The Sister

Chapter 1 Lookout

It’s ten to two in the afternoon and I’ve been waiting for my little sister, Vivi, since one-thirty. She’s finally coming home, at sixty-seven years old, after an absence of almost fifty years.

I’m standing at a first-floor window, an arched stone one like you’d find in a church, my face close up to the diamond-shaped leaded panes, keeping lookout. For a moment I focus on the glass and catch the faint, honest reflection of my eye staring back at me, a lock of gray straggly hair in its way. I don’t often look at my reflection and to peer at this moment directly into my eye feels more disconcerting than it should, as if I can sense I’m about to be judged.

I pull my wool cardy—an old one of my father’s—more tightly around me, tucking the loose end under my arm. It’s dropped a degree today, the wind must have changed easterly during the night, and later we’ll get fog in the valley. I don’t need a barograph or a hygrometer these days, I can sense it—pressure changes, a shift in humidity—but, to tell the truth, I also think about the weather to help me take my mind off things. If I didn’t have it to ponder right now, I’d already be getting slightly anxious. She’s late.

My smoky breath turns to liquid as it hits the window and, if I rub the mist into heavy droplets, I can make it trickle down the glass. From here I can see half the length of the grassy drive as it winds through the tall skeletal limes on either side, until it disappears right, curving downhill towards East Lodge and the lane and the outside world. If I move my head a fraction to the left the drive elongates and the tops of the limes veer suddenly to the side, distorted by the imperfections of handmade glass. Moving it a little to the right splits the beech hedge in two on either side of a bubble. I know every vagary of every pane. I’ve lived here all my life and, before me, my mother lived here all her life and, before her, her father and grandfather.

Did I tell you that Vivien said in her letter she was returning for good? For some final peace, she said, because now, she said, we ought to be keeping each other company for the rest of our lives, rather than dying lonely and alone. Well, I’ll tell you now, I don’t feel lonely and I certainly don’t feel as if I’m dying, but even so I’m glad she’s coming home. Glad, and a little nervous—a surge of apprehension is swelling in my stomach. I can’t help wondering what we’ll talk about after all these years and, I suppose, if I’ll even recognize her.

I’m not, as a rule, an emotional person. I’m far too—how shall I put it?—levelheaded. I was always the sensible sister and Vivi was the adventurer, but my excitement at her impending arrival even surprises me.

She is late, however. I look at my wristwatch—the digital one on my left wrist. Her letter most specifically read one-thirty and, believe me, it’s not my timekeeping that’s gone awry. I keep a number of clocks just so I can be sure that, even if one or two let me down, I can always find the correct time. When you live by yourself in a house that you very rarely leave and is even more rarely visited, it’s essential that you don’t lose track of the time. Every minute lost—if left uncorrected—would soon accumulate to an hour, and then hours, until—as you can imagine—you could easily end up living in a completely erroneous time frame.

Our mother, Maud, and I were always waiting for Vivi: in the hall before we went to church or shouting for her from the landing to hurry up for school. And it’s now, as I wait for her again, that I find snippets of our childhood jumping into my head, slices of conversation, things I’ve not thought about since they happened: our first pair of boots, which Vivi had chosen for us, long black ones that laced to the top; long afternoons in the summer holidays spent damming up the brook to create our own tributaries and islands; sneaking into the loggia at harvest time to drink cider before taking it to the men in the fields; giggling with Maud at Clive’s rare excitement when he created a Six-spot Burnet with five spots; our first trip to boarding school, holding each other’s clammy hands with shared anticipation, squeezed among the chemical bottles in the back of Clive’s car.

It was a childhood in perfect balance, so I’m wondering what it was that came along and changed everything. It wasn’t just one thing. There’s rarely a sole cause for the separation of lives. It’s a sequence of events, an inexorable chain reaction where each small link is fundamental, like a snake of upended dominoes. And I’ve been thinking that the very first one, the one you push to start it all off, must have been when Vivi slipped off our bell tower and nearly died, fifty-nine years ago.

Chapter 2 The Bell Tower

When Maud gave birth to Vivien, on 19 October 1940, I thought she’d borne twelve other children of varying ages at the same time. I was almost three and I remember they all came home from hospital in a minibus. When I asked Maud why she’d had so many she said that we had the largest house in the district and could fit them all in, and two maids and a housekeeper to help her look after them. My father, Clive, told me later they were called evacuees. They had come from Bristol to play with us and to double the attendance at Saxby village school. I always thought Vivi was one of them and when, three years later, the worst of the blitz was over and the evacuees all went home, I couldn’t understand why baby Vivi had stayed.

“She’s your little sister, Ginny. This is her home,” Maud had said, hugging us both to her in the hallway.

I took a good look at Vivi then, in her little red woolen jumper, her fluffy hair sticking up and her big round eyes gazing at me. From that moment on, I worshipped her. Two more war years passed, and V-J Day brought weeks of celebrations. Then, while everyone else was adjusting to life in a country on its knees, Vivi and I were just getting on with our childhood together, sharing our secrets and our sugar ration.

Not only is Bulburrow Court the largest house in the district, it’s also the most striking. Tucked away in the soft folds of the West Dorset countryside and buttressed against the slope of its own hill, it overwhelms the village of low-lying houses below. A vast Victorian folly.

There are four stories and four wings. In the reception rooms marble fireplaces stand squarely under ornately corniced ceilings. In the paneled hall, a large oak staircase pours majestically from the vaulted ceiling onto the parquet floor, while behind the pantries at the back of the house—the north side—winds a much smaller, secret staircase designed to shuttle domestic staff discreetly up and down. By the time we were born, Bulburrow Court’s glory days were buried well within the previous century, when the house and gardens would not have run smoothly on less than twenty staff, more if you counted the surrounding tenant farmers and farm laborers, all originally part of the estate.

As we grew up, the Red House, as it was often called on account of the Virginia creeper that turns the south side a deep red each autumn, became better known as a local landmark than for its splendor. It was a reference for directions, a passing spectacle for West Country holidaymakers—iced in Gothic extravaganza and topped with castellated turrets, an observatory, the bell tower and mock-Elizabethan chimney stacks that rise above the peaks and valleys within the immense landscape of the roof, all arrogance and late-Victorian grandeur.

Outside, at the back of the house, the cobbled courtyard is enclosed by stables and apple stores, an old parlor and a butchery, still stained with slaughtering devices hanging grimly from the rafters. Behind them the loggia and then, at one time, Maud’s kitchen garden and cold frames, a former vegetable patch and a spinney lead up to the north water garden. To the south, meadows run down from the terraced gardens to the brook, the peach houses and the riveted tail section of a Halifax bomber that landed in our fields. Then there are the things that only Vivi and I knew about, like the holm oak that looks solid from the outside but is completely hollow in the middle. If you climbed up its branches it was possible to lower yourself into the guts of the tree, where we’d agreed to hide when the Germans came.

Bulburrow Court has been in my family since 1861 and since then, Maud told us, each generation couldn’t resist stamping its mark on it so that the house has become a conspicuous register of its own history.

“Either Victorians were vulgar or we were very vulgar Victorians,” our mother would say. “Each of us put his crest here, initials there and a turret or two everywhere,” and it was true that if you wandered around the house you were reminded of the relative self-importance, or vulgarity, of each of them. The first, Samuel Kendal, who made his fortune illegally importing agricultural fertilizers from South America (which Maud was not proud of), commissioned an enormous stained-glass window as a backdrop to the hall stairs, spanning the height of two floors. It depicts four completely fabricated—Maud said—family crests along with pompous Latin mottoes as if he had in fact been the progeny of the coming together of four great families. Samuel’s son, Anthony—Maud’s grandfather—had too much time and all his father’s money on his hands, so he added a star-gazing tower on the east side, which, since I’ve been alive, has had a far better purpose housing a rare colony of greater horseshoe bats. He also embossed his initials wherever he could around the house, which Maud said was a dreadful mistake because he has been remembered only as ANK.

Since then nothing has been added and lots has fallen off. Likewise, Samuel’s fortune hasn’t been added to but, rather, has slowly dwindled, as those who came after him pursued a far less lucrative profession—the study of butterflies and moths. So it is that Vivien and I are direct descendants of an eminent line of lepidopterists—including our own father, Clive. The vast attic rooms and the expansive cellarage of Bulburrow Court, along with many of the north-wing rooms and most of the outhouses, have for more than a century been reserved solely for the study of lepidoptera, with net and tank rooms, laboratories, winter rooms, caterpillar houses, pupation troughs, display cabinets and an internationally renowned entomological reference library.

While life for the other village children revolved around cattle and sheep rearing, or the harvest, our yearly calendar centered around the life cycle of a moth. For us it was endless hours of pupae digging in the autumn, moss gathering in the winter, spring evenings spent dusking and sallowing, and long summer nights light-trapping and sugaring in secret glades and forgotten wastelands. But spring was the busiest time, the time of emergence, as Clive called it, when our captive breeders would emerge from their winter cocoons in our attic rooms and the mating season would start.

Bulburrow Court was saturated with the belongings of four generations. Furniture, pictures, books and also things—artifacts, possessions, mementos, letters, papers and countless other bits and pieces—so that the moment you stepped inside, you were aware of the historic progression of the house. The walls leached the desires and fears of those who had peopled it. The style of the furniture, the pictures on the walls, the quality of the rugs and carpets, the toys we played with in our nursery, all spoke of the wealth, tastes and virtue of its past owners. The silverware, crockery, tapestries, even the linen for the beds, monogrammed for posterity, the stains on a tablecloth, the marks in the woodwork, the wear of the stairs, the wistfulness of an ancestor inadvertently revealed in the eyes of his portrait. They all told part of the same story, so that the house and its contents became a museum to the Kendals, a claustrophobic tribute to one dynasty.

Visitors were left in no doubt as to the family profession or their eminence in the field. The oak paneling in the hall was barely visible behind framed photographs, letters and commendations, honorary entomology memberships, framed newspaper clippings (“‘Largest Moth in Asia’ Found by Dorset Expert”) and supercilious photos of one or other of them meeting royalty or receiving yet another accolade.

The centerpiece in the drawing-room cabinet was a black-and-white photo of a fresh-faced ANK in a dense jungle, looking dapper with a clean flat cap angled to one side, surrounded by mud-soaked local porters. He’s holding up a board pinned with around two hundred moths that we assumed were the Blue Sapphires he had recorded collecting from Peru in 1898. Next to it, as if in perpetual competition, was the one of my grandfather Geoffrey solemnly shaking hands with the king of Mustang on an internationally acclaimed butterfly expedition to the Himalayas during the first part of the last century, his young assistant behind him, beaming into the camera while holding aloft a setting board and a huge bottle of killing fluid as if they were trophies.

Above this, framed specimens were arranged on the walls; Incatua molleen from Brazil, the size of a child’s hand, faded and worn and lifeless; a completed box-framed plate of all the known Brazilian Underwings, unidentifiable without the tabulated index beneath, set and pinned in the days before they knew how to fix the colors with ammonia. In the next display cabinet, caterpillar skins were laid out and labeled, the name of the famous nineteenth-century case makers, White and Sons, stamped across its mahogany top. The skins had been carefully pricked and blown, then dried papery and rigid over a Bunsen burner. Other, larger insects from across the world had their places lining the walls or in glass-topped mahogany cabinets: a bird-eating tarantula, a giant Australian cockroach, an Atacama scorpion, labeled as gifts from other eminences in the field of Victorian entomology, all of which led to the impression that rather than my family having been fond of the natural world, they had scoured the earth in a bid to kill and pin every poor insect that crossed their path. Maud thought the displays repulsive and Clive thought them unnecessary, but neither took them down.

Maud had added her own small exhibit to the museum. Half a dozen framed photos of our family stood together on an occasional table alongside the back of the sofa in the drawing room. One was of a young Maud and Clive embracing on a balcony in a foreign city, Paris perhaps, with the evening light behind them, eyes only for each other. It must have been taken before the war, before I was born. Maud is wearing a pretty peacock-print dress. She’s lifting her chin and arching backwards with happiness, Clive’s arms looped round the small of her back, supporting her preciously. Then there was the one of me as a baby, wrapped up so you can’t actually see any of me at all, Maud and Clive holding up the package between them next to the sundial on the top terrace. Snow hid the ground and lay, heavy and precarious, on the fir-tree limbs above us, and the image was blurred in a couple of places where snowflakes had caught the lens.

Most visitors would remember the house, foremost, as cold. It was built in the days when the vast rooms with their high ceilings and box bay windows could be kept warm only if constantly stoked by a staff that outnumbered the family. But after the war Maud said we couldn’t afford more than one help in the house and two in the garden so our maids, Anna Maria and Martha Jane (two of nine sisters from Little Broadwindsor) were sent home, and we were left with Vera. Vera was our housekeeper.

Vera said she didn’t work in the house but she was part of it, like the hall stairs or the potting shed. She didn’t talk very much but she was most interesting to study. She had wiry gray hair, and she’d been alive so long that her whole body was slowly shrinking, except for her nose, which grew instead and became slightly redder and more bulbous as time went by. Vivi said that Vera’s nose was sucking the life out of the rest of her body for its own independent growth. Sometimes another little lump would appear, or an aberrant gray hair an inch or so long as if it had arrived overnight already at full length. Maud would laugh when Vivi pointed out these things—Vivi was always making Maud laugh—although she said that she’d be Very Cross Indeed if either of us mentioned it in front of Vera as it was “a condition.” It was as if Vera’s face was in a constant state of flux, perhaps weather dependent or in response to what she’d eaten the day before.

The way we got around a diminishing staff was an evolving fluidity in the volume of the house throughout the year, a constant expansion and contraction, like a lung. In the most bitter winter weeks, we’d lock up the extremities and retreat to the inner sanctum, huddling in the heart of the building—the kitchen, the study and the library—where the fires could be kept continuous.

When we were children, Vivi and I were inseparable. When she went to play in the stream, scour the ridge for mushrooms, collect acorns for the farmers’ pigs, turn the apples for cider or go scrumping in the next-door village, whatever the pursuit, I’d go too. Our parents liked us to stay together. Sometimes Maud would check when she saw one of us setting out. “Have you got Ginny?” or “Are you with Vivi?” she’d shout, often out of a window from a higher level of the house. And if she ever saw Vivi set out without me she’d call her back, even the times I didn’t want to go: “Will you take Ginny, please?” and I’d feel I ought to go along for Maud’s sake. Vivi was always the leader, even though she was younger: She’d have a plan, a contingency plan and an emergency strategy. But I’d be right there, next to her, following her every move.

So, the day we went up the bell tower for the last time, of course it had been all Vivi’s idea. She was eight and I had just turned eleven. We’d crept up there after breakfast with a piece of toast each that we’d been saving, luxuriously spread with our mother’s famous loganberry jam. It was Vivi’s favorite place.

“We’re going to ask Vera if she’s seen a stray cat we fed yesterday,” Vivi told Maud at the table.

“With your toast?” Maud had asked.

“No, we’ll eat it before we get there,” Vivi said, as we rushed out of the kitchen.

“See? Told you it would work,” my little sister gloated when we reached the second pantry unrecalled. The second pantry, where Maud stored her cheeses, hung her meat and dried her gourds, was also the start of the secret set of back stairs. Halfway up the stairs was a little oak door, one where even I, at eleven years old, had to stoop slightly to get through. It had a hole you put your index finger through to lift the latch on the other side. From there was a steep oak staircase, unlit except for a shaft of natural light that coursed down from the top, tumbling the dust in its path. It was a magnet for a child like Vivi—any normal, imaginative child, in fact—and at the top was a little wooden platform open to the air and a small turret, surrounded by a low stone parapet.

The turret had a peaked wooden hat held up by wooden posts, all painted a kind of limey green, and hanging from its apex was a beautiful, dainty, blackened brass bell. A thick, furry, red-and-white striped rope, like an enormous piece of the sweets the American soldiers used to give us (they called it candy), hung from a brass hoop on top. It was just too thick for either of us to connect our thumb and fingers when we gripped it, and it disappeared through a hole in the wooden platform, ending up in the back passage on the ground floor beyond the pantries. It was on this platform, under this bell, in our own little turret, that we found just enough space for two small children to dream. Truth be told, it was Vivi who dreamed and I who listened, enraptured, for I was very aware that it was a gift that she’d been given and I had not. We’d go there when Vivi wanted to plot her next adventure or scheme her next scheme. Just sometimes I’d offer her a little idea, and just sometimes, not often, she’d latch upon it to help her see through the puzzles in her head. And I’d feel ever so slightly triumphant.

Vivien was from a fantastic world, definitely not the same one as mine. I thought when God made Vivi he was giving me a window to see the world in a different way. She lived out her dreams and fantasies in our house or in the woods behind it, or in the eleven acres of meadow that stretched out down to the brook. She spent hours meticulously planning her life—and mine.

“Ginny,” she’d start, “you promise, cross your heart hope to die, not to tell anyone?”

“Promise,” I’d say. I’d cross my heart with my right hand and I’d mean it.

I never tired of Vivi’s company, and I always took her side, even against Maud. Vivi might have been able to make our mother laugh, but she knew how to infuriate her too. (I never argued with Maud, but I rarely laughed with her either.) After they’d had a row Vivi would storm off in an uncontrollable temper and Maud would send me to try to comfort her. Often I’d find her sobbing with such abandon that I truly believed that even the little things sent her mood spiraling downwards, that they really affected her. When she was young she couldn’t control her emotions, swinging easily from good temper to bad.

So, if I hadn’t been there, squatting in the bell tower with her, I might have thought she’d jumped. But I saw how she’d slotted herself into a huge crescent-shaped stone, which made up part of the low parapet round the platform. For Vivi, it was an irresistible place to perch. She was making herself comfortable while holding her toast level in her left hand. I remember saying that I didn’t think she should be there, that it looked too dangerous, and just as she said, “Ginny, don’t be so bor-ing” a pair of martins, scouring the eaves for a nest site, startled out from underneath her little ledge. My heart leapt but Vivi must have lost her balance. I watched her trying to regain control of the toast that danced about, evading her grip like a bar of soap in the bath. For those slow seconds it seemed as if repossessing the toast was of utmost importance to her and that she was losing her balance didn’t register. I’ve never forgotten the terror in her eyes, staring at me, replayed a thousand times since in my nightmares, as she realized she was falling. I didn’t see her grabbing the bell, but she must have stretched out for it as she went, because it rang and the echo of that strike gave to me a resounding significance, a lifetime of noise. As I looked over the edge I saw her lying, not on the ground, three long stories below, as I’d imagined, but hanging motionless over the battlements that run above the porch. Later, they said the algae, recently proliferated because of the first few warm days of spring, had made the ledge more slippery than usual.

Peculiarly, she didn’t die. Or, rather, she died and came back again. Two ambulance men in red and black jackets carried her limp little eight-year-old body, full of plans for our future, on to a stretcher and down a wooden ladder from the top of the porch. But I was watching her all the time and I remember the moment she died; while she was on that stretcher I actually saw her Entire Future give up the struggle to survive and leave her, and at the same time I felt my own future reduced to a dead and eventless vacuum, a mere biological process.

It seemed longer but later Maud said that really it was just a minute before they got her back again. She was resuscitated in front of the porch by the ambulance men. I was in the driveway, watching, when Maud rushed up to me, red-faced and frantic, tugging at my arm in a frenzy. Her usual calm and poise had been shattered, giving way to raw terror. She was leaning slightly forward, as if she were about to vomit, her hair angry, eyes acute and desperate.

“Tell me what happened,” she pleaded. I said nothing. I stared at the hydrangea crawling up the side of the porch, its branches woody, split and peeling. If it weren’t for the fresh buds appearing at the tips, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was dead. I had already told her how Vivi had slipped off the tower, how she’d tried to catch her dancing toast.

“Ginny, darling,” she sobbed, folding her arm round my waist, pulling me gently to her, squeezing her cheek to mine, her mouth near my ear. “I love you,” she whispered slowly, and I knew it was true. “I love you and I don’t blame you. I just need to know the truth.” I could feel her whole body trembling, her tears gluing our cheeks together. My mother wasn’t this wretched person; she was usually the source of all strength. I stood rigid, thinking of the wetness on my cheek, feeling her shaking and trying to understand, trying to fathom what she wasn’t blaming me for.

The next minute Clive was striding towards us from where he’d been helping to lift Vivi into the ambulance. He looked at me as he approached, searching my eyes and finding my confusion as Maud clung to me. He leaned over and kissed my forehead firmly while unclasping Maud’s hands from my waist.

“Come on. We’re going,” he said, pulling Maud towards him, fastening her arms round him and leading her off to the ambulance.

When they were sent home from the hospital that afternoon they had no news yet of Vivi’s prospects. Clive showed Maud into the library to get her a drink, which was what she needed at times of crisis. I helped to pour it. “Open the cabinet, get a glass, no not that one, the little one. Can you see the bottle that says Garvey’s?” I found it and put my finger on it. “That’s the one, finest old amontillado. Mother’s sherry.” I stayed out of my parents’ way after that but later in the day, as I passed their bedroom on the landing, I heard them arguing, my mother sobbing.

“It’s all my fault. I thought we could be a normal family.” She was hysterical.

“We are a normal family. Stop jumping to conclusions,” I heard Clive say softly.

“Her sister’s dying…. She’s not even crying…. She stood there staring at the shrubs.” Maud’s voice was scathing. “There must be something—”

“Pull yourself together,” Clive interrupted in a tone I’d never heard him use before, not unkind, but firm and authoritative. “Save your hysterics until you have the facts.”

I knew they were talking about me and guessed Maud was angry about something to do with me, but I had no idea what.

Half an hour later I was in the kitchen, huddled next to the wood stove with Basil, our elderly Great Dane, when I heard the front door’s brass goat’s-head door knocker being rattled. I went to open the door, and Dr. Moyse, our family doctor from Crewkerne, greeted me effusively.

In our household, Dr. Moyse was the most trusted member of the outside world. He had cured three of our evacuees of diphtheria, nursed Vivi and me through whooping cough and devised a potion for Clive’s gout. But everyone seemed to forget that he had consistently failed to rid me of the four warts that cursed the underside of my fingers, which I’d developed the habit of chewing when I was eight. In the end Clive froze them off with pure liquid nitrogen.

The doctor was a favorite of the village children, giving them rides in his white convertible and telling them gory stories between puffs on his pipe. He was in his mid-thirties, incredibly tall and lanky, stooping through most of the doorways even in our house, staying hunched when he was standing. He’d get to his knees to talk to children. He had curly blond hair, wore round rimless spectacles and carried a doctor’s case over his shoulders with straps like a sports bag. When he walked he put a little bound in his step as if he’d just got a piece of good news. But Dr. Moyse had always made me feel uneasy. He singled me out for little or long conversations, losing his casual manner and becoming more serious, as if allowing me the intimacy of confiding in him, making sure I was aware he was on my side. Maud wouldn’t have heard a bad word against him, and I suppose he was nice enough. He was patient and kind perhaps, but he got on my nerves. He’d come and find me, then ask me daft questions right when I was in the middle of something. That day, as usual, I didn’t feel much like talking to him.

“Ginny,” he said, “I came as quickly as I could.” I said nothing. I hadn’t known he was coming at all. I opened the door so he could get past me. I was still battling with why Maud was angry with me. “Your mother wanted to see me,” he said to clarify his presence. “Any news from the hospital?”

I shook my head. “Maud’s upstairs,” I said.

I left him in the hall and went into the library. A fire crackled and hissed in the grate. Wasps, butterflies and crickets, painted daintily on the tiled surround, were brought to life by the flickering amber flames. I sat on the smooth oak window seat looking out at the valley in the distance, reddened by the low sun, and the pretty terraces just outside, trapped in the shadow of the house. Two low box hedges with last summer’s topiary efforts were still vaguely evident, the stone steps disappearing into rough pastureland, which, in a couple of months’ time, would be waving with the rare meadow grasses Maud had sown there. Basil followed me in, his uncut claws tapping on the parquet floor as he walked. He rested his chin on my lap, his jowls cold and wet from lapping at his water bowl. From this position his eyes, atop his head like an alligator’s, gazed at me, blinking and steady, imploring me, I imagined, just to be happy. I stroked his head and his tail started to bash the window seat in appreciation, steady like a metronome.

Maud had told me that when I was born we were snowed in for a month. For six days and six nights the snow had fallen, until it had reached the height of the ground-floor sills. Maud said that when you sat right here on this window seat and looked out onto the Bulburrow valley you had the impression the house had sunk. The tops of the hedges on the south terrace looked like hedge trimmings scattered on the ground, and the stone goose that topped our fountain, stretching his neck and bill high into the air to spurt out the water, looked as if he were just managing to keep his head above the ground in a desperate bid to breathe. It was this weather at my birth that had apparently swayed the balance of my personality. Maud told me it had made me the stay-at-home type.

“Can I come in?” Dr. Moyse was at the library door. Basil padded over to sniff him, friendly, bottom low and wiggling in submission, looking for an alliance with all factions.

“No,” I said, because it was what I meant, even though I knew it wasn’t a polite answer. I turned back to the window, mainly to avoid my own insolence or the trouble it might get me in. The doctor ignored me and wandered in silently, pretending to look from one book spine to the next, musing among the shelves and the gallery of pictures that hung between them, mostly framed satirical sketches from Victorian periodicals—men in top hats, black trench coats and waders prancing about the countryside, bounding after insects in a bog or leaning precariously out of fast-moving trains, an enormous net in one hand and a bottle of poison in the other—reminders of a time when the pastime was at its most popular, when trainloads of Londoners would flock to the country for a weekend’s mothing.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Dr. Moyse was beside me at the window, sharing my view as if that would allow him to share intimacies too. He appeared to arrive inadvertently, abreast of me, peering out of the window with casual indifference.

“Don’t you worry. I’m sure she’ll be fine, Ginny,” he said, seizing the moment and laying a hand awkwardly on my shoulder. I turned to the fire, and was instantly mesmerized by the bright flames dancing between the logs, squeaking and hissing because, yet again, Vera had taken from this year’s wood pile rather than last.

“Who?” I said, thinking of Maud seething upstairs.

“Who?” he said, astonished, pulling away his hand as if I were hot and bending his knees to be at my level. He looked directly at me, fixing my gaze. “Do you realize Vivien’s in hospital in a critical condition?” he said patronizingly. As if I were an idiot.

“Yes, I know,” I said, slightly irritated. “I just thought…Oh, it doesn’t matter.” I wouldn’t have been able to explain it suitably for him. I find that once people think you mean one thing you’re never able to change their opinion. But how could he be “sure she’ll be fine”? He hadn’t seen her or spoken to the hospital.

Dr. Moyse gazed at me with a most troubled expression. “No, go on, you can tell me. You and I are friends, Ginny.” He was always saying that—“You and I are friends.” I wasn’t his friend and I didn’t want to talk to him. It seemed far too complicated to explain.

“I just forgot,” I lied.

“We’re all on your side you know, Ginny, but sometimes you have to help us a little,” he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he asked if I was angry about what had happened, how I felt about it, if I was cross with Vivien or with my parents. He went on and on with the most peculiar questions, and really I just wanted to tell him that the only person who was making me angry was him, couldn’t he leave me alone. I know Dr. Moyse was a good man and he was always trying for the best, but sometimes it felt like he was interviewing me—what I felt about this and that and stupid things; if I ever wanted revenge. He never did it to Vivi. In the end, I told him I didn’t feel anything. I’d come to realize this was the best way to end his diatribe. He never knew how to continue when I said that.

Later that evening the telephone rang through the silence of the house. Clive answered it.

“Crewkerne two five one,” he said, pushing out his chin as he did habitually and stroking the thick-cropped beard that spread down his neck and merged with the hair rising up out of his shirt. He rubbed it with the back of his fingers, upwards against the growth. A moment later, “Thank you, Operator, put the hospital through.”

My heart beat away the time as Maud and I watched him, searching in vain for answers in his firmly set features as he listened. But his face, much of it hidden under the cropped beard, gave nothing away and the rhythm of his hand strokes up his neck were slow and even, unaltered by the news he was hearing.

“The good news is that Vivien is okay. She’ll be fine,” Clive informed us matter-of-factly after the call. “They’re watching her closely, but the doctor is confident she’ll pull through.”

My world regrew, not least because whatever the reason for Maud being upset with me soon dissolved into the many layers of a family’s misunderstood memories. Later, when we’d come back from visiting Vivi in hospital, it was as if she’d never even thought it. She hugged me and told me how lucky Vivien was to have such a loving older sister. Maud was right about that. I’ve always loved Vivi, even all the years she’s been away. And I always will, no matter what.

What Vivi lost that spring when she fell from the bell tower was not, luckily (as everyone kept telling her), her life, but the ability to have children. She’d been impaled on an iron stake, part of the balustrade that had run round the top of the porch. Maud said it used to be a balcony leading from the first-floor landing and my lookout window had been the door that led on to it. For the war effort everyone had to hand over any iron to the munitions factories, Maud said, to be melted down into guns and bullets, so the balcony—along with the house’s main gates—had to go.

Vivien had ruptured her womb and the infection quickly inflamed her ovaries so that a week after her fall she had an operation to take away her entire reproductive system. She lost it to save her life. It didn’t bother her, mind. She liked to tell people she had died once already, or give them the weeks, months or years since the accident that she “could have been dead for.” In the village, Mrs. Jefferson assured her that she must have been spared for a reason, that there would be a “calling” later in her life, and Mrs. Axtell questioned her persistently about what she had seen, trying to get a preview of eternity. Later, at school, she impressed her friends with stories of what it had felt like to die. None of them had known anyone who had died before. And once, when she’d found out that all a woman’s eggs are already in her ovaries when she’s born, she told Maud’s lunch guests that she’d lost all her children.

But Vivi herself was still a child. She hadn’t yet developed the womanly urge to hold her newborn, to feel and need its dependence and to understand that that was what life was about and nothing else mattered. Nor had I, so at the time neither of us realized the true significance of her accident. Only that she’d been so incredibly lucky.

Chapter 3 Vivien, a Small Dog and the Missing Furniture

This full-length arched window at the end of the first-floor landing, where I’m still waiting for Vivi, is my lookout. I know it might sound funny but sometimes I think of the house as my ship, myself as its captain, and here I’m at the helm, in charge of its course and direction. I can see who’s coming up to the house, who’s walking their dogs on the footpath running up to the ridge and what’s about to come down the lane from the top of the hill. For instance, I can tell you that every day, at eight in the morning, the woman from East Lodge—I don’t know her name—takes her collie up to the ridge. Sometimes, not often, she’ll glance this way when she gets to the bit that curves into view of the house, but she doesn’t know I’m watching her—I make sure I’ve pulled back against the pillar in time. I feel in control in this captain’s post: I see what I want to see and nobody sees me.

I have two other strategic lookouts. From my bedroom window I can see the church, the postbox in the wall on the other side, the lane leading up to the rectory and Peverill’s bustling farmyard. From the bathroom I can see directly south to the brook and beyond to the peach houses, and to the Stables where Michael lives, the other gate houses and the lane that leads to them.

I don’t venture out much anymore. It’s unnecessary. Michael, who used to garden for us with his father, buys my groceries and does the odd job, like putting out the rubbish at the end of the drive. I don’t employ him anymore so I don’t know if he does it out of kindness or duty, but he’s the only person I see close up these days, even though I spend hours watching the daily turns of the village from a distance. Bulburrow’s houses are clustered in a valley bowl and from my three vantage points I can see them all, except a couple of new bungalows built halfway up the lane to the north. If I’m at the helm of a ship, then Bulburrow Court is at the helm of the village, the central control tower from which the rest can be monitored and directed.

When Vivi and I were growing up, we knew every single person in every single house, but I don’t know any of them now. The ones we knew have died and their children moved away. It’s one of the problems with getting old: the more people you outlive, the more your life reads like a catalog of other people’s deaths.

Poor Vera, our housekeeper, was the first person I can remember dying. It took her four months. Maud said that, really, she blew up slowly and eventually burst. Vivi and I weren’t allowed to visit her in her north-wing room, as Maud said it might give us nightmares, but I’m certain we had much worse ones just imagining what Vera’s death looked like. But it was Maud’s death that had the biggest impact on our lives. It was pain-free, although probably not as dignified as she’d have liked. She tripped down the cellar steps. But afterwards our lives changed direction forever. That was when Vivi left this house for the last time and she hasn’t been back since. It’s quite a thing, you know; she was twenty-one when I last saw her, not much more than a child. I was twenty-four.

My reverie is disturbed by the even hum of a modern car slowing down the hill and fading, then rising again in this direction, and I can tell it’s cruising up the drive. It must be her. Not many people come up the drive these days. Mostly it’s strangers who’ve taken a wrong turning and quickly reverse or turn round again at the top. Then there are the sort who have recently been coming more and more, in their tall, smart cars. They bang the door knocker, and when I don’t respond, they go away and come back later with a letter asking if I’ll sell up. Why on earth do they think I’ll want to start moving house now? Once a month the woman in the stripy bobble hat walks up the drive. She’s from Social Services, and when she gets no answer to her knock, she leaves her calling card and a pile of leaflets. I like to flick through them—it keeps me in touch with at least some of what’s going on in the world—and all the junk advertising that comes through the door: offers on credit cards, holidays to win, how to switch my fuel supplier, or the free Diamond Advertiser, which they don’t always bother to bring up the drive. I used to have a radio but it never worked very well so I got rid of it.

It’s the leaflets from the bobble-hat woman that I find the most interesting, and relevant. It’s how I know, for instance, that my gnarled joints and blotchy fingers, my loss of appetite, low energy, dry eyes and mouth are all part of my rheumatoid arthritis and that I should be eating a lot of green-lipped mussels. It’s how I know that, because I have “flares” followed by “remissions,” my case is fairly mild at the moment but will get a lot worse when it becomes chronic. Then it will be permanently painful and I’ll have to have the joints “popped” to let out some of the excess synovial fluid and I don’t like the sound of that at all.

A silver car rounds into view. It is broad and long and low, and purrs with an air of quality and arrogance. Vivien had told me when she would arrive, but not how. The car makes a wide sweep of the drive’s circular frontage and comes to a standstill alongside the front door, as horse-drawn carriages would have done when Maud was a girl. My heart is beating so hard that when the engine cuts, the sound of hollow thudding fills the silence, and I’ve just realized I never truly believed until right now that she was going to come at all. At the same time I wonder—for a fleeting moment—if I really want her to. But then the thought is gone. She’s coming back because she needs me now. After all, I’m her older sister.

The driver’s door opens. Why is everything happening so slowly? Perhaps it’s true that time is slowed by a quicker heartbeat, like the mayfly, with one hundred wing beats per second, which can fulfill a lifetime in a day. I imagine a young Vivi getting out, the girl I remember her as, quite forgetting I should be expecting someone I won’t recognize. Instead, out steps a young man, no more than twenty-five, with thick dark hair and a smart blue suit. I’m stunned. Where’s Vivi? Perhaps he has nothing to do with Vivi at all. My wave of excitement crashes around me. Has he the wrong house? Another person come to offer to buy it from me, leaving an obsequious letter when there’s no answer? But instead of coming towards the porch, the man walks round the car and opens its back door, the one nearest the house. Now I know she’s here.

A decorative walking stick is thrust out of the car onto the muddy gravel, the man holds out his arm and, leaning on the stick with one hand and taking the young man’s arm with the other, Vivien emerges, guided like royalty. My face is pressed to the window but she is too close to the house for me to see her clearly. All I can see is the top of her head, gray like mine, but while my hair is long and lies flat against my head, hers is cropped short and obviously shaped. She walks to the back of the car, stops and faces the house. She plants the stick firmly on the ground in front of her, both hands resting on the pommel at the top, one over the other, her feet slightly apart for balance, and surveys Bulburrow Court. All the while the young man is collecting bags and boxes and hangers of clothes wrapped in plastic, and piling them outside the car. Vivien takes in the house slowly, looking crossways from one side to the other. I can imagine what she is seeing: the windows, a few cracked, others smashed with boards replacing the glass; gargoyles, exact copies of those from Carlisle’s twelfth-century cathedral, whose farcical grimaces scared us as children; the corbels that hold up the porch; escutcheons carved under the mullioned windows, the battlements above. It is easy to imagine what she can see, but what memories does every window of each room stir in her? What emotions do the dark gray haunting stones bring, or the enormous quoins at the base of the house, each made from a solid piece of granite, the almighty foundation stones of our lives, holding up for generations the framework of our ancestry?

As she is gripped in her consideration of the house, so I am gripped by watching her from above, all at once desperate to know what is going through her mind.

Her head lifts as she studies each section slowly, methodically even, and I am about to make out more of her features when her eyes begin to run diagonally, crosswise, towards the top of the porch, and up, to the arch of my window…. I pull back into the shadows before she spots me, but as I do, it strikes me that I have seen a ghost. Maud. I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t even tried to imagine what Vivien would look like but I’d never considered she’d be so like Maud. I feel like a little girl again. I don’t dare look out of the window now for fear that I will meet Maud’s all-knowing eyes. I’m numbed with indecision, for a moment paralyzed. I can’t tell you how many minutes go by before I am slowly aware that the goat’s-head knocker is being rattled from side to side (rather than banged as a stranger would do).

I glance at my clothes. I’ve been so busy wondering what Vivien would look like that I haven’t considered the impression she’ll have of me. I’m thinking now of how I might appear to her, but because I never check myself in the mirror these days, I can’t really decide. My hair, I know, must be pretty unruly, like a vagabond’s I should think, and whereas I can tell she’s made an effort with makeup, I don’t have any. Quickly I undo my ponytail, run my fingers through my hair in an effort to comb it and refix the elastic band. I check the front of my navy cardy and pick off a couple of specks of something white and crusty, toothpaste, perhaps, then go down to answer the door. I’m brimming with that sick, nervous apprehension, the sort that churns your stomach. When I get to the heavy oak front door I stop. I have to gather myself for our meeting. I begin to fiddle with the black plastic watch strap on my left wrist, a habit I find consoling. I run my finger back and forth along the inside next to my skin and rub the smooth Perspex face firmly with my thumb, until I know I am ready.

When I open the door Vivien is standing back a couple of paces in the porch, as if to give me a fuller view of her. She’s discarded her stick, as if it was a mere affectation. I am impressed. She must look at least ten years younger than me, not three. She’s smart in a pair of rust-colored cords and a thin gray jumper with a speckled furry collar. A thickly beaded belt with an enameled clasp is draped loosely round her hips and she smells strongly of scent. She wears a simple twisted gold bangle on one wrist and a heavy bejeweled spider crawls up her left breast, rather reminiscent of the brooches Maud collected. She has dangling, brightly colored earrings, on each of which, at further inspection, a cockerel is painted. A small dog, I wouldn’t know which sort, a wiry white one, is tucked casually under her arm. Although the resemblance to Maud is still a surprise, thankfully, up close like this, Vivien is less like our mother than she was from the landing window. She has Maud’s intelligent face, shaped by wise, reflective lines at her brow and mouth, but her eyes are not Maud’s at all.

“Hello, Vivien,” I say coolly, though I’ll admit I’m a little in awe of her immaculate appearance. I remember how Vivi, like Maud, always liked to make an impression, to strive for a reaction, and it used to rile her that I was impassive and imperturbable—or, rather, that I was able to hide my true feelings. My emotions weren’t played out on my face, like hers. I’d always thought it was the price she paid for having a pretty, highly defined face, with delicate, precise features—a hard straight nose, distinctly curved lips, visible cheekbones. Such refinement was not well equipped to shield a disturbance rising beneath it, and every one of Vivi’s emotions would surface and give itself away. None of my features were so elegant or clear-cut, but a thousand thoughts and feelings could be buried unnoticed beneath my broader cheeks and softer, rounded nose. My lips were too wide and full for my face, the bottom one too heavy, curving down a little to reveal a glimpse of the inside. While Vivi had worked on disguising her true feelings as she grew up, I had worked on finding a little muscle to lift my bottom lip so that it might meet its opposite.

“Ginny…,” she says warmly.

“Vivi…,” I reply, finding myself mimicking her tone.

“Is the east wing vacant?” she inquires, mockingly serious, as if she’s addressing a hotel receptionist.

“The east, the west, and the north are all vacant,” I say, more as an accurate answer than to affect her game.

“Well then, I’ll take all three.” She smiles, seeking my eyes. There is a brief, awkward pause as she stands watching me, and I her, openly studying each other like the meeting of two cats on one territory. When we were young I’d instinctively wait, even a split second, to judge her mood. She’d make the first comment, suggest the first move, and I’m irritated to find myself once again waiting to divine her reaction, as if the intervening years have just slipped away.

“Ginny…,” she says again, this time in a low questioning voice. Then all of a sudden her face relaxes and she breaks out into a loud irrepressible giggle, throwing her head back wildly, abandoning herself to laughter.

“What’s so funny?” I ask, a little offended.

“Oh, Ginny,” she manages, between hiccuped giggling. “Look at us, Ginny. Just look at us. We’re old people!” she says, and then another uninhibited wave attacks her. It’s a laugh I recognize instantly, that I’m surprised to have almost forgotten, the whooping little-girl giggle that carried me through my childhood, that I could recognize from the other side of a field, a laugh so catching it could infect even the iciest disposition.

And I’m off. I don’t think I’ve laughed like this, bursting out uncontrollably, since we were children. It’s the kind that makes you bend over double with a knot in your tummy and, at every lull, the frenzied embers of your hilarity are still so hot that you need only the smallest spark of absurdity to set it off again, burning through your stomach.

It’s surprisingly liberating to laugh after a long time having not. Soon we are in unstoppable and unsteady hysterics and the dog under Vivien’s arm is being thrown about, unfazed, as if this were a regular occurrence. Vivien’s dog doesn’t seem to comply with the most basic description of Dog, like barking or wagging a tail. I can’t even see a tail. It seems less of a companion and more of a protuberance, most of the time forgotten like any other body part. Uncharacteristically giddy, I look past Vivien and find her driver inspecting the higher reaches of the turrets and battlements of the house, ignoring us, akin to a manservant not noticing the torrid affair of his master even though he keeps watch at the door. Vivien catches my eye and we set each other off again, laughing until I see tears chasing the makeup down her face. I can tell this is going to be fun.

Vivien sits down to rest on the stone bench that lines the porch and puts the dog on her lap. We’re utterly exhausted. I allow a wave of nostalgia to sweep through me like a revelation. It was Maud and Vivi who used to fill this house with laughter. Sometimes, as I listened distantly to their late-night conversations, I envied how they could make each other laugh, and now, sitting here in the porch with Vivien, I’m aware for the first time that part of me went missing a long time ago, that without her I’d become a different person and I’ve just had a taste of who I used to be or even what I might have become, had she been there.

The dog on Vivien’s lap gnaws the top of its paws, cleaning them, scrunching its upper lip in a concentrated effort to get into the gaps between its claws. I’m watching him and wondering if his paws have ever been dirty, if he’s ever been allowed to walk, or if cleaning them is something dogs are programmed to do, whatever their state. To tell you the truth, I’m usually most wary of dog owners. In general I find them loud, meddlesome people, who invariably love their dogs in an unhygienic sort of way.

“This is Simon, by the way,” Vivien says, following my gaze. “You won’t even notice him. He’s very old and I’m sure he won’t last long,” she adds.

I don’t know whether to thank her for the reassurance that he will die soon or to say I’m sorry about it. Or to admit I’d almost stopped noticing him already. Instead I look at the creature and try to screw up my nose in a way that is supposed to indicate that it looks like a very sweet dog, like the faces people make at babies. By Vivien’s reaction—or lack of one—my expression doesn’t look remotely genuine or, worse, she doesn’t register that it has any meaning at all. She looks away as if she’s just witnessed me picking my nose.

I am, and always have been, hopeless at social expression. Our mother, Maud, was a master. She’d say all the right things and make all the right faces at exactly the right times. For it to come so naturally, I think you need to start believing you’re earnest even if you aren’t. I can’t dupe myself like that; I’m too straightforward. If I don’t believe it, I can’t say it. It’s partly why people don’t feel comfortable around me, why I’ve always found it difficult to fit in. I can’t work out if it was something I was never born with or something I’ve never learned.

Clive wasn’t socially skillful either, but that was because he never made an effort rather than through lack of understanding. Clive preferred silence to small talk, but Maud could do both. She was instantly able to judge the person she was with and adapt herself to suit them.

Once, when I was twelve and Maud and I were buying me stockings in the ladies’ wear department at Denings in Chard (for a barn dance that she was making me go to with Vivi), she rushed up to a fat, exhausted-looking woman with a pram and bent down over her new saggy-looking baby. Then she looked up and said “Oh, isn’t she g-o-r-geous” (in the only way she would—really loudly), so that everyone in the shop turned and stared at us. Her insincerity was so blaringly obvious that I thought they were staring because she’d made a fool of herself. Later, while I was hiding alone in a dark corner of the dance, I resolved to let her know, kindly, so that it didn’t happen again. When I did, she stroked my hair and thanked me lovingly. Years later, I realized I’d been wrong about the other shoppers: The ladies’ wear shoppers hadn’t questioned Maud’s feigned delight for a second. Maud had thought to give the tired new mother a little gift of encouragement, a ticket to confidence. The mother had pulled herself up and smiled and, while I was tugging at Maud’s trousers to encourage her to leave, that woman had felt warm and wonderful and worthwhile inside. What I want you to know is the part that baffles me isn’t that Maud lied for someone else’s benefit, or that she didn’t let herself admit it, but that none of the other shoppers questioned it. They understood instinctively why she was complimenting that baby, as if they all belonged to the same club, born knowing club rules.

Vivien stands up and walks past me into the house and up the stairs, instructing the driver to follow with her bags. I’m still in the porch and I’m starting to wonder so many things at the same time, like a small child beginning to question the world. I wonder if she’s as immaculately dressed every day; I wonder why she wants the east wing; I wonder if she too is plagued by arthritis; I wonder if she’ll remember to miss the second from last stair, which squeaks (Vera had once told us it was groaning in complaint after a century of being trodden on, and we’d made a pact to let it rest for a generation); I wonder what Vivien’s left behind in London; I wonder if this is the start of another special bond, like the one we had many years ago. Most of all I wonder why she’s decided, finally, to come home.

From the doorstep, I look up at the east windows on the first floor. Vivien appears and stares out disconsolately, without seeing me. Beautiful, warm, fun-loving Vivi. Finally she’s back at Bulburrow.

I’m still outside when Vivien comes downstairs, followed by her obedient driver. “Darling, what happened to the house?” she asks reproachfully.

“Oh, it’s beginning to fall down,” I say, feeling wonderfully at ease with my sister.

“I mean all the furniture. Were you robbed?”

I’d forgotten she hadn’t seen it like this. Selling the furniture has been such a gradual process. Bobby came once every few months and took another load in his transit van. I met him first when he worked for the water board and had been sent to fix a series of leaking pipes on our land. Three days later, when he’d finished the work (and all my biscuits), he told me he owned an antiques shop in Chard and suggested he sell some furniture for me. When he’d got rid of it he came back with an assistant and loaded some more, the heavier oak pieces, and then, a few months later he took more, until his visits became fairly regular over the last ten years or so. Each time he paid cash for the items he’d sold. It was an excellent system and it suited me. I converted assets into grocery money without having to use a bank or go to town. I lived amid my own cash pot! I laugh out loud at the thought, still giddy with exuberance from our doorstep hysterics, as if I’ve become tipsy on a single sip of wine.

“It’s become my pension,” I quip, readying myself to laugh again.

But Vivien isn’t laughing. “You sold the lot?” she gasps, her darkly rimmed eyes widening in disbelief. The change in her throws me. Alongside the makeup, I find it impossible to judge if she’s being serious. I look at Simon, who blinks, incapable of offering any clues.

“Well, I’ve kept all the clocks and barometers that work, and Jake’s head,” I say, motioning to the stuffed pig’s head on the wall as we walk in. (To tell you the truth, Bobby had said he didn’t want it, but now I’m glad. Jake was Vivi’s pet pig when she was about six, and she was so upset when he died [of unnatural causes] that Clive had his head mounted for her so she could see that he was smiling happily when he died.)

I smile myself at the long lost thought of Jake, but Vivien can’t hide her disappointment. “But Virginia, do you realize”—she says this like Maud would have done, slowly and emphatically, Do…You…Realize—“you needed only to sell the Charles the Second chest in the hall for your pension? Or the settle, or the sideboard, an Aubusson tapestry, a few caquetoire chairs…” Her voice rises until it cracks. She sits heavily on the porch seat, as if the very idea has whipped her legs from under her. “Or a fucking painting,” she half shouts, half cries. “But everything?! The house was crammed with furniture, Ginny. Furniture,” she says again, waving her arms in front of her, as if painting it back in its place. “Furniture, rock-crystal chandeliers, dressers,” she rants, in a senseless naming game of anything that springs to mind, “carpets, canteens, silver, vases, mirrors”—she pauses for breath—“porcelain, that, that oyster mirror just there”—she points at the bare wall in front of her—“the William and Mary…” She puts up both hands to cover her face. “Priceless furniture, Ginny.”

I assure you I am now in no doubt of her seriousness. I understand that it’s been a shock, and one she had never expected, but I’d never have guessed it would affect her so deeply. Why is it that as people grow old they cling to possessions and let go of knowledge? After all, it’s only furniture. Each generation has spliced down Samuel Kendal’s original estate, first the land, then the estate houses and the outbuildings. Surely the unnecessary hordes of contents are a natural progression? Besides—and this is just between you and me—I don’t think Vivien’s thought it through. She thinks there’s a legacy to continue, poor woman, but it’s all over now. Vivien and I are the end of the line, there is no future generation. It would have been split up and sold off after our deaths, free money for the government, if it hadn’t been sold already. Perhaps she’s slightly doo-lally—our own father went demented much younger than this. I try to reassure her, as I used to when we were little. I always enjoyed comforting her.

“But it’s completely, absolutely, entirely empty,” she complains, as if there are recognizable degrees of emptiness. “No pictures, no clothes, no photos. I mean, you’ve wiped out every reference to our past. Our family might not have happened. There was no point in its existing for the last two hundred years if it’s got nothing to show for itself.”

It is an interesting view but not one I share. Is it really necessary to record your life in order to make it worthwhile or commendable? Is it worthless to die without reference? Surely those testimonials last another generation or two at most, and even then they don’t offer much meaning. We all know we’re a mere fleck in the tremendous universal cycle of energy, but no one can abide the thought of their life, lived so intensively and exhaustively, being lost when they die, as swiftly and as meaningless as an unspoken idea.

“I don’t mind, Vivien, really I don’t. I never used all those things and I don’t want the clutter. I feel far better off without it,” I say softly, sitting next to her. And I mean it. I found the furniture stressful. I didn’t want to look at it for fear it needed cleaning or I’d discover a scratch that I’d not noticed before. Since it’s gone so too has the constant tightness in my stomach, and I find the house and the space much more manageable. Vivien drags her hands down her face, smudging her eyes some more, and pushes her lower cheeks up with her fingers, making her mouth a duckbill. She seems to come to some sort of resolution.

“Oh, darling, Ginny.” She sighs, more relaxed now. “That was our family’s…our ancestors’ entire collection of furniture, of belongings, of everything. It’s taken nearly two hundred years to accumulate.”

“I haven’t sold any of the moth books. Or any of the specimens, or the equipment,” I say quickly, a little too defensive. “The museum and the lab and the other attic rooms haven’t been touched.”

Vivien nods slowly.

“I forgot. You’ve always been hopeless with money, haven’t you?” she vituperates. “You should have phoned me about it, you really should,” she says wearily. She speaks as much to the flagstones on the porch floor, smoothed deliciously wavy with wear, as to me. I don’t reply, not because I agree—I don’t even have a telephone—but because it seems a good place to end the conversation. And, believe me, I desperately want it to end. I want to salvage our laughter, the excitement and euphoria I felt all too briefly. It’s irrelevant, anyway. The furniture has gone because I wanted it to, and I needed the money. It was my choice, and that’s that.

Now I’m irritated with myself for becoming defensive. After all, she left all those years ago and she invited herself back, and now she’s disappointed with a decision I made and says I should have phoned her for advice. I remember now how Vivi sometimes patronized me, but I used not to mind. I always accepted that she was worldlier than I and, actually, I quite liked it, as if she was looking out for me. It was part of her color, part of her quality. Now that I’m self-sufficient, now that I’ve achieved my own goals in life, I find her criticisms more difficult to stomach. I force myself to stop thinking about it. I don’t want to ruin our reunion.

I tell her I’m going to make us a cup of tea, then go inside to put the kettle on the Rayburn to boil. We are going to forget about the furniture. We are going to drink tea and talk, reminisce and laugh, and she will tell me funny stories about her life in London. I will sit, listen and relax, live them all through her and we’ll laugh again. We are going to catch up, and what a lot of time we have to catch up on! Vivien was right. She was always right. The kettle starts its whistle, faint and hesitant at first. It was her idea for us to live together again and it feels natural that she is back as we near the end of our lives, companions and soul mates, devoted and inseparable. The kettle is now screaming at full steam, shrill and desperate. I slide it off the hot plate.

Chapter 4 Belinda’s Pot

Vivien and I haven’t spoken to each other since our dispute about the furniture. I’m focusing intently on the tea-making process so that I do not have to look up and see her walking back and forth past the open kitchen door talking on her mobile phone, or her driver carrying her boxes and bags from the car into the house and up the stairs. I’m impressed that Vivien has such a phone, that she’s kept up with the times like that. I pour until the teapot is a quarter full.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Simon, the small dog, trotting presumptuously into the kitchen. He stops next to me and wrinkles his eyes, ingratiating himself. I ignore him frostily and, accepting that he lacks the skills required to change my opinion of him, he takes himself off to lie by the Rayburn, first circling over his chosen resting place, then flopping to the ground.

Holding the handle in my left hand and moving it in a small circular motion, I swish the water inside the teapot while my right hand cups the outside, high up, waiting to feel the water’s heat through the bone china. I study the pattern of small, prettily entwined wildflowers that ramble up from the base to the lid, while willing the swirling water to gain enough momentum to reach up the sides in its circuit inside the pot. To be honest, I have no idea why the china must be warmed or whether the tea really does taste better for it, but it’s those little tenets your mother teaches you from an early age, which her mother instilled in her at a similar age, that become the most difficult to let go of in old age.

The teapot is an elegant one, tall rather than fat. Although it was Maud’s, we’ve always called it Belinda’s teapot. I don’t know the details—I never knew the old woman—but the story went that Belinda had left it to Maud in her will as a way of thanking her for whatever help, advice or listening time Maud had given her, as my mother was naturally predisposed to do. During her lifetime, Maud came to fulfill the role of village consultant and appeaser. It was she who wrote, for instance, requesting more prisoners of war to help bring in the harvest at Peverill’s farm and later, she who quelled the uproar when Charlotte Davis’s horse was found trampling the graves in St. Bart’s churchyard and later still, she who deflected the bloodshed when Michael gave the Axtells’ youngest daughter a cannabis cigarette. Maud would counsel, correct and court-martial. She’d offer coffee at Bulburrow after church on Sundays, give a twice-yearly drinks party and open her garden for a week in the summer. Maud loved people. She understood them and liked to surround herself with them, whether to entertain or to help them. Vivi always joked that our mother wouldn’t survive without doing things for other people.

All in all, I’d say Maud was a near-faultless woman. She had just the right amount of wisdom and wit and charity. Taller than her husband, she was also the sort of woman who looked elegant in whatever she wore, from her gardening clothes to her dressing gown. She had rows of mid-length floral dresses in her wardrobe, full-length sequined evening wear, long and short boots and hats and gloves for every occasion. Maud loved occasions.

Clive, on the other hand, was neither sociable nor well groomed, but he was not allowed to hide himself away. He trailed along to all the local events and gatherings and would smile wryly when Maud introduced them playfully as “the lady and the tramp.” As I said, Maud would be dressed immaculately, while Clive would walk out in one of his two lifelong gray suits, which hung off him from the days when he ate more and were frayed at the collar and cuffs. Sometimes it seemed as if he dressed shabbily on purpose. Once—and I can swear to this—he wore his slippers to a luncheon in the neighboring village. He said there were fewer holes in them than in his shoes, but Maud teased him all afternoon as if she was enjoying his deviance from the social etiquettes she observed so stringently herself. After a few drinks, Maud became the soul of the party, and sometimes I’d see Clive watching her adoringly from afar, entranced by his wife’s charm and vitality. But Clive himself—who never drank because he said it gave him gout—was also surprisingly popular, especially with the ladies who mistook his inadvertent nonconformity to be furtive antiestablishment, which excited them in 1950s Dorset society.

I put two of the new pyramid-style tea bags into Belinda’s pot. Michael bought them for me instead of leaves two weeks ago, explaining that the extra effort required in dealing with the loose stuff was unnecessary, these days. My immediate instinct—as you can imagine—was to resist the novelty, but I tried it and found the bags so much easier to handle with the poor grip control I have in my fingers. I used to have such trouble, especially on those mornings when my fingers curl up with pain, in keeping the leaves on the spoon rather than shaking off and skidding all over the counter. Then, when I’d maneuvered as many as I could into the infuser, the trap that stops them free-roaming the pot, I’d fiddle about for several exasperating minutes trying to close the catch to shut the little devils in, only to be given yet more trouble hooking the tiny link over the pot’s rim. In the end the strength of the tea was more dependent on my deftness for delivering the leaves into the tea trap, rather than consistent with my own preferences to taste, and often I’d have to start all over again. Now that I’ve tried the bags I’ll never go back to the loose. Michael is trying now to convince me that teapots aren’t necessary. I’ve been pretending I agree with him, to avoid having to discuss it, but between you and me, Michael knows nothing of the satisfaction in the ritual of making tea.

I fill Belinda’s pot with boiling water and put on the lid to let it brew. Perhaps today it would have been better to deal with the leaves. I’d have had a longer task to concentrate on, to take my mind off what Vivien is doing and thinking. She’s now upstairs making shuffling noises and wandering between the room directly above me and the one over the pantry that used to be her childhood bedroom. Her driver is carrying up the last of her belongings.

I take down two cups and saucers from the dresser and fetch the milk from the fridge, arrange them by the steaming pot and wait. I won’t pour the tea until she comes down, or it might get cold.

I’ll tell you a strange old thing that I’d never have predicted. I can feel the start of Vivien’s and my relationship re-forming again, but—and this is what is odd—it’s exactly the same as it was half a century ago, as if we’ve not matured at all, as if our childhood is flooding in and scrabbling to catch up with our old age. Here I am again, leaving the decision with her, waiting for her to judge whether our little altercation is over and to resume our reunion. Vivien sets the rules and the boundaries, she takes the risks, and I’m there waiting for her when she needs me. I’d almost forgotten that that was my role.

Those sisterly boundaries shifted when, two years after Vivi’s accident, we were sent to Lady Mary Winsham’s School for Girls. Maud gave us a little talk the night before we left for our first term. “I want you to look after each other so that if either of you gets into any sort of difficulty,” she said, looking at us sternly, one after the other, “you know that you can go and find your sister and talk about it.” As I was the eldest, I was sure she was asking me, especially, to look after Vivi.

Our parents thought that if we started at the same time we’d be a support to each other, but as it turned out, Vivi didn’t need my support. While she started at ten in the lower fourth and found herself instantly popular with the forty other new girls, I was the new girl at thirteen, looking for a niche in a long-assembled year group where friendships and alliances had been brokered for three years already.

The school was an hour’s journey away, and at the start of each new term, Vivi and I were squashed up with our trunks in Clive’s light blue Chester, which he’d converted into a mobile moth-setting station. He’d ripped out the backseats to make way for a setting table that he’d bolted to the floor, so Vivi and I squeezed in on either side of it and worried that our heads might bump if the road got rough. Bottles of bromide, cyanide, ammonia, sodium nitrate and other noxious potions rattled casually in the back, loosely tied into a rack, while nets, traps, pins, scalpels, water baths, corkboards and other essential mothing equipment were arranged neatly in boxes and strapped down elsewhere. By today’s standards, Clive would be vilified for carrying such vast quantities of poisons alongside his children on bumpy country roads, but in 1950, Clive’s mobile setting station was the envy of his colleagues. It had everything required for killing, anesthetizing, relaxing, color fixing and setting moths when they were fresh from the field so he was able to prepare them before the common problems of wing damage, color change and rigor mortis had time to set in.

Lady Mary’s was where well-brought-up girls might “acquire manners, posture and conversation” and a little bit of education. Each week our MPCs (manners, posture and conversation) were graded and suitable punishments set if they were found to have a low average. Even so, during my time there, I never found any evidence of manners in that school. Instead, I was severely subjected to the underhand taunting of an all-girl environment.

The first small incident took place during my second week, when I challenged Alice Hayward who was squishing flies for fun, flies that were desperately vying for freedom through the 5B windows, and I appealed to her to let me open one for them. Within seconds she’d managed to get the whole class laughing at me. The incident instantly marked her out as a leader and sealed my fate, stamping out any hope I might have held of making friends—all because I wouldn’t hurt a fly.

I wasn’t quick-witted or confident enough to play them at their cruel games. I’d feel the heat rush to my face as I fumbled for a rebuff, and I’d become highly aware of my heavy bottom lip, the position of my hands, of my entire body, and I’d end up looking silly and uneasy. I’d walk away hearing the other girls snigger, and it hurt. I didn’t cry, but each time it changed something in me, deep down, shaping who I was and who I would become: each time less confident yet stronger; more insular yet more self-contained.

During the holidays I confided in Maud, who held Clive fully responsible for my not being able to cope with the gibes of other teenage girls. “I’m afraid you’ve got a bit of your father in you somewhere, darling,” she’d say remorsefully. “He’s not a fighter either.”

Although I loved my father dearly, I didn’t see it as a great compliment to be told I’d acquired any of his characteristics. On first impressions, Clive might seem no more than a small, dull man, but once you knew him, he was an interesting sort of dull. He was a uniquely two-dimensional person, either uncommonly interested in things or uncommonly uninterested. For instance, he wasn’t interested in food so he wouldn’t waste much time on it. He’d eat once a day at most, usually in the evenings, and even then he would often get up halfway through, distracted by a matter of greater importance that had come into his head, such as bleeding the library radiator or planning the order in which the vegetables were to be planted. He was punctilious about those things that interested him, yet completely chaotic with everything else, such as the mess in their bedroom, or a broken window which he’d Sellotape up as a long-term solution.

Maud tried her best to help me overcome the difficulties I had fitting in at school. First, she invested much time and energy persuading me to be proud of myself, giving me the confidence to see my best sides and not worry about what other people might think. She’d hold my face and make me look directly into her eyes, as if to hypnotize me. “Don’t you ever forget,” she’d threaten, “you’re a beautiful, intelligent and kind girl. They’re just jealous because it’s so rare to be all three.” She’d often end with something like “Now you go back out there and show ’em,” as if I was acting a part in a play.

Second, she’d do all my fighting for me. She never did it for Vivi—she said Vivien could fight for herself—but if I told her I wasn’t happy about something she wouldn’t hesitate to glide into the event and, with either charm or aggression, sort it out. Then I was labeled a sneak, which left me with the greater problem of judging what, and what not, to tell her.

Whereas Maud overcompensated for my unpopularity, Vivi clearly couldn’t cope with it, so, during term time, I didn’t see her much. When we did meet, it would be near the bins behind the changing rooms in the quad, or in the third cubicle in the central loos. Maud had hoped we’d help each other at school but Vivi didn’t need any, and I understood that she couldn’t possibly offer me the kind of help I needed. I didn’t blame her for a minute but I missed her company terribly. Each time we traveled the bumpy country lanes to the far side of the county, packed between the poisons, I was saying good-bye to Vivi as well as to my parents for another term. I yearned for the school holidays when we’d do everything together once more. I never told Maud about Vivi’s term-time desertion. Somehow I knew that she would have been devastated to hear of it.

Outside the window I can see the fog creeping in. The light is fading even though it’s mid-afternoon.

Vivien and her driver are talking upstairs. I can just about hear their muffled voices. I’m watching one of the last faint ribbons of steam funnel out through the teapot’s spout and, I have to say, I’ve been wondering if she’s planning not to come back downstairs at all. I had thought, briefly, of taking the tea up to her but I couldn’t possibly. She’s on the other side of the landing from my bedroom, through the glass-paned double doors, and I’ve not been in that part of the house for more than forty years. I doubt I’d even be able to. I wouldn’t feel safe. It’s not for superstitious reasons, I’m far too levelheaded for that. It’s just not what I call the Normal Order of Things. I do like Order.

As the tea is made and I’m lost for anything else to do, I wonder if I go to the pantry and put my head against the door frame, I might be able to hear something of the conversation she’s having. I try all sorts of positions and, although I can’t hear her very clearly, I gather she’s on the phone, a one-sided conversation in which I think she’s thanking someone for their help. Her voice tails off as she walks away, her footsteps telling me she’s heading down the corridor towards the small bathroom, just left of the landing door. I catch up with her movements as I get to the hallway beneath her and I hear her ask her driver if he’d “reach up for it.” I’m surprised to find that as I creep between the two pantries, the back stairwell and the kitchen, straining to hear her movements and the other noises above me, I can visualize a little of what she’s up to.

Now someone is coming heavily down the stairs and I hear Vivien shouting “Thank you” from the landing. I’ve moved back to the teapot and cups, and as the driver passes the kitchen doorway, he pauses, taking a firm hold of the door frame with one hand and leaning into the room. I’m focusing on his hand, wishing he hadn’t put it there, thinking I’ll have to scrub it pretty hard after he’s gone to get him off it. Then I look up and briefly catch his eye. This might sound strange to you, but that fleeting contact unnerves me; I haven’t looked a stranger in the eyes for an awfully long time now and it at once feels domineering, intrusive. Does he know I’ve been listening? Instinctively I drop my gaze to the floor, inherently apologetic, but a moment later I wish I hadn’t as his other hand shoots up in a firm, friendly wave, and I realize I’ve misread him. He calls out cheerily, “Good-bye, then,” as he passes. I want to answer but I’m not quick enough. I feel like a little girl again, back at school, waiting for the ridicule, the scorn, and never being fast enough to reply.

Did I tell you it was Maud who taught me the self-control that I desperately needed when I was teased? She told me about that place you can go in your head, a place you can walk into and barricade up so no one can come close and you don’t need to listen and you don’t get hurt. Of course, I had to learn to hold my breath while I ran down the tunnel away from myself. All I hear is the pounding of my footsteps, and their echoes, echoes of echoes chasing up my heels and the rushing of the dark wind screaming past my ears, blocking out all other sounds. Distant voices merge with the rushing wind; unidentifiable sounds, incomprehensible meanings in a constant faraway flow, like a ball of thunder yelling along the tunnel behind me, collecting and bulking as it rolls, gaining on me in speed and size and momentum. Until at last I reach the end, stepping into a room of my own, heaving the door closed behind me, shutting out the rushing wind, the ball of noise, the cascade of footsteps and echoes and nonsense. Safe and secure, I can bolt the door slowly. Confidently. One iron rod at a time, from top to bottom, slamming them firmly into their catches, unrushed and unflustered. There’s an infinite number of bolts, so I am able to slide across as many as I want to give me the comfort I need in hearing them snap shut, one by one, until finally, when I’m alone, all I can hear is my own serenity. I have found composure. Peace. I can breathe again, silently and calmly. And I can check: Has it stopped? Have they gone?

I wait and listen to the car as the door is slammed, the engine starts and it purrs off along the drive, leaving Vivien and me alone. I hear the car reach the end of the drive, stop, then turn left into the lane, its engine straining up the steep hill and briefly becoming louder again as, at the top, the lane curves nearer to the house. Then it’s gone, and as I glance out of the window, I see I am unable to make out the beech hedge just four yards away. The house is stranded in thick fog. And, apart from the sonorous ticking of the two hall clocks, silence.

Normally I would have welcomed this fog, by no means uncommon in the Bulburrow valley. As it swallows the house, it makes me feel safe, a blanket of warmth and security, asylum from the rest of the world. But today, it doesn’t seem to bring me its usual solace, as if isolating Vivien and me from the rest of the world has made our own separation more stark. The thing is, I’m just not used to knowing someone else is sharing this house with me and, it might seem absurd to you, but I’m finding it most distracting. My concentration has shifted from its solitary focus on my life, to what each of us is doing in relation to the other. I could quite easily convince myself that Vivien and I are alone on this world, inextricably linked—nothing else exists and the other is our only hope of refuge. I’m waiting to hear her walking, talking, shuffling, anything, but I hear nothing. I’m transfixed by the silence, staring at the stagnant fog outside, empty of thoughts, existing in stillness, in a space somewhere else.

It’s just after four o’clock when I hear a lorry pull up outside the house. Vivien never came down to drink her tea. I wander into the library—with its walls of bare shelves—where I’ll have a better view from the window, and finally hear Vivien on her way downstairs. Like an apparition through the fog I see the outline of a small lorry and can just about make out the hazy black lettering on the side, R & S FURNISHINGS, CHARD. Two young men jump down from either side of the cab, screech open the tailgate and carry a small single bed, in pieces, into the house and up to Vivien’s room. Then they collect a small table, a basic rack to hang clothes on, two lamps—one of which they bring back and return to the van—and some other things that I can’t see clearly. I spend the entire time listening and distracted, uncharacteristically preoccupied with a growing need to know what’s going on.

They stay upstairs for a while, and from my listening post at the bottom of the back stairs I can hear them doing what I suppose is putting the bed together, muffled voices talking and, at intervals, laughing. I can’t quite catch what is being said, but I feel strangely compelled to stay and listen until well after I hear the men leaving in their van.

“Ginny, darling, there you are,” Vivien announces as she strolls into the library a while later. “I fell asleep earlier. Utterly zonked,” she says. “It must be the country air.” She’s behaving as if she doesn’t realize she’s stood me up for tea. Perhaps she doesn’t? I’ve forgotten how exhausting I find it to predict other people’s frame of mind or to assess their general humor.

After my moment of thought, I say, “It’s probably this house. I’m always falling asleep during the day.”

“Well, we’re up now. What do you say we make pizza? I’ve bought some bases and lots of different things to go on top….” She fades as she walks back into the kitchen with me following. Should I have thought of what we’d have for supper tonight, her first night? How did she know I hadn’t?

I’ve never made pizza before. In fact, I don’t recall eating it either, although something holds me back from telling Vivien that. Her furniture outburst was such a surprise, I’m not so certain now how she might react. Privately, I’m thrilled we’re having pizza. I’ve seen it so often on the leaflets that come and I’ve always wanted to try it. We spend as fun an evening as I can remember, deciding whether olives go best with ham or with mushrooms—or both—and how much cheese is needed. We also discuss our hands—she’s got arthritis too, but not yet as severely as me—curious to inspect each other’s, almost competitive to claim the harder time of them, and we exhaust the comparisons of pain and pain relief with which we’ve learned to live. We agree that we can’t do buttons and that zippers are so much easier, and what we really need is a shoe horn with a really long handle so we don’t have to bend over when putting on our shoes. She tells me she takes an aspirin every day, which her doctor told her keeps the knuckles symmetrical, and she promises to give me some anti-inflammatories she’s been prescribed.

So we fuss and fiddle about hands, feet and pizza, all very pleasantly, and then we eat pizza, pleasantly too, sitting in lazy chairs in the small study behind the kitchen, warmed by a fire we’ve lit in the hearth and by the company we’re offering each other. But now here’s something surprising—neither of us refers to the missing furniture, or asks each other any of the more searching questions we know there’s plenty of time to ask later. For instance, why it is now, after all these years, that she’s decided to come home?

Chapter 5 The Monster, the Thief and Pupal Soup

Two days after my sixth birthday I found a monster of a caterpillar among some dead leaves on the second terrace of our south gardens. He was extraordinary: as fat as a shrew and twice the length of my finger, mostly an apple green but splattered with blotches of white, purple and yellow, with a shiny black, sharply hooked tail. I watched him for a while, as I thought Clive would do. He looked gorged, fit to burst, taut in some places but flabby in others, and even then, at six, I realized he had the most unusual manner.

I’d seen the way caterpillars behaved normally on open ground. Prime and juicy targets for birds, they race purposefully along, stopping only sometimes to rear up on their hind legs as if to peer about, surveying the area for the direction of their next meal. My caterpillar, however, was sluggish, heaving himself across the ground oddly, first in one direction, then another, and when he tried to rear he’d get halfway up before his great, torpid body would come slapping down to the ground, exhausted by the effort. He was going nowhere and finally I scooped him up, together with the leaves he was on, and put him into the front of my jumper, which I’d shaped into a pouch. Holding the jumper with both hands, I ran back to the house to show my father.

Just as I got to his study door I stopped, so entranced was I to see that the creature was rearing up at me in a display, stretching itself to its full five inches and waving its legs, dancing in a sudden fit of writhing energy. Then, even as I stared at it—you’re going to have to believe me—I began to see bulbous warts rising up along the length of its back, swelling and bubbling like thick boiling treacle, and within a minute I counted eight. Then the warts began to seep.

I’ve never been more afraid, before or since, and I was still riveted to the spot, holding my jumper stretched out in front of me, when Clive came out of his study. He saw me staring down, my face pale with horror, as if I were watching my insides spill out of my stomach. He peered over me. “Where did you find him?” he asked, neither alarmed by its appearance nor delighted.

“Underneath the lilac,” I whispered, not taking my eyes off it lest the revolting creature start to shimmy up my jumper. Clive straightened and, rather than help by taking the damn thing off me, he started into one of his lectures.

“It’s a Privet Hawk-moth caterpillar,” he said. “They also like lilac. And ash. It wants to pupate and that’s why you found it on the ground, rather than on the bush—”

“No, it’s not,” I interrupted sternly, astonished that an expert like Clive was unable to see the difference. “I’ve seen lots of Privet Hawks,” I said, stretching my jumper to get it as far away as possible. Clive had even bred some in the attic last year. “And they’re green with purple, white and yellow stripes,” I said, “not blotches. And they’re smooth, not lumpy.”

“Well, that’s why this one’s so interesting,” he said as, at last, he gently retrieved it from my jumper in a silver serving spoon. “He’s shivering, he’s sweating, and look”—Clive unfixed a needle from where he kept it in his lapel and pointed with it at some slime by the creature’s anus—“he’s got diarrhea,” he said, smiling at me. He took it into his study and I hoped he might throw it in the fire, but instead he returned a moment later, carrying it in a biscuit tin lined with moss and covered with glass. He sat me on the stairs outside his study and put the tin on my lap so I could watch the caterpillar through the glass.

“If you want to see something interesting, don’t take your eyes off it,” he instructed.

I sat on the stairs outside Clive’s office with the tin on my lap, entranced for the next two hours. The caterpillar gradually darkened and soon I watched it spontaneously rip itself apart, starting behind its head and continuing to split itself open, right down between its eyes, the skin on both sides falling away to reveal the shiny mahogany pupa underneath. As the skin continued to fall off, pairs of legs, a moment ago walking, became instantly inanimate, hanging down limply, a discarded costume. There was nothing unusual about that—I’d seen caterpillars pupate many times before—but it was midway through when I began to see something new. The caterpillar’s shiny new underskin started to burst all over in tiny little uprisings, one at a time, a gash here, a gash there, and then all over, and out of the holes popped the writhing, tapered heads of a totally different creature’s larvae, tiny translucent maggots hungrily eating their way out of the caterpillar, devouring the body alive, from within. I continued to watch, transfixed by the most sordid feast you could imagine, as these small larvae not only gorged themselves on caterpillar but also ferociously cannibalized one another whenever they met.

Before long those larvae, in turn, had pupated and the biscuit tin was swarming with flies under the glass, the huge body of the once Privet Hawk caterpillar half devoured by the flies’ forgotten forebears. Later Clive told me they were ichneumon flies, that their mother had stabbed the skin of the caterpillar and laid her eggs within it, so that when they hatched they wouldn’t be short of food. The caterpillar had become a living hamper.

Well, that momentous event at six years old thrilled and disgusted me so much that I have been fascinated by these creatures ever since. The moths didn’t interest Vivi so it was always me, rather than her, who volunteered to help Clive during the busiest times of the year and it was me, rather than Vivi, who followed him into the profession. Clive often told me that I’d make a great lepidopterist. “It’s in your veins,” he would say. “Nobody can take that away from you.”

It turned out he was right. But it wasn’t until a few years later, at Maud’s annual harvest drinks party, that I understood it was my vocation. I’ve always been taciturn and have never liked parties, so Maud, as usual, set me up offering people nuts from a tall glass dish and there I was, satelliting the room, hoping to be ignored. Even then I found eye contact with anyone outside of my family almost unbearable so, as I stuck out the dish for each little group of guests, I stared at the hands coming in to appropriate the nuts as if I was monitoring their takings.

When I came to Mrs. Jefferson, the rector’s wife, I recognized her instantly from the waist down. She was a rotund, weatherworn, boot-and-skirt kind of woman who, when she had an opinion, let it be known. She would have thought it rude to ignore me, so, while she took four nuts in her fingertips, she asked what I was going to do when I grew up. I liked Mrs. Jefferson, and of course I would always have answered her, but I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. I’d never thought about it. I was still studying the delicate frosted rim of the glass dish, searching for my answer, when Maud cut across me—she often talked for me—and said, “This one? She’s going to follow in her father’s footsteps.”

Mrs. Jefferson bent down so I had to step back a little to give her room. “So it’s moths then, is it, Virginia?” she asked at my ear level.

Is it? I thought.

“Yes, moths,” Maud answered resolutely from above us.

Mrs. Jefferson straightened and I went on to offer my nuts to a huddle of people by the window.

From that day on everyone seemed to know that that’s what I was going to do. Maud, having said it, had cast the future in stone. Many years later, when Vivi and I were expelled from Lady Mary’s, it was a foregone conclusion, an undisputed assumption by everyone, even me, that I’d become my father’s apprentice.

Vivi was fifteen when she was expelled for pilfering bananas from a box beside the fruit delivery van as it dropped off supplies to the school kitchens. She tried to argue that she simply had them a little earlier than she would otherwise but Miss Randal, the head, saw it differently. Randy had worked out that this must have been a long-term plan, with Vivi timing the delivery each week and taking notes of the man’s progress as he went in and out with boxes. Vivi was not only a thief (Randy said you either are or you aren’t, it’s part of you, like your nose shape) but it was a premeditated heist and there was only a cursory difference between this and a bank robbery (one leading to the other sooner or later). It was all about principle, Randy said. She made Vivi stand up in morning assembly in front of the entire school and say ten times, “I’m a thief.” Vivi thought it was funny but I cried for her in the back row and at the hopeless injustice of it all.

Maud received the letter expelling her lying, thieving daughter on a Monday morning and by lunchtime, having hurtled through much of the West Country’s narrow, high-hedged lanes, she was banging on Randy’s door and making such a fuss that Ruby Morris came running to class 6M to tell me that my mother was trying to kill the staff.

What happened next, and why I was also expelled, I’ll never know the truth of. Maud said she’d been so enraged by the abominable way Vivi had been treated that she’d taken me away too, as a sort of punishment to them, she said. But Miss Randal told me that thieving was inherent and that the same characteristic might possibly show itself in me too, at some point, and it was part of her job to protect the school against the inevitability of future occurrences. When I looked unconvinced she told me that, if I wanted to know the truth, I was only there in the first place because Vivi was there. We’d come as a package, she said, so we’d have to go as one.

I was in her office and she was standing with her right fist on her desk as she spoke, her arm locked straight like a fulcrum for her stocky body, swaying back and forth with the pressure of a long and troublesome morning. Behind her hung a vast print of an oil painting, an elephant charging at full pace out of the canvas, and I was just waiting for it to hurry up and mow her down.

When I told Maud about Randy’s sister package, she went berserk, said it was nonsense, that she’d never heard such tripe, and after that she swore rather a lot whenever Miss Randal was mentioned. Then she lectured me about how clever I was and what a lot I had going for me, which, I have to say, both my parents did frequently. They never seemed to offer the same compliments to Vivi.

What surprised me most was that Maud wasn’t at all cross with Vivi for stealing the fruit in the first place. She said that seeing some bananas in a box outside school kitchens and helping yourself without asking was hardly an expellable crime. She accused Miss Randal of trying to find any excuse to get rid of us. She said the school was prejudiced.

So, according to the school, I was expelled too, but to the family I’d left in protest and in allegiance with my little sister. It’s one of my most glorious memories.

Clive had said we didn’t need any more schooling; we were clever enough as we were, so I knew that, after the long summer, I would at last become Clive’s apprentice.

I haven’t made many active choices in my life—I’m not that sort of a person—and I’ve never resisted anything that life’s thrown at me, or even thought to steer it in a particular direction. I’m one of the lucky ones who are carried along and life falls into place by itself. It was as if my eventual success was printed at the beginning of time in the universe’s voluminous manuscript, a very small part of the wider big-bang/collapsing-star theory. I was always going to be famous, even if I’d tried to resist it. Did I tell you I’m actually quite a famous lepidopterist?

Mrs. Jefferson would never have predicted it. Vivi was supposed to be the one to make something of the life she nearly lost when she was eight, not me. I just fell into it, and now my name will be heard for many years to come, whispered through the corridors of one eminent institution or other, citing my papers or my expertise in practical experimentation, the insight of my deductions or the acuity of my hypotheses. I hope you don’t think me immodest to imagine that those praises would now have spread around the world within the most highly regarded entomology circles, in all the leading universities, societies and other elite academic establishments. Even here, in the small farming community of Bulburrow, they’ve heard of my reputation. I believe that here I am commonly known as the Moth Woman—after my late father, the Moth Man.

Clive did not follow directly in his father-in-law’s footsteps. The way I saw it, Clive was the first of a new breed of lepidopterist. He was not a collector and did not wish to be regarded as one. Collectors want to complete a collection. Some want to pin all the species to be found within an area, others want just one species, but from all parts of the country, while others still are rarity hunters. As long as the specimens can be grouped together in some sort of unified classification and the quantity in that categorization is a finite number, then, without doubt, that group will be collected.

Clive’s goal was different from that of his colleagues. He didn’t care about collections and—between you and me—he didn’t care much for the insects either. Clive wanted to find out how nature worked. He was concerned with all nature, but he had chosen the moth as the subject of his research because, he said, it is an ancient animal whose evolutionary pathway is much older even than that of a butterfly, which, in biomechanical terms, is a lot more sophisticated. He wanted to know how a moth ticked, how all its intricate little processes make the thing live, die, breed, eat, move, molt and metamorphose.

There was a fundamental difference between the way that the collectors and Clive (and those like myself who came after him) studied these insects. Collectors have one goal in common: they are looking for the perfect unadulterated specimen, with flawless markings and anatomical composition. An insect with an aberration, say a spot too few or a spot too many, or any other imperfection or handicap, would be discarded at once. The point is, my sick Privet Hawk caterpillar, the one that I found on my third day of being six, would have been thrown, by a collector, straight into the fire in disgust.

To find out what makes a moth a moth it wasn’t the perfect specimens Clive was attracted to. He appreciated earlier than all of them—Thomas Smith-Ford, Robin Doyle and the D’Abbrette brothers—way back in that slow postwar era, that it was nature’s imperfections that we needed to study to discover the secret codes of inheritance and genetics and other biological mechanisms. Clive used to say you find out more about a machine when the machine goes wrong and, to him, that’s pretty much what a moth was—a little robot that one day could be reduced to its biomechanics, a formulaic equation; every little piece could be pulled apart and laid out on the table, rather like the pieces in a construction kit. He wanted the moth’s entire formula, such as

5x + 2y + 11z + (all other constituents) = Moth

Clive was going to unpick a moth like a cross-stitch jumper, so while perfect insects weren’t of the slightest interest to him, he became unbearably excited by a Six-spot Burnet with five spots, a wingless Fox Moth or tailless Lobster Moth, a blind Oak Eggar, a tongueless Convolvulus Hawk (which, I should mention, is a frequent deformity in that species). If you could work out, he said, how they’d gone wrong, you’d discover a lot more about how nature worked.

While most lepidopterists concentrated on breeding the perfect insect, Clive concentrated on breeding the perfect freak. Clive and I designed and manufactured more cripples than I can remember. Between our lengthy careers, we’ve set hundreds, perhaps thousands, of “malfunctional conditions,” as I like to call them, during spring, when we’d dedicate a whole attic room to experimenting with deformities. Sometimes we’d set out with a specific goal, such as to create a particular aberration of the Lime Hawk, but often we’d just play around with adverse conditions and record the deformities that resulted from them, looking for patterns and clues to some of nature’s secrets. Like an unapparent god, we’ve transformed their entire winters, or changed the conditions during their time of emergence, giving them early summers, late frosts, flash floods. We’ve used Vaseline to bung up their spiracles, blocking off their oxygen, pierced their horny casings, frozen them through winter, emerged them in unnatural spectrums of light. We’ve dipped, sprinkled or soaked them in every combination of every chemical from our lab, sliced off their wing cases, removed their twigs, their moss or their mud. Maud thought cripple experimentation was a sick sideshow of scientific perversion, and Vivi called it the Frankenstein Room.

A moth is such a simple machine in the animal world—the go-kart to the modern car—and it takes a lot of glitches to prevent it going. It’s this intriguing simplicity, the idea that you could pull it into its constituent parts and put it back together in the same rainy day, that if you pulled back the skin, you could watch the inner workings, that makes a moth such an absorbing creature to study. Moths have a universal character: there are no individuals. Each reacts to a precise condition or stimulus in a predictable and replicable way. They are preprogrammed robots, unable to learn from experience. For instance, we know they will always react to a smell, a pheromone or a particular spectrum of light in the same way. I can mimic the scent of a flower so that a moth will direct itself towards the scent, even if I have made sure that in doing so it goes headlong into a wall and kills itself. Each time each moth will kill itself. It is this constancy that makes them a scientific delight—you do not need to factor in a rogue element of individuality.

Although a moth is complex enough to be a challenge, it is not too complex to imagine success at every stage. Reducing bits and pieces of it to a near molecular level, a series of spontaneous reactions, Clive convinced himself that it wouldn’t be long before we’d be able to predict all their equations of cause and effect, then perhaps even map out each and every cell, and configure them in their entirety as robots, in terms of molecules, chemicals and electrical signals. So, in Clive’s compulsive mind, it was not so unbelievable that one day, not too far in the future, we would know their complete chemical formula. And what fed this particular obsession was Pupal Soup.

If you cut through a cocoon in mid-winter, a thick creamy liquid will spill out, and nothing more. What goes into that cocoon in autumn is a caterpillar and what comes out in spring is entirely different—a moth, complete with papery wings, hairlike legs and antennae. Yet this same creature spends winter as a gray-green liquid, a primordial soup. The miraculous meltdown of an animal into a case of fluid chemicals and its exquisite re-generation into a different animal, like a stupendous jigsaw, was a feat that, far from putting him off, fed Clive’s obsession. He believed it made his lifetime ambition easier because, however complex it might be, it was, after all, only a jigsaw, and to Clive, that meant it was possible. For all the chemicals required to make a moth were right there, in front of his eyes, in the Pupal Soup, as he called it, inside the horny casing of a cocoon. His fixation with the obscurity of a cocoon’s contents peaked each winter and led him to endless hours in the attic dissecting and extracting the biochemical formulas for as many compounds as he could find contained within the cocoon and its changing molecular state during transmutation.

I think, in the end, the chemical composition of Pupal Soup crazed him, consumed him and eventually overran him. You see, Clive was in no doubt that he had been put on this earth to discover something, to educate us, to bring the world on in some way. It was inconceivable to him that his existence had no greater purpose, that it could be as worthless as he considered the lives of the creatures he studied. My family was fanatical. They all seemed to be consumed by something in the end.