Weird Sister (18 page)

Afterwards they sit in front of the fire. Robert puts his arm around Agnes and his head on her shoulder. They look into the fire and he thinks of perfect Christmas Eves, and soon he is asleep.

Agnes slips away. She goes into the kitchen. Karen is making hot milk to take up to Andrew and Francis in an attempt to subdue them; Andrew is too excited to sleep and Francis is taking his cue from his brother. Jenny is in her room wrapping presents, this year Agnes gave Jenny money for her Christmas shopping. Now Jenny is fretting over the wool scarf she bought for Agnes – is it good enough, will she like it, does it matter that Agnes paid for it herself? Graeme is sitting at the table. Once Karen leaves the room Agnes stands behind him. She begins to play with his hair, pulling the curls at the nape of his neck straight, letting them pass through her fingers. Graeme finds her touch shocking. They have not stepped near each other since that night. Suddenly he is full of the most intense longing.

‘Let’s go outside,’ she says.

He follows her out the back door. Two of the holiday cottages are occupied for the Christmas week, smoke puffs from their chimneys. As they cross the field – Agnes in her dress and her shawl, Graeme stumbling behind – he looks up and sees that the cottages are like something out of a fairy tale, like Hansel and Gretel gingerbread houses, like the house where Grandmother waits for the little girl with the red riding hood. Agnes holds up the key for the third cottage.

Inside it is cold. The heating is off and in the bedroom the bed has been stripped, the sheets, pillows and duvets stuffed into bin liners to keep away the damp. Agnes turns and beckons Graeme. ‘Here,’ she says, ‘warm me up.’

They are there for less than a half hour. When they finish Graeme finds himself lying on top of Agnes. He props himself up on one elbow and pushes his hair out of his face and looks down at her. She smiles, and he feels a pleasure as dense as any orgasm. ‘Don’t move,’ she says, ‘you’re keeping me warm.’

He looks down at her face, her lovely heart-shaped face, her lips that this time she allowed him to kiss, and he thinks, this is it, my marriage is over, I want Agnes, I do, to the exclusion of all others, I will have her, she will be mine. Even if I have to get rid of my brother, I want her, she will be mine. In that moment something inside him hardens, his black heart turns to lead. There is no going back.

They move apart. Agnes sits up and begins to dress, turning away. Graeme lies on the bare mattress, steaming. ‘Come here,’ he says, his hand on her hip.

‘We have to go back,’ she replies. ‘We don’t want them to notice we are missing.’

Graeme pulls himself together. She is right, of course, like she said before, it’s the ideal situation. She is married to Robert, he is married to Karen, they live in the same house. There is nothing to stop them from doing exactly as they please.

Elizabeth

I never intended to become friends with Agnes. I didn’t have it in me to be that generous. I think she knew from the start that I was in love with Robert and that she had usurped what I – and a lot of other people – saw as my rightful place. And I also believe that, at the beginning, she felt genuine empathy with me. Agnes’s version of empathy. Either that or she was the most splendid faker. But, like I said, she had a strange ability to get me talking. And keep me talking. Afterwards, I hated myself.

‘Elizabeth,’ she said one evening in the new year, ‘why is it that a lovely woman like yourself has never been married?’

I looked at her aghast.

She laughed. ‘Oh Christ, I’m sorry, what a question. Just the kind of thing people used to ask me. Please forgive me. I’ll shut up now.’

We were sitting on our own in front of the fire. After dinner Robert had discovered there was nothing to drink in the house. He’d gone to the pub to buy us a bottle of wine.

I stretched my feet toward the fire. Before she arrived I had always loved to spend time in that room. Being in that room, in front of the fire, always made me feel expansive. Or perhaps it was something else, I don’t know, some spell that Agnes had cast. I looked at her and, before I knew what was happening, my tongue was loosened.

‘I did almost get married,’ I said. ‘A few years ago. When I was twenty-nine.’

‘Okay,’ she said, pulling her shawl around her shoulders. She had a glamorous collection of scarves and shawls in dark colours. ‘What happened?’

There is great pleasure to be found in confessing. As a therapist I saw how profoundly people enjoy talking about themselves, even when dealing with painful things, or when they know they have done wrong. I knew the thrill well from my own therapy, the euphoric gratification that comes with spilling the beans. As I told Agnes what had happened, I began to feel like the wife-killer who walks into the police station and tells all; it was a tremendous relief.

‘I met him on holiday. In Greece. I know it’s a cliché but at least he wasn’t a Greek golddigger or a professional holiday gigolo or something like that. He was English. I’d gone with my friend Marina – you know, the woman Robert stays with sometimes in London.’

‘Oh yes,’ Agnes said speculatively. ‘I’ve often wondered about the mysterious Marina.’

‘Agnes – you don’t think that –’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘I make sure he’s worn out before I send him off to stay with Marina.’

I didn’t much like what that conjured so I got on with my story. ‘We were in Crete, in Agios Nicolaus, a little town on the coast that really only exists for the tourist trade, although it pre-dates tourism, of course. Restaurants, cheesy night-clubs, dangerous rental mopeds, that kind of thing.’

‘I’ve never been to Greece.’

‘No? Well I wouldn’t recommend this particular place. Marina and I met Michael and his friend Alan in a restaurant one evening. Our tables were next to each other and we got talking. They were both charming and clearly in need of company, they’d run out of things to say to each other. There was something fantastically adolescent about the whole thing – I remember that after we’d eaten and were getting ready to go off to a night-club together, Marina leaned over to me and said she’d take the tall one. That left me with Michael, which was fine. He suited me. We went dancing and drank far too much and after the club closed, had a moonlit walk beside the sea.’

Agnes sighed, closed her eyes and smiled.

‘Spent the rest of the fortnight together. We got on brilliantly. Well, Marina and Alan got on well enough, Marina said she was relieved to be getting it regularly. She hadn’t been out with anyone for ages. She’s like that, usually single with these very intense, often rather inappropriate, involvements from time to time. Nowadays her boyfriends are usually married.’

‘That’s not very reassuring,’ Agnes laughed.

‘Oh,’ I said, suddenly worried, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Back to the moonlight.’

‘Well, it was great. He lived in London and I lived in London and before the end of the fortnight we had a long talk and decided we would keep seeing each other when we got home, even though we both knew that not being on holiday – ordinary life – might alter our relationship. And so we did. He worked for an insurance company – he was an accountant, although he wouldn’t have called himself that. He owned a flat –’

‘What would he call himself?’

‘He’d say he was a manager – in financial management. Which he was. Accounting. He lived in Battersea and I lived in Islington, quite far apart, but we both had cars so that was fine. It was very nice. We slotted in together, as if we’d both had enough with being single and decided that this was it.

‘Did you love him?’ asked Agnes.

‘No.’

She frowned sympathetically.

‘But that didn’t seem to matter somehow. I liked him a lot, we had a good time, he treated me well. I don’t know. We were on course.’

‘What was the sex like?’

‘The sex. Ahh,’ I said, ‘a Marina-type question.’

‘Hmm,’ said Agnes, ‘that Marina.’

‘Yes. Fine, I suppose – fine. Good. Great sometimes. Fine.’ I wasn’t used to talking about sex. I know I’m supposed to be – that’s our generation, isn’t it? I talk – talked – about it endlessly with my clients. But I never got used to talking about myself that way. I try to bluff it, but I’m no good. ‘He was handsome. He had this amazing line of hair which ran from his navel down to – well, you know. That line of hair was a thing of beauty.’

Agnes smiled. ‘What happened?’

It was vivid to me still. I could remember his words precisely. ‘He asked me to marry him. “We’ll get married, shall we?” That’s what he said. Just like that. Those were his words. “We’ll get married, shall we?” We were lying in bed.’

‘Was it romantic?’

‘No. Not really. It felt parental somehow, like something my father might have said – “We’ll have lunch here, shall we?” when he would just as soon have lunch elsewhere.’

‘You know Elizabeth,’ Agnes said, ‘you’ve never really told me much about your parents.’

‘Haven’t I?’ I found this an odd comment, coming as it did in the middle of my story. ‘Well, what do you want to know?’ I didn’t quite know what to say. I’d got started on Michael and didn’t want to stop.

‘Did they like him?’

Relief. Back on track. ‘They loved him. He used to fix things around the house – my father was useless at that. It transpired that Michael could fix anything. I didn’t know about that side of him, nothing in London ever needed fixing, unlike the cottage where virtually everything was broken all the time.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said yes. No one had ever asked me to marry them before. Unlike Marina. People used to ask her to marry them all the time.’ I looked at Agnes. ‘I’ll bet you’ve had a few proposals.’

She smiled. ‘A few proposals in my time.’

‘You’ll have to tell me.’

She nodded. I knew she would never tell me. ‘So what happened?’

‘We planned to get married in the spring. We’d both be thirty – our birthdays were within a few days of each other.’ I suddenly began to feel reluctant about telling the rest of the story. Remembering it – what I’d done – was making me feel ill.

‘And . . .?’

‘And we made the arrangements, booked the registry office, booked a restaurant for a party – both sets of parents offered to help pay. We didn’t have engagement rings, we thought they were – I don’t know – silly.’ I knew I had to finish the story now. I had been enjoying telling it, but no longer. I drew a breath. ‘And I changed my mind.’

‘You changed your mind,’ Agnes said simply, nodding as though it was perfectly understandable behaviour. ‘That was that.’

‘Well, yes. Michael was away for a couple of nights on business and I called in sick, cancelled my private clients, stayed in my flat and had a long dark night of the soul.’

I paused. Recalling that time now – forty-eight hours, no more – made me ache inside. It was too hard – life was too hard for me. Michael . . . and here I was looking at Agnes. Who had married Robert. And I realized suddenly that I’d rather be here in Warboys, miserable as hell, than married to Michael.

‘What?’ said Agnes.

She wanted me to tell her what I was thinking. I rallied round, for the sake of the story if nothing else. ‘I stayed in bed mostly and foraged for sweet things in my cupboards, except there weren’t any. I took a number of hot baths. I stared out the window. I listened to
Gardeners’ Question Time.’

‘How did you tell him?’

‘Well, I . . .’ I could see his face. I hurt him terribly. ‘We had arranged to have dinner once he got back. We met in a restaurant near me, our favourite, the one we’d booked for our reception. We ordered a bottle of wine and, once he’d had a glass, I told him. I said, “I don’t want to marry you Michael.”’

I took a sip of the tea that Agnes had made me earlier. Robert was taking a long time to get back from the Black Hat. He must have stopped for a drink. Maybe they’d planned it. You pump her for information, Robert said, she’s never told me what happened. Nonsense, of course. Robert didn’t care about the time I almost got married. Not then. He didn’t care.

‘What did he say?’

‘He said, “What?” like people do when they don’t want to believe what they’ve heard. So I said it again, “I don’t want to marry you Michael.” I couldn’t come up with any excuses, I didn’t want to lie to him, so I told him the plain truth. And I think I needed to make him hate me. I wanted him to hate me. It would make me feel better if he hated me. I deserved it.’

‘You’re always looking for punishment,’ Agnes said.

I didn’t answer.

‘Did he hate you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. I never saw him again.’ I remembered how he looked that evening. As soon as what I was saying registered properly he stood up, took his coat down from where it was hanging and left the restaurant. ‘I never heard from him, nor spoke to him again. I thought he might ring me. I wasn’t about to ring him. But he didn’t.’

‘A clean break.’

‘It didn’t feel clean.’

Robert came into the sitting room with the bottle of wine and the glasses. I sat up straight, buttoned my cardigan, blew my nose. I hadn’t started to cry, but I was close, and I did not want him to see me. ‘It’s freezing,’ Robert said emphatically, before running up to the loo. While he was gone I turned once more to Agnes.

‘Pretty screwed up,’ I said, ‘for a therapist.’

She shook her head and poured the wine. ‘Just because we do something for others, doesn’t mean we can do it for ourselves.’ She shrugged. ‘Besides we have more than one chance for happiness.’

‘More than one?’ I asked. ‘How many?’

‘As many as we make.’

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘don’t tell Robert. I’ve never told him.’

‘I won’t,’ she said. A promise. Not that I had any idea how much a promise from Agnes was worth.

Robert came back into the room. He leant down to kiss Agnes and somehow I felt shocked by that, as though I’d forgotten that he belonged to her, not me. I let Michael go because of Robert. I hadn’t known it at the time, but I knew it now. I knew it all too well.

I hadn’t told Agnes the whole truth about Michael and me. I left out the bit about Robert. The previous weekend – before our big scene – I’d been home to Warboys for Robert’s birthday. I didn’t invite Michael; I wanted to go on my own and, besides, he was away. Robert had organized a party in the Black Hat. We got very drunk – everyone got very drunk – and I rescued him from a tussle with Geraldine Andley. I didn’t notice what was happening until Jim Drury spoke to me.