You Must Be Sisters (25 page)

‘Not at all, miss. We had a nice little chat.’

They went home, the bus rumbling up the hill and Holly gripping the seat in front and glueing her nose to the window. Despite the bravado she had been frightened, Laura could tell. That stolidness had been a bit too stolid.

She looked out at the passing shops that now and then, jokingly, froze. She would never marry Mac, she suddenly realized. Even if he wanted to, which she doubted; she couldn’t quite picture that scene. She loved him but no, not marriage. Not for life. She couldn’t spend her days rescuing Hollies; so to speak.

After lunch they crossed over the Suspension Bridge and went to explore the woods on the other side, with their giant trees and surprising wildness. Up a bridle path the three of them straggled and into a darker part. Holly dawdled behind, pulling off grass heads and practising her whistles. Mac strode ahead, hunched but jaunty, his curly hair rising and falling, rising and falling with each step.

All of a sudden the whistling stopped and Holly piped up:
‘
Celery
raw develops the jaw but celery stewed is more quietly chewed
.’

Laura laughed. ‘Gosh, did you make that up?’

‘No, it’s Ogden Nash. I know lots more. We learn them after lights-out in the dorm.’

‘In the dorm, eh?’ Mac’s voice floated back. He’d put on a silly grand accent. ‘In the dorm?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘With your lakky sticks and your Angela Brazils?’

‘What’s that?’

‘And your Mummies and Daddies coming down in their Rovers and eyeing each others’ hats –’

‘Oh shut up!’ Laura said this with surprising venom. It left Mac, she could see, unrattled. She looked over her shoulder at Holly who, despite the renewed whistles, looked rather solitary amongst the tall grasses. Why did Mac sometimes feel he had to say things like that? Funny. Funny, too, how sisters pulled one’s loyalties; more than men did. Blood was thickest.

The path darkened; the trees closed overhead; the ground grew muddier and midges hung dancing in the air. They picked their way around the puddles. Tranquillity restored, Laura became conscious of squelching behind.

‘Holly, what on earth are you doing?’

‘Breaking in my shoes. They’re new, you see.’ Holly stood still to explain, ankle-deep in the blackest of mud. ‘You must get them Experienced. First they need mud, especially smelly mud like this.’ She squelched around a bit. ‘Then you’ve got to stick ’em in water. Get them properly soggy.’ She waded out of the mud and into a tractor rut brimming with oil-filmed water. She stood still, reverently. Lines shot through the oil and it separated into silken squares. ‘Shake ’em around a bit.’ She did this, thoroughly. She stepped out. ‘Then they really should have some cow’s mess, but they seem all right already.’

Laura inspected them. ‘They certainly look full of experience now. So do your socks.’

She glanced at Mac. Perhaps he thought that only a spoilt private-school girl, used to an unending supply of new shoes, could indulge herself like this.

Ah, but she could never predict. His teeth showed white in a grin, and with a grunt he jumped into the middle of the water. Holly stared, then she giggled.

‘Ha!’ he shouted over the splashes he was making. He was stamping up and down. ‘Now your mum can get at both of us for our dirty shoes!’

With a suck and a plop he pulled his feet out of the muddy water and started to run in great striding leaps, hair rising and falling, up the path and into the distance. Soon he turned off into the trees and Laura, who had taken Holly’s hand and was running, laughing, after him, saw his wild figure flickering between the tree trunks.

They caught up with him eventually. He had thrown himself down on the dead leaves and lay, arms outstretched and the hair round his face dark with sweat, beside an inky pool.

‘Lo! A Narcissus!’ cried Laura, not expecting a reply to
that
, and with a crackle of leaves flung herself down beside him. Holly stood next to the pool and prodded it with a stick; Laura just leant on her elbow and contemplated that outflung arm with its faint miraculous veins. After she’d gazed at that for a while she undid, very gently, two buttons of his shirt to reveal a triangle of chest. She contemplated that.

He was such a mystery to her. Sometimes, that is. Despite misgivings and disappointments, despite the times he irritated her, he could still startle her with his strangeness. As an animal would startle her. She gazed down at his muddy plimsolls. Or like a child.

Holly’s presence made it altogether an odd sort of day. Laura had seen so little of her lately that she couldn’t predict at what stage of maturity Holly had arrived. At home Holly never seemed to change or get older, but that was probably to do with the backcloth. Hard to appear different in the same old nursery. It would take the sullen heavings of adolescence to shake up
that
fabric, and Holly hadn’t reached adolescence yet.

But what stage
had
she reached? Laura tried to picture her suspended in limbo, a young female, and wondered what sort of day she should provide. A jolly day exploring and mucking about, or was she too dignified for that now? A gentler day, cutting things out of felt? A more adult day, gardening and chatting, perhaps even exchanging confidences about clothes? And should she, Laura, tidy up the room for her as she would for an adult, or leave it messy and explorable as she would for a child who would muck it up in ten minutes anyway?

Finally, being lazy, she’d left the room as it was, the only concession to her virginal visitor being the removal of Mac’s more obvious possessions and the concealing of them in the cupboard. And she changed the sheets in honour of the chaste couple who would be occupying them that night.

And anyway, once Holly had arrived it was at once obvious that no effort had been needed at all. It didn’t matter what they did. Everything was delightful to Holly because every rule could be broken. How fascinatingly lawless to lie on the carpet at one o’clock on a
sunny day
and read
Beano
! ‘Holly, really!’ her mother would have said. ‘Just look at that sun outside.’ But all Laura had said was ‘There’s a
Beezer
in my bag when you’ve finished that,’ and gone on stirring something in a saucepan, something that smelt funny and foreign. Everything was so different here, even the meals.

And then she’d seen some ants walking across the floor, a little line of them carrying crumbs towards a crack in the wall. ‘Oh look, Laura!’ she’d said, and Laura had stopped stirring and knelt down beside her. ‘Mac!’ she’d called, and Mac had woken up (a funny time of day to be sleeping!) and got off the bed and they’d all knelt down together and watched the ants for ages. They both seemed really interested. Back home Mummy would have swept up all the ants with tut-tutting noises. But then, back home, there wouldn’t have been any crumbs on the floor anyway.

After lunch they’d gone off into the woods, which was fun, and she’d broken in her shoes which she’d been meaning to do for ages when she was at a safe distance from Mummy and Daddy.

Then they’d come back and seen some chairs piled up behind a fence. Mac had climbed over the fence and taken some. ‘Aren’t you stealing?’ she’d asked. ‘I expect so,’ he’d said, calm as anything. How naughty! It had made her feel quite peculiar. Nicely peculiar, she’d decided after a bit. And back in Laura’s room they’d broken them up and had a real fire. At home it was just a dreary pretend one. This one was lovely.

And now they were all sitting round the fire and she was teaching them how to do cat’s cradles. At home nobody would have sat with her long enough. Certainly not Mummy and Daddy at the same time. Mummy and Daddy were always looking at their watches. Mac didn’t; he practised them again and again and got jolly good at them. Nobody told her to wash or anything boring like that; in fact, nobody got boring at all, except once or twice
Mac
got funny about school. Questions like Did the girls have any power in the running of the school? And she’d said No fear.

Later they had another meal, sort of soupy stuff with bits in it. ‘What’s this funny branch?’ she asked. She lifted it out on her spoon.

‘Time,’ said Laura, or something like that. ‘It’s a Herb.’

She sucked it. All new tastes today. After supper Mac went out and she thought he’d gone back to his home. Laura kept saying what a nice home he had. But he came back a bit later with a bottle. The fire had gone out because they’d run out of chair and it had got rather chilly. There was only one light, too, so she had to crouch on the floor to finish her
Beezer
while they poured out whatever it was into glasses. She had a sniff; it smelt horrid, like Badger’s big jobs in the sandpit, and sick, and stuff the doctor had given her when she had tonsilitis – no, actually, it didn’t smell like them, she was just thinking of all the worst things she could.

They took ages drinking it, as if it was
nice
or something and she, Holly, was feeling jolly cold by now because she’d not brought another jersey with her; but she couldn’t get into bed because Mac was still there and she certainly couldn’t get undressed with him there, no fear, because her bosoms were starting to show. So she found a book and looked at it beside the lamp. It had peculiar pictures in it of bare men climbing all over each other, and monsters.

‘That’s bosh,’ Laura said, or something like that. ‘He’s good, isn’t he?’

It was funny, they were doing such odd and rude things, she spent ages looking at all the rude bits. She never knew people did things like that. But she didn’t like it much, it made her feel queasy. And anyway, to tell the truth she was rather sleepy. It was eleven o’clock and Mummy always made her go to bed at half past nine, which was soft of course, but –

‘By the way, Holly, if Mummy and Daddy ask if anyone was here, just say Mac came to tea.’

‘But he didn’t.’

‘I know, but say that. Please. Be a sport. Anyway, he’ll be going, er, home in a minute. So it’s nearly true.’

‘OK,’ she said, but she felt confused. Why must she say that? What was wrong with Mac being there?

She hid a yawn behind the violent pages of her book. How
sissy
to look tired! Specially after the fuss she always made, about going to bed at half past nine!

‘By the way,’ said Laura. ‘Claire’s coming tomorrow. She wrote and said Geoff has some business here so she’s coming for the day. And they’ll take you back to London in the evening.’

‘Claire?’ Surprisingly, Holly suddenly felt better. Somehow, Claire and Geoff meant things being done properly. And just for a humiliating, homesick moment that was just what she wanted. Silly, but she did. It was something to do with it being night and nobody minding what time it was, and that book and things.

She yawned again, and when she woke she was lying with Laura’s legs all tangled up with hers and it was morning.

‘CLAIRE!’

They hugged each other, then stood back, each sister with so much to say.

‘Excuse the stink, excuse the mess.’ Laura led Claire into the passage. They squeezed past the pram and the potty cupboard. ‘There’s a family with about thirty children upstairs. They have a social worker visiting and everything.’

Claire picked her way over the curling lino. ‘I feel I know this place, every inch, from your letters. Where’s Mac?’

‘Out for a walk with Holly.’ It pleased Laura to link their names together, so that Mac was a part of them all. ‘Let’s go straight into the garden and wait for them there.’

They edged their way down the passage and out of the back door. ‘And Geoff?’ Laura asked over her shoulder.

‘Seeing some client. He said he’ll come here after lunch.’

Something in Claire’s voice made Laura stop in her tracks. This Geoff business couldn’t be more serious than she thought, could it? He seemed so much part of Claire’s day, accepted into it.

Geoff. Mac. The names hovered round their speech, but for a moment they just let them hover. ‘Here’s my garden, then,’ said Laura. ‘Our garden.’

They stepped across some rusted iron spokes, the bowels of something long past recognition, and sat down in Laura’s small square of cut grass.

Claire gazed round, smiling at the sun on Laura’s lettuces which struggled through the weeds. Then she gazed at a clump of cornflowers; such intense blue – if she closed her eyes until everything went blurry, the blue still pierced through, ‘It’s idyllic,’ she said. ‘Your own room, your own garden, your own Mac. Do you feel all fulfilled and happy?’

Laura lay back on the grass and closed her eyes. ‘I suppose so. Yes, I’m sure I do. It’s just that sometimes I feel it’s all a bit
too
idyllic, if you see what I mean.’ She lay still. If for once I organize my thoughts, actually speak my doubts, won’t that make them concrete? And then won’t I have to do something about them? Better just to lie back and feel the sun warm on my arms and listen to the hum of the traffic.

But then she thought: Geoff must be amongst that hum somewhere. And she felt uneasy again, especially as she could hear Claire pulling up bits of grass. Claire, usually so straightforward, wasn’t the sort to fidget.

Laura took a breath, kept her eyes closed and asked: ‘What gives with Geoff, then?’

A pause, a long one.

‘Well,’ came Claire’s slow voice. ‘That’s really why I came down here. I wanted to tell you first.’

Oh no, thought Laura. Oh
no
.

‘You see. Well.’ More grass-pulling sounds. ‘Well, I was thinking …’ She paused. A silence, but for the tearing sounds. ‘What I mean is, Geoff and I were thinking of …’ Another silence. The tearing sounds stopped. ‘Amazingly enough, we were thinking of getting married.’

Laura let out her breath. Christ. She sat up and stared at Claire. Claire’s eyes looked bright and enquiring; anxious too? She stared at Claire’s hand, stilled on a clump of grass.

‘Well?’ asked Claire.

‘Well, how about that! Claire! When did you know?’ It hardly mattered what she said.

‘Just a week or so ago. I wanted to tell you in person.’