Weird Sister (20 page)

As well as the physical ache in his leg, Graeme finds not working painful, more so than he could have guessed. He doesn’t tell Agnes this. He hates spending so much time around the house and yet it doesn’t occur to him to do anything else. Now he has Agnes to occupy him.

Karen gets uppity

Karen and Graeme are in bed. Down the hall Francis starts to scream. Karen throws on her dressing gown and rushes to him. He is dreaming. When she asks what is wrong he sits up and says ‘Jenn’ – his name for his aunt Jenny, ‘– bad. No.’ He shakes his head vehemently. He points at the window. Karen takes him onto her lap and quietens him. She sings ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star.’ He says, ‘Again.’ So she sings it over and over. After a while, he sleeps.

Karen returns to bed. She slides under the cover and lies there in silence, unable to get back to sleep. She can tell that Graeme is awake as well.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asks after a while, ever hopeful.

‘Nothing,’ he replies. ‘Sleep. Why can’t I?’

‘Me too,’ she says. She hesitates, and then she says it, the thing that has been bothering her. ‘Don’t you think there is something a little odd about Agnes?’

Graeme controls his reaction carefully. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. I just find her a little – strange.’

Graeme doesn’t reply.

‘I know she makes Robert happy and she’s been living with us for all this time now but . . . I find her cold. And there’s something odd about her eyes.’

‘Her eyes? That’s ridiculous.’

Karen knows it’s ridiculous. She wishes she hadn’t said it. But, still, she pursues her point. ‘I think she hates me. I think she hates all of us.’

‘That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.’

‘She makes me uncomfortable. In my own home.’

Graeme’s heard enough. He turns over. They both continue to lie awake, and they both continue to think about Agnes. In different ways. For different reasons.

Jenny misses Graeme

In his bluff, baleful way, Graeme is a good friend to his sister Jenny. He’s always taken her as she is, he’s never placed expectations on her that she feels she can’t meet, they’ve always had an easy, unspoken allegiance to one another, ever since Jenny was a small child. Robert asks things of Jenny, he wants her to do better at school, he wants her to be better behaved, he wants her to go out in the world and accomplish things – he wants her to do things that he himself isn’t capable of doing. In a way, Jenny is thankful that Agnes has appeared because now less of Robert’s attention swings her way. Less and less, in fact, until some days Jenny feels that Robert no longer sees her at all, so intense is his focus on Agnes. She is grateful and jealous at the same time.

But Graeme, the drift in Graeme’s attentiveness is unexplained. Why does he no longer sit with Jenny of an afternoon? Why doesn’t he walk her home from school? Why does he no longer come into her room after he’s been down to the Black Hat, to lie on her bed and talk about things? They used to gossip, Graeme and Jenny, about the good and upstanding citizenry of Warboys, and Jenny enjoyed her brother’s bitterness, his sharp tongue; she understood from an early age that he saw things differently from other people. She was his audience and she was appreciated. She was prepared to listen to what he had to say, and she was allowed to not take him seriously.

‘Shall we go into Peterborough tomorrow?’ Jenny asks him one Friday evening.

‘What for?’ asks Graeme. He is wolfing down his dinner, sitting at the table hunched and shifty.

‘I need to do some shopping.’ As if she does that kind of thing, as if she and Graeme do that kind of thing together.

Graeme looks at Jenny, as though he is tempted. ‘What for?’

‘Oh, things. I need some trousers.’

Agnes stands up and begins to remove the plates. Graeme looks across the table at her and Jenny can tell his mind is suddenly elsewhere, not on this conversation.

‘Graeme?’ demands Jenny.

‘Oh,’ he says, returning to her, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’ she asks, angry and hurt, showing her age.

‘Don’t pout,’ he frowns. ‘It’s unattractive.’

Jenny gets up abruptly. She walks over to the sink and starts to help Karen clear up. Robert glances at his father, sees his baseball hat has slipped down over his eyes, goes over and straightens it. ‘All right Dad?’ he says. Graeme continues to watch Agnes move around the kitchen.

Agnes puts her arm around Jenny. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m all right.’ Jenny fights her urge to lean into Agnes, to let Agnes’s arms envelop her completely, to rest against her shoulder and sigh.

‘You haven’t felt faint again?’

Jenny shakes her head.

‘I still think you should have gone to the doctor.’

‘That’s not how we do things in this country,’ Karen interjects, irritated suddenly. ‘We don’t go to the doctor for every little thing.’

‘You don’t?’

Karen is embarrassed now, she feels she’s been rude. She shakes her head. ‘It’s not that kind of culture.’ She doesn’t know anything about Americans and their doctors, she doesn’t know why she is saying these things, it’s not even true.

‘Well, when I was in the doctor’s office the other day –’ and everyone looks up at this, why would Agnes have been visiting the doctor’s surgery? – ‘they had a whole lot of posters on the walls of the waiting room telling people that they should only visit the doctor if they really feel they must. As if you are a nation of hypochondriac time wasters.’

‘That’s just the NHS trying to save money.’

‘Oh,’ says Agnes, raising her eyebrows to show she’s not convinced, ‘okay.’

‘Why were you at the doctor’s?’ asks Jenny. Everyone is relieved, glad someone else did the asking.

‘Just a check-up,’ Agnes says dismissively, surveying the room. Robert looks anxious, is my beloved unwell? Graeme’s face has darkened; he can’t bear the idea of the doctor touching Agnes, the doctor giving Agnes a physical examination. He feels ill himself at the thought. ‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘how are you feeling?’

‘I’m fine,’ says Jenny. ‘I don’t know what happened. The school nurse said it might have been because I was having a heavy period.’ The two men blanch slightly and look away. Robert stands and bangs his knee on the table. Agnes laughs out loud and Jenny feels pleased with herself. ‘She said I should take it easy.’

‘Why don’t we do something together tomorrow? Just you and me,’ says Agnes. Everyone in the room looks at Agnes expectantly.

‘Why don’t we go to Peterborough.’

Now Graeme looks openly miserable. He doesn’t say a thing. Karen feels very tired, she can’t remember the last time she got away from the house on her own. Ordinarily this doesn’t bother her, she loves being with her boys, small and big. She works hard and, in the evenings, she contemplates the assault on the domestic world she will carry out the next day. But now she feels that there is nothing she would rather do than wander the streets of Peterborough. Buy a dress. Some shoes. Get her hair cut. What bliss. What freedom.

Robert folds his newspaper, clears his throat. He speaks manfully. ‘Sounds like a great idea. I’m sure you both could do with an outing. Go ahead, don’t worry about me.’

Agnes gives him a cool look. ‘I wasn’t planning on it,’ she replies.

He smirks and shrugs boyishly. Graeme leaves the room, not concealing his disgust. Karen returns to the washing-up.

Robert

The builders quit. They walked off the job. I had given a lot of work to that firm over the years – they did all the work on the cottages and most of the other jobs that have come up around the place – and as soon as problems arise, they’re off. They were in the habit of packing up their tools at the end of the week – I think most of them worked elsewhere on weekends – and come Monday they simply didn’t arrive. We were used to them coming and going and so it was lunchtime before we noticed that no one had turned up. I’d become so accustomed to the noise that I no longer noticed whether there was any or not.

I was making Andrew and Francis and myself sandwiches. Karen brought the boys in – she’d been to pick up Andrew from nursery – and she said, ‘Are none of the big men here?’ We’d adopted Andrew’s habit of calling the builders ‘the big men’. I put down the jar of mayonnaise I was holding and went through the house to the foot of the stairs. Up top there was silence, no dust, no hammering. I checked in our bedroom to see if Agnes was there, but she was not. I stood at the door of what was to be our bathroom. All the floorboards had been taken up and several of the joists were missing. Much of the plaster had been chipped off the walls, exposing the fretwork of wattle and daub. All of the plumbing had been removed, apart from the old bathtub which balanced precariously on remnants of the floor. They’d taken away the old radiator and sealed off the pipes. The window had been taken out and not replaced – at night across the hall Agnes and I barricaded our room with draught excluders on the floor and a heavy curtain over the door, burying ourselves under two duvets – and wiring dangled loose from what had been the overhead light and its switch. There was a weird pattern of mould covering what was left of the ceiling.

I walked across the hall to the two smaller rooms that were being converted to a sitting room. Patches of the flooring had been removed here as well. The wall between the two rooms had been brought down and much of the resulting rubble taken away. The plaster on the remaining walls was intact; this room had had most of its ceiling removed and several beams afflicted with wet rot excised. The room was open to the crawl-space overhead and the draught that moved through from above was heavy with an attic smell of old birds’ nests. There was a small hole in the roof and, on the floor directly below, a bucket half-full of stagnant rain water. It looked like a photograph of a London house during the Blitz.

There were no tools left behind, not even the ladder. Usually a battered old radio sat on the window-ledge in the sitting room; that was gone as well. I could tell they weren’t coming back.

I went to my office – where was Agnes? – and tried to track down the contractor. I soon gave up on that and phoned Derek Hill instead. His daughter, Lucy, whom I had attempted to chat up in the Marquis of Granby the night I met Agnes, answered.

‘It’s Robert, Lucy, Robert Throckmorton.’

She didn’t reply.

‘Is your father around?’

‘Why do you want to speak to him?’ Suspicious.

‘I’ve got some work he might be interested in.’

‘Oh. Well he’s not here. You can get him on his mobile.’ She gave me the number.

‘Thanks. What are you up to –’ She put the phone down. I felt incredibly relieved that I was married.

I went into the kitchen and Agnes was there, helping Karen give the boys lunch. I ate the sandwich I had made earlier. The kitchen was full of Andrew and Francis’s conversation – they liked to shout and interrupt each other – and no one mentioned the builders. I asked Agnes to bring me up to date on what was happening about the ceiling of the ballroom.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘thanks for reminding me. I’ll get on to it.’ I was a little surprised that she hadn’t done anything, but at least if she hadn’t engaged anyone, no one could quit.

Derek came round after lunch; his crew was building a house elsewhere in the village. I took him upstairs. ‘Christ almighty,’ he said as he looked around. He went back and forth between the rooms several times. ‘Jesus Christ.’ He turned to me with a pity-filled and mocking smile on his face. Derek Hill had never like me and he liked me even less since that episode with Lucy. ‘It’ll cost you,’ he said.

‘Just give me a quote. I need someone reliable.’ He agreed to get back to me within the week. I didn’t want to think about the money.

As I said, Agnes and I had to make a lot of effort to ensure that we didn’t freeze to death at night. Despite the cold, and the dust, we enjoyed the privacy of being on our own in this part of the house, away from everyone else – we could make as much noise as we wanted during sex. But it was an epic journey to and from the nearest bathroom. Sometimes Agnes got up to go to the loo in the middle of the night; I’d fall asleep and wake up, fall asleep and wake up, and it would feel as though hours had passed before she returned.

That night we went to bed early. I felt depressed about the house. I told Agnes the builders had walked off and, to my relief, she didn’t ask why. She said she was going to cheer me up. She climbed under the duvet and went to work on my body. Soon I could think of nothing but her mouth. She left me feeling drowsy, longing to hold her, saying she wouldn’t be gone more than a minute.

It was while she was away that night that I first heard the noises. The noises that the house started to make.

Agnes sits with Martin

Agnes sits with Martin, by the oven in the kitchen, by the fire in the sitting room. She sits with him for hours at a time. She takes his hand from where it rests on the blanket across his knees and holds it in her own lap. She leans close to him, her lips to his ear, and she whispers. None of the others can hear a word of what she says. Karen moves in and out of the room and watches, sometimes she stands right next to them as she works at the sink. But she can’t hear a word of what Agnes says, no matter how she concentrates. Agnes has not taken on any of Martin’s care, that labour remains Karen’s responsibility, but this talking goes on and on, and Karen tries to convince herself it is a good thing. She watches Martin’s face as she sits at the table helping Andrew learn to read. He is blank and placid, as always, although occasionally Karen thinks she sees something else pass across her father-in-law’s face. He grimaces. He blinks heavily. Is he distressed? Or is he happy to be whispered to in this way?

It is mid-afternoon, dark outside, Karen deposits the boys in the sitting room. Graeme is in there, she leaves them to play. Karen carries the shopping into the kitchen. She glances at Agnes and Martin in the corner, puts down the bags, and notices an odd, familiar smell. She looks around the kitchen, toward the window which someone has propped wide open. She realizes that Martin has got a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth.