Weird Sister (8 page)

Agnes can’t find anything for herself. She doesn’t try on much, she seems more concerned with getting Jenny set up. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says once they have finished, ‘I’ve got plenty of clothes with me in Warboys. I’ll find something. You’ll see.’

Out on the street it is dark now and raining steadily and all the taxis are taken. They go into the underground. As they are climbing down the last set of stairs to the platform a train rushes in to the station and at the same time they hear a terrible sound, an enormous crippling thud, and people already on the platform begin to shriek and scream. Jenny freezes on the stairs; she is not an experienced underground traveller, but she knows what that sound means, it doesn’t take imagination. Agnes keeps going forward, down the stairs. ‘Agnes,’ Jenny calls out, ‘wait.’

Agnes turns around, smiling. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Didn’t you hear that?’ she says. ‘Didn’t you hear that screaming?’

‘We’re travelling in the other direction. We should just go down, and get on the train.’ Agnes walks back up the stairs and takes Jenny by the hand. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘we’ll get the next one.’

They walk to the bottom of the stairs and stand for a moment gazing through to the afflicted train. It has stopped halfway along the platform. Several women are weeping, leaning against the curving wall of the station. Two men are sitting on the ground, their heads bowed. Someone has vomited. London Transport personnel begin to appear, shouting in to their radios. Afterwards Jenny remembers the crackling of their stiff plastic fluorescent jackets as they rush up and down the platform. They look as lost and confused as the passengers. ‘He’s there,’ says a man in a suit, pointing his shaking hand, ‘he’s down there, under this carriage.’

‘Is he alive?’ asks the staff member.

‘No,’ says the man, ‘no way.’

The driver stumbles out of his cab.

‘Come on,’ says Agnes. ‘Let’s get out of the way.’ She puts her arm around Jenny.

‘Someone jumped, didn’t they?’ she asks. ‘Someone jumped in front of the train.’

‘Looks like it.’

Jenny feels ill. ‘God,’ she says, ‘how awful. You must really want to die to do that.’

‘Unless he was pushed,’ Agnes says calmly.

Jenny looks at her, looks back through the arch to the other platform. ‘Do you think he can have been pushed?’

‘You never know. You never know these days. Never take things at face value, Jenny.’ Their train is now approaching. ‘I hope he was pushed.’

‘Why?’ asks Jenny, astonished.

‘Because if he jumped, he’ll never rest. He’ll never have any peace.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘His soul,’ Agnes says, and Jenny hears her despite the noise of the train. ‘It will be in torment, forever.’

They get on to the train. It is packed and their shopping bags are awkward; everyone is damp and steaming. The doors close and as they pull away from the scene Jenny asks, ‘Are you religious?’

‘No,’ replies Agnes, ‘quite the contrary.’

Karen panics

Karen doesn’t know what to wear to the wedding. She doesn’t have any nice clothes anymore, all she has are mummy clothes, jeans, shirts, stretched old cardigans that she’s worn every day for years. There isn’t room in her budget, in the money she gets from Graeme, the money they receive from Social Services. When Graeme was working she used to ask him for extra money from time to time, and he’d always looked shocked, and he’d always handed it over, although usually slightly less than what she’d requested. But now she doesn’t ask for money for herself and, quite frankly, she can’t be bothered. She has ceased to worry about the way she looks. She has other priorities.

Except for now. When Jenny arrives home from her day out with Agnes Karen asks to see what they bought. She is amazed by the quantity of glamour in those shopping bags. ‘You’ll look fantastic,’ she says to Jenny and as the girl blushes, Karen can feel her excitement and pleasure. And that leads her down a narrow bumpy track to the conclusion that she herself will look ugly, she’ll look frumpy, she’ll look terrible. She’ll look short and pear-shaped. Her parents are driving down from Leicester for the day, everyone she knows is coming to the party, and she has nothing to wear.

From time to time, in the past, her brother-in-law Robert has given Karen money. Usually before the boys’ birthdays – ‘Buy him something from me’ – handing her too much cash to spend on a small boy. Between them it is understood that Karen will buy something for herself as well. But she’s never actually asked Robert for money, and she’s not about to start, especially not now that he’s getting married.

That evening, after the children are in bed, Karen goes up to her bedroom. She looks in her closet, hoping to find something she’s forgotten, some miraculous item of clothing that has escaped the moths and risen above fashion, but she knows that’s wishful thinking. She remembers a box of clothes she brought with her when she and Graeme married; perhaps there might be something in there? This is a dim hope, most unlikely, but she clings to it anyway.

She makes her way through the house, down the stairs, through the sitting room, into the entrance foyer, and up again, into the old part of the house. Robert is there, clearing boxes out of the room that he will share with Agnes. The air smells musty, disturbed. Karen hugs herself. She never likes coming up here, she doesn’t know why.

‘What’s in there?’ she asks, pointing hopefully at a box.

‘I haven’t got a clue,’ says Robert. ‘Clothes I think. It’s quite light. I’m shoving it all into the attic. I haven’t got time to go through everything.’

‘I’ll take it,’ says Karen, ‘I think it’s mine.’

‘Help yourself,’ Robert says.

Karen lugs the box back through the house and into her bedroom. She finds her sewing scissors and cuts through the packing tape. When she opens it, she recognizes the contents immediately; she is glad she didn’t open it in front of Robert, glad that Graeme isn’t watching. The box is full of their mother’s clothes. Dresses, Mrs Throckmorton was good at wearing dresses; she had an amazing collection of clothes from the 1950s. Seeing them here, neatly folded, tissue paper tucked around them – who did this, Karen wonders, who put these things away so neatly? – brings Sylvia Throckmorton – Mrs T – back to Karen. She died a few months before Graeme and Karen were married. Karen had liked her, admired her, though she wasn’t confident Mrs T liked her. She pulls one of the dresses out of the box and holds it up to the light; heavy cotton, wide skirt, cinched-in waist, tailored bustline. Slightly tatty. Beneath it, half a dozen others like it. Karen can’t wear one of these dresses, they’re too memorable, too Mrs T, half the people at the wedding would recognize it. She digs down deeper into the box and produces a short navy jacket, boxy with shoulderpads, and matching skirt. Not Karen’s kind of thing, really. Not Mrs T’s either. But Karen can sew and she can see that if she takes out the shoulderpads and adjusts the skirt – she’s not as tall as Mrs T was, not as angular – she might be able to make it work.

Mrs T was unwell throughout that pregnancy, carrying Jenny. She was grey when she was usually pink. Karen remembers feeling uneasy at the time but when she asked, Graeme didn’t seem to think anything was amiss. At first she thought he was embarrassed by his hugely pregnant mother, but he wasn’t, not in the slightest. He loved his mother and he loved the idea of having a new baby in the family. And Graeme did love Jenny when she was born, despite what happened. They were good at that, Karen recalled, separating the trauma of that loss from the way they felt about Jenny.

Karen shuts the lid of the box, fetches the tape and seals it once again. Carries the box to the bottom of the ladder to the attic. She can hear Robert rummaging around overhead. She leaves the box with the others for him to store away, and sets to work on the suit having resolved not to tell anybody where she got it. Chances are no one, not even Graeme, will ask.

That night, Karen hears Mrs T screaming. The sound is coming through the walls from the other side of the house, as though Jenny is being born and Mrs T is dying once again. Karen was not present the night Graeme’s mother died; she and Graeme have never discussed it. Not when it happened, not since. But Karen knows it is Mrs T she is hearing and she knows why she is screaming.

When she sits up in bed, the noise stops. Graeme is beside her, on his back, snoring lightly. She rubs her eyes and gets out of bed. The air is cold, the floor is freezing, but she needs to get to the loo. If she walks down the corridor perhaps she’ll shake off that dream. She stops at the window and, without thinking, opens the curtain and looks out at the night.

Across the rose garden stands a Scotch pine, the only one for miles. Karen looks at it and drops the curtain and steps away from the window abruptly. What has she seen? Three bodies, dangling from the tree. Party tricks, she finds herself thinking, Jesus and the thieves. Hanged, not crucified. She is no longer cold but instead is sweating heavily. Three bodies on a gallows.

Then she hears laughter.

She forces herself to open the curtains again. The bodies are gone, but Robert and Agnes are there – what are they doing outside so late? Robert has his arm around his fiancée; they are strolling down the lawn as if it’s a summer’s day, heading away from the house. Agnes turns her head and looks up, as though she knows Karen is watching. She smiles at her in the grey moonlight. Karen drops the curtain and suppresses an urge to cry out. She suppresses the entire incident in fact, like she blocks out all unpleasant things, something at which she has become adept over the years, a skill that serves her well. Karen walks down the corridor toward the loo and with each step forces away what she has seen and heard. And the next day she will believe nothing odd has happened, nothing amiss. Almost.

Not quite.

Agnes gets married

Agnes is standing in the door of the village church, her arm lightly linked through Jim Drury’s. She has spent her last night at the Black Hat, and she has asked the landlord to give her away. They are waiting for the wedding music to begin.

For the first time ever Jim has closed the Black Hat for the day. He is very nervous, about the wedding, and about closing the pub. He tells himself over and over that Robert has invited most of his regulars to the wedding and as he surveys the gathered folk he ticks off a mental list. They’re all here, he tells himself, and those who aren’t, well, they’ll just have to go to the Marquis of Granby for a change. He looks at Agnes, who smiles and squeezes his arm for reassurance. With a surge of confidence he thinks that an evening in the Marquis will make the punters appreciate the Black Hat all the more. And, besides, he and Lolita are doing the catering for the wedding and they stand to make a few bob from that. When Agnes had asked if he would close the pub and come to the wedding Jim agreed without hesitating, without pausing to ask himself – or Lolita – why he would close the pub for Agnes when he had never closed it before. And of course Lolita doesn’t mind, Lolita is thrilled – she loves a good wedding.

Jenny is in front of Agnes and Jim clutching a bouquet of lilac and white flowers; she is the bridesmaid and will precede Agnes and Jim down the aisle. She is wearing the pale green dress and coat purchased earlier in the week and although she has spent hours practising walking in her new shoes, they are not comfortable. She feels unaccountably cold. Everyone feels a sudden chill, as though the temperature in the old church dropped several degrees when the wedding party arrived.

Everyone is on their feet, except Martin whose wheelchair is tucked in at the end of the front row. Next to him stand Karen, awkward in the navy suit – she has spent hours unpicking and restitching and now the too-big suit looks crooked, handmade – and the two little boys who are wearing uncomfortable grey wool trousers with matching red waistcoats and white shirts. Elizabeth is beside Andrew, pleased, despite herself, to be included like part of the family. She has assured Karen that she will help make Andrew behave, glad to have a task. Now that they know Agnes has arrived at the back of the church, the boys are clamouring to be picked up so they can see.

On the other side of the aisle the front pew stands empty. None of Agnes’s family is here today. Lolita Drury had offered to sit there, she felt that as the landlord’s wife she could take the role of surrogate mother. But Agnes said no, thank you, she would prefer it if the seats remained empty. ‘It’s symbolic to me,’ she says, ‘of my family. You understand, don’t you?’ Lolita does understand, and her heart fills with pity for the orphaned Agnes. Agnes had wanted to walk down the aisle alone as well, but that had upset the vicar, so in the end she agreed to take the arm of Jim Drury.

That morning Jenny had a shock when she arrived at the Black Hat loaded down with her wedding outfit, shoes, hat and cosmetics. She and Agnes had planned to get dressed together at the pub, Agnes said it would be fun. ‘It will be a good dose of girl-time before I walk down the aisle. Before I lose my freedom.’

Agnes came to the door of her room wearing a white towelling dressing gown, her hair in curlers, a lime-green face-pack smeared across her face. But that wasn’t what shocked Jenny, even though they had only an hour to get ready. The shock came when she entered the bedroom and saw the dress that hung from the curtain rail. It was a white dress, a wedding dress that Jenny thought looked antique with long narrow sleeves and a low lace and bone bodice, tiny pearl buttons, a slim, floor-length skirt and a short lace train.

‘Where did that come from?’ asked Jenny, thinking of their trip to London a few days ago. There’d been no time for shopping since then. Agnes hadn’t mentioned that she already had a wedding dress. Would she have arrived in Warboys with one packed in her case? Jenny imagined Agnes issuing more girlie advice: ‘Never travel without a wedding dress,
just in case
.’

But Agnes didn’t answer Jenny’s question. She was across the hall in the bathroom removing the facial. ‘Come on,’ she called, ‘there’s not much time. Let’s do your make-up.’