think I didn’t used to hear you. You were both very fond of droning on about how I was “going off the rails”.’

‘I had to talk to
someone
about you,’ I defend. ‘I didn’t have anyone else. And you
did
go off the rails! You were totally out of control and you gave me hell so don’t deny it.’

Scarlett laughs hysterically.

‘I only went out with Aaron and all that crowd at the Blue Jazz
café because I wanted some friends of my own. People that had nothing to do with you! I never wanted you to get involved, Hollie. I never asked you to intervene between me and Aaron.’

‘Don’t even
talk
to me about Aaron, OK? Don’t ever mention his name again.’

‘No,’ she says bitterly. ‘We can’t mention it. We can’t talk about anything that went on that night, can we? Even though I know you blame me for what happened. Even though I never wanted…’

‘You put yourself in danger, Scarlett. I
had
to come out and get you—’

‘I didn’t want
you
to come, you fool! I wanted…I hoped Rich would come. Not you. After you two started dating I never had another moment with him alone. You stole him away from me. I wanted him back, that’s all.’