A Tale of Two Sisters Read online

  Two days later, we handed an only slightly snot-nosed Tomas back to his rightful owners, and crawled into bed to recover. We were no longer those naïve optimists who’d set off so carefree only five days before. Now we knew. That we would never holiday in England again. That we were not happy being poor. That we were awful, absolutely awful, with children. They didn’t like us, we didn’t like them, and please God let Jeremy and Tabitha live for ever.

  I discovered I was pregnant two weeks later.

  Chapter 2

  I told Tim I was pregnant and he replied, ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘No, I am,’ I said, and showed him the stick.

  ‘Do another one.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  ‘We must have.’

  I’d had a bad feeling when I’d cried at an advert in which a small boy knocks on a door and presents a box of inferior confectionary to an old woman. I think she gave him his ball back instead of spearing it on the end of her stick. I considered myself intelligent but I was as easily turned as a door knob. Pry open my soul, and you’d be splatted with a sticky green gloop of materialism and gullibility. I’d see a product on the screen, say, Cornflakes – ‘Have you forgotten how good they taste?’ and think: have I? Maybe I have. Better check, and send Tim to the petrol station to buy a packet. But the weeping was suspect.

  I felt sick and it was nothing to do with hormones. I was an idiot, a disappointment to myself, and there’s no worse feeling. I didn’t like babies. They frightened me. It was like a fear of spiders, except rational. At the magazine company, women swelled up routinely, disappeared for three months, returned in triumph as if from a heroic venture, portly figure half deflated, bearing a small screeching bundle, and everyone would crowd round – as if there was something new to see, when truly, all babies look alike and are thus given wrist tags in hospital. I’d hover at the back, a tight smile on my face, hoping I wouldn’t be forced to touch.

  I didn’t want one.

  It was my sister’s fault. Cassie. She was five years younger. I remembered trudging up the hill with the Canadian nanny, Cassie roaring away in her pushchair.

  ‘I don’t want babies,’ I said to the Canadian nanny. ‘I prefer dogs.’

  The nanny – she had hair that frizzed at the tiniest speck of moisture and hated England – replied, ‘Well. All the other ladies will be pushing their babies in prams, and you’ll have a dog on a lead.’

  Fine by me.

  Cassie bit. You could muzzle a dog. She also required endless entertaining. There was no peace. It was like living with Henry VIII. A voracious eater, short-tempered, easily bored, scarily powerful. I became her substitute carer after the Canadian nanny was sacked by our mother for shutting Cassie in the walk-in larder while she watched episodes of The Professionals on the Video Cassette Recorder. (We were the first family I know to own a VCR. It was battleship grey and the size of a suitcase.) Cassie passed her time in the larder roaring, and eating raisins, which gave her severe diarrhoea.

  The diarrhoea, in which an alarming number of unchewed raisins were clearly visible, plus a neighbour’s casual remark to our mother, ‘I always hear her screaming,’ raised our mother’s suspicions. She crept home early from the office, and caught the nanny in flagrante with Bodie and Doyle. Our mother was physically sick at the thought of Cassie being mistreated, but there was no question of her giving up work. She adored work. She was editor of a magazine entitled Mother & Home.

  Dad was a concierge in a central London hotel – he liked his job, but would have left it for us – well, for her. But he didn’t. I think he knew our mother would not have been comfortable with a house husband. Was there even a word for it then?

  So Kristina, the Danish au pair, was employed. Blonde, beautiful, within days of her arrival she was snapped up by an Englishman with a sports car. Despite the zircon engagement ring, she remained in our house. She treated Cassie like a prize doll. I noticed that our mother was irritable around Kristina – who had a vague dreaminess and a smug aura – but she couldn’t fault her childcare. I saw Kristina as a goddess. Our mother was glamorous, in a brittle way, but Kristina was exotic, even in track pants. Our mother murmured the word ‘dumpy’, but I didn’t understand it, any more than I understood the box of individual white-paper-wrapped tubes in Kristina’s bedroom drawer. (‘Are they cigarettes?’)

  Every day Kristina would collect me from school, present me with a Curly-Wurly or a Flake, and talk to me as if I were an adult. Her boyfriend was a businessman. He had a house in Scotland. They’d marry in Denmark. She would wear a ‘massive’ dress like a princess. In return for these jewels of knowledge, I’d play with Cassie in the playroom while Kristina sat on the pink carpet and watched, a faraway look on her fairytale face. I didn’t like Cassie, I just wanted to be near Kristina.

  Cassie and I developed a relationship similar to that of two prisoners sharing a cell. Cassie was probably the drugs baron, I was the dodgy accountant. I devised a series of games that bored me comatose but enthralled Cassie. For instance, Magic Chick. I’d hurl Cassie’s toy chick across the room like a cricket ball. Da-na, Chick had disappeared. I’d order Cassie to close her eyes and decide whether Chick should appear from the ceiling or the floor. Depending on Cassie’s choice, Chick would drop on her head, or nudge her bottom. It was a compliment, I feel, to my powers of deception and authority, that Cassie continued to believe in Magic Chick a good three years after she’d publicly scorned our mother for referring to Father Christmas, and snubbed our dad for alluding to the Tooth Fairy.

  Long after Kristina moved in with her Porsche-driving prince, I remained Cassie’s chief of staff, ent. Without liking a single minute of it, I performed one-woman plays alongside a cast of bears, told long rambling tales about favourite toys, recreated Dallas inside Cassie’s Pippa Doll house and read from her big fat Walt Disney book. Snow White, I recall, was my favourite, as I’d force Cassie to stare at the picture of the wicked witch with a wart on her nose until she cried. I also invented a game called The Bravery Test, which entailed Cassie sitting on hot radiators for as long as she could bear (max points for max pain).

  I had no illusion that having a child was fun. I’d discovered the truth aged five. Kids ruined your life. And at least back then I’d had the benefit of backup. Our parents were not a constant presence, but they did their bit. Rather like our cat, Sphinx, who daily offers Tim and me withered leaves harbouring insects, or, if she’s feeling flush, a frog, our parents were always bringing home small gifts that they hoped might appeal.

  Our father was given a surfeit of flamenco dancer dolls – the hotel had a lot of Spanish guests – and Cassie built up a fine collection of gorgeous swirling ladies in scarlet lace, holding black fans up to their coy faces. He also received many key rings, and it became legend (it wasn’t true) that I was obsessed with amassing these rather dull objects I had no need of. Our mother bought me a corkboard with a picture of a bee on it and a box of coloured pins which, hobbywise, sealed my fate. Aged twelve, I was the mortified owner of a hundred and thirty-two key rings – one of which was the shape of a fried egg – and no keys.

  Our parents weren’t intuitive, but they did pay the electricity bills, the mortgage, and provided food. Every weekend, we ate at The Harvester. Our father liked it because you could refill your plate at the salad bar unto infinity. (Now I think about it, while you could refill your plate at the salad bar unto infinity, I’m not sure you were meant to.) Our mother sat there with a pinchy face, picking at a bowl of warm cottage cheese. Cassie and I ate fish nuggets – soon to be the eclipsed precursor of the poultry version – and chips.

  It wasn’t haute cuisine but it was better than dining on anything our mother had prepared. She was a dreadful cook. She tried, but every dish tasted foul. Even her porridge had lumps in it, when all she had to do was add milk and stir. Also, she rarely bothered to read labels, which meant she frequently added turmeric to our oats instead of cinnamon.<
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  She and our father flailed about when it came to what one does to entertain children. Over the course of years, Cassie and I were hauled around all the stately homes in Britain – armour, tapestries, moats, really, the same every time – and on Sundays I’d humour our father by helping him to wash his Volvo. It would take an hour, turn my hands chapped and raw, and – as our water source was always a bucket not a hose – the car would remain dirty. Meanwhile, Cassie would be trapped in the kitchen helping our mother make a disgusting cake.

  One thing man and wife were agreed on: fresh air. We spent a lot of time out of the house while our parents remained inside it. There was a sandpit in our garden, full of orange sand, which every local fox and feline assumed was a litter tray, and Cassie and I passed many a winter afternoon crouched on our haunches at its edge – we didn’t dare sit on the wooden corner seats because a nest of spiders lurked beneath – cracking through its frost coating, scraping away purple worms and squirls of poo, digging through the orange sand to the brown mud underneath.

  Our mother and father had a religious belief in itineraries: the Museum of Mankind, Whipsnade Zoo, the London Transport Museum. If Cassie and I had a fixed destination to stare at something hairy or engine-driven, they felt they had fulfilled their parental duty. Actually, Cassie and I preferred the unscheduled time we spent squashing red berries at the back of the house, or climbing over the white fence at our garden’s end to the daisy- and buttercup-filled lawns of the mental home beyond. Their grass was better than ours, because no one ever cut it, and I could make daisy chains the length of my sister. We only saw a mental patient once. (‘Look,’ said Cassie. ‘You’ve got that jumper.’)

  I’m not sure that our parents trusted the imagination. They felt safer if we were formally occupied. Twenty years ahead of every supermodel, my favourite pastime was knitting. Aunt Edith had started me off – I couldn’t start or finish, I could only do the middle bit – with ten little balls of brightly coloured wool. I embarked on the longest scarf in history. If you rolled it onto itself it had the span of a wagon wheel (not the chocolate sort, a real one). Aunt Edith gave me her cast-off wool, and I might have kept going for ever, except that one day the scarf was donated to a children’s home, and the next day, our mother announced that I was going to have tennis lessons.

  We weren’t a sporty family, although our mother was good at Kaluki. It didn’t help that my tennis racquet weighed about as much as a Le Creuset frying pan. Cassie got out of tennis by breaking the neck of every tennis racquet our parents bought her, on the first day. Hand her a Dunlop, she turned into a cat with a sparrow. It was swiftly decided that she was better suited to ballet. She wasn’t. At one fairly desperate point – the Junior Arts & Crafts and Miss Pricket, the neighbourhood piano teacher, were oversubscribed – our parents decided that I should learn Hebrew. (Prayer books are literally sacred in Judaism and, after the tennis racquets, I don’t think they dared risk it with Cassie.)

  I was sent to the local synagogue on Sunday mornings, where an ancient Polish woman with sparse hair forced us to read from the Torah. For the life of me, I couldn’t master the Hebrew alphabet, nor did I engage with the subject matter: God, God, God. It never occurred to those in charge that a Hebrew translation of, say, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe might have more appeal to a gaggle of twelve-year-olds, and while, in retrospect, I admire the staunchness of their principles I do feel they ultimately scored an own goal.

  I spent those interminable three hours at Hebrew classes marvelling at perspective – squinting, measuring between finger and thumb how tiny the blackboard duster appeared from where I was sitting (a centimetre, if that), when I knew for a fact it was the size of a brick. It made the minutes pass and invoked the wrath of the old crone, who screeched at me, ‘All you do ees peck peck peck!’ Here, she mimicked the shape of my finger and thumb, like a bird’s beak, opening and shutting.

  Funnily enough, it was Cassie who came to my rescue. She agreed to consider pony riding, but only if I came too. The stables’ timetable clashed with the synagogue’s, but so eager were our parents to please their younger daughter – or, indeed, to be guaranteed rid of her for a morning – that I was freed of that stale airless classroom the same week. Instead, I spent my Sunday mornings shifting horseshit in an enclosed space, while our parents paid handsomely for the privilege.

  I didn’t blame our mother and father for not understanding us. I didn’t understand them. But I knew from experience that parenthood was a thankless task, one long concerted effort to get your ungrateful offspring to leave you in peace. And my parents were lucky. God help you if you didn’t have money to throw at the problem (which Tim and I didn’t). Not that it was any use in my current predicament, but – despite the shaky start and a few mild radiator burns – one good thing had emerged from my less than perfect childhood.

  Cassie and I were great friends.

  Chapter 3

  When I was younger, the fact that abortion existed was like the fact that our parents’ car existed – it was available as a convenience should I require it.

  A few times I’d stared at a small white stick, until it deigned to reveal my future like a Roman emperor: thumb up, thumb down. You can always get rid of it, were the words hammering in my terrified heart, as I waited for the thin blue line to appear. Back then, it was always an it. Fear made me callous, I couldn’t think beyond myself.

  But now I was in a settled relationship (I’d love to chance upon a description of a long-term love affair that doesn’t weld slippers to the feet of those involved.) I was also thirty-two. Not only were the policemen younger than me, the sports heroes, the singers, the actors, artists, were too. I had no excuse any more. I had got to the point where you look back on the skittering trail of your life so far, and think, phew, bypassed that dilemma by the skin of my teeth.

  Getting rid of it was no longer an option. Tim and I couldn’t even consider it.

  That said, nor could we think of what would happen in nine months’ time. Tim said he was happy. He communicated this by spending all day out of the house. He’d return, eventually, shaky and pale.

  After a week of this curious behaviour, I decided to crash the party. The mystery was solved in minutes. We lived in a child-infested area, and everywhere Tim looked, fat fathers with thin hair and shocked expressions trudged along pushing buggies. Their deportment was a disgrace (as Tim’s mother might say), they were schlemiels (as my Aunt Edith might say), and the clothes they wore! Did they even care that they were men? Saggy baggy material shorts, shapeless, faded sweatshirts, white socks, unfashionable trainers – clothes for a life that was one long treadmill.

  Tim had been spending each day slumped in the window of Starbucks, downing cappuccinos in half-pints, and watching his own future – and it looked a lot different from the dreams he’d pinned on his wall aged fourteen. There comes a day when a man realises that he will never be asked to play for Man U, that he is never going to win a grand prix, or be a millionaire by the time he’s thirty – and, sitting in Starbucks, aged thirty-one, that day had come for Tim, with a scythe and a black hood and unfashionable trainers.

  Meanwhile, I had thought vaguely of taking a small child to the ballet one day and everyone going ‘Ahhh!’, but this was the first time I had thought of the real consequences – or rather, had the consequences parade before me – and I had no sympathy. Had Tim seen the women? I thought of them as Mothers-Who-Don’t-Give-A-Shit. Now that I was forced to face reality, I recalled a prime example living on the corner of our street. She was forty years old. I knew this because I’d heard her shouting it to Tabitha at seven o’clock one Saturday morning – ‘I’m forty today! Harold’s making a barbecue! Do come! Bring John, and, er, Toby!’

  She looked fifty and I never ever saw her wear anything but an old grey tracksuit. Maybe she’d iron it for the barbecue. She might have been pretty but she never wore a scrap of make-up and her skin was dry and lined. Her black hair was streaked with grey,
and it seemed like she never brushed it. What killed me was, she had a boy who must have been Tomas’s age, and she only ever dressed him in an old navy tracksuit. ‘I Don’t Care’ might have been written on her forehead. I worried that she was setting up the kid to be bullied.

  ‘We won’t be able to do this any more,’ said Tim, as we sat in our preferred local restaurant one Thursday night. He said it like he was joking, but I saw the naked fear. We won’t be able to do this any more . . . He said it about fifty times a day. If we went to the cinema: ‘We won’t be able to do this any more.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, after sitting through a particularly vacuous film about five unpleasant teenagers who are murdered one by one in a wood by a monster. ‘I don’t care about these people. They’re nasty and they deserved to be eaten. I’m from a different generation.’

  ‘You know why every other film is about teenagers? Because everyone older is stuck at home with their kids.’

  This was undeniable. But as I pointed out, we happily lived in the age of the DVD, and if it emerged that he missed the cinema experience unbearably, I’d willingly shift an armchair to directly in front of the sofa, in order that Tim could enjoy the perimeters of each scene of our rented film around the silhouette of my head.

  I shared his fear of change – of course I did. But there was a thrilling edge to my terror. Everyone makes such a fuss of pregnant women. I hadn’t done anything that anyone had thought was worth making a fuss over. There was no ‘since’ in that sentence.