A Tale of Two Sisters Page 10

  He’d been waiting for six years, was tired of always being the one to run across the road to buy cake for birthdays. He was bitter. His colleagues never saw it, but I did.

  I hadn’t at first. But the discovery – and loss – of my real mother threw our relationship into sharp relief, and I saw a lot that previously I’d been blind to.

  Especially when we failed to conceive and George acted as if his failure – all failure – was my fault. We had the home, car, and lifestyle to show for my success, and it began to dawn on me that he was jealous. He knew he wasn’t a partner, he was a dependant. His resentment turned him into an old woman. He was sullen to me, curt to my friends, and anal about the house. He was forever slipping place mats under my coffee mugs. If I loaded the dishwasher, he’d rearrange it. We weren’t allowed to sit in the front room until he found the right sofas.

  George was tall, thin with dark hair and a slight pot belly. (Lizbet had indeed felt his abs at her birthday party all those years ago and – she was a little drunk – cried, ‘There’s nothing there!’) But gorgeous men bored me and anyway, George’s arrogance was attractive. Now he’d lost it, and the spell was broken. Everything he did annoyed me. Like, he pronounced Lemsip, ‘Lemzip’. You don’t zip it! You sip it!

  And then came The Art Project. George decided he wasn’t pretentious enough and enrolled on an art course at a London college close to ‘The Beeb’. George studied Renaissance Art, but he couldn’t paint a picture to save his life. (I’d seen him draw a house; it was a triangle on top of a square.) To save face, he took refuge in modernism – a genre he would otherwise have loathed. He called his creations ‘bodyworks’. He’d tip a vat of paint on a sheet of plastic, and roll in it naked. Then he’d roll on the canvas. He was definitely protesting against something. I just wasn’t sure what.

  Once, I peered closely at a finished ‘piece’ and said, ‘There are three pubic hairs on this!’

  He snapped, ‘It’s all integral to the installation, don’t you seeee?’

  His final thesis was entitled, ‘Inhabitation of a Male Skin in the Post-Modern Era’, and he spent many an evening naked and blindfolded in the lounge, groping himself and painting ‘what he felt’, while a video camera on a tripod recorded proceedings. The college held an exhibition for all graduating students, and while George wore a suit for the occasion, the entire room saw his particulars (as Aunt Edith might say) on a large screen. I found it silly and humiliating, and I felt that in awarding George an A, the college was pandering to his childish behaviour. I was grateful that Mr Hershlag was in hospital with pneumonia.

  I made George’s comfortable existence possible – without me he’d be living in an East Acton squat – and yet he was so disrespectful. He was the only person who ever interrupted me. If we had dinner with, say, Tim and Lizbet, George would jump in and provide the last word of my every sentence. And get it wrong.

  Me: ‘Whenever I’m in a posh restaurant I always order scallops. I don’t even really like scallops, but I feel compelled to order them. It’s something about the—’

  George: ‘Texture?’

  Me: ‘No. The word “scallops”. It sounds delicious.’

  I’d look at Tim and Lizbet’s relationship and I’d be envious of what they had. They were so happy together. They had fun. They were best friends. Even with no money. How did they do that? I wouldn’t know how to have fun without money. They were like kids together. They had their own private words, like ‘jel-jel’ for ‘jealous’. They laughed together about little things.

  ‘Tim,’ Lizbet had said, the last time I’d visited, ‘show Cassie that flyer.’ Tim rustled around the desk by their front door, and handed me a poorly typed photocopied leaflet. It read, ‘TIRED OF CLEANING YOURSELF? LET SOMEONE ELSE DO IT!’

  I’d smiled and handed it back. I knew that if this leaflet had dropped through my letterbox, I’d have considered showing it to George. And then I wouldn’t have bothered. But Tim and Lizbet shared, and so their days were scattered with lovely moments. They were a team, and – I noticed – they touched each other a lot.

  When Tim had secured his potty deal, they’d gone to Amsterdam to celebrate, and ‘had a bit of a sesh’, in a hotel. Only after had they noticed a guy in the building opposite, binoculars in one hand, penis in the other. Presuming they were putting on a show, the man had put down his binoculars, or penis (Tim didn’t specify) to wave at them. I laughed as Tim and Lizbet recounted, but secretly, I was stunned. Imagine that! Tim and Lizbet still had sex for fun! And it wasn’t five minutes of dog-like humping under the duvet! It was fancy enough to be entertaining!

  Seeing those two together left me with a dollop of gloom in the pit of my stomach. George and I bickered more in their company, and I think it was because the warm cohesion of their relationship threw ours – jarred and damaged – into sharp relief.

  Also, I couldn’t help thinking that Tim was the better man.

  So you see, I was caught. I wanted that baby – George and I were still trying for the baby – and yet the sex was cold and joyless because in my heart I no longer wanted George. A baby without a father . . . You should tell him . . . But then you won’t get the baby . . . I am not going to think about this now. When I get the baby, then I’ll think about it. The thoughts ran through my head endlessly. What a mess. It seemed that suddenly, I had nothing, and Lizbet had everything.

  And then, she didn’t. Mummy called and told me, in a flat voice. I listened, in silence.

  I said, ‘Is Lizbet OK? I mean, physically?’

  ‘Mm,’ said Mummy. She gave a sort of moan, and put the phone down. This, the woman who tried to cheer up my sister – after Letty Jackson’s Persian got into our garden and bit through the carotid artery of Lizbet’s lop-eared rabbit, Miffy – by saying, in a comforting tone, ‘In a hundred years we’ll all be dead and none of this will matter.’

  In a hundred years we’ll all be dead and none of this will matter.

  It didn’t convince. I walked into my kitchen, and opened the cupboard door. Inside was our gorgeous wedding crockery, our complete and valuable set of Royal Worcester bone china in Mountbatten Cobalt. It was my favourite possession. It spoke of another era. It said that life was elegant and civilised and genteel. Every piece was smooth and beautiful. Each dinner plate was thirty quid. The covered soup tureen cost two hundred and seventy-five pounds. I lifted each of the twelve plates out of the cupboard, carefully unwrapped them from their white tissue paper, and dropped them on the floor, one by one by one, until I was standing barefoot in a prettily glinting sea of smashed china.

  ‘What are you doing?’ screamed George.

  ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ I said. I lifted the covered soup tureen out of its nest of tissue paper, and held it lovingly at chest level.

  ‘No!’ shouted George. ‘I beg you! Not the covered soup tureen!’

  We watched it break into hundreds of pieces.

  ‘Are you mad?’ screeched George. ‘Have you lost your mind?’

  I shook my head, and reached for the sauce boat stand (twenty-four pounds). George gave me a sharp push away from the cupboard, and I lost my balance and fell.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said George, as the blood rushed from my hands and knees. ‘I didn’t mean— Are you alright?’

  I gasped for a bit, with the pain, even though it felt right. Everything was turning red. Then I said, in the smallest voice, ‘I can’t believe it. My sister lost her baby.’

  Lizbet

  Chapter 13

  The meanest thing Cassie ever did to me was on a family holiday in St Moritz, in celebration of our parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary. (Our father never forgot a birthday or an anniversary – he remembered, he said, by not writing things down.) It was the prettiest place we’d ever seen, all snowy and sparkly, like a neverending Christmas. I was wide-eyed for the entire week, as our usual holidays were a bit scratchy. This was because, unlike certain of his colleagues, our father refused to accept favours from his cl
ients.

  We could have stayed a month in a villa on the beach on the island of St Barts, free of charge. We could have spent the New Year in Monaco, lazily cruising the bay on a white yacht. We never did. We’d rent an apartment in Crete with an ancient kitchen and blocked-up drains. (If you went to the beach and forgot to shut the bathroom door, the stench hit your throat as you entered the hall.)

  Our mother sulked for the entirety of that particular vacation. Her face darkened on day one when a three-legged dog ran up and sniffed her you-know-where, and she didn’t raise another smile until we saw the graffiti on the bridge as we left Heathrow. But our father said, ‘When I’m on holiday, I prefer to be my own person. I don’t want an upgrade. I don’t want to be known. I don’t want to have to shave.’ I didn’t like our father with a beard. The bristles emerged grey. I felt as if he was old and out of control.

  Cassie adored the glamour of St Moritz, and spent much of the time prancing around in a moth-eaten fur coat that she’d found in Aunt Edith’s attic. I very much fear it was squirrel. Our father had booked a family suite, and Cassie and I were sitting on the sofa, talking. I didn’t hear our parents come in, but Cassie did and said in a loud voice, ‘And stop talking about blow jobs!’ then ran out of the room.

  As talk of blow jobs didn’t figure in their parental lexicon, our mother and father said nothing. It didn’t figure in my lexicon either. I was mortified into silence. A few days later, I got a sore throat. Our father took a look, decided he could see an ulcer, and concluded that I had orally contracted VD. He took me to a doctor and said, ‘Elle a eu de rapport orale.’

  While it soon became evident that I didn’t have VD, I never told our father the truth. I was so caught up in the lurid drama of his imagination, that I actually wrote in my diary, ‘I don’t have VD after all!’ The trip to the doctor was humiliating. But at sixteen, I thought it was worse not to have ever given a blow job. I’m not sure that I ever forgave our father. I was hurt that he didn’t trust me, but I was more hurt that he didn’t know me. I forgave Cassie, though. It struck me that I’ve always forgiven her.

  After my baby died, Cassie was wonderful. Professional wonderful. Not many people were. They were full of consolation. But they were a little brisk. They seemed to have weighed it up and decided that this was worth just the one ‘I’m so sorry’ conversation. They’d ask ‘How ARE you?’ but the expression on their face said, ‘Don’t tell me.’ It was like in a nightmare, where you need someone’s help to save yourself but you can’t speak and they can’t hear you.

  So I never said that I woke every morning and for a blissful second forgot, and stroked my stomach. The sorrow had seeped into my bones. If the editor presented me with a problem at work, often I couldn’t hear him because my whole head would be screaming, ‘Fuck off, fuck off – can’t you see I am half-dead with pain here?’ The editor’s PA said – with the confidence of the unbothered – ‘You’ll have other babies.’ I didn’t want other babies. I wanted this baby. I was knocked flat by the violence of my yearning for a person I never knew. ‘Oh, Baby,’ I’d whisper. ‘Poor little Baby’ – and then, because I’d always spoken for her – ‘Ah, Mummy.’

  I kept winding back my life to survey the surreal horror of its disintegration – why? How? At sixteen weeks and five days, we were fine. At sixteen weeks and six days, we were dead. Sixteen weeks and six days had destroyed me. Seventeen weeks ago, I’d been happy, with nothing. But for sixteen weeks and five days, I’d been lent the experience of having it all, and now, nothing was no longer nothing. It was minus everything. It was beyond bearable.

  The cramps were sudden and painful, and the blood was wet and slippery and everywhere in the bed. I made Tim look – I was too frightened to look myself. ‘It’s coming out in clots,’ he said. Suddenly, I couldn’t catch my breath, I couldn’t take in the oxygen to scream. Grim-faced, Tim sped us to hospital, me in a dressing gown with a towel stuffed between my legs. He carried me into A&E – they wheeled me to a room by the maternity ward – and for a second, with the rush and the fuss and the pain of it, I could imagine that I was giving birth as normal.

  I wasn’t. I thought of it as giving death.

  Each moment stood alone in its awfulness. My head telling me: this is the end, and my heart refusing to believe it. Lying on a bed, hearing foetal heart monitors in the next room. The obstetrician, telling me that I was ‘actively miscarrying.’ Feeling the contractions crushing, harder and harder, begging someone to stop them, keep the baby in, and the midwife saying, ‘The cervix is open, honey. There’s no treatment, no drugs to stop the uterus contracting. I’m sorry.’ She told me I wouldn’t need to push, and I felt sicker than I did already – a small mercy, in that I didn’t have to collude with my stupid body.

  The tiniest most perfect baby girl.

  The obstetrician was kind, allowed that it was ‘traumatic’, but made himself scarce. I formed the word, ‘Why’ and he said, if I’d had a little bleeding at seven weeks . . . ten . . . recurrent episodes . . . could have opened up the cervix . . . bacteria . . . into the womb . . . blood clot . . . infected . . . labour . . .’ The words floated here and there, and questions arose like bubbles: had I had bleeding? Had I even known I was pregnant, then? Was I such a bumbling idiot I’d assumed it was a period? But all I could hear was my own voice screaming, ‘Baby – dead.’ He tried to comfort me – the ‘sinister possibilities’ of a late miscarriage, but mine being a ‘one-off complication’ – but I was rendered half-deaf with grief.

  I wanted nothing going in the incinerator, and so the hospital gave me a small cardboard box. A makeshift coffin for my first child. They were good, they really were. I could see it in their eyes: ‘You poor lady.’ I didn’t want to be a poor lady. I wanted to be a mummy.

  I buried our baby under the orange blossom, digging the soil with my bare hands. I recalled myself as a little girl burying my rabbit in a Clarks shoebox all those years ago, and I was glad that little girl hadn’t seen ahead to this. My world shrank and everything reflected my grief. Staring glass-eyed into the garden, I saw a small white petal flutter to the ground – a mocking message from a sadistic god – and I collapsed on the floor, howling. I was as bad as Tim’s mother (convinced the robin redbreast fluffing its feathers in the bird bath was Nan, checking up on her).

  My moron body still thought it was pregnant – it mocked me with two blue lines on the test I did, after. I felt empty – because I was. Like one of those cheap hollow chocolate eggs – what were they called – Kinder Surprise. Surprise, your kinder’s dead.

  Tim was useless – silent and grave. He’d been making me pot chicken. Now he stopped, as if I was no longer worth cooking for. A week after the operation, he caught me checking the New Pregnancy and Birth Book to see what stage we would have been at. His face paled, and he held out his hand for it, like a teacher confiscating sweets. Then he said, ‘Lizbet. Try to remember what the doctor told you. Carrying a viable pregnancy is similar to the predictability of throwing a dice. You can’t guarantee a six every time. Sometimes you’ll throw a two.’ I felt a lurch of hatred in my gut so fierce I thought I’d wrenched something.

  But Cassie didn’t put a foot wrong. She appeared on the doorstep, crushed me in a long hug, and whispered, ‘I am so, so sorry. How are you? This is a tragedy. It’s horrific.’

  I waited for the ‘But’. It didn’t come.

  She brought food with her. I stared at the glass casserole dish in disbelief. ‘Is this . . . home-made?’

  Cassie nodded, blushed. ‘I followed the recipe,’ she said. ‘It’s a bean thing.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. I was impressed. That girl could pillage Marks & Spencer like a Viking in a village. But while she owned a John Pawson-designed kitchen, so white and minimalist that ‘bliss’ could have set up a spa in there, I had never seen her touch her Gaggenau oven. In fact, as every knob, switch and appliance was hidden behind white lacquered wood doors, I couldn’t even be sure that she knew where it was.


  A small, thin woman with a nervous posture and bouffant burgundy hair appeared behind her.

  ‘Oh!’ said Cassie. ‘This is Rumi. She’s come to clean the house.’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Cassie. ‘It’s all taken care of.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I muttered. I managed a smile for Rumi. ‘Would you like a cof—’

  ‘Rumi only drinks Coke,’ said Cassie. ‘Don’t you, Rumi?’

  Rumi grinned and affirmed. Her teeth needed work. ‘Where I start?’ she said.

  I stared at her, like she’d asked a maths question. Even the tiniest challenge drew a blank.

  ‘Upstairs bathroom,’ said Cassie.

  I knew that Cassie found the dirt levels in my house revolting. They probably were.

  Because we were us – financial bozos, inept adults – even the one room we’d had redone wasn’t right. Our new bathroom cost nine grand (Tim didn’t realise that the sandstone was costed per tile) and was installed by idiots. I got an inkling on the first day when I trotted upstairs to see that James – charming, charming, vey posh, total bodger – had sawn the top off a water pipe and was trying to stem the gushing water with his fist. By the time the bathroom was finished, they’d caused three leaks, and had to repaint the lounge, twice. The first time I sat in our new bath, I seriously worried that it would drop through the floor and the paramedics would find me sitting, dead and naked, in a giant enamel bath in front of the French doors.

  Within weeks, tiles cracked and wall paint bubbled. The button you pressed to flush the toilet bounced off its spring and into the bowl. The stainless-steel switch on the power shower fell off the wall, clunked into the bath and chipped it. The underfloor heating went nuclear, so every trip to the loo was like stepping across hot coals.

  When the sink blocked, we discovered that the plug wasn’t detachable, and that the unit had been installed in a way that made it impossible to unscrew the drainage pipe. I spent hours with tweezers prising grot from beneath the plug, but it never made much difference, and every time you washed your hands, the sink would fill with water rank with regurgitated flotsam. It was quite, quite disgusting, even to me. But plumbers were expensive, and one day Tim really would get round to tipping a bottle of drain cleaner down the plughole. But he didn’t, and eventually, I noticed that while Cassie might visit, she never used the facilities.