Weird Sister (36 page)

I inherited the two little boys, if inheriting is the right word for it. Their welfare became my responsibility, mine alone. Graeme was dead, and so was Karen. Graeme and Karen and I had never discussed their guardianship, but it didn’t require discussion. And in some ways the boys were lucky. Their parents were dead, there is no underestimating that loss, but they didn’t have to leave their home. They were quite aware of what had happened. But they were used to me, and I to them, and we were better off because of that. I can’t bear to think about what happens to other children in this situation; both parents dead and sent to live with strangers. New rules, new food, new house, new everything. I did what I could to make things easier for them and I had Elizabeth there to help me. Elizabeth was there beside me, right away. She held me in her arms while the cottage burned to the ground.

The boys don’t call me Daddy. Despite the biological facts. Nor Elizabeth Mummy. They call me Robert, ever since they learned to speak they’ve called me Robert, not Uncle Robert. They call Elizabeth Lizzie. But they come to us as though we are their parents. They come to us in the night – I’m in what was Graeme and Karen’s room, with Elizabeth. They get out of their beds, one at a time, and they trot down the hall to where we are sleeping. They stand at the foot of the bed and call our names until we wake up and invite them in. Most nights our bed is full of little boys by three or four a.m. They put their cold feet on our backs and snuggle down. Once in a while Francis wets the bed, either his own little bed or our bigger one. We don’t make a fuss, we simply strip the sheets, change his clothes, stroke his head. A little bit of bed-wetting is a small price to pay after the trauma of what took place. The boys are very good, so good, quiet – too quiet. We can’t begin to know how to help them get over what happened, so we let life continue. And life does continue.

There’s so much talk about ‘the family’ these days. The disintegration of the extended family, the importance of the family unit. But families aren’t so terrific. In fact most of the really sick stuff you hear about these days takes place within the family. I had a big family once, now I have a small, make-shift family. Roles shift and change. We make do, we get by. We take care of each other, we take care of my father. Agnes used to say it was one of the things she loved about me, how when she married me, she married my family. I loved her for that as much as anything.

Elizabeth and I got married in a private ceremony in Geoff and Marlene Henderson’s garden. Geoff and Marlene were our only guests, our witnesses. The vicar performed the ceremony, he kept it brief. I wasn’t that keen to be married by him again, I thought it would bring forth too many associations with my wedding to Agnes. But Elizabeth pointed out that with anyone else we might have to do something about my first marriage, I might be asked to produce divorce papers or a death certificate or something like that. The vicar was in Warboys throughout, he saw what happened. People in the village went to him with their worries and, later, their fears about Agnes. He agreed to marry Elizabeth and me; I think he saw it as a way of putting the whole episode firmly in the past.

And it is in the past. But the past lives on inside me.

Elizabeth says that the arrival of Agnes coincided with everything going wrong – not coincided, Elizabeth says that it was
because
of Agnes that everything went wrong. But I’m not so sure. Graeme and Karen had been having problems for years, and Jenny, well, when she was born our mother died and that was a long time before Agnes arrived. So you see, I say to Elizabeth, the Throckmortons were already in difficulty.

‘Well,’ says Elizabeth, ‘you only made her task easier. You helped her on her way.’

In the evenings Elizabeth and I watch telly. It fills the silences. It makes our evenings totally unlike the evenings I used to have at home with the red, orange and gold of the open fire, Agnes, and the whisky. Our evenings are cool blue and flickering, we like them that way. Occasionally one of us laughs at something that’s been said and we turn and smile at each other. Elizabeth has a very sweet face and the sweetest thing of all is how familiar it is to me.

I know everything there is to know about Elizabeth. Our pasts are shared in many ways. There are no surprises, no gaps in our knowledge. I guess we resemble Graeme and Karen in that way. Reassuring for the boys, I suppose, a kind of continuity. And reassuring for me.

At night sometimes I creep into the old wing of the house. I sit on the floor outside what was once our bedroom. I think about what happened. I think about Agnes. I listen out for the voices.

Part of me left with Agnes. The better part perhaps, I don’t know. Elizabeth is happy, and that’s a good thing. Our lives are dull. We are predictable. To see us now you’d never guess at what happened.

I’ve been to the library to look at the book. I haven’t told Elizabeth. I was shocked by it, by the story it told. I think there is no escape from that story. 1593; the Samuels were hanged, my family was responsible. It’s enough to turn anyone toward evil.

At night sometimes I hear the voices. Three voices moaning, singing through the house, through the eaves. I greet them silently. I’m happy to hear them. They’re all that is left of Agnes for me.

Agnes. My best. My beloved. My girl.

And Agnes?

She isn’t gone, is she? No body was found and – no matter how fierce the flames – they should have found some kind of remains. She slipped away through the trees. Did she? Robert wonders. Elizabeth wonders as well, although she won’t admit it; it is, after all, her greatest fear. The villagers wonder: did she fight through the smoke and fling open the bathroom window and climb out? Did she gather her cashmere shawl around her shoulders and walk away from Warboys? Is she somewhere now, marshalling her strength, sharpening her charm on yet more eager strangers? And she will return, won’t she? It might be ten years before that black taxi makes its way down the high street, it might be one hundred years. We might have to wait another four centuries before we see Agnes Samuel again. But she will return. She will come back to Warboys.

Robert wonders.

Robert hopes.

PRAISE

Where Does Kissing End?

‘a very sexy depiction of amour fou’
Leslie Dick

‘It’s not a happy story… but it is an interesting one’
Times-Colonist

‘Pullinger writes economically but with enormous power and impact’
Jersey Evening Post

Weird Sister

‘A perfect, gruesome, little tale’
Independent on Sunday

‘Daphne de Maurier retold by Margaret Atwood’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Pullinger has created a thrilling combination of Rebecca and Mrs Danvers’
Independent

‘Pullinger’s exercise in gothic fantasy is as seductively clever as its heroine’
Sunday Times

‘The real possibility that, this time, good will not overcome evil keeps you reading’
Daily Telegraph

‘This is a bewitching yarn, perfect reading for a dark winter’s night with the wind howling at the door’
Daily Mail

The Last Time I Saw Jane

‘Sensually exquisite’
The Times

‘This novel hits the ground running and proceeds at a cracking pace throughout.’
Daily Telegraph

‘A thought-provoking and entertaining addition to the genre of exile’
Observer

‘Pullinger is a fluid and gifted writer’
Sunday Times

A Little Stranger

‘Gripping, sharp and brilliantly kind. She knows the gamble that life is and she never once flinches. Her books are always revelations. What a good read’
Ali Smith

‘The dark side of motherhood explored in a tale of terror and rage’
Independent

‘Pullinger treats with thoughtful sympathy that profound taboo, the breaking of the mother-baby bond’
Guardian

‘A Little Stranger is that extraordinary thing: a mix of literary excellence and finesse combined with a very ordinary and accessible look at life’
Sunday Express

Copyright

Copyright © Kate Pullinger 1999

All rights reserved. 

Published by Kate Pullinger Books, 2014

e-ISBN: 
9780-992851958

First published by Orion Books Ltd, London, 1999

www.katepullinger.com/books

About the Author

Kate Pullinger
 is an award-winning writer of novels, short stories and digital works. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University.

Born in Cranbrook, British Columbia, Kate dropped out of McGill University after a year and a half of not studying philosophy and literature. She then spent a year working in a copper mine in the Yukon where she crushed rocks and saved money. She spent that money travelling and ended up in London, England, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Kate’s most recent novel is Landing Gear, 2014. Other books include The Mistress of Nothing, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, A Little Stranger and The Last Time I Saw Jane, as well as the ghost tale, Weird Sister, and the erotic feminist vampire novel Where Does Kissing End? 

Kate’s digital works include Inanimate Alice, an episodic online multimedia novel and Flight Paths: A Networked Novel and, most recently, Letter to an Unknown Soldier, a national writing event commissioned by 14-18 NOW to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.

You can find out more about Kate and her work at
www.katepullinger.com

Other Works by Kate Pullinger

Novels

With Jane Campion

The Piano

Short Stories

Digital Stories