Weird Sister (4 page)

And then the door opened one more time, and it wasn’t Agnes, and I looked at the clock, it was 8:15, and I looked at the window – there was Agnes’s face, framed perfectly, hovering at an unnatural height, she must have been standing on her very tip-toes, pale skin, her green eyes staring, but not at me. I grabbed my coat and rushed out the door, but she wasn’t there, she wasn’t standing on her toes in front of the window, and I thought, damn, I am going crazy, when I heard her voice. She called my name. She was on the other side of the street, by the entrance to the grounds of the church. I went over to her and she gave me a kiss on my left cheek. And we walked again, through the village, around in circles, and all the things – banal and profound – I’d been waiting all my life to say came pushing and stuttering out of me.

What can I say about her? At the time, when it became public knowledge that we were going to be married, I was asked about her several times every day, strange, vague questions that you’d think people might ask of a movie star, not someone flesh and blood, not someone they had sat with at the pub, bumped into on the street. ‘What’s she like?’ they’d say. ‘What’s she really like, you know, in private?’ But the funny thing is that I’d have the same trouble answering that question now, after everything that has happened, as I did then. She was beautiful – but that doesn’t tell you anything. Tall – 5′10″ – slim, green eyes, black hair – her hair grew very quickly and it fell out a lot, at times it was as though she was moulting. When I’d complain – I did complain I’m afraid, I was forever having to unclog the drains – she’d reply serenely, her tone only very slightly harsher than normal, that it fell out at exactly the same rate as other people’s, except her hair was more noticeable because it was long and dark. She smelt fantastic – of perfume, light and floral and, beneath that, something riper, womanly. The profiteroles, one of the young women I’d been dating recently used to say about the way we smell when we are horny. I think she meant pheromones, the sex chemical we are said to release. Agnes smelt of profiteroles. She had the ability to make people feel good; you felt good if you’d been talking to Agnes. When you had Agnes’s attention you felt as though the world revolved around you, the universe existed so that you and Agnes could have this conversation. There was nothing better in life than talking with Agnes. ‘Yes,’ she would say as you spoke, nodding her head, remembering some small detail from a previous conversation, ‘what was that like? Tell me.’

Our courtship felt like it lasted a lifetime, but in fact it lasted exactly three weeks. We had a week of lunches and evenings together, long walks, time spent sitting by the fire at the Black Hat. Jim Drury was over the moon, he was so pleased that she was staying, and that she and I had, as he said, ‘made friends’. It pained me when Jim used those words to describe my relationship with Agnes and that’s when I realized that I had fallen in love with her. And as I have said, it happened when we first met, when I first saw her in front of the fire.

Lunchtime on the eighth day, I went to fetch Agnes for our walk. Jim Drury, rather sheepishly I thought, told me Agnes had asked if I’d go upstairs to her room, she was waiting for me there. I hadn’t been to her room before and I’d never had an occasion to go upstairs in the Black Hat. While the pub itself is decorated in classic posh pub style – ornamental shoe horns and rather valuable Toby jugs, logs stacked by the fire, plush and faded velvet curtains, thick, slightly worn upholstery, and lots of gleaming woodwork – from the staircase upward it becomes a different place altogether, a kind of chintz extravaganza, very fussy. Lolita and Jim live on the top floor and on the middle floor there are three extra bedrooms that they let out to bed and breakfast guests, although overnight visitors are pretty rare in Warboys. Agnes was staying in the largest and most heavily decorated room; there was even a ruffle around the sink. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said when I raised my eyebrows. ‘It serves my purpose. The bed is comfortable, Robert.’ She looked at the bed, and she looked at me.

I’ll say only this – a few minutes later Agnes and I got into that bed. We scarcely emerged from it for the next two weeks.

Elizabeth

Agnes’s appearance coincided with a very rough patch for me. I was no longer working in London. I’d given up my career as a therapist. It had been my vocation and without my work I didn’t know who I was any longer. I’d sold my flat with its stripped wooden floorboards and yellow walls and those green brocade curtains I bought in John Lewis and I’d come home to the cottage in which I’d grown up. My father had died, and our cottage was there with its sweet-smelling climbing roses and its foxgloves and wild sweet peas. It was as though I’d retired from life, from the world; on very bad days it felt as though I had died and Warboys was the grave I had dug for myself. On those dark days I could picture Agnes looking down at me in my coffin, ready to throw her spadeful of sod.

There was a lot to sort out in the aftermath of my father’s death and, as I’d been pre-occupied with work and had left it for some time, it had got rather complicated. I had to sort out his will and transfer his possessions – the cottage, the car, some investments – into my name. The mortgage on the property was completely paid off and I had thought that there was enough money for me to live, if I was careful. But I guess I miscalculated, or perhaps underestimated the cost of living on my own while unemployed. It was around the time Agnes arrived that I realized I’d have to get a job and that it wouldn’t be doing anything I wanted to be doing. I sank very low indeed. And Robert was nowhere to be seen. I tried to ring him, but he was never in, and my messages went unheeded.

Agnes meets the Throckmortons

Although they have seen each other every day and most nights for several weeks, Agnes has not been to the Throckmorton house yet, has not been introduced to the family. Robert feels as though Agnes is his secret, his passionate, dark, consuming secret, even though everyone in the Black Hat – everyone in the village – knows about the affair. Bringing her to the house involves revealing something, an unveiling. He will present her to the family, like a gift, and with this gift they will know more of him as well. He feels ready.

The Throckmorton house stands at the outskirts of the village, tucked behind a dense stand of gone-wild hedgerows and trees, not visible from the high street. A curved gravel drive leads to the front door. On the left is the original sixteenth-century house, grand for its time, small by later standards; in the middle a seventeenth-century, rather larger, addition; on the right a further enlargement, built in the eighteenth century. All these parts give the house a grafted look, like it has sprung up from the earth unnaturally; no attempt to disguise this disunity has ever been made. Inside, most of the rooms have changed their usage half a dozen times as the focus of the house has shifted from left to right to centre. The kitchen is a Victorian addition to the rear of the building. Bathrooms are an even more recent afterthought. The ground floor of the Elizabethan wing now lies empty, as does most of the first floor, empty and waiting for occupancy. It is this, the original house, that was built when the Throckmortons were at their most prominent and confident, their most wealthy; so it is this part of the house that is the grandest and also the most decayed.

The front garden has been overtaken by brambles and sprawling shrubbery, lavateria, forsythia and cistus choking out everything else; the wisteria that once climbed above the front door is dead, the thick vines slowly peeling away from the brickwork, taking the pointing with it. Once a year Robert rakes the gravel drive, pulling up the dandelions and bindweed that spring up despite the cars. The Throckmortons spend no time in this part of the garden; instead they look to the rear, to the field and, in the distance, the cottages. Graeme’s wife, Karen, tends the rose garden. There is a lawn framed by massive old yew hedges upon which Graeme practises a mad version of topiary. Standing on the top-most rung of the crooked ladder he shapes and curves the yew with his father’s petrol-powered chainsaw; the hedges look like vast dark clouds rolling up the lawn, a dense fogbank between the Throckmortons and the rest of the world. The yew hedges themselves are hollow; they form a long, dark tunnel, tall enough to stand in, where spiders and field mice dwell, hedgehogs and foxes as well, and generations of Throckmorton children have dared each other to hide.

Saturday morning. They’ve dressed up, Agnes and Robert, they are both wearing suits, Agnes in a narrow skirt. As Robert walks beside her up the drive he can smell her perfume and he worries he has put on too much aftershave. He feels slightly dazed from the almost constant sex they’ve been having, and at the prospect of introducing Agnes to his family. They enter the house through the infrequently used front door; most of the household traffic comes in and out of the back, through the kitchen. In the entrance hall – too big, given the size of the house, as though they’d worn themselves out building a sumptuous foyer then had no stamina for the rest – they stand below a high empty space where a chandelier once hung, Robert’s arm through Agnes’s, him squeezing. He feels compelled to giggle and so, as with most things he is feeling these days, Agnes giggles first. She giggles quietly and, for a moment, he wonders what she is seeing, what the house looks like to her. Does it seem too awful, he wonders, will an American be overwhelmed by its layered decrepitude, its battered grandeur? Or will she think it a Hammer Horror house, a haunted house from an old movie? Laughter bursts out of him, echoing up and down the stairway.

‘This is where,’ he says, pausing for breath, ‘I grew up.’

Agnes steps away. With her hands behind her back she walks around the foyer, inspecting the oak panelling, the worn stone-flagged floor with its dips and cracks, the carved and wormy broad wooden staircase, looking up to the elaborate ceiling mouldings, all of it dusty, worn by centuries of people not taking too much notice. The Throckmortons have not employed domestic staff since before the Second World War; one uniting characteristic of the house is that it is filthy. A kind of cosy domestic filth that the people who’ve created it, who live in it, don’t see, the kind of filth that holds things together. The Throckmortons don’t notice the dirt, but Agnes does, and Robert notices that.

‘It needs some work,’ he says, embarrassed yet again.

‘It’s fabulous,’ Agnes says as she perambulates. ‘So old. So . . . family.’ Her heels click against the stone, are silenced as she steps onto a thin rug, click as she walks on stone again. She stops in front of the painting hanging above the broad mantel of the fireplace.

‘They’re gone,’ he says, ‘all the other paintings. That’s the only one left. They were sold ages ago. You can tell there were others because of the marks.’ He points to a collection of discoloured rectangles on the walls.

Agnes doesn’t reply. Robert has informed her about the financial situation, that there isn’t any money apart from what he generates on the estate. She has made it clear she doesn’t care about that, she doesn’t need to be interested in money. ‘Who’s this?’ she asks of the solitary portrait.

‘Somebody or other Throckmorton. I don’t know. No one knows.’

‘It looks an awful lot like you.’

Robert steps forward. ‘Do you think?’ He peers at the painting and realizes he’s never really looked at it before. ‘I suppose it does, in a way.’ He steps back. The eyes of the man in the portrait follow him. ‘Humph,’ he snorts, ‘creepy.’

‘If you’re a family with a history . . .’

‘Everyone’s got a family history. If there’s no money left, what’s the point?’ He laughs again. ‘That’s my theory, at any rate. My grandfather used to tell people we’d lost all our money in the war. He meant the civil war – the English civil war. He used to say to my father, “We’re working class now. We have to work like everyone else.” Working class.’ Robert shakes his head. He expects Agnes to say something, but she does not. ‘Anyway, if there’s no money, there’s no point in hanging on to the past. And there’s no one around who disagrees with me. Except my old friend Elizabeth, she says there might be stories, stories that are worth knowing, worth heeding.’

‘She might be right. Maybe you’ve got some terrible and hidden secret, something so awful it can’t be faced, that previous generations have counted on time to bury.’

Robert looks at Agnes; he can’t tell if she is teasing. ‘Well,’ he sighs, ‘that would be exciting. But we’re not like that. Some old families you hear about – they’re obsessed with their own history. They know every brick in the house, every relation who ever lived. It’s as though once the money’s gone that’s all there is left. We’re not like that. We might have been grand once but now we’re ordinary. We’ve been ordinary for generations. It’s gone. Lost.’ He wonders if this disappoints her. ‘You’ve come along about four hundred years too late.’

Agnes looks at him levelly. ‘Never too late,’ she replies.

Agnes puts her arms around Robert. He realizes then that Agnes doesn’t get it, that she doesn’t really understand what he’s saying. That the Throckmortons have come down in the world, very far down in the world, that they’ve lost all sense of who they once were, who they are today. We’re not impoverished upper class, he thinks, we’re not shabby genteel. We’re like any other Warboys family.

They stand in front of the unnamed portrait, looking up.

Robert speaks first. ‘I should think the only reason Daddy didn’t sell that painting is because it’s worthless.’

Agnes is silent, gazing at the picture with an intensity that Robert still finds disconcerting.

‘Come on,’ he says, ‘come and let’s meet them.’

Without knowing why, or what for, they have gathered in the kitchen. Graeme is standing in front of the open fridge drinking orange juice out of the carton. His wife Karen is at the sink, washing dishes. She is a small dark-haired woman wearing a wellironed cotton shirt tucked into belted jeans. Trim. Their two children, Andrew and Francis, are playing with toy trucks by the back door. They are scrub-faced and clean like their mother and they wear their dark hair slightly long for little boys; Karen won’t let Graeme take them to have their hair cut short. Jenny, the family blonde – where did she get that hair? Robert sometimes thinks, as if it’s something she picked up in Peterborough – is standing beside the telephone as if she hopes it might ring, twisting her hair with her fingers. Martin, their father, is in his wheelchair in the corner, a baseball cap on his head, a blanket over his knees. The sun, making a brief appearance, is shining through the back window that overlooks the garden. They are waiting.