The Sister

Chapter 6 Methodology

I’m awake again, for the second or even third time tonight. Perhaps I never got back off. Nights, for me, are an endless enterprise of waking and half waking and wandering the landing in pursuit of sleep. I dread the start of them, knowing the lengthy path of insomnia I have to tread for the next eight hours. I only wish there were a clearly defined pattern, but instead it’s made worse by its endless unpredictability: lying still, convincing myself I haven’t come to yet, that I’m still drifting in a dream and can slip back there if only I shut out any wakeful thoughts; or getting up and out of bed, pacing the landing in search of the weariness that comes so naturally during the daylight hours; or trying to tire myself with things other than the worries of sleeplessness.

I heard the bell in the night, louder and clearer than ever before—and there it goes again, although I can’t tell if it’s real. Sometimes when a storm’s up, I’ll hear it even though it hangs on the other side of the house, not sounding like a gong, but a distant tinkling as the stick inside it glances the edge now and then. At other times I’ll hear it in my sleep or when the air outside is calm and still. Then I know it’s not the real bell, but the faint, relentless ringing in my ears, the reverberation of that single strike still trapped, rebounding in my head from when I was eleven, diminishing but never ceasing, never allowing itself to be fully absorbed; the strike I heard as I watched her fall.

I cannot bear to hear it. I find it helps to think positive thoughts like reminding myself of what I am good at, what I have a reputation for. Did I tell you I’m a fairly famous—yes, I think I can say famous—scientist?

This night has been unusually restless. First, I’ve woken up exhausted, as if sleeping and resting have made me even more tired. Second, my head has been invaded by a surge of long-forgotten memories that have scratched their way to the surface and crowded the front of my mind. As a rule, I don’t like to dwell on the past. I’ve always thought that as soon as the past is permitted to fill more of your thoughts than the here and now, it precipitates old age. But I can tell you that since Vivien arrived yesterday I’m remembering things that happened half a century ago so much more clearly than what I did last week, as if her presence has given them the courage to crawl out of the past. I’ve thought of things I haven’t considered again since they happened. Nothing of any significance, and often just fleeting, unrecognizable moments vying for my attention and becoming exhaustingly tangled and disordered in my mind. My childhood, my family, school, and then there are the games I’ve just remembered I used to play with Dr. Moyse, card games he’d made up himself. I can’t tell you if it was real or something I’d dreamed, but I remember how the memories of it plagued me. I sense we played often. Different times, different places: in the kitchen and it’s sunny outside; wrapped up in a rug in the drawing room while it’s hailing or snowing; on the sofa in the library. I don’t say it, but the games are a bit boring and Vivi’s never allowed to play. It’s private. She’s not even allowed to watch. Maud brings me biscuits, she ruffles my hair, she looks over our shoulders.

Even though I know Dr. Moyse thought I wasn’t very good at the games, he always enjoyed them more than I did.

It feels like Vivien’s been home for ages, but she arrived only yesterday afternoon, precisely fifteen hours and thirteen minutes ago. I heard her during the night, twice I think. I’m sure I heard her go to the kitchen and then the kettle whistled so I can only assume she made herself a cup of tea. Milky tea, I’ve noticed. I couldn’t possibly drink it the way she likes it, it’s hardly got a hint of color. I wonder if Vivien is as restless as I am during the nights, and if one day we’ll meet on one of our nighttime excursions and discover another trait that we share. Twisted fingers and night rambling. All I know is that, according to my bedside clock, she got up at 12:55 to make the tea, and then again at 3:05 when she went to the lavatory or, rather, when she’d finished in the lavatory. I didn’t hear her get up that time, but from my bed I heard the water gushing along the landing pipes once she’d pulled the flush, as it raced to join the downpipe in my bathroom.

I reach for my bedside clock, depressing the lime-green button on the top to illuminate it. It says 5:03 amid the ghoulish fluorescent glare of its face. A welcome advancement in the night. Any time past four-thirty and I feel I’m on the home stretch, that I will soon have the dawn to watch and listen to, propelling me to the start of the day. But before four-thirty I know I must try to take myself away from my conscious self once more before the night is over.

I may already have mentioned it, but I’m very keen on time. I never used to be, but as I’ve grown older I’ve realized how essential it is. Keeping time, being on time and knowing the time. I live by it. Time and order. All things have order and people should be ordered, and I find that in most instances order requires some element of time.

I have six clocks: a watch on each wrist (digital on the left and dial on the right), a bedside clock, a ship’s clock in the kitchen, a longcase and a bracket clock in the hall (which both lose time, up to four minutes a week, and need to be reset and wound on Sundays). I like knowing I can find the exact time whenever I want to and, if I can’t, it unsettles me and I worry about the next time Michael might come so I can check it. It can be a couple of weeks between his visits and I don’t always see him. Michael’s only ever been in the flagstoned areas of the house—the kitchen and the pantries—and he always comes in via the courtyard at the back, never through the front door. It’s not my rule—it must be his own—but if I’m upstairs resting he won’t disturb me, and I might miss him.

We all have our idiosyncrasies, especially at my age. Some people—on approaching old age—fear senility, others immobility, memory loss, confusion, madness. What I fear is timelessness, a lack of structure in my life, an endless Now.

In the half-light, I can just begin to make out the few shapes in my bedroom: the stripped pine chest with four deep drawers that I keep a change of clothes in; the mahogany bedside table (with drawer), which has almost finished shedding its veneer; and an old wicker nursing chair, white, which once had a green-and-white-striped cushion. It stands just outside the bathroom door, but facing the wall because I use the high back as a resting post on my trip from my bed to the bathroom on those mornings that I can’t manage it in one go. The only other thing in here is this huge oak bed I’m in, which I inherited from Maud and Clive, high to my waist and with Gothic claws for feet.

The light is racing in now through the row of mullioned windows lining the south wall ahead. New tendrils on the Virginia creeper are in eerie silhouette, pointing at me with young, fresh attitude. It’s exhausting having to watch them, all curled up like a chameleon’s tongue, ready to unfurl and pounce towards the next foothold in their spring invasion of my room. Five diamond panes of glass from the top of the far right window (directly opposite my bed) are now smashed or have fallen out of their leads. I didn’t see it happen. I just woke up one day last winter with an extra draft running through the room. It’s as if all the elements of nature have come together to work slowly—imperceptibly even—on an old untended building to bring about its climatic downfall, with the rain and frost and wind somehow ensuring entry for invading plants.

It’s two minutes past seven when I hear the faint squeak of the sprung double doors that separate her landing from mine, followed by their whisper as they pass each other on the backswing. In my mind’s eye I see Vivien descending the stairs and, knowing where they creak, I judge her speed and her progress. A moment later I hear the water pipes banging and thudding round the house, as they do when you first turn on the cold tap in the kitchen. It’s strange, after all these years, to have someone else in the house, and I’m too tired to get up and join her, too tired to negotiate another person.

I’m always tired during the day. Sometimes, more often in winter, I’ll stay in bed all day, quite happy thinking my thoughts, undisturbed and unnoticed. Of course, the next day I’ll pay for it arthritically. The flexibility of my joints each morning, I’ve noticed, and the pain within them, are directly proportional to the amount of exercise they had the day before, in the order of more exercise, less pain. And the weather, of course—the surges and the seasons, they all announce themselves deep within my joints. I swear I’m able to feel pressure changes long before the mercury, and my predictions never fall short. But my instinct for the weather is more than a physical modification. I’ve spent a lifetime necessarily predicting it as part of my profession—a moth’s life is finely tuned to the forthcoming weather, and often it’s the habits of the moths themselves that give me the first and most infallible indicator of an approaching squall or drought.

Even though outside all I can see now is a blanket of low cloud, believe me, I can feel that spring’s on its way again, full of renewed energy.

There’s a knock at my door.

“Morning,” Vivien says, and without waiting for an invitation she busies round the door with two cups of tea on a tray. She flagrantly surveys the privacy of my bedroom. “I won’t draw the curtains then,” she says.

“There aren’t any curtains.”

She laughs throatily, then swallows it suddenly. “It was a joke, Ginny,” she whispers.

Of course it was a joke. I’m quite surprised I didn’t pick it up. I haven’t joked for a long time.

“You really have lived on your own for too long,” she says, as if she’d read my thoughts. Her face is neatly made up once again. Maud tried to teach me how to apply makeup, but I never understood why it was necessary. She used to say she felt naked without it, and I never once saw her venture farther than her bedroom with natural lips. They were always rose red.

“I’ve brought you some tea,” Vivien says. I think of the tea as a peace offering, the furniture forgotten. She stops in the middle of the room and for a moment I think she’s staring at me, but as I sit up, I realize she’s not. She’s studying the bed, the tall oak headboard behind me, blackened by years of polishing, with its heavy octagonal corner posts and fleur-de-lis finials. It’s one of the very few old bits of furniture left and, though I agree that Maud and Clive’s old bed is outlandish, I must say it’s incredibly comfortable. It’s very difficult to give up a bed you get used to.

“Where shall I put it?” she says, jerking her attention back to the tray in her hand.

“Anywhere.”

“You need some more surfaces,” she remarks vaguely, as she walks around the bed to put the tray on the bedside table on the other side. Then she sweeps her hand along the top of the chunky headboard and regards the fluffy dust collected on her palm. She pulls a disgusted face. “You might not like mess, Ginny, but you don’t mind flup,” she says, reminding me of Vera’s pet word for dust and rubbing the flup onto her dressing gown. “I’ll have to give the house a good clean sometime. Did you sleep well?”

“I kept thinking of things we used to do when we were children, things I’d forgotten,” I say.

“Oh. I hope it was fun.”

“It was,” I agree. “But then I remembered playing card games with Dr. Moyse.”

“Card games?”

“Yes, where me and Dr. Moyse are—”

But Vivien interrupts. “Goodness me!” she exclaims. “You’re not still having those peculiar dreams about Dr. Moyse, are you?”

“I haven’t thought about them for years actually.”

“Well, I am sorry,” she says, as she sits down heavily on the end of my bed. I’m slightly shocked. She did it without thinking, as if it had come naturally, but it’s not as if I’ve had anyone sitting on my bed for the last forty-something years. I can’t work out whether I like it or not. I want her to be there, but I can’t help wondering how long it’s going to take me to straighten the sheets. I’m finicky about sheets.

Vivien scours the empty bedroom that was once our parents’. It’s a lovely room, south-facing, with tall ceilings and an oak floor that slopes west with age, so I’ve had to stuff three old British Countryside magazines under the bed legs to level it. Back then it was far from sparse. It was chock-a-block with antique furniture, paintings and photo frames, gilded mirrors, bowls of potpourri and varnished gourds, a stuffed sea-bird collection on a shelf above the picture rail, untidy clothes and all sorts of clutter.

The windows, now bare, were once dressed with thick green silk curtains, and the large burgundy snowflakes, which danced boldly across the wallpaper, have now faded pink, embellished under the width of the sills and in the corners of the room by a series of watermarks, as though a dog’s been scenting his patch. In places the paper is peeling off altogether, exposing damp powdery plaster that every so often becomes unstable and comes crashing down in a great plaster avalanche. It’s not an uninteresting pastime, looking at the progression of the damp through the walls, the peeling of the ceiling paint and the marching of the creeper up the wall and in through the window.

“Do you remember the chandelier?” Vivien asks, looking up at the lonely brass hook hanging down from the center of an ornate wreath of leaves and roses, the climax of the ceiling’s plasterwork.

Even for such a grand bedroom the chandelier was enormous, raining shafts of providence into the room, collecting light from the windows and splitting it, directing it, combining and reflecting it, not shy to exercise its mastery of the laws of refraction. Maud had taken it from the even larger and grander drawing room downstairs, where she’d rightly thought it was hardly noticed and when, she’d said, the fashion was to have side lamps. Maud liked statements, not understatements.

“Don’t you miss it?” Vivien adds, but before I have a chance to tell her I don’t, she carries on, “Remember how Maud let us lie in here when we were ill? I spent hours gazing up at that chandelier, imagining that all the sparkly light was helping me get better.”

“Were you? I was always thinking it was about to fall on me,” I say. “I spent all the time watching the hook at the top, trying to work out if it was close to giving way. Exhausting.” I sigh. “What about their fake-fur bedspread? Do you remember it?”

“Oh, that thing,” she says. “Horrid. I’m very glad you got rid of that. I always thought it was crawling with lice.”

Maud had been comfortable amid her clothes and clutter, so the room, like the rest of the house, was grand and shabby at the same time, full of warmth and belonging. Clive, being more of an exacting personality, had learned to ignore the mess or, rather, being on the verge—as he always was—of many important scientific discoveries, he preferred not to consider it.

Both my parents said they knew, the instant they met, that they were right for each other, even though, more often than not, they seemed complete opposites. When Maud’s father enlisted a keen young chemist called Clive Stone as his new apprentice, by all accounts, Maud and Clive spent the following year conducting a clandestine relationship. When they married, my grandfather retired and, his wife having died some years before from tuberculosis, moved lustily to one of his hunting grounds—Brazil—where he lived out the rest of his days in pursuit of rare butterflies and beautiful women. Clive moved into his father-in-law’s place, taking over the advancement of our knowledge of the moth world within the attics, cellars and outbuildings of Bulburrow Court. Maud sometimes teased him, saying he’d married the attic and got her thrown in too, considering the amount of time he squirreled himself away there.

They said it was their love of conservation—long before it became a fashionable affair—that brought them together, but I think even that they came at from very different directions. Maud loved nature. Each and every animal and plant was to be cherished and the miracle of nature something to be preserved. She was a pioneer of conservation and recognized, even in the 1930s, that, rather than assuming nature could take care of itself, we needed to assist the natural world by cultivating and planting natural habitats. Of all these, she spent the most time caring for her meadows and would discuss them at length with the gardeners: when to cut and where to shake the seeds, the grasses that were taking over and needed to be culled. Now and again she’d come home from the other side of the county, having procured some hay bales that contained the seeds of a new species she wanted, like wild carrot or yellow rattle, or a new type of dropwort. Then, on a windless day, she’d stomp around the meadows shaking the hay about, trying to infiltrate the grass with them.

Clive wasn’t so much fond of nature as fascinated by it, as though he wanted to preserve the miracle just so he could unravel it. Together they transformed Bulburrow’s gardens and grounds into an ecological haven, creating every possible type of habitat—marsh and meadow, wood and downland, heath and bog—and, over the years, stocked them with birch and alder and willow, elm, lime, poplar and plum, hawthorn, honeysuckle, blackthorn and privet. Every inch was given over to something that a moth, a caterpillar or a pupa might find useful or appetizing.

So the giants of the family, the great Hawk-moths, were enticed with limes for the Lime Hawk, pines for the Pine Hawk, poplars and aspen for the Poplar Hawk, and for the Privet Hawks, privet, ash and lilac. The eleven acres of meadow that ran from the gardens to the brook were assiduously laid out for grass lovers like the Ermines and The Drinker, whose black hairy caterpillars could easily be heard on warmer spring mornings noisily sucking the dew off the tall grasses. By the brook, bog plants were introduced to feed the Gold Spot and The Shark, willows were given over to the Kittens and the Puss, while copses and pockets of woodland, glades of ancient beech, elm and oak held the homes of the Lobster and the Scalloped Hazel, the Peppered and the Goat. Orchards of plums and pears were nurtured, not for their fruit but for the leaves that tempted caterpillars of the Grey Dagger, the Magpie and other fruit-tree lovers, and up on the ridge to the north you’d have found the brightly striped orange-and-black Cinnabar caterpillars in their thousands, and the Lappet, Yellow-tail, Sallow and Angle Shades flitting and fluctuating over willowherb and ragwort, bindweed and dock in the warmth of their short summer lives.

The fields were left wild and unkempt, smothered with weeds, and hedgerows a mess with sallow and bedstraw, brambles and sloe. A disgrace to a farmer but a haven for those species like the Prominents, the Tussock and the Eggars, whose ebbing existence is greatly worried by the taming of the countryside. And the suburban garden species were not forgotten. The formal terraces to the south were sculpted and manicured with lilac, buddleia and sweet-scented tobacco, urns of Mediterranean geranium and oleander, petunia and fuchsia, vine and balsam, all designed in the hope of sighting the Garden Tiger, the Elephant Hawk, the Dot, the Dark Dagger or the extensive tongue of the Convolvulus stealing nectar from the pink-tinged trumpets of the plant after which it is named. Even that rampant creeper outside my bedroom window, which in autumn paints the south wall a deep, aristocratic red, was planted primarily in the hope of encouraging the elusive Death’s-head Hawk.

“Can I get in, darling?” Vivien asks. “I’m chilly.”

I nod. “If you like.”

“I suppose it’s really my bed too,” she says, and I wince as she draws the sheets and blankets right back, pulling them loose from the sides of the bed to get in. It doesn’t make an awful lot of difference now because, to be honest, it’s just as difficult to straighten one part of the bed as it is to start over and do the whole thing again. The sheets are held to the blanket with safety pins along the top and have to be tucked in in a very particular way at the bottom. I hate it when they go saggy, when you can kick your foot at the bottom of the bed and not feel any resistance because they’re loose. I’d probably have found myself taking off all the bedclothes and starting from scratch anyway. It takes fifty-five minutes and there’s a definite method to it. I usually get away with doing it once a fortnight when I wash the sheets. I know what a bore it is so when I go to bed each night I make sure to slip between the sheets without drawing them back any more than is absolutely necessary. Once I’m in, and I’ve checked the pressure of them all over, I lie very still. In the morning when I get out—also very carefully—the bed hardly looks slept in at all.

I’d never have said no to Vivien getting into bed with me, not when she offers that sort of closeness. When we were young, she would often crawl in with me if she was sad or lonely or frightened of the wind, and things she needed to discuss had a habit of coming to her in the middle of the night, things that could never wait until morning. Back then I felt honored, and now, besides the tedium of straightening the sheets, I can’t help feeling the same. Vivi always had a wonderful way of making me feel special by assuming that her world and mine were inherently each other’s, without any barriers between them.

“Ginny and I are going for a walk,” she used to announce, without asking me first, but it made me feel as if I’d been specially selected, out of a world full of people, to go for a walk with her.

So when Vivien asks if she can get into my bed, the privilege is all mine. She snuggles down on what used to be Maud’s side, tucking her body into a ball, like the girl she used to be. Her head is resting on the upper part of her arm while her hand stretches up and her fingers feel their way childishly along the panels of Gothic tracery carved into the headboard behind her, reading it like a blind man would. For a moment she is far away in thought with her fingers. I can’t help thinking that every minute I have with her, the less I see the old woman who arrived on my doorstep yesterday and the more I see the little girl I’ve always adored.

I study her lying next to me. It is her eyes that are most changed. Once they were a strong bright blue, scattered with natural shards of silver that made them sparkle as bright and vivacious and hypnotic as the girl herself. But now they’re faded to a weak gray-blue, dulled by the life they’ve seen.

“Is anyone I know left in the village?” she asks finally.

“No, I don’t think so. Michael’s still here of course, still in the Stables.”

“Well, he obviously doesn’t do the gardening,” she says, referring to the mass of tangled undergrowth and wild jungle that our once manicured terraces and meadows had become.

“No. He hires out those big tents in the peach houses for parties and he’s made a fortune.”

“He bought our glasshouses?”

“Years ago, with the Stables and the bit of land by the lower spinney. He stores the marquees in them.” Vivien’s eyes are shut, the lids flicker restlessly as she listens. “A few years ago he offered to buy this house and let me live in the Stables.”

She opens her eyes quickly, bright thoughts rousing a remnant sparkle. “Swap with the gardener, darling? What is the world coming to?” She laughs. “Would you have to do the gardening too?”

I tell her that Charlotte Davis’s daughter, Eileen, is now living in Willow Cottage. Michael told me she came back a few years ago, after her mother died. “I haven’t seen her, though. Do you remember the Davises?” I ask.

“Yes, of course,” she says, as she props up her head on an elbow. “Mrs. Davis and her beloved carthorses. What were their names?”

“Alice and Rebecca.”

“Alice and Rebecca.” She sighs. “That’s right. Your tea’s gone cold, darling.”

“Never mind,” I reply ruefully—but, to tell you the truth, I’d never have drunk it. It’s far too milky and it’s been spilt on the saucer. My tea needs to be the exact mix of strength and color, and there’s a definite method to that.

Chapter 7 Breakfast

Vivien leaves my bedroom and I start the routine that gets me up and dressed. Then I take the cup and saucer to my bathroom and pour the cold tea into the washbasin. I manage to tip it directly down the plug hole without getting a drop on the white porcelain, and I feel satisfied to have spared myself the bother of rinsing it.

When I get down to the kitchen Vivien’s not there, but a breakfast place has been laid for me at the table, with a couple of pieces of cold toast propped up against the sugar bowl. The butter and jam are out, and there’s an egg in an eggcup with the egg toppers by its side. Is this what Vivien had for breakfast? I go to the cupboard to get my cornflakes and a bowl, but even as I sit down I’m not the least bit hungry.

I watch Simon sleeping silently on a pillow in front of the dresser and wonder where she is. She’s in the house, I know, because if she’d gone out I would have heard the door. She’s had her breakfast and now she’s gone off somewhere in the house. Even the birds outside stop singing for a moment to let me listen. Silence.

This house is more than thirty thousand square feet, including the cellars and the attic rooms. My parents were the first to trim the living space by gradually closing off rooms they didn’t use. They shut off most of the north wing when we were still children and then the rest of that wing when Vera finally vacated it in death. Later, when there was only me, I closed off the rest of the rooms except the ones I still use—the kitchen, library, study, my bedroom and bathroom—and the hall and landing that connect them all. Forty-seven years ago I shut the doors and never went back, not to see the state of their decay and not when Bobby cleared them of their furniture and clutter. I didn’t want to dwell on the past—best left alone undisturbed in the dust, sealed up, not to be rifled through. Live for today, I always say. It’s dangerous to throw open the past. The deal with Bobby was he’d clear the lot and whatever he couldn’t sell he’d get rid of to save me going through it myself.

As each of Bobby’s trucks went down the drive I felt the burden of history lighten and float away after it. I’d watch it until it was well out of sight, taking with it not just our childhood and my life but one and a half centuries of the Bulburrow epoch. It was delightfully purgative. It’s difficult for me to explain to you why, to put it into words. All I can say is that it feels reassuring to know that the rooms are empty, and if I don’t see them again, I won’t have to worry about what’s happening in them, the dust and the dirt and the gradual decline. Perhaps it’s that, on one hand, I couldn’t stand to see their clutter, but on the other, I don’t want to remember them any other way. Now it’s strange, disconcerting even, to know Vivien is somewhere deep within the bowels of the house, infecting it.

I get up from the table and move to the hall door. I’m curious—I’ll admit I’m almost frantic—to know where she’s gone and what she’s doing. Perhaps I could get some bearing on where she is by listening intently from certain parts of the hall. Bulburrow is a house of echoes, more so since it’s been emptied of furniture. Sound travels through the air spaces—the beating of the weather on one side, a squeaking door on the other—so maybe I’ll be able to hear the sounds of Vivien too. I need a prop. I return to the table and pour some milk into a glass, even though I don’t actually drink milk, and then, glass in hand, I venture out into the hall. I know it’s rude and it’s none of my business and I really ought to stop myself getting fixated on Vivien’s whereabouts, but I hope you understand that it’s so new to me, so different, to have someone else here that I just can’t help myself. Besides, there’s no harm done.

I’m standing in the shadow of the kitchen doorway, looking out into the hall. Jake the pig-head smiles high up on the wall above me. Opposite me is the library, to my right the cellar door and then, farther along, the great curved oak stairs begin their gentle ascent. Off the first, wide tread there’s a door to the little study behind the kitchen.

I walk straight ahead, as smoothly as my enfeebled legs allow me, passing the porch on my left and stopping in the wide architrave of the library door. I swap my glass to the other hand, aware of the fatigue in my fingers, which have been squeezing it too tight, and ready it to put up to my lips if Vivien were to appear from the library or the study, or at the top of the stairs. I put my head to the door—no sound—and then I move, crablike, along the edge of the hall wall, pausing at intervals to put the glass near my mouth and listen, but there’s not a sound. I pass the stairs that run down the opposite wall and stop by the drawing-room door. I listen again. Nothing. Farther along there’s another door, which leads to a different part of the house—the orangery, loggia, potting shed and out to the courtyard behind. It’s another area that’s off-limits, as it were. Could she have gone down there? What could she want there?

Right here and now it comes to me, with sudden understanding, that Vivien is looking for something. Well, it is rather odd, don’t you think? Yesterday she tramped all over the first floor. At the time I thought she was just sorting herself out and settling in, but now I’m beginning to see it must be something else entirely. Vivien’s come home with an ulterior motive, and it’s one she’s not telling me about.

Then I hear her. Footsteps, far away and above me, and then Vivien coughing. From here, I can see up the stairwell to the vaulted ceiling above, and beside it the vast stained-glass window that only comes to life with the evening sun. As I creep up the stairs I hear the footsteps again, and by the halfway landing I know she’s in the attic. There are two ways up to the attic. The obvious one is via the spiral staircase behind a door off the main landing, but between you and me, I think Vivien must have secretly snuck up the back stairs by the pantry or I’d have heard her.

In fact it’s not an attic at all, it’s the second floor, but with so many rooms on the first floor for accommodation, it’s always been called the attic and is entirely given over to moths. Three large “museum” rooms house the famous collections my intrepid ancestors amassed from around the world, all displayed in highly polished Brady cabinets. Then there are the larva rooms, hibernating cages, pupation troughs, net-lined emergence rooms, dry rooms, damp rooms, storerooms, a vast private library, the laboratory and a little workshop where Clive cobbled together his own boxes and breeding houses from crates and ammunition cases, jars and biscuit tins. I hadn’t let Bobby into the attic so nothing’s been removed.

But what’s Vivien doing there? She’s never been interested in the moths. This was something I never fully realized until the summer we were expelled.

Maud had asked us to seal her jams, ready for the harvest festival. Usually it was one of our favorite chores—melting a pot of discarded candle stubs and pouring the runny wax on top of the jam in the jars. But Vivi was silent and sullen, as she’d been most of the summer. I think it riled her that I was happy to have been sent home while she was so upset. She took up the ladle and nonchalantly scooped up the hot wax, dribbling it carelessly over the bench on its way to the first jar, then tipping in so much so fast that the jam’s level was mucked up and some went down the side rather than settling on the top. She wasn’t usually so slipshod. Then she dribbled it over the edge of the jar and across the workbench to the next, sloshing some into that one too.

“Do you mind if I have a go, Vivi?” I said as sweetly as I could.

“Is it not neat enough for you, Virginia?”

“I’d like to do it,” and that was as much the truth as not wanting to watch her slop it about. She handed me the ladle. I dipped it into the wax and swirled it round, melting the last solid clusters as if they were chocolate. Then I scooped out the smooth wax, tipping the ladle backwards to catch the drips on its belly, then poured it carefully over a jam, watching it spread out and fill up the glass side smoothly. I poured slowly and evenly and cleanly before nodding the ladle to stop the flow and moving it over to the next jar. Vivi sat down and began to cut out squares of tartan cloth with pinking shears. Later, when the wax was cool, we would tie them over the tops of the jars with twine.

I’d found that if Vivi was very silent for a long time, it often meant she had something to say. I also found it wasn’t always best to ask her: if I did and it turned out to be something I’d rather not have known, she’d always end with “You did ask….”

She finished her cutting in silence.

“Ginny,” she said, studying the pinking shears as she chopped at the air with them, “don’t you ever feel you need to break out and get away, get your own life back? Maud and Clive make all the decisions for us, always. Why can’t we decide what we want to do? It’s not fair. Do you ever feel like that, Ginny?”

I knew I never did. “I don’t think so,” I admitted.

“Really?” She shook her head with resignation, as if she were disappointed in me.

I concentrated on pouring wax into the last jam jar.

“Isn’t it obvious how unhappy I am here? Haven’t you noticed?” she said.

“I knew you were unhappy about being expelled.”

“Only because this is the alternative,” she snapped, as if she’d been ready for my reaction. “This isn’t a life, this house and Clive’s damn moths. What am I supposed to do here? Grow old and dissect insects?” she said, as if his life was abhorrent to her. By answering I’d inadvertently given her the go-ahead for a small tirade. “I can’t stay here, Ginny. I had friends at school. There’s no one here but you and me. I’m not staying here to melt wax on top of Maud’s jam. That might be all right for you, but it’s not all right for me.”

Vivi was in one of her moods and there was nothing I could say to change it. I skimmed off some of the wax at the top of the pot. It was just starting to form a skin so it creased a little as I drew the ladle through. I put the back of my hand out under the ladle and dribbled wax onto it, bit by bit, watching the little translucent domes turn opaque.

“Maud and Clive don’t even try to understand me. I get so”—she searched for the right word—“lonely. Do you think there’s something wrong with me, Ginny? I’ve been trying to work out what’s wrong with me.” She turned in her lips and rubbed them together to stop herself crying but tears gathered anyway along her lower lids and spilled over, running down the crease of her nose.

“I think they can be quite reasonable—” I started.

“They’re reasonable to you,” she butted in, sniffing herself together. “They don’t listen to me. They only listen to you.”

At the time I found Vivi’s attitude surprising, but I realize now that she hadn’t left school with the same advantage as me. You see, Maud had never got round to proclaiming Vivi’s future to an interested neighborhood during a drinks party so, although it was generally understood I would now stay and help Clive with the moths, Vivi (along with the rest of the village) was at a loss for what she was going to do. Maud and Clive didn’t seem the least bit concerned, and I could understand Vivi’s frustration. They had this way of shrugging off her worries. “Vivien will be all right,” they’d say. “Don’t worry about Vivi.” But, between you and me, I think they got it back to front: I was the one who was fine and Vivien the one who was always in some sort of quandary or getting herself worked up over the next life hurdle. After all, it was Vivi, not me, who had fallen off the bell tower and ruptured her womb, Vivi who had got us expelled and Vivi who didn’t want to be here sealing jam.

Later that night, Vivi slid into bed beside me. I felt her search for my hand and entwine her agitated fingers with mine, playing with them, curling them and uncurling them with urgency, rousing me. I could tell she wanted to wake me, that she wanted to talk.

“Are you awake, Ginny?” she asked finally.

“Yes,” I said, sitting up, befuddled. “What is it?”

“You do understand why I can’t stay, don’t you?” she said. “You know I have to leave, don’t you?”

I wondered if I did. I’d never thought of myself without Vivi being somewhere in that thought too. I’d never dreamed a dream that she wasn’t in. I only seemed whole when I was with her, as if she somehow made up the parts of me that were lacking. I couldn’t imagine living without her.

“What about me?” I asked.

“You’ve got the moths,” she said vaguely, as if she thought they could substitute for a sister.

Then she stretched up and kissed my cheek. “Thank you, sis,” she said. “Even if Maud and Clive don’t understand, I knew you would.” She squeezed my hand again, and all of a sudden I felt very specially connected with my wonderful, spirited little sister, and everything seemed to make sense: we understood each other.

Then she told me the plan.

It was after supper the following day when Vivi showed me where she would hide. She took me into the back pantry and shut the kitchen door. Climbing onto the workbench, she reached up to dislodge a rectangular panel above the architrave of the door. It was painted white, the same as the walls, and although I had vaguely noticed a square of beading there, we had lots of empty air spaces and access panels about the house and I’d never thought to take them off and have a look. Vivi obviously had. She crawled right in through the square hole. She’d already described—in the middle of last night—how, once she was in, she could crawl along the rafters in the empty space and end up behind the study wall, above the door to the kitchen.

I went into the study and waited until I heard her knock three times. I knocked back and went to call our parents into the study as a matter of priority.

“What is it, Virginia?” Maud asked, perplexed. I’d disturbed her on the telephone. She perched herself on the window seat, Clive sat at his desk and Vivi stayed very still on her hands and knees in the wall, listening to her scheme being put into place.

“I wanted to talk to you about Vivi,” I started.

Maud glanced at Clive, narrowing her eyes.

“Go on,” Clive said, but he seemed uninterested, opening the top drawer of his desk and fiddling with his pens.

“I think you should let her go to London to do a secretarial course,” I blurted.

I think Clive was about to say something when Maud cut in. “You do, do you?” I thought she almost laughed. “And why is that?”

Clive only seemed interested in the leads of his pencils. He looked intent and serious as he took them out of the drawer one by one, pushing the tips against the pad of his middle finger to gauge their sharpness. I wished he’d join in and have an opinion for once on something so important to Vivi.

“Because she really wants to go and do this and I think it’s unfair not to let her. She’s not going to be happy here—and I won’t be happy either, if she’s so sad,” I said.

“Oh Ginny, reeeally,” said Maud. “Don’t you worry about Vivien. She’ll be fine.” That made me want to shout at her, to tell her to stop saying it, to tell her that Vivi was far from fine—had they not noticed how unhappy she was? But the words got stuck in my head and never made it out.

Maud looked at Clive again. “Vivien put you up to this, didn’t she?” She sighed. Vivi had told me Maud would say that.

“No.”

“Well, she’s fifteen and she’s not going anywhere,” said Maud definitively.

I glanced up at the boarding above the door to the kitchen and imagined Vivi’s hopes soaking into the rafters behind it.

“She’s going to stay right here and—”

Maud was interrupted by Clive slamming his desk drawer back into place. “Sorry,” he said, because the noise had broken off our conversation. “Virginia, thank you for coming to tell us.” He stood up. “Now, if you could leave us, your mother and I will think about what you’ve said.”

Of course I didn’t believe him. He hadn’t seemed interested in the slightest in what I was saying. I wanted to stay. Vivi would be disappointed I hadn’t talked for longer; she’d say I hadn’t tried hard enough. I wanted to think of a way to prolong the conversation, put forward a different viewpoint, anything to make them reconsider. But Clive had cut me short. He’d made it clear he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Perhaps he had blunt pencils to attend to, I thought unkindly.

I waited nervously in Vivi’s room for her to come back and tell me what had happened next. The wall by her bed was plastered with posters and postcards and messages from her friends. The posters were an odd mix of animal pictures and film stars that she’d pulled out of magazines. A funny one of a donkey in a boater, with holes cut out for his ears, was right next to Ava Gardner drawing seductively on a cigarette.

When Vivi came back she told me she’d heard their entire conversation. Apparently Clive had told Maud to let Vivi go to London, although I couldn’t imagine him being so forthright. They’d had quite a row about it, but in the end she said Clive had put his foot down. His decision was final, and he didn’t want to hear another word about it. I was surprised. None of it sounded like the Clive I had seen, the one testing his pencil leads. I wondered if she was making the whole thing up.

Vivi leaned her head back against the wall next to a recalcitrant-looking James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. She’d never seen his films so I thought it was extraordinary that she’d cried so hard—along with most of her friends—when he’d died in a car crash last month.

“What did Maud say?” I asked.

“She was worried about you and me not having each other, but Clive told her she should stop being so silly, we were going to have to go our separate ways at some point.” She looked up at James Dean—his jacket half undone and a defiant, ungovernable look on his furrowed brow—as if really only the poster could understand.

My room was painted yellow, and I’d not put anything on its walls. When, a few weeks later, Vivi left for London, I remember I felt that, somehow, her bedroom wall displayed how much I was going to miss her.

I am standing on the landing, with my head bent as far back as it will go, steadying myself with my right hand on the dado rail and staring up at the ceiling. I’m following her footsteps above me. Now she’s in the museum rooms, walking slowly, stopping. Something scrapes along the floor. Forty-five seconds later I hear her in the attic library, more shuffling and scuffing, then silence. The thud of a book landing on the floor. Now she’s in the storeroom, which isn’t above me but above the other landing, the one that’s out of my boundary through the double doors. Faint, faraway noises. Now she’s heading towards the laboratory, I think. A gentle tapping. Silence.

All of a sudden she’s coming, walking across the ceiling directly above me with purpose, towards the top of the spiral staircase. I hurry down the main stairs, leaning heavily on the thick banisters as I go, and twice splash a little milk out of the glass onto the stairs, but she’s coming fast. Now she’s on the landing. I sidestep off the bottom stair into the little study, close the door and sit quickly on the padded leather seat of the fire guard, poised awkwardly with my glass.

Vivien opens the door and walks in. My heart is still racing. I am surprised that, only three years younger than me, she is so much sprightlier. She came down two floors almost as fast as I came down one. “Oh, hello,” she says. “Well, you weren’t wrong. It really has been emptied, this place, hasn’t it?” She sits down on the window seat. “They even took the marble hearthstones in the drawing room and the main fireplace.”

“Did they? How odd,” I say, meaning it, and lower the glass of milk from my lips as if the thought had made me change my mind about drinking it. What had Bobby wanted those for? I wonder. He wouldn’t have been able to sell them, surely. They were made for this house.

“The fireplace. The hearthstones.” Vivien sighs in disgust. “Imagine that!”

I try.

“What does it look like? What’s underneath the hearthstones?” I ask her.

“Well, it’s just a great big hole. They must have been very thick slabs of marble. It’s like…well, it’s like a great big grave, darling,” she says grimly. “I was wondering, Ginny, did you keep anything of Maud’s, any little personal thing? I’d really like something of hers.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I reply.

“Are you sure? How about a perfume bottle…or a gourd? Just something to remember her by.” I’m studying the milk in my hand. My hand—and the outside of the glass—is wet from when I spilt it earlier so I hold it away from me. If it drips it’ll do so on the floor rather than on me.

“A shirt you’ve kept to use as a rag?” she offers.

“There are lots of Clive’s things, all his equipment and the observation diaries and recording books—”

“I don’t want anything of Clive’s,” she snaps. “I’d rather not be reminded of him, thank you,” she adds callously.

“Vivien!” I say, taken aback. “I know you think he favored me but he loved you too, whatever disputes you two may have had.”

She looks slightly disgusted. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she retorts, firmly but not unkindly. “He spun a little silk cocoon around you like you were one of his specimens.”

“Oh, that’s absurd. We just worked together, that’s all.” I’m shocked she has such a wrong impression of our father.

“He made everyone roll over for you, Ginny. Even the world would have had to go round the wrong way if necessary,” she adds.

I don’t know what she’s talking about. I never imagined we could have such opposing memories of Clive. I don’t remember any times that he went particularly out of his way for me, or anyone else, for that matter. He was always too embroiled in his work. I think she makes things up in her head. I’d always thought Clive was impossible to dislike. He was such a passive person, quiet, I’d go so far as to say unnoticeable, most of the time. He never had a strong opinion on anything outside his work. Or if he did, I certainly didn’t notice. He got on with his own business and didn’t meddle much in anyone else’s, and I couldn’t see how he could have caused offense to anyone. I probably understood him better than Vivien because I worked with him and we shared more interests. That was what it boiled down to, different interests, and I’d have thought she’d realize that. I try to brush it off lightly. “Vivien, we both know Clive couldn’t have made anything much go round. He was so entranced by his own little world.”

“What do you mean?”

I thought it was obvious. “Well, he didn’t have a clue what was going on anywhere in the house apart from his lab.”

“What, Clive?” She laughs scathingly. “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong person, Ginny. Clive could smell a rat in the pantry from that lab,” she says.

“A rat in the pantry?”

“Give me that milk if you’re not going to drink it. It’s dripping over the floor,” she says, changing the subject, and I’m glad; I don’t want another pointless argument. I also don’t want her to realize that I’m not drinking the milk, that it was a prop to help me spy on her, so I put the glass to my mouth and tip the milk up a little without actually sipping any. She’s watching me so I pretend to take some more, this time tilting it farther, until I feel the milk covering my lips. I wish I’d used something I don’t mind the taste of. The way she’s looking at me, I think for a moment she might have guessed I’m only pretending to drink it, but when she winces and says, “Do you want to go and wipe off your milk mustache?” I know she hasn’t seen through my milk prop after all, so I can stop.

Vivien follows me into the kitchen. “So, is there anything of Maud’s?”

“No, sorry,” I say. “Nothing.”

Chapter 8 The Apprentice

My official initiation into the world of entomology, as Clive’s apprentice, in the autumn of the year that Vivi went up to London, was to accompany him to London to give a popular lecture at the Royal Entomological Society. It was called “The Response of the Barred Red to Differing Spectrums of Light.” Clive instructed me on how and when to change the slides, and the cues he would give to let me know when to show an exhibit.

He wasn’t looking forward to the lecture one bit. “Popular” meant that anyone could attend, and Clive didn’t have much time for part-time enthusiasts. He himself, having had no significant further education on the subject—past his chemistry degree—and not working under the auspices of an institution, would also have been labeled an “amateur,” but he liked to think of himself on a par with the academics. It was the only thing Clive was ever snobbish about. He had been given a doctorate and was awarded grants in the same way that university professors were, and although he hadn’t yet made any astounding discoveries, he was well known for publishing a great many papers on wide-ranging subjects, from species dichotomy to the extraction and assaying of a great many of those minor biochemical compounds he’d painstakingly identified.

Clive said amateurs were made up of ex–medical men (who were, at the very least, educated), ex–military men (who were only interested in collecting beautiful specimens to display alongside their medals) and clergymen (who had far too much spare time, were all too often argumentative and dictatorial and at odds with everything—killing and collecting, evolutionary theory, the ferocity of nature). He told me he wasn’t looking forward to the same old questions and arguments from this latter section of the audience, and within twenty minutes of the start, an eager, smooth-faced man with spectacles and a reduced chin challenged him.

“Are you suggesting that the moth has no say in whether it approaches the light or not? It doesn’t make up its own mind, its actions are absolutely determined, and there is no decision-making process?” he said, in a much-rehearsed manner.

“Good afternoon, Rector,” Clive began, and I wondered which one, out of all the rectors Clive had mentioned or Maud had laughed about, this might be. “Yes, I believe that insects are not capable of making a decision,” he said.

“But…but, Dr. Stone, we’ve all seen a caterpillar making single-minded decisions, whether it’s searching for a place to pupate, burrowing an underground chamber, spinning a silken sling or wedging itself into the nook of a rotten tree. Surely, before the preparation for its pupation, it must have decided to pupate,” said the rector.

“No.”

“No?” The rector appeared superficially aghast and looked about the room in a bid to rally support.

“I think you know, Mr. Keane, that I believe it is involuntary,” Clive replied quietly. So it’s Keaney, I thought. I knew all about him. He’d never made a sermon without reference to a moth hunt. He set light traps in his Cotswold church and would stop a service to check them, then enthuse to his congregation.

“Involuntary? What, like the muscles that pump our hearts? You really believe that insects are living automatons? They have no emotions, no sentiment, no interests and no mind?” the rector continued with practiced eloquence and feigned disbelief, his voice rising in volume and tone for crescendoing drama.

“I do,” Clive said, as though it were a vow.

“Not even a conscious purpose, Doctor?”

Clive was on trial. He scratched the stubble on his neck with nervous irritation. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not even sure we have a conscious purpose.” The room broke up with appreciative laughter, but I knew it wasn’t a joke. Clive didn’t make jokes, and certainly not quick-witted, belittling ones like that. He continued earnestly, “Of course we’d like to believe it, to make our existence more meaningful.”

I saw a group of people in the front row lean forward to exchange glances like naughty schoolchildren not understanding why they were having a telling off. I was sitting on a chair up at the front in the shadows beside the projector and took a long look at the entire audience.

Maud had told me once that Clive was a misfit among misfits. She didn’t like these people. She said they adopted pet names and idiosyncrasies to make themselves more interesting. They’d hone the eccentric characteristic they wanted to be known for and, if they were lucky, it soon became synonymous with their name, to be cited in the same breath: “Ah, I know Dr. Toogood, he’s the one who stirs his tea with surgical forceps.” “Oh, of course, Lionel Hester, who pins his moths on his hat when he’s out hunting.”

Maud said they were often under the infuriating illusion that, as eccentrics, they might also be regarded as geniuses, or at least hoped to be mistaken for them. She said she had finally understood their collective affectations when Major Fordingly (who kept a pet seagull) once quoted grandiosely to her: “To distinguish between eccentricity and genius may be difficult, but it is surely better to bear with singularity than to crush originality.” Well, Maud thought, surely not. She said it was better to admit who you were even if it meant admitting you were dull and had a dull little hobby, rather than covering it up in a pathetic attempt at some sort of singularity. Of course, Clive was different. Maud said Clive was the only one who didn’t try to be eccentric and was.

From where I sat in the shadows of the stage, I looked at this room of charlatans and tried to spot any of their fabricated habits.

“So these creatures are just machines to you, are they?” someone from the midst of the bearded auditorium asked Clive.

“By definition not machines, no. They are living. But I believe every action an insect makes is due to a reflex, a taxis or a tropism. Their existence is purely mechanical.”

“So an ant lion chews a struggling ant with no more emotion than a machine mangles a man’s hand?” the chinless rector in the front eulogized loudly and poetically, still trying to elicit emotional outrage in the room.

“Yes.”

The rector stood up to address the entire room.

“A caterpillar has no idea why it’s spinning a cocoon or making a chamber for itself in the ground?” he continued, throwing up his hands with Shakespearean effort.

“Exactly,” Clive replied in a quietly bored tone.

“So if a female moth saw her own larvae, she wouldn’t recognize them as hers or even understand that they belong to her own species or class of animal? She has no parental feelings?”

“Love, you mean?”

“Yes…love.”

“Oh, I don’t know about love,” Clive said, a little more roused. “I think many animals exhibit love for their offspring.”

“Well, there you go,” said the rector, sitting down heavily and slapping his hands on his knees in a show of triumph.

“It’s just that I believe love itself is no more than a mechanical process,” said Clive, once the rector thought his victory was settled.

“But love is an emotion, Dr. Stone,” the rector replied with a certain asperity.

“Yes, and an emotion is merely the symptom caused by a particular chemical being released into your brain and central nervous system, which, in turn, acts on other parts of the brain to elicit this feeling.”

“Your beliefs are more far-fetched even than I thought,” said the poetic rector in a final irate judgment.

I could see Clive was glad that the matter was closed and he could continue with his lecture. He didn’t want to argue with these people. He just knew what he knew, but, unfortunately for him, what he knew had always attracted impassioned opposition.

Afterwards everyone gathered for a drink, to discuss the lecture and to catch up with news of butterflies and moths the country over. I was glued to Clive’s shoulder and he introduced me to everyone we came across. When he led me over to Bernard Cartwright I was relieved, finally, to see someone familiar. Bernard often stayed at Bulburrow—either to discuss his latest research with Clive, on his way down to the West Country for a field trip, or as a family friend for the weekend. Bernard was a proper academic. He was a professor at a London college, and a few months ago he’d isolated a caterpillar hormone, one that initiates molting, so he was now a household name in that very small and exclusive collection of entomology households. He was addressing a group of men as we approached.

“A gland secretes a hormone in our heads, which actuates a nerve, which then activates a muscle, all involuntarily, without us knowing,” he was saying.

“Congratulations on your paper, Bernard,” Clive interrupted, shaking his hand.

“Thank you, Clive. Good talk, very lively as usual. Hello, Virginia,” he said to me, then leaned down to whisper in my ear, “do you like the way your daddy gets them going?” as if Clive had goaded them on purpose. Then he laughed loudly and I winced as a fine mist of spittle engulfed my face.

“So, Clive, what do you think makes the gland secrete the hormone in the first place?” said one of the men in the group.

“Most probably something that has not yet been discovered,” Clive said.

“That’s ducking the question, if I may say so.” Another laughed.

“No. I could speculate if you like,” said Clive, “that it was another hormone, one released as a coefficient of a mechanical process, like growth, perhaps. Before Bernard here”—he nudged his ally—“found the hormone that loosens and releases a caterpillar’s skin at certain stages of its growth, you probably thought that a caterpillar decided to shed its skin—voluntarily—when it was getting a little uncomfortable, a little too tight? We now know it wasn’t thinking of shedding its skin, and I’d say there’s probably a lot more thinking that the caterpillar is given credit for.”

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t agree with you,” said the same man.

“No, I know,” said Clive, satisfied once again with a cease-fire, and the conversation drifted on to something else.

I looked towards the acclaimed Bernard. He was a truly ugly man. He was short with a pan-shaped face, a tiny nose in the middle and tiny eyes too. Bernard must have been slinking up to middle age but seemed younger on account of his plump cheeks and shiny-skinned complexion and his reputation for hailing round the countryside on a Triumph motorcycle. He had a loud, inappropriate laugh but, I thought, at least he was cheery and a friendly face. Whenever he visited Bulburrow he’d always take notice of Vivi and me, and make conversation or sit down for a game of dominoes, unlike some of Clive’s more stuffy colleagues, many of whom would walk in and ignore us. (Maud said most of them ignored her too; they were weird about women, she said.)

When he saw me looking at him he sidled up, slapped his hand on my back and pulled me a little closer to him. “I’m glad to hear you’ve joined our team,” he said privately to me, as he ran his hand down the length of my back. Then he caught my eyes and held them, his puffy face a few inches from mine, so I couldn’t possibly avoid pitying the extent of his unnatural ugliness.

I assumed he was waiting for some response.

“I’m glad to have joined the team,” I replied with a hiccuped laugh and an idiotic smile. It was all I could think to say.

“Great,” he said. “Great. In this game you need allies, so remember I’m an ally.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling again.

Then he ran his hand from the small of my back down over my bottom, which he grabbed lightly and shook a little. And then he left it there. I didn’t know what to do or say. I felt a little heat rise in my face and we both turned our heads back at the same time to resume being part of the group’s conversation. His hand still lightly cupped my bottom but our bodies were too close for anyone else to notice. Was it familiar friendliness? Or a consequence of a tight space? Or was I being fondled? The answer wasn’t as apparent as you’d imagine. We were squashed more or less into a corner so space was a little limited, and that confused my judgment for a start—the intimacy that’s tolerated on a packed bus isn’t on an empty one. All the options ran through my mind: He was protecting me from being pushed farther back into the wall. There was nowhere else for his hand to go. He’d merely forgotten it was there, as our familiarity over the years had deemed my bottom not a particularly personal place.

I was further prevented from reaching a conclusion by Bernard’s own puzzling behavior. He seemed to be listening so intently to the conversation in the group, with his head strained forward, that I was convinced he couldn’t possibly be thinking about his hand, so it was most probable that he’d just forgotten where he’d left it. A genuine mistake it may have been, but I couldn’t help but feel a strange hand cupping my bottom was oddly uncomfortable. I clenched my bottom muscles a couple of times, hoping he’d feel the movement and realize his mistake—the equivalent of a sharp look of distaste—but he merely shifted it a little, so intent was he on the conversation going on in front of him.

“You think a dog has instinct, don’t you?” a walrus-like man asked my father.

“Yes.”

“So where do you draw the line in the animal kingdom between those that have developed instinct and those that haven’t?”

“I don’t. All animals have instinct. The difference is most of them don’t know about it. The thing that sets us apart from other animals is self-awareness. And don’t ask me where, in the animal kingdom, I’d draw the self-awareness line, because I couldn’t tell you, but you can be sure it won’t be distinct. It will be a question of degree, and there will be lots of animals with only a little self-awareness.” Clive rattled off his thoughts without pause for breath, and I realized he’d said the same things many times before. He went on, “What do you think makes decisions for a pupa when it’s in liquid form? There’s no brain left. It’s a primordial soup. Surely you don’t imagine Pupal Soup can think. Its genetic coding orchestrates the proceedings, like a key opens a door. It’s not a decision-making process.”

A throng was now gathering round him, like a dissatisfied mob, and I could tell he was increasingly uneasy, as he stepped up the frequency with which he scratched his neck beard.

“So what exactly is self-awareness, then? Is it a soul, do you think?” someone asked.

Clive’s trial was far from over.

“Well, that’s an issue for a different kind of lecture entirely.”

“I know, but I’m interested in your view. You seem very definite on all of it,” someone pointed out acerbically.

“I am a reductionist, so I do not think that self-awareness is a spiritual attribute. I think that, perhaps, it is a by-product of evolution.”

“By-product? Like a mistake?” came the reply.

“No. Well, I don’t know….” Clive paused, but it was obvious he did. “Perhaps,” he continued tentatively, “as animals get more advanced in their biochemical processes it becomes too complicated to try to orchestrate everything in terms of reflex and reaction. It is, in fact, a simplification to make the creature’s brain responsible for determining its own solutions, to be able to learn by memory and recognition, to compute its surroundings and make a decision for itself.”

He said it all so quickly, as if he’d rehearsed it many times, that it sounded unbelievable, like an actor reciting lines his heart wasn’t in. I was hot and uncomfortable and it occurred to me that it was as if I had dreamed up my worst nightmare and made it a reality: Bernard’s hand was still on my bottom, and now he was moving his thumb up and down in a caress. Was it voluntary or involuntary? It was the same question to which the entire room wanted the answer. Did Bernard think this united us as allies in the team he had talked of? Clive looked exhausted. The crowd drew closer. I could hear the scoffs and general contempt for Clive’s latest theorizing.

“I don’t have the answers,” he was saying with exasperation. “It is my hypothetical belief that everything, including self-awareness, can be reduced to chemical and mechanical reactions, and minute anatomical changes within our central nervous system.”

The walrus-man looked askew at Clive in a mixture of pity and disgust. Clive scratched his beard. The group got bigger and bigger until I now saw swarms of people crowding in on us, encircling us, shrinking us. I couldn’t think straight. The floor melted underfoot and I began to sway as if I were on a boat. The whole of The Hand stroked my bottom now, circularly. The ceiling started to drop, incrementally. The door at the far side of the room was now jammed full of men with beards and long necks all asking questions at the same time, and they were using up the air in the room, they were taking huge breaths of it, gulping it greedily. The Hand stroked harder in big, unrepressed, flat-handed circles, as if it were rubbing beeswax into furniture. Clive scratched his beard. All of a sudden I was naked. Bernard was a dog full of instinct, panting, dribbling. I couldn’t breathe. I closed my eyes so I could go to that place in my head where I would be able to keep calm as I slowly asphyxiated.

At last I heard Bernard’s sonorous voice, not right by my side, but in front of me, a yard or so away. It was unmistakable—he was discussing some sort of water heater he’d had installed in his house, then let out one of his loud distinctive laughs. I opened my eyes sharply and saw him—as I’d thought—two paces in front of me, waving his hands about as he spoke. Both hands. It was only as I looked at him that The Hand That Cupped My Bottom gently dissolved away. I glanced discreetly over my shoulder to check that there was nothing there.

I was still staring at Bernard’s hands when someone else’s passed him a plate of vol-au-vents. Rather than one hand taking one and the other passing on the plate, both hands reached out for a vol-au-vent, and both picked one up delicately between its thumb and forefinger. While holding the surplus fingers aloft Bernard effetely popped them into his enormous mouth, one at a time, and after each I watched him rub the tips of his finger and thumb together to rid them of pastry crumbs. Nausea rose up my throat. Surely those same fussy fingers had been rubbing my bottom. Yet I’d still felt his hand there when I saw it wasn’t. I was a little hot and very confused.

All the way home on the train Clive was silent. When we finally got in, late that evening, Maud gave me a glass of sherry but I couldn’t drink it. With Clive’s gout prohibiting him, I think she would have liked me to have a drink with her, but the last time I’d tried it I hadn’t liked it.

She had made an effort with supper. She’d made pork in cider sauce and put the silver on the table, and I knew she wanted us to sit down and tell her everything about our first lecture together as a scientific team. She had been so excited about it that morning, before we left, and had kept giving me bits of advice and thinking of things I should be ready to expect—listen, don’t talk, keep well back and to the side of the stage so you don’t feel daunted by a room full of people—and I understood she’d be excited to know how it had gone. Now, of course, I can appreciate that we should have given her the time, that we should have sat down and eaten her supper and told her the little details of the day that would help make her feel a part of it, but Clive and I were so weary that we went straight to bed. Maud stopped me as I was going up the stairs.

“Are you sure you won’t have a quick drink?” she asked, pouring herself another.

I shook my head apologetically.

Then she asked me a strange question: “How many of them didn’t have a beard?”

Funny, I thought. “All the men had beards,” I said.

“Oh, I know that,” she said, laughing. “What I really meant was were there any women?”

It was then that I understood the true position of my unchosen career. Not only would it involve a great deal of confrontation and debate, but I would have two ongoing battles: first, like Clive, to be accepted in academic circles without the certificates to prove it, and second, to be a woman in this men-only sphere, even though the famous Bernard Cartwright had welcomed me personally to the team.

Chapter 9 Another Trap

I want to tell you about what happened four or so years later. It was 1959, the year that changed everything. It was the year of the Plymouth Convention and the year—I’ll never forget it—that Bernard Cartwright threw down his challenge.

But first of all I should tell you about Vivi. While I was busy with Clive and the moths, Vivi had molded herself into a new life in London, sharing a flat with two girls she’d met on her secretarial course. She visited us irregularly, even though Maud was always trying to coax her home, but she wrote every other week. Maud always got to the letters first. She’d fetch the post the instant it arrived, then walk back into the kitchen flicking through the envelopes, hoping to spot Vivi’s handwriting.

After her course, Maud had hoped Vivi would come home and find a job locally, but instead she went to work in a London firm of solicitors. A few months on she’d left and found herself something more interesting, she said, in a newspaper publishing house, but even then she was unsettled. She moved to a doctor’s surgery, and then became personal secretary to a freelance journalist. I lost count, after that, of her different jobs. It seemed to me that each time she came home she’d moved on again, and she always managed to persuade us that the next place would be so much better than the last.

I don’t think Maud had realized when Vivi left home that it would be for good. But Vivi had wanted to make something of her life, and neither a crumbling Dorset mansion nor an attic full of moths was enough. One day, she wrote in one of her letters, she was going to work on a film set, perhaps even at Pinewood, because she’d met someone who knew someone who wanted someone.

During that time Clive and I had formed a remarkable partnership and our research enterprise at Bulburrow was saturated with work and grants. It wasn’t all down to our brilliant teamwork. The fifties, you might remember, were a boom time for experimental science. They saw the invention of the electron microscope and the electronic chip, the widespread use of antibiotics and immunization, Watson and Crick’s double-helical DNA, and then came genetics.

The moth, along with the fruit fly Drosophila, became the experimental animal of the moment, for all the same reasons that Clive had identified twenty years before, and by the late 1950s it seemed as if everybody wanted a little bit of moth. The traditional lepidopterists were swept aside as all the other scientific faculties—molecular biologists, biochemists and, in particular, the new evolutionary geneticists—hijacked the moth for their research. Kettlewell published his now famous illustrations of industrial melanism with the Peppered Moth, and the evolutionary geneticists Sheppard and Fisher used many species of moth to help interpret the laws of inheritance and the chromosomal behaviors that allow for continuous variation. Chemists took over the field, trying to find answers, equations and formulas to the questions that Clive, Bernard and others like them had marveled at for years: identifying the specific compounds that control its life cycle, instigate hibernation or emergence, the molecular events that attract a moth to light, that release volatile oil from a female’s scent gland and the structures in a male that can detect it from a very many miles downwind. These considerations, along with the chemical assaying of every compound—pigments, hormones, pheromones, enzymes, neural inhibitors and stimulators—or, at least, an investigation into how they worked or behaved chemically, were suddenly up for grabs and it seemed like a race to be first there and first to publish.

Obviously Clive and I had a bit of a head start as Clive’s solitary life’s work, often derided in the past for being out on a limb between two scientific fields, was now being ambushed by institutional research looking for big business. We got busy. We published more than ten papers a year, gave twice as many lectures, and the grants rolled in steadily.

Finally I ought to tell you about the Robinsons trap. It was the only other real excitement that happened during those four apprenticeship years. It was Maud who first read about it in one of her subscription magazines, British Countryside, I think. The Robinsons were two brothers from Kent who launched a revolutionary new design of light trap on the market, and it was causing more than a small stir. I remember Maud specifically bringing the magazine up to the laboratory when it arrived with the post. She stood at the end of the workbench and sensationally read out the astonishing leader article: “A Robinsons set on a single night in Hampshire collects more than 20,000 specimens of the Setaceous Hebrew Character, Amathes c-nigrum L., Caradrinidae, along with vast numbers of other species.”

I have never understood why Clive didn’t rush out and buy one then and there but he didn’t seem interested, even though stories of its success were soon to head up every entomological magazine of the season. The Rolls-Royce of moth traps, as it became known, consisted of a mercury-vapor discharge lamp set in a cleverly designed glass bell jar. It worked in a similar way to a lobster pot. From dusk onwards, when most moths are on the wing, they head into the top of the huge bell-shaped jar, attracted by the light, and, once in, they haven’t the wit to get out. The Robinsons trap radically revolutionized the capturing of moths and—more shockingly—altered the current understanding of their national distribution and rarity. Moths that were once thought to be rare were suddenly shown to be abundant and others existed in places they had never before been found. So, you see, the entire bank of national statistics based on more than half a century’s worth of scrupulously gathered distribution data was deemed invalid overnight and the auction rooms, which at the time made a good trade dealing in rare insect collections, were left reeling as prices plummeted overnight on those not-so-rare rarities that passed under their hammer. Not even that made Clive rush to order one.

When I asked Maud, she told me that of course Clive would like one but pride got in the way. She said he’d always made his own equipment, to his own specifications, which he’d perfected over many years, and he refused to believe that his own designs might not give optimal performance. I didn’t believe her. Clive wasn’t the conceited type.

Over those wonderful partnership years Clive never let go of his lifetime ambition—that of resolving the composition of Pupal Soup and, with it, revealing the secrets of metamorphosis—and as each autumn came, it led us, with trowel and chisel in hand, to the broad rides in the local woods or the sheltered borders alongside the furrowed fields in search of those small elusive pupae that had hooked themselves so deeply into Clive’s fascination. Until the following spring we were thrown into this ambitious pursuit, analyzing the contents of cocoons at different stages of their development to try to find the pattern, the trigger, the golden key, to the miraculous process of metamorphosis. But it was frustrating and futile, and we found few patterns. A team in America had reported that pigmentation within the developing imago was affected by temperature, but from our own observations we found temperature had no effect either on the development of the pupa or on the initiation of the reorganization of the imaginal buds. Neither did we find it to influence or control the speed of destruction of the larval tissues and organs by the phagocytes, but that the process varied between a few days and a few years, depending on the species. We also saw no effect on the active phase of pupal life, the reorganization of the new insect or the time of emergence. Having discounted temperature, we looked for other triggers, such as hormones and changes in polarity or pH, but three years on we were no closer to finding the stimulus, catalyst or control that activates the onset of genetic reorganization.

Eventually we had some successes in other areas, especially on the subject of pigments. I particularly remember Clive’s heightened enthusiasm when he discovered that the red pigment in red British moths—the Scarlet Tigers, the Burnets and Red Underwings—was not the same compound found in our red butterflies but, rather, one prevalent in continental species, which, Clive said, shed new light on the British moths’ evolutionary pathway, the details of which he discussed at length in a lecture during an international entomology convention in Plymouth.

This convention brings me to the events of 1959 because it took place in the spring of that year. Clive culminated his lecture—unbeknownst to me—with a most impressive stunt that was to become the talking point for the rest of the three-day convention.

There are only two British moths, the Brimstone and the Swallow-tailed Moth, to share a fluorescent yellow pigment in their wings, and they are both classified Selidosemindae because of it. But Clive dramatically illustrated the flaw in this universal classification, in front of the entire auditorium, when he passed an extract of the fluorescing compound from each of these two species under ultraviolet light. It showed—beyond any doubt—that the two phosphorescing compounds are in fact of a very different chemical makeup. With that redoubtable demonstration Clive then concluded by calling for a complete taxonomic overhaul of the entire genera based on new biochemical evidence. It became hotly debated: Should we, or should we not, reclassify when we find evolutionary pathways contradicting our observational classification and nomenclature? As you might imagine, Clive was punctilious when it came to correct classification.

The strangest part for me was that I had no idea, not even a suspicion, that Clive was going to perform this spectacle and challenge the entire classification system. I knew by heart the lecture he was going to give, I’d heard him practice it enough, but he’d never rehearsed this last little stunt. You’d have thought he would have mentioned it, but it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to everybody else.

The most memorable thing about the Plymouth Convention, however, was what happened when we got home.

We’d set off on a Tuesday afternoon and arrived back at teatime on Friday. When we walked in, the house was quiet and there was no one to greet us. I almost skidded on a pile of post on the hall floor. In previous years Basil might have been the first to the door but he’d died a couple of years before when his kidneys packed up. We called for Maud but, unusually, there was no reply. In the kitchen a great pile of washing up haunted the sink and the overloaded bin smelt sweetly putrid. It was most unlike Maud. In the library the cushions on the sofa were limp, the curtains half drawn. A saucerless cup and an apple core, browned with age, had been left stickying on the mahogany card table, sure to mark it. In other places things were curiously out of place: one of the ancestors had been knocked and tilted on the wall up the stairs, a small framed certificate had fallen off the paneling onto the floor and the whole house had a mildly shambolic feel.

Clive moved quickly now, checking the rooms downstairs one by one. I followed him. I felt the slow, sickening panic of a child who loses sight of its mother for a moment in town. Clive didn’t speak but I felt his fear. It was in his short, sharp steps, in the way he swung open each door as if boldly standing up to his own dreaded imagination, in the curt, composed way he enunciated her name—“Maud”—as he entered each room, with intensity but not volume. My mouth was dry. My stomach was dancing. First we checked the downstairs—the potting shed, the shallow pond in the orangery, the steep stone steps descending from the loggia, round the back to the parlor where the meat hooks hang…

There was no sign of her downstairs so we made our way back to the hall. But just as Clive began up the stairs ahead of me, I saw, to my unimaginable relief, Maud at the top, sashaying elegantly down in a green and blue peacock-print evening dress.

“Hello, darlings,” she called halfway down, glowing with exuberance. “Good trip?”

Her dress was cut high and rounded at the neck, and pinched her small waist with a sash. I hadn’t seen her dressed up for a long time. Tight, lace-edged sleeves finished on her upper arm and two lengths of amber-colored beads hung in low loops round her neck, tied together in a loose knot. It was the kind of thing she had worn when she was much younger. Tarnished silver bracelets jangled round her wrists and a quarter-glass of sherry dangled off her right hand. She might have been neglecting the housework but she’d certainly made an effort with herself. Undoubtedly she was striking.

“It looks like you’ve had a party,” said Clive, glancing into the kitchen.

“Oh, I did, darling. I’ve had lots of parties while you were away. And don’t worry about the clearing up. It’s all under control.”

“I’m not worried,” he said, meeting her on the stairs with a kiss.

I was still marveling at her appearance. I was sure I’d never seen her in that dress, yet it reminded me of something. I thought if I stopped trying to think of it, it would spill unexpectedly from my memory sometime soon.

“Did you really have parties?” I asked.

“No, I’m just teasing you, darling.” She made a funny face and held my earlobe, shaking it a little. “Pulling your ear…”

She seemed animated, restless. “I’ve got you a present, Clive. It can be an early birthday,” she said coquettishly, even though his birthday wasn’t this side of the year.

She put her glass on the arm of the settle in the hall and pulled out from under it a large box wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string. She said, “There you are, darling,” and smoothed down the waist, then the sides of her dress with her hands.

“What do you think?” she said. “Do you recognize it?”

He looked down at the parcel. “No. I have no idea. What is it?”

She laughed. “Open it,” she urged. “Go on, open it.”

Clive took out his pocketknife. Deftly, he sliced the string and split off the brown paper. I caught sight of the writing on the box before all the paper had come away.

“It’s a Robinsons trap!” I exclaimed, as the paper fell away.

“So it is,” Clive said plainly.

Then I remembered how openly he’d despised the idea of a Robinsons. He’d made it quite clear he didn’t want one. I realized of course how much effort Maud would have gone to, tracking down the brothers’ company in Kent and ensuring it arrived in time for our return, and I worried—as Clive casually undid the box and laid out the pieces—that he’d be ungrateful.

But he didn’t reject the present out of hand, as I’d assumed. Instead he examined the parts to see how the structure had been designed and muttered disparagingly about any flaws that were instantly apparent to him. Then he set to piecing the thing together before he’d even consulted the instructions. It wasn’t long before he was completely immersed in the assemblage, studying the dynamics and durability of each little part before fitting it into the structure. I began to realize that, in actual fact, Clive was excited. But even then, as he assembled the device, he swore at the ill-fitting bulb and the tiffany of the surround, cheaper than he himself would have used.

Maud offered to fetch him a glass of bitter lemon but I don’t think he heard her. I remember how he stood back, trap partly assembled, almost suppressing a laugh as he said, without taking his eyes off it, “This really is beautiful, beautiful. Thank you, Maud.” He walked round it, at arm’s length, like a dealer checking first the head and then the flanks of a horse he’d acquired. “Look at this. It’s exquisite. Really stunning.” Maud couldn’t have wished for a more effusive reaction or more obvious gratitude, but she went into the kitchen to serve up the supper as if she’d gone off the whole thing.

I followed her in to see if I could help. It was funny to hear Clive next door, muttering half sentences to himself: “Oh, I see.” “Yes, that’s how they did it.” “Interesting…but I can’t believe it stays put.” “The wind’ll whip that.” Sometimes he swore in frustration, I presumed when something wouldn’t fit, and at other times he’d let out a little pitted laugh. The sounds and words came from him unrestrained, as though he were the only person in the world.

Clive was so thrilled with his new Robinsons that, in fact, it turned out to have been a mistake to give it to him before supper. It seemed Maud had worked that out already, the way she called him halfheartedly to the dining table. After we’d sat there for ten minutes it was quite apparent that there was no chance of Clive joining us.

Maud and I sat together and ate. She’d set little posies on the table and dressed it with the family silver as she had years ago. I’d forgotten how good-looking my mother was, even though the dress she wore didn’t suit her age. The neckline was too prim, the waist too pretty and the dainty, lace-trimmed sleeves cut into the baggy skin at the top of her arm, leaving the rest drooping loosely out of it and juddering as she cut up her food. Still, it was easy to see how lovely she’d once been and, even now, I was impressed by how handsome she was with a little effort. She’d given her face some extra color and her eyes were lifted with blue shadowing. She’d pressed her lashes with the lash curler, forcing them upwards, curly and girly. But Maud’s earlier exuberance had subsided. She was quiet and unhungry. She opened a bottle of wine.

Every night I’d ever known, Clive had unfailingly set a moth trap, a simple homemade device, on the slate sill outside the drawing-room window before he went to bed. He called it the Night Watch. It wasn’t for serious collecting, just a daily reference to see which moths had visited during the night, to note what sort of weather and temperature had brought them, or even, in some cases, to forecast weather that was on its way.

The evening that Maud gave him his Robinsons, he set it on the drawing-room sill, replacing the one that had kept the Night Watch for more than a decade. During the night, at times of lighter sleep, I was plagued by anticipation of the rare visitors we would find in this new miracle trap, and in the morning I rushed down first thing to have a look. Clive was already there and he was giving it undue attention. True, the jar was reasonably full, but I could tell in the instant I scanned it that there were no great surprises, no jewels. It might seem insignificant now—as it did to me at the time—but that morning Clive did something I found extraordinary.

Most mornings he scanned the Night Watch quickly, jotted down anything of interest, then released the lot. Very occasionally he found a scarce one worth breeding, or one with a pigment he wanted to assay. Then he’d drop a couple of grams of tetrachloroethane into the jar to sedate them all and pick out the ones he wanted. But that morning he chased around in it with his hands like an amateur, wrecking—I was sure—a number of beautiful specimens. Garden Tigers, Underwings, a Bordered Beauty, Scalloped Oak, some Small Black Arches and several species of Pug were disregarded in the wake of his unfathomable mania. I thought he must be after the Light Crimson Underwing for a source of that iridescent pink, but why not anesthetize the jar first? Instead he spent at least a minute rummaging about, crushing some and damaging others until finally he had hold of a small, unremarkable gray micro-moth that I hadn’t even noticed.

There are nearly one thousand species of larger moth in Britain, but more than three times as many small—and sometimes tiny—micro-moths. Far too many for them all to have names, so that when Clive had hold of that one, at the time I didn’t even know what it was. All I could think was, What an odd calculation to damage lots of beautiful large ones in order to catch such a dull, possibly nameless, tiny one. His strange behavior didn’t stop there. He pinched it neatly through the thorax with his thumb and index fingernails, which is a way of killing that usually you’d use only as a last resort—say, when you’re in the field and haven’t brought any killing fluid with you, or if you’re specifically trying to avoid the side effects of some of the poisons, such as the discoloring of ammonia or the stiffening of cyanide. Pinching is bound to mash the body a bit, and it’s certainly not the way I’d have chosen to kill a little moth like that. I’d have pricked it in the belly with a nitric acid needle.

“It’s Nomophila noctuella,” Clive announced finally, arranging it in a small pillbox.

I wasn’t to find out for two more years, on the day that Maud died, why he was so unusually interested in it.

Chapter 10 Bernard’s Challenge

A week after the convention, Clive received a simple telegram. It was from Bernard, who was, by that time, head of biological sciences at a northern university. It read simply:

YOU DO BRIMSTONE STOP

I’LL DO SWALLOW-TAILED STOP

IT’S A RACE STOP

BERNARD STOP

“Silly games,” Clive tutted, tossing the telegram dismissively into the wastepaper basket in the hall. “He’s supposed to be a professor now,” he added, walking through to the kitchen.

I had thought that would be the end of it so at first I didn’t take much notice. But—now here’s the funny thing—it turned out Bernard understood something about my father that I didn’t: that a challenge of this nature had an irresistible lure for him, that even against all rational judgment and time pressures on our mounting deadlines, he would never ignore it.

A moment after he’d dismissed it as frivolous, I saw Clive scribbling calculations on the notepad he carried with him in his jacket pocket for “observations,” but it was only after lunch, when he laid out his entire stratagem for assaying the Brimstone fluorescence, that I realized he was picking up the gauntlet. He still professed irritation at Bernard’s message, so I can’t think why he decided to waste valuable time and energy on it when we were already up to our necks in the grant-backed research.

To make all this perfectly clear, what Bernard was challenging us to was a race to assay the fluorescent compound in the two species of moth—him doing the Swallow-tailed and us the Brimstone. First we’d need to extract the compound, a fairly simple process of emulsifying the animal with a pestle and mortar and putting the resulting slurry through a series of alcoholic distillations. Assaying the compound would be easy too, if a little laborious: it’s a series of strategically devised chemical tests, the results of which would lead, by a process of elimination, like laboratory Cluedo, to the type of compound we were dealing with, if not to its specific empirical formula. There were lots of tests to do: the murexide test for uric acid; litmus test for pH; chromatography for solvency; hydrogenation, distillation, oxidization and acid/alkali reactions.

So what was the difficult bit of the enterprise? The challenge, as Clive put it, was not in the chemistry but in the cooking. It was a problem of quantities: to get enough of the fluorescing compound to do the assay, Clive had worked out that we were going to need to crush more than twenty-five thousand Brimstones.

So that was it. We went headlong into Bernard’s challenge.

You can’t just set up a light trap night after night and hope you’ll catch lots of Brimstones. By the time the hunting season is over you’d have only a few hundred. We needed thousands, and quickly, and for that some cunning was required. Clive devised an ambitious plan. First, we needed virgins.

Moths share our weakness for sweets and alcohol, and the Brimstone is no exception. If you take the time to make their favorite recipe, mix it in a little treacle and smear it on trees or fence posts, they will come from miles around to feast and, at the same time, get stuck to the treacle, ripe for collection. So Clive went into the pantry and, like a witch at a cauldron, set about mixing together a potion of exquisite attractiveness to Brimstones, whose particular tastes are for wine, fermented bananas and rum. In time he reappeared with a sticky, gloopy pot of sour-smelling treacle.

Clive knew when and where the Brimstones would be on the wing and want a little something sweet. Each morning and night, he consulted his barograph and plotted the hygrometer recordings, patiently awaiting the perfect conditions. Moths won’t come to sugar when the air current is northeast or easterly, or if the atmosphere is not to their liking. For the first three weeks the weather was lazy and calm, too clear, too hot or too dry, but in the middle of the fourth there was a sharp rise in the mercury. It was overcast at dusk, and the night became a little thick and heavy, tight and threatening, hot and thundery, not a breath of wind….

“Tonight,” said Clive, like a conjurer, “but the Brimstones won’t fly ’til ten.”

Just prior to the ten o’clock news on the wireless, we slopped the treacle in strips onto six of the lime trees down the drive, and just after the news we returned to collect fourteen fresh yellow Brimstone females, two pregnant and twelve virgins.

It was the virgins we particularly prized. Back inside, I squeezed their bottoms one by one, and out dripped the most powerful aphrodisiac known to nature. Males will seek it out from up to five miles away, even from within a closed smoke-filled room upwind. It was with this powerful potion that we were going to persuade all the male Brimstones in southwest Dorset to flock here to take part in our experiments.

As well as light traps, which we set along the hawthorn hedges, we hung the scent of virgins in lures all over the grounds and began to collect the Brimstone population of the surrounding countryside. They came each night in their hundreds and each day I had the laborious task of anesthetizing them in batches and sampling through them, gassing the males, saving the pregnant females, which we could breed from, and squeezing the virgins for more potion. It was like a military operation, the mass execution of the local Brimstone population, and I sat from dawn to dusk, for days and weeks, during that long deathly summer, separating those who were to be immediately gassed and those who were of more use to us alive.

That summer Clive and I were both so involved in our work that we’d break for a quick meal at seven, then work long into the night. The autumn that followed was particularly dreary, bringing days when the mist refused to lift, as if a daylong dusk had come forever to the Bulburrow valley. Looking back, I can see how I got caught up in Clive’s unhealthy obsession with his work but—you must believe me—I’m not about to make excuses for the problems that arose from it.

One early autumn day Clive and I were busy killing and counting the second-generation Brimstones from the night before. It had been the best catch of the season, the trap such a shimmer of iridescent yellow it looked as if we had caught a single celestial being, which writhed in protest in its jar. It was while we were jubilantly counting them, more than two thousand in one trap, that we considered showing the result to Maud. That is when, to my disgrace, I worked out that we hadn’t seen her for two days.

Eventually we found her camped in the library. She had moved in, she said, in high spirits. The room stank. The customary smell of old books and beam oil was now suffused with burnt toast, stale breath and pure alcohol. She was lying on the floor in front of the sofa, her head propped up on her hand, her usually temperate hair loose and angry. Various books, with some issues of The Ideal Home, for which she had a subscription, were strewn about. Within her reach there were two plates with crumbs, a yogurt pot and a Kit Kat wrapper. Letters from Vivi were scattered across the floor with an array of varnished gourds usually displayed in a bowl on the window seat. The Hoover was on its side under the window as if it had dashed out of its cupboard in the hall in an independent attempt to help but at the last moment keeled over in horror at the sight of it all. I counted five bottles of Garvey’s sherry at various levels of empty, and seven tumblers. It was just after ten-thirty in the morning.

“Did you discover how to make a moth?” She grinned.

Clive tutted and walked out.

I was shocked. “Not yet, Mummy,” I said, appalled at the state of her and the room and my own selfishness not to have seen what had become of her. A sick thrust of guilt and love and shame and overbearing failure churned through me.

“I’m so sorry, Mummy,” I said, kneeling to hug her. “I’m so, so sorry.” I started to cry, taking her in my arms, and I felt her stiffen a little as if the role reversal was too unnatural for her.

“What on earth are you sorry about, darling?” She giggled, her chin digging into my shoulder. “I really don’t give a damn if you haven’t discovered the divine secret of moths,” she slurred. “I never have,” she whispered. “Just don’t tell Daddy that.” Her elbow slipped, her head hit the floor and she laughed at the ceiling in pure enjoyment.

“No,” I said, straightening up. “I’m sorry about this.” I gestured to the room around me.

“What?”

“Well, the room. And you lying here like this and—”

“You mean all the crap, darling?” she said, with her arms outstretched as she lay on the floorboards. “Oh, we don’t need to worry about that, my love, just a little dust and a sweep and a…you know, we can do it anytime,” she said, breaking into a sort of singsong.

She’d lost sight of herself. What was the point in trying to convey to her what I saw? What a shock the real Maud would have if I could lead her into the room and show her this Maud as I saw her now. Maud, one of the most respectable people in this village. It struck me suddenly that it was partly my fault. The real Maud would have put enough trust in me to ensure it never came to this. I’d failed her, even though she’d always been there for me. I’d let her down because I had been too concerned for too long with my work and my own life to see what needed to be done.

“What’s the time, darling?” she asked, sitting up again.

The shutters were closed and I shouldn’t have thought she knew the time, the day or the year. Maud was not there at all. I checked my watch. “It’s just gone ten-thirty.” I went to open the shutters. “In the morning,” I added.

What happened next came as a bolt from the blue.

“What do you mean by that, Virginia?” Maud barked aggressively at my back. “What do you mean by in the morning?”

I turned slowly. I wanted to say that I hadn’t meant anything by it, but when I opened my mouth nothing came out.

“In the morning,” she repeated, imitating an enfeebled voice. “Don’t you dare patronize me, my girl. Hear me. I won’t stand for that behavior from you. Do you understand?” She was shouting now and had pulled herself up to sit with her back against the sofa.

“Look at me,” she ordered, and stared straight into my eyes in the most frighteningly direct way, a look I’d never seen in her before, her eyes keen, wild and vivid. She pointed at me and went on, “You might think you’ve got all big and clever because you’ve joined Daddy in his work, and you might think what you do makes the world go round, but, Ginny”—she stopped shouting, stayed pointing and deepened her voice so low and gravelly that it shook—“you’ve still got a hell of a lot to learn, my girl, and I don’t want to ever hear you talking to me like that again. I don’t care what you might think I am, or how remarkable you think you are, but you will respect me because I’m your mother. Do you understand? Do—You—Understand?” she repeated, shouting once more.

Chapter 11 Arthur and the Cannibals

I took the rest of the day off to look after Maud and straighten the house. After supper Vivi phoned. Maud was fast asleep on the sofa in the library where I’d left her, wrapped up in a blanket like a battered sausage. If Vivi had been here, I thought, she’d never have let Maud get into that state. She’d have confronted the issue early on. She’d have picked Maud up by the shoulders, given her a good shake and told her to pull herself together. That’s what a good daughter would have done.

Vivi was talking to me but I wasn’t listening. Had it been obvious? Had all the signs been there that Maud had started to drink so much? I must have been blinded by my own ambitions. It had suited us to be left alone to our work that summer. Then I remembered a promise I’d once made to Maud, after Vera died. She’d made me promise I’d hit her over the head rather than let her die a death like Vera’s. She’d said, “Ginny, I want to die quickly and with dignity. I want you to remember that.” I was sure that Maud would have applied “dignity” to how she wanted to be seen conducting herself in life too, and it was there that I knew I’d let her down.

Vivi said she was coming home the weekend after next. “And I’ve a little surprise,” she said.

I wondered if it could be anything like as surprising as the things that had gone on in this house recently. I wanted so much to tell her about Maud shouting at me that morning but I stopped myself, partly because I knew Vivi would storm in and make a scene about it, and partly because I knew I was to blame. I suppose I had patronized Maud, even though I hadn’t meant to. And I had failed to help her before she’d got herself into such a state, and for that I deserved a dressing-down. But Maud was wrong about my arrogance. I’d never thought of myself as arrogant.

“I’m bringing Arthur,” Vivi said. “Arthur. My boyfriend,” she added after my silence.

I heard Maud stirring and decided that the news of Vivi’s forthcoming visit would cheer her up. As I walked in I was assaulted by the acute smell of rancid vomit. I walked across the room and folded back the shutters round the box bay window, allowing the day’s silver light to streak across the floorboards and leap onto Maud. She’d hardly moved. Her face was loose and relaxed, her mouth open and her cheeks sagging, temporarily released from the pressures of life. But she’d been sick in her sleep: a dried crust ran down her blanket, spilling over to scurf the yellow silk sofa and down, pooling in the gap between the floorboards below. I went to get a bucket and mop, and when I returned she was sitting up, looking bewildered.

“Hello, Maud. You’ve been a bit sick,” I informed her as I busied about, unable to look her in the eye. She stirred slowly back to the here and now.

“Oh. Oh, darling, how disgusting, oh, you are a sweetie. I must have…I don’t feel too well,” she said. She looked dreadful—old, even. She stuck out her hand, signaling to me not to clear up the mess, then grabbed my arm and held it tight. “What happened, darling?” she said. “I don’t remember.” Her eyes pleaded for comprehension. I led her gaze with mine to a Garvey’s amontillado bottle lying empty on the floor a yard away.

“Oh. Oh, yes,” she said and let go of my arm, leaving a little bleached band where her fingers had squeezed it bloodless.

“Vivi’s coming home soon—the weekend after next. And she’s bringing Arthur,” I said.

“Arthur?”

“Her boyfriend.”

“Vivien,” she said. “Oh, no.” She crashed back onto the sofa, defeated by the day before it had begun.

I knew what she was thinking. “Don’t worry, Maud, I’ll help you,” I said, putting my hand on her arm.

“Would you, darling?” she asked. “Would you really?” Right there and then there passed between us an unsaid secret. We both knew what kind of help she needed. If she was to keep her dignity, she must have an ally. She could no longer control the drink’s hold on her, so she needed me to do whatever was necessary to cover it up, to hide her ignominious habit. That I should know it she could bear, but that anyone else—most of all Vivi—should discover it would be too humiliating. So, not having found the courage to help her stop, I would become her accomplice instead, standing guard between her and the outside world, protecting her against giving herself away.

Vivi and Arthur arrived just before lunch on Friday, a day earlier than expected. Vivi looked exhausted. She hadn’t been home for almost six months and it seemed that so much had changed. As soon as I saw her, I realized I could never tell her about Maud. It wasn’t only that I’d promised Maud not to, but also because of the unexpected wedge that lodges itself between people once one of them moves out of the house, as if they’ve swapped teams. Even though she was a daughter and a sister, Vivi was now officially a visitor and it seemed natural that the message should be we were coping just fine without her. So it was that the allegiances of the people within the house, however unstable, far outweighed all external bonds of love and friendship. When Vivi left Bulburrow, she had given up the right to be party to its authenticity; she had visitor status now, so that week I’d made sure I’d scrubbed the house clean and unreal.

When they arrived, I made soup with some courgettes I found in the pantry, and I dragged Clive from the attic and Maud from the library to sit and eat with us all: a pretend family.

I felt a heavy responsibility to everyone to ensure it went smoothly: to Maud, to cover up her secret; to Vivi, to make Arthur feel welcome; and to Clive, to translate for him between his own world and the real one. It felt like I was orchestrating a grand performance. I was protecting everyone from everyone else, and some of them also from themselves.

Arthur Morris was a baker, or rather, he helped his father run a business that supplied bread to shops all over London. It was a difficult topic to talk about if you knew nothing much about bakeries or the new self-service stores that Arthur told us were coming from America.

Vivi had first mentioned him to me about four months ago, but I hadn’t appreciated until recently that they were actually stepping out together. Arthur had short wavy black hair and two overblown freckles on his forehead. Dimples dug into his face to frame his ready smile, and you could see that his teeth were a little crossed at the front. He was very enthusiastic, about practically everything, and he seemed extraordinarily appreciative to be with us, as if he’d won a golden ticket. He talked a lot, about shopping schemes and shoppers’ habits, although during lunch, Clive was patently more interested in the habits of a slothful hornet that had landed on a slice of bread near his elbow and was walking slowly round the edge of it. All in all I thought it was very lucky Arthur was helping himself to conversation because he wasn’t being offered any.

It struck me that none of us had any common ground with Arthur, not even Vivi. He had hardly ever set foot outside the city and she had only recently stepped into it. Arthur knew everything about convenience shopping and nothing about insects; Vivi knew little about shops and lots about insects. Arthur was full of optimism and eagerness; Vivi was forever finding obstacles.

I was clearing the soup bowls as Arthur set to with a lengthy description of his baking premises, which, he said, were out to the west on Wainscot Road. Clive sprang on the name as if it were the punch line to the entire luncheon conversation.

“Wainscot Road? How interesting,” he said, more animated than he’d been all day. “Why’s it called Wainscot?”

“I have no idea, actually,” said Arthur, tilting his head, giving the impression that now it had been asked it was an interesting question.

“You don’t know?” Clive said incredulously. “You work in a bakery on Wainscot Road—”

“I don’t actually work in it,” Arthur corrected him—politely and without arrogance. “I run it.”

“All the same,” Clive said, flipping the comment back at Arthur with his hand as if it were a fly, “you run a bakery on the road but you’ve never bothered to find out how it got its name?”

“Clive!” Vivi exclaimed, but he ignored her and went on to get assurances from Vivi’s boyfriend that he’d go back and find out the origin of the road’s name. Because, did Arthur know?, there was an entire family of moths called the Wainscots, so he would be extremely interested to discover if the road was named after these moths or—which he thought more likely—if it was named after the very famous family from whom the moths had also got their name. Arthur agreed cheerfully that it was important, as well as profoundly interesting, that he should find out how the street had got its name, but I had the impression he didn’t think Clive was being altogether serious.

Once that conversation was over and agreed on, I was about to prepare for an uncomfortable silence when Vivi saved the moment in one swoop, as easy as a stroll in the park. “Clive is very clever, aren’t you, Clive?” she teased.

“Well…,” Clive started seriously, missing Vivi’s playful sarcasm.

“But the thing, Arthur, that he’s particularly clever at is bringing absolutely any conversation round to moths. Most people find it incredibly difficult to put anything about a moth into a conversation, but Clive finds that most conversations naturally come to moths in the end, don’t you, Clive?” It was only when Maud and I started to giggle that Clive understood he was being gently teased and braved a small smile. Arthur was gazing at Vivi adoringly.

“Clive,” Vivi continued bossily, “why don’t you show Arthur some of your specimens? He’d love to see them.” She turned to Arthur. “Clive’s got moths from all over the world. Some are bigger than your hand.”

I relaxed a little, letting my responsibility lighten. Vivi was taking control. She was pure, fresh air, and slowly she was filling up the house with it, resuscitating the space and pulling us all back together.

Caring for caterpillars is like caring for the young of any animal. They require constant attention. Our attic and our drawing room and, incidentally, much of our south terrace were full of larvae boxes housing our self-created plague of Brimstone caterpillars. Once we’d given Arthur a tour of the museum, he volunteered to come on our rounds of the caterpillars, helping to clean them out, give them fresh food and check them over.

The Brimstone is a shady brown caterpillar tinged with green and spends much of its time clasping a twig with its back legs, sticking its body out in front of itself, rigid yet crooked, looking uncannily like the twisted twigs of the bramble it’s most often found on. To complete the general effect, it has two growths midway along its back that look exactly like a pair of buds. It took Arthur a while to find one, but once he caught sight of it he was so thrilled that he made a game of seeing how many others he could spot in each cage. He asked a torrent of questions with boyish enthusiasm so we were spurred into explaining to him the basics of their daily care. Clive gradually assumed his lecture voice, giving Arthur tips—their leaves should be fresh but not the youngest and most succulent in case the richness gave them diarrhea.

“The onset of diarrhea spreads through a box of larvae like a virus and it’s nearly always fatal to the whole batch,” Clive informed him. I could see he was beginning to warm to Arthur. “You also need to check for flu, fleas, parasitic flies, wasps, mites, and, because caterpillars are little more than a bag of fluid, they’re particularly susceptible to desiccation, drowning, sweats, salt—”

“The odds don’t sound good for a caterpillar,” Arthur interrupted gamely.

“And their worst enemy—earwigs,” Clive replied.

“Earwigs?”

“Terrible. Terrible,” Clive said, shaking his head vehemently. “If I could destroy an animal species on earth forever it would be the earwig. They manage to invade even the most indestructible box to ravage my caterpillars—”

“What’s this?” Arthur interrupted him. He’d picked up a jam jar of leaves and was peering into it, searching it for a less upsetting subject than the earwig one.

“Why’s this poor fellow all on his own?” Arthur asked once the occupant had been spotted.

“He’s a cannibal,” said Clive, almost proudly, a parent blind to his offspring’s antisocial habit.

“Oh?” Arthur said, regarding the jar now as if he might drop it.

“Some are born with a taste for their brothers and sisters. All of them eat their shells once they’ve hatched, but some then carry on and eat through their siblings.”

“That’s quite disgusting,” Arthur said definitively, placing the jar down carefully.

“Well, it’s all good protein,” Clive reasoned. “Some species, like the Privet and the Death’s-head, the whole lot of them are cannibals and will never let up on a chance to gnaw into each other, but with the others you might get just one or two in a batch. The trick is to spot them before they start because once they get going that’s it, they’ll finish off all the others pretty quick.”

“So you have to sit and watch them once they’ve hatched, at the ready to pick out the cannibals?”

“Well…yes.”

“But how long do you have to watch them for? I mean, how long before you know they’re not going to start eating the others?” Arthur asked, obviously worrying that too much time was spent on this one exercise.

Clive looked at me and smiled wearily. I knew he was thinking that such details were a little tricky to explain.

“No,” I butted in abruptly, “you don’t really need to watch them at all. You can usually just guess—instantly—which ones will be cannibals.”

Arthur raised his eyebrows and I realized that wasn’t a sufficient answer for him. He was genuinely interested.

“You just know,” I tried to clarify. “They’ve got a look about them.”

“Vivi!” Arthur shouted playfully to her in the next room. “You’re going to have to clear this one up for me.”

“How can you tell a cannibal?” he asked her as she glided into the room.

“Well, they’re the only ones left, silly,” Vivi replied cheekily.

“No, before they’ve eaten the others,” he said.

“Oh, that,” she said, affecting mystery. “They’ve just got a look about them,” and Arthur and I, we started laughing.

I found Maud keeping herself busy in her potting shed. I’d hidden her sherry today, as we’d agreed, and as soon as she saw me she said—very politely—“I need a little drink, Ginny.” I didn’t say anything. It was half-past four. She was trying to separate some bulbs as she said it, and I remember watching her shaky hands, which looked like mine do now, swollen round the joints and bent at the knuckles. All they were achieving was to strip off layers of the bulbs’ papery skin, as if her fingers couldn’t get a proper grip. Now that I know how hard my own hands are to manage I realize her arthritis might have impeded her, but back then I was shocked by what I thought were clearly withdrawal symptoms.

It was only after supper, when Maud seemed choked with desperation, that I finally helped her into the library. I was proud of her, like a nurse might be proud of a patient, and I told her so. She said nothing. She sat stiffly on a small upright chair by the window and looked at her feet, lifting them up and down to exercise her ankles.

Since I’d become her official collaborator, we’d normally have gone through a little role-play at this point: I’d ask her if she wanted a drink, she’d say, “Go on, then, just a small one,” and chide me for not joining her. We’d talk about whatever sprang to mind, and for a while it would seem a most congenial affair. Then, when her sense started to leave her, I’d go and let her slip inside herself to reflect on the darker side alone.

That night, however, she sat there on the chair, loosening her ankles and rubbing her clenched hands up and down her legs to encourage the circulation. When I asked if she’d like a drink, she didn’t answer. Her jaw was taut and I wondered if she was even capable of speaking. Then, when I poured her drink, she couldn’t muster the coordination to hold it steady, so I wrapped my hands round hers and together we lifted the glass to her mouth and tipped it. At that moment I felt us take another secret leap together. The role-play, the polite ceremony, the pretense, it was all gone now and her crude addiction was laid bare between us. By the third glass she’d refueled and discovered a moment of equanimity. She relaxed into the chair.

“Ginny,” she said, “what would I do without you? Thank you.” This was the first phase—I called it her lucid phase—when she was replenished but not too drunk, when the sherry had loosened her tongue, but not her mind, and she would pour out funny stories and scrutinize the world.

I’ll tell you something now, something I’m ashamed to admit, one of those honest little secrets that are hard enough to admit to yourself, and I can only hope that you’ll try to understand why I felt it. You see, I began to covet the intimacy that Maud’s reprehensible secret brought us and I really enjoyed—looked forward to, even—the entertaining moments her lucid phase would bring. One minute she’d have found a way to relate the pattern of Mrs. Axtell’s flower borders to her personality, the next she’d have taken on one of Clive’s pompous colleagues in a make-believe row. Maud had never talked to me in that way before. It was like some of the conversations she used to have with Vivi.

The second phase was when Maud turned. I was usually out of the room well before she turned, but that day she’d drunk too much too fast, and the lucid phase skipped by too quickly. Something trapped and dissatisfied was gathering buoyancy, pushing its way to the surface. She transferred herself to the sofa to sit next to me.

“Well, what do you think, darling?” she whispered hoarsely.

“Think of what?”

“The boyfriend. Bit stiff, darling, don’t you think?” Maud said, discarding the whisper. “Tight-arsed, don’t you think? Tight-arsed,” she said, even louder. Her head flopped against the back of the sofa and she laughed.

“Bloody London bloody little tight bloody arse,” she said, laughing at her moment of inspired rhapsody.

I didn’t say anything.

Then she turned on me, her mood switching suddenly. “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you talk?” she snapped.

I didn’t say anything.

“You can wipe that bloody look off your face, Ginny,” she said. “You’ve really got some cheek, you know. You’re not so damn perfect yourself.” She’d consumed an entirely different personality.

Just then we heard Arthur’s laugh burst out down the hall and luckily her attention was thrown back to him.

“Tight-arse,” she shouted to the ceiling. Then her eyes searched me out again. “Well, don’t you think, darling,” she said more softly, “bloody tight-arse?” I glanced nervously towards the door, as if to judge how far through it her voice might travel. Maud caught me. “Oh, Ginny, darling, please don’t be so bloody pathetic. I’m just telling the truth, darling,” she complained peevishly. “Can’t you see he’s a bloody tight-arse? God, I think I might have to go and live in Spain, yes, that’s not a bad idea, is it? What do you think? Get away from here for good and sit in the sun and look at the sea, darling, what do you think?”

I knew I had to leave.

“Tight. Arse.” She laughed again, as if it were just saying the words that she found so enjoyable—therapeutic, even.

“I’m going to do the washing up and then I’ll be back,” I said quickly, and left before she had a chance to protest. I knew the only possible way to extricate myself was on a promise to return, and I was relieved when I’d closed the door behind me. I stayed to listen. It was my responsibility to make sure no one saw her drunk.

There was silence for a second, then the clanking of glass on glass. Maud was going to make trouble tonight. I took a deep breath and rubbed two fingers along the key in the door’s lock. I balanced the risks: I could faintly hear Vivi and Arthur chatting in the drawing room farther down the hall; Clive was either in the cellar or the attic; Maud’s sherry supply was plentiful and I doubted, anyway, that she’d be able to get up from the sofa for the rest of the night. My mind was made up.

I held my breath, pulled the door tightly towards me so the lock wouldn’t click and, very slowly, very quietly, turned the key.

It felt good. A problem locked up for the night.

I went to clear up the kitchen. Tonight’s outburst had been less manageable and had felt more sinister than any of the previous ones. It was not only my job to hide her behavior from Clive, Vivi and the rest of the world, but also my solemn promise to the other Maud, my mother Maud. Vivi was in the house and I would have to be on guard all night. All at once the house, and everything in it, felt extremely precarious.

I had nearly finished the dishes when I heard a dreadful thudding at the library door and Maud shouting, her voice distorted with rage. “Ginny, come and open this door at once!”

I could hear the pounding and crashing of books being flung at the inside of the door. What had I been thinking to lock her in?

“Ginny, do you hear me? How dare you lock me in.”

I was outside the door now, silent—and uncertain whether or not to open it. I wasn’t sure that anyone else could hear her. I didn’t want to enrage her further but I didn’t know what I would be faced with if I opened it. I was weighing the options when she whispered through the door. Surely she couldn’t have known I was standing there.

“Ginny…I promise that if you don’t open this door right now, I promise, I’ll kill you,” she threatened in a low growl.

I turned the key, the door flew open and three large hardback books hurtled towards me, glancing off me as I ducked. Then more books came, one or two at a time, as I cowered on the hall floor.

Vivi opened the door to the drawing room and stuck her head out. “What the hell’s going on?” she said. “What are you doing, Ginny?”

Thankfully she hadn’t witnessed any books in flight. She saw me kneeling in the hall with books scattered around me and I quickly busied myself with collecting them up and sorting them into piles. As soon as Maud heard Vivi, she had shut the library door on herself.

“I’m just chucking out old books. We’re finally sorting the library,” I lied impressively.

“Well, you don’t have to throw them around, do you?” Vivi said, slightly irritated, and went back to Arthur.

I pushed the books against the wall and went to bed. I was relieved that Vivi would be gone tomorrow and we could get back to our normal routine without any added constraints.

The flying books marked the start of violence that seemed as addictive as the drink. When she was drunk Maud looked for a fight—only with me—and the more I tried to appease her, to say the right thing, to tell her what I thought she wanted to hear, the more aggressive she became. It was a good day when I suffered merely a little shouting, and increasingly normal to suffer worse. I didn’t resent her for it. I felt sorry for her. I saw how she couldn’t help it, how she went away and something else filled her place that didn’t resemble her old self in any way at all. It took hold and possessed her, gaining in strength daily, feeding off her weakness. At those times she wasn’t my mother: she’d been ravished by a demon, overtaken by uncontrollable anger and aggression. Strangely, she was physically far stronger too, than my mother ever was. I found her lifting tables, smashing doors, throwing chests, things Maud would never have been able to move, as if her muscles, during those rabid moments, received a secret gift of strength. But it was her eyes that were most severely altered. They quickly became another’s. Clear, hard-edged and determined. Eyes that saw everything darkly. And I knew that Maud would never conquer this thing. Its force and ambition grew more palpable each day.

But one thing I could never understand. Even though I’m sure she was, for the most part, oblivious to her attacks, she would always stop the instant she heard Clive coming, and switch to a task close at hand. She was like a five-year-old who, even if she seemed completely out of control, still knew somewhere in her heart that she shouldn’t be behaving as she was.

When I closed my eyes at night, I’d remember my mother, the sober Maud, who’d hold me in her more lucid moments, stroke my hair and tell me she loved me so much it hurt. And then she’d thank me for being me, and I’d almost imagine her eyes were wet with tears, and I’d wonder if she was ever aware of the terror that daily turned in her.

Chapter 12 I Spy

Vivien’s been home for a day now, almost exactly twenty-four hours. I’ve been lying on my bed all morning. The last time I saw her was earlier this morning, when I was holding my glass of milk as a prop and it had become quite obvious we had very different memories of our late father.

Since then I’ve been trying to shake off this awkward, irrepressible feeling that has crept over me ever since she came home: the need to know exactly where she is and what she’s doing. As time goes on the urge grows stronger. I’ve managed to get through the last forty-seven years without knowing her whereabouts, yet now, since twenty-four hours ago, I’m liable to panic if at any point I don’t know where she is. It’s completely illogical, I know. Perhaps it’s because I’m used to knowing exactly where and how things are in the house, because my surroundings are fixed, a constant if you like, and that, until Vivien came home, I was the only variable.

Luckily she doesn’t realize I’ve been spying on her. I know this house so intimately that I don’t need to be right on her heels. I’ve been developing a system whereby I can track her movements by listening to its sounds while staying within my own boundaries. I know all the views from the windows. I can recognize the doors that creak, the boards that squeak and the pipes that rattle. I can interpret the echoes that reverberate through the air spaces, the windows that shake when certain doors are opened and closed and the sounds that old ventilation pipes bring me from all directions. It is as if the entire internal workings of the house have been transformed into a vast communications network, carrying to me the sounds of Vivien, wherever she may be.

For instance, I might look through a window on the first floor to see her pass by another in a different wing or on a different floor, and I know if I move to a back room on the ground floor I will be able to hear her footsteps above me. Then, with the creak of a door, I can judge where she’s headed. I’ve been following her routine (at our age you always have a routine, it’s impossible not to—your body dictates it): last night she got up to go to the lavatory twice, and this morning to get her—and my—tea. All these noises are brought to me by this loyal house, as though it’s alive and throbbing and I am in tune with it, or even part of it, as Vera once said she was. It’s on my side.

However, it means I’m always trying to make sure she doesn’t see me, so our paths haven’t crossed as much as you might imagine they would, and there seems so much that is still unsaid between us.

Listen, I can hear her again. She’s bashing about loudly—in the hall, I think. I pull myself off the bed and creep onto the landing. She’s rattling the door to the cellar, trying to open it. She’s got various keys in her hand that she must have found in the house and she’s trying each in turn. I’m baffled as to why she wants to open it. I tread as quietly as I can down the stairs and finally step out behind her.

“Oh my God, you gave me the fright of my life!” Vivien gasps, as her hand shoots up to her chest.

“Sorry.”

“I never know where you are or where you come from. It’s always so quiet and then you appear out of nowhere.”

“I saw you were trying to open the cellar door,” I say.

She looks at her hands as if to remind herself that that’s what they’ve been doing. “Yes I was, as a matter of fact. That’s exactly what I was trying to do.” She puts them back on the door latch and gives it a demonstrative yank.

“What do you want from there? What are you looking for, Vivien?” I want her to know that I’ve guessed she’s come back to look for something.

“I don’t want anything. I just want to take a look, but the damn thing’s got stuck,” she says, pulling at it again. She stops and stares at me. “I’m allowed to, you know,” she says testily, although I didn’t say she wasn’t. “Sometimes I think you forget it’s my house too.”

Her saying that surprises me a little. Of course I’ve always known it’s both of ours, but she’s right. I never really think of it as hers.

“I’ve had the door locked,” I say. She might as well know her labors are futile.

“But I’ve unlocked it.”

“You’ve unlocked it with the key but there’s a bolt on the inside.”

“On the inside?”

“I got Michael to put it on the inside, then climb out through the window.”

She looks at me strangely.

“Why on earth would you want to do that?”

“It was years ago, after Maud’s death. I never wanted to see the damn cellar after that. I didn’t want to be reminded of it or have it happen again. The problem is, it’s completely dark and the stairs are so steep and they’re right in front of you. It’s easy to see how you might step out into nothing as you reach for the switch. And that would be it.”

“So that’s why you locked it?”

“Yes.”

“Because Maud fell down the steps.” She eyes me carefully, uncertainly, as she has many times the past day. It feels intrusive, as if she’s looking right through my clothes to my nakedness.

“Yes,” I say impatiently, and even as I say it I can tell that Vivien has planned, in her mind, the entire future of this conversation, and I don’t like it.

“So you still think that’s what happened?” she says, to my astonishment.

It’s been years since I’ve felt someone’s goading me. I thought I’d long grown out of it, but here I am now, feeling tight as a coil, like an adolescent, remembering with irritation how Vivien had a way of obfuscating everything, and how Maud had to tell her to stop it because I never found a way to react that didn’t make it worse.

“Yes, that’s what happened,” I reply, with mild indignation.

She considers, and nods.

“Never mind,” she says, stepping back from the door and turning to leave.

Is she really going to end the conversation right there, like that? She can’t do that. You can’t start a revolution and then go home for tea.

“I was here, Vivien,” I say. “I saw her. I phoned for the ambulance.”

“Were you, Ginny?” she says, stopping to look up at Jake. “Were you standing right there? Did you see her fall?”

“Where were you?” I retort, more sharply than I’d imagined I could.

She shakes her head and turns to go, another of her most maddening teenage tendencies. She had a habit of introducing an infuriating idea or a niggling suspicion, and then she’d refuse to explain herself, presumably because she couldn’t. And even if the whole thing was complete and utter rubbish, she’d still have left the tiniest doubt to nag away at you for years.

“Vivien, you can’t walk away. I asked you a question. I said, ‘Where were you?’”

She seems a little surprised.

“Where were you when Maud died?”

“In London,” she says.

“Exactly.” But she doesn’t seem to understand the relevance.

“So who is better placed to say what happened?” I say, spelling it out for her.

She is clearly stunned that I’m fighting back. I feel myself redden. I don’t remember standing up to her like this before. By all logical reckoning I’ve won the argument, but for some strange reason it doesn’t feel like a victory. She stares at me for longer than I like—as if, for the first time ever, she’s lost for words.

“Well,” she begins slowly, “I think that depends on who is able to see things as they really are.” And then she adds glibly, “Was the cellar door always left open?” Again, a question to which she already knows the answer.

“No. It was left open accidentally and Maud mistook it for the kitchen door.”

Now she laughs. Not a real laugh, but an affected, condescending one, emanating superiority. Is it really us having this conversation, exactly the same adolescent girls battling it out with infuriating pauses and omissions, leaving everything unsaid? Why should she make me feel small in my own house?

“Mistook it for the kitchen door?” she says with ludicrous disbelief. “Ginny, how I would love to have your cozy view on life, everything slots into place. You never question anything, do you?” She pauses.

Of course I should be infuriated by her belittling strategy, but instead I’m bewildered. I can’t begin to work out what she’s getting at.

“She wasn’t an idiot, Ginny. Why on earth would she mistake it for the kitchen door?”

Now, suddenly, I understand. I’ve just remembered, Vivien doesn’t know. She’s never known. I’d made sure of it. Of course I’d like to tell her the truth. I’d like to scream at her, “No, your mother wasn’t an idiot, she was a drunk,” but I can’t bring myself to tell her, to shatter her untarnished memory of her mother. But now I realize that by ensuring that Vivien never knew the truth about Maud’s drinking I’d inadvertently led her to question the manner of her death. If only I could tell her that Maud was raving and rampaging at the end, that she could easily have walked into the greenhouse thinking it was the bedroom, or the pond for a bath. Mistaking the cellar door for the kitchen wasn’t the least bit difficult to imagine but only, of course, if you knew.

“But, Vivien…” I sigh, and then I’m stuck for words. The knowledge that I have stood by my promise to Maud gives me the composure to rise above all this. She can patronize me as she likes, but after years of protecting her from the truth about Maud it wouldn’t be fair to destroy her perceptions of the past at life’s final hurdle, just to prove a point. I won’t do it, not only for Maud’s honor, but also for my little sister’s sake.

“Well, they’re right next to each other,” I say feebly.

Perhaps she’s still not got over Maud’s death. Perhaps it was Maud’s death that stopped her coming back for so many years.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and I let her bring me close until my head is buried in her shoulder and she holds it there firmly. It’s her way of finding support.

“No, I’m sorry,” I say.

Chapter 13 The Ridge Walk

I’ll never forget the winter that followed, the same year Vivi brought Arthur to meet us for the first time. It came in quickly. I like winter. I like its contradictions: cold but cozy, sparse but beautiful, lifeless but not soulless. The fences were smoothed with ice, the ground white, crunchy. The trees shut themselves down, skeletons standing firm against the winds, and the ones that line the top of the ridge, exposed and bent like wizened old men, were said in these parts to bear the souls of the dead.

Inside the house winter had come too, for all of us, bleak and desperate, but here it was worse—soulless but not lifeless. Clive continued his feverish pursuit of small-world fame. Maud turned more often to the dark side, her rampages more and more extreme. And I was a wretched bridge between them and the world. I felt liable.

Maud didn’t go out anymore. She wouldn’t have been able to go through the necessary procedures to get herself ready. For the next few weeks and months, I took her phone calls, answered her letters and when anybody called, Maud was either very busy or fast asleep. Sometimes the villagers would quiz me about her and I’d feel the sweat gathering on my face as I lied, hoping they wouldn’t see through me. Mrs. Jefferson came up to the house on a number of occasions when she realized we’d stopped making it to church on Sundays, and asked if we needed any help. Each time, before she went, she tried to pin me with her small powerful eyes and told me that if ever I needed her she would always be there.

Maud’s drunken habits became stranger and less predictable. All of a sudden I’d find out about something she’d been up to for a while, things she’d done covertly so that I’d not known about them, like the time I discovered she’d been telephoning the operator. Apparently she’d insisted on interviewing him for various positions in the house or gardens, even though we weren’t looking for anyone in the house and we already had the Coleys for the garden. The operator got so irritated with her disturbing his work that he telephoned one morning and told me he was very happy in the telephone exchange and if we insisted on trying to reemploy him during his working hours he’d have to report us to his supervisor. From then on, I had to remember each evening to pull the telephone cable out of the wall, disconnecting the line into the house.

That winter everything deteriorated, along with Maud. We had the worst storms I could remember, and the cold and the wind and the wet had finally got underneath the vast slated roof on the north side. Clive wasn’t interested. He told me to board up the top two floors, Vera’s old rooms, of the north wing rather than investigate the leakage. The house was far too big for the three of us, anyhow, and Clive said it wasn’t worth maintaining a wing that would never be used again.

Then, late in January, Vivi let in a bit of warmth by coming to visit us, just for a day. She demanded a walk on the ridge. She and I saw walks in the way that most people regard teashops: the perfect environment in which to relax and chat. This walk and talk seemed more urgent than most. She rushed me out of the house, grabbing our coats and hats, and was halfway up the hill at the back, shouting for me to hurry, before I’d even started. There was something on her mind.

It was past midday and the low valley fog had only just lifted, unveiling a layer of soft white sherbet sprinkled on the fields and atop the bare hedges. The chill was ready to be burned off by a weak winter sun, low in the cloudless sky. It’s always been the perfect weather in which to admire this part of the country.

We’d reached the top, from where you could see three valleys meeting, rolling and falling, as they’d done for generations. I stopped for a moment, but Vivi went on ahead, following the path along the top of the ridge, drawing in the fresh icy air she missed in London. I stood admiring the village and the patchwork of bleached fields beyond, the solitary farms and homesteads, the hamlet of Saxton perched on the valley’s rim and the windy interlocking roads and pathways that bind all these places together, linking one life with the next, in a tangle of shared stories.

I was about to start off again, when I noticed a Fox Moth caterpillar rolled up into a tight black hairy ball and strapped with silk to the side of the fence, hibernating. It would be frozen solid, I mused, as hard as rock, probably too hard even for the birds to eat. It shuts down so spectacularly during hibernation that it’s unimaginable there’s life left somewhere deep within it, a tiny epicenter with a remnant pulse. But spring always works its magic, bringing it miraculously back to life. Even if it was frozen solid all winter, spring would revive it; if it were submerged in a pool all winter, it would survive; if it were submerged for five years rather than one, those restorative ingredients of its first spring would be able to return it to the world. What was it, I thought, that enabled it to adjourn life so effectively, and how is it that something as simple as the warmth of the sun can restore it, can get the tiny valves pumping once again, to shunt along its cold, stagnant blood? How is it that it can send an impulse to awaken the clusters of nerve cells in each segment of its body? If it doesn’t breathe all winter and if its neurons are inert and uncharged, is it theoretically dead? Is this, in fact, a resurrection? I marveled: all this inherent ingenuity, yet it doesn’t have the slightest idea that it’s doing any of it. Its nervous system is far too simple to know, to think, to be self-aware. It doesn’t even have a brain in the way you’d think of one—a single central command center. Instead it has a loose knot of tangled nerve cells—a ganglion—in each segment of its body, a sort of beaded string of early brains. People see the cleverness of nature and suppose it’s the cleverness of the animal itself but it was obvious to me that each and every segment of the animal isn’t aware. How much I’d hate to live totally unaware of myself, I thought. What would be the point of living, of existing, if you weren’t ever to know about it? I looked at the Fox Moth and pitied it, poor unconscious creature. But then, I supposed, at least it wouldn’t be disappointed. It would never find out.

I heard Vivi marching up behind me, breathing heavily. She had been far ahead so she must have turned round and come back.

“Ginny,” she said, “knock, knock.” She tapped my head gently. “You’re playing statues again,” she said in a childish singsong. I said nothing. I was still thinking: If you were born unaware, at least you’d be blissfully ignorant. It’s not as if you’re going to wake up one day and suddenly discover yourself.

“Ginny?” she said more seriously. “Ginny, you’re not moving.” I felt her put a hand on my shoulder. “Giiiinny?” she called, as if she were summoning me from a different floor of the house. Why’s she doing that? I thought. I’m right in front of her.

“Ginny!” firmly now, like a mother telling off a child, and she gave my shoulders a little shake.

I looked round at her.

“Oh, God, don’t do that, Ginny,” she said.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Your absence thing. You haven’t moved an inch for fifteen minutes.”

She was exaggerating, of course. “It’s not an absence thing, I was thinking.”

“I know, but it does seem like you’ve gone away sometimes. It really does,” Vivi said. “You need a back-in-twenty-minutes sign,” she joked lightly.

“I’m just concentrating.”

I have the best concentration of anyone I know. I can concentrate so hard that I block out everything around me. My family used to get completely flustered by it but it’s perhaps my only natural gift. It annoyed me when Vivi called it being absent. She would say she’d seen me stay as still as a statue for hours at a time but she always exaggerated. In fact I can only ever keep it up for a few minutes.

“I’ve got something to ask you, Ginny,” she said suddenly, as if it were another ploy to pull my attention back to her. “Are you there?” she asked annoyingly.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she continued. “I want to get married.” She said it quickly, almost as if it were a question.

I stopped, surprised. I’d already thought, over the last few months, that she might marry Arthur. It wasn’t what she said that came as a surprise, just that I hadn’t expected it right then, or that that would be the manner in which she’d say it.

“Oh, Vivi, that’s wonderful,” I said effusively. I tried my best to give her an uncustomary hug and sort of grabbed her around the middle.

“Oh, no, he hasn’t asked me, Ginny. We’ve just talked about it.”

I should have guessed she’d have found a complication. Vivi always managed to fill the simplest ideas with ambiguity. I should have trusted my instincts. Had she actually got engaged, telling me would have been a far more elaborate affair.

“But I can’t marry him,” she continued, squeezing her eyes shut. Only Vivi, I thought, could start you off assuming this was a happy event and, in moments, twist it into a sad one. Infuriating as it could sometimes be, her overflowing emotion was also part of her appeal, and I hated to see her sad. I could cope with pain and disappointment, but somehow Vivi wasn’t built to shoulder anguish. Her fragile body would crumble under its weight. She needed shielding. She should live free of suffering, and in return she’d give so much back in happiness and vibrancy and fun.

“I’m sorry, Vivi. I thought you were saying that you were getting married,” I said finally.

There was a long silence. A jay landed on a rusty tin barrel that had been discarded at the edge of the fence by the farmer. It hopped along to the end, jerking its head this way and that with robotic, watchful movements. I knew I wasn’t the most ideal comforter at times like this. I was a practical person, not well equipped to offer emotional support. I tried anyway. “So do you think he’ll ask you?” I asked cautiously.

“I suppose he has, sort of.”

“Well, that’s great, isn’t it?” I offered.

“But, Ginny, I don’t want to.”

I was certain that a moment ago she had wanted to. As always, with Vivi, I had to expect the unexpected. Often I saw no point in trying to understand her and the puzzles into which she tore her life. I watched the jay as it leaned down over the edge of the barrel, doubling back on itself to inspect the inside. Then it jumped to the ground and skirted warily round some fungus that foamed out from beneath, then hopped sideways and disappeared into the darkness within.

“Don’t you want to know why?” Vivi asked.

She’d buried her head in her jacket but I could hear a note of annoyance. “Why?”

“Why do you think, Virginia?” she barked confusingly. First she’d wanted me to ask a question, and then it was a stupid one.

“Because I can’t have children,” she continued. “I can’t have children so I can’t see the point of getting married. I mean, if you can’t have a family then it’s not a…It’s just not the life I’d want. I can’t think of anything more depressing than a childless marriage.”

She started to cry properly now and she looked fifteen again. I took her by the shoulders and supported her as she sat down on the icy grass, trying to pull her jacket under her bottom to protect it from the wet. Then I sat down next to her. Her not being able to have children wasn’t something we’d ever discussed properly. It had seemed such a small price for her life. I’d never felt any desire for them and had assumed she felt the same. I tried to take an authoritarian stance.

“Now Vivi, you might not be able to have children, but you’re alive, aren’t you? And you’ve found a man who loves you and that must be wonderful. You can’t have everything always,” I finished, just as Maud might have.

“Everything? I don’t want everything. I just want a child. I’ve always wanted a child,” she sobbed, “ever since I couldn’t have one.”

“Well, it’s not going to happen, Vivi, and that’s that. It’s pure biology,” I said. I didn’t want to make her any more upset but there was nothing else to say. It all seemed pretty miserably final to me. Poor Vivi, I thought. She’d be more stable with the security of marriage. She was the type who needed constant assurance that she was loved. “He loves you for you, Vivi, and not being able to have children is just part of you,” I said after some thought.

It stopped Vivi crying. “Rubbish. It’s not part of me at all, Ginny,” she rebuked me. “I wasn’t born unable to have children. It’s something I lost. It’s a part of me that’s missing, not the other way round.”

“I’m really truly sorry, Vivi,” I said, meaning it sincerely, and put my arm tightly round her. “You poor thing.” She sobbed loudly on my left shoulder. I was the stronger, self-sufficient sister and it was at times like this that Vivi really needed me.

When we’d been expelled from school Vivi and I had spent two hours crying in a lavatory cubicle in the kit room with Vivi’s best friend, Maisie (who’d apparently requested some bananas in the first place). We’d cried and cried, sobbing as if our lives had fallen apart, and Vivi scratched “Fuck Bananas” with her hair clip three times across the black and yellow harlequin floor tiles and declared she was an anarchist. But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t upset. I was just pretending. Instead I felt invigorated, revitalized and valuable. I was at the center of something with my sister. We were deep in it together. After a time I asked Maisie if she could leave us alone for five minutes because, I explained, she wasn’t in the same situation as us so she couldn’t fully understand what we were going through. Vivi had needed only me then, as she did now, and now, like then, my role as her elder sister suddenly felt crucial.

The jay finally hopped out of the barrel into the light, carrying a snail in its beak like a prize. Vivi looked up and stared at me. Her face had puffed up and—

“Will you have my baby?” she asked.

I laughed.

“No, I mean will you, you know, have my baby?”

Chapter 14 Vivien’s Day Out

Vivien’s walked out. She’s gone. She didn’t tell me where she was going or when she was coming back. She didn’t tell me she was going out at all. It’s all rather odd, don’t you think? It’s almost like she sneaked out, and if I hadn’t been watching her I’d never have known. I happened to be in my bathroom, from where I could see her dark outline pass back and forth across her bedroom window. Then I heard her go onto the landing and down the stairs, so I ventured out myself and, halfway down the stairs, I glimpsed the back of her long winter coat as she shut the front door behind her. I wanted to follow her but I knew that by the time I’d changed into warmer clothes, of course I wouldn’t know which way she’d gone, so instead I hurried back up the hall stairs to my lookout on the landing and peered close to the leaded window so that I could see which way she was headed. Perhaps, I thought, I could hurry from window to window and keep her in view. I was surprised. I thought she’d retrace one of our old walks; I thought she’d skirt the house and go up the ridge or down through the meadows to the copse. But she didn’t. Instead I’ve just seen her stride off boldly down the middle of the drive, headed for the village, straight into the arms of its whispering houses.

Here’s a strange old thing: I didn’t want Vivien to go, and as I watched her walking away I was desperate not to lose sight of her. The farther she went, the more I hoped she might suddenly turn round or go right and follow the brook, where I could see her from the house. But—and this is the unexpected part—now that she’s gone and I’ve finally lost sight of her, I’m not craving for her to turn back at all. To tell you the truth, the twisting anxiety that has wrung my stomach ever since her arrival has evaporated, and now I’m overtaken by a delightful sense of relief and freedom. It’s the same feeling I had when I watched Bobby driving away, the furniture and all that clutter disappearing down the drive in his van. I have respite from her being continually in the house, and a reprieve from my constant vigilance. I can wander about without worrying where she is, and what I should do or say if I come across her. I can shut a door and know it will stay shut. I can put my tea blends back in the right order in the kitchen cupboard and throw out the greasy butter paper she’s been saving in the fridge.

I walk downstairs into the hall, in part to exercise my newfound freedom but also to check she hasn’t left any doors open to the empty rooms. I don’t like them open. For me they’re not part of the house anymore. It’s like leaving the front door open. Luckily I find them closed, but it’s as I wander through into the kitchen that I notice that Vivien’s left her handbag on the counter by the Kenwood mixer. It’s a soft green leather one with heavy brass buckles and no zip or fixings so that, as it lies in a saggy pile, the top flops over, showing me through its wide-open mouth, the contents of its belly. A lipstick and a book of stamps peep out near the entrance and, as I come closer and lift up the edge, I see inside a messy world of receipts and slips and paper clips and safety pins, a nail file, the face of a wristwatch with the strap broken off…. I am distracted briefly by the inside lining, a thin loose material, unattached to the leather. It is light gray and evenly punctured with tight rows of pinprick holes. Its recurrent pattern mesmerizes me; I can see the dots as rows or as columns, or diagonals, triangles or squares, and then as shapes with depth, stretching away from me until I’ve lost perspective entirely. Eventually I have to reach out and touch it to feel how far away the material really is and bring me back from my wildly distorted visual field. It feels silky and, as I caress it, it shimmers in the light—like silk, but I know it can’t be silk because it catches on the rough dry skin at the tips of my fingers, sending a queer shiver down my back.

I lift the handbag and pour it out, its contents spinning and skating over the smooth Formica work top. I don’t know why I’m looking in here or what I think I might find. Perhaps an insight into the new grown-up Vivien or a clue as to why she’s returned. I collect up her things, one by one—three pens, her mobile phone, a bunch of keys (what for?), a pocket sized London A–Z, six loose bobby pins—and put them back into the bag, aware that she could come back at any moment. There’s a lipstick, a powder compact, a fold-up comb, a magnifying glass, three safety pins that I pause to look at (I’d like to add them to the eight I have on my bed to keep the top sheet from shifting against the blanket, but I wouldn’t dream of taking them).

I try to put everything back randomly, messily, as chaotic as I found it, but my natural disposition is to order things—it’s the scientist in me—and I find it terribly difficult to resist. Once or twice I look the other way, shove my hand into the bag and whiz it around to mess it up more than I am capable of doing deliberately. I envy her the bobby pins and it’s as I’m trying one out, sweeping some fringe hair into a parting, that I spot the gold brooch that must have skimmed to the far edge of the counter and come to rest under the shadow of the wall cupboard. It’s about the size of a small bird’s egg, a similar shape too, oval, but flattened. As I pick it up I see there are small colored stones encrusted in the gold on the front and, in the center, a large bloodred ruby. Its heaviness surprises me. I weigh it in my hands, rolling it over and over. On the back, under the big pin, one edge is beaded with tiny decorative gold hinges, and opposite these is a small catch. I ping the catch open with my nail and catch my breath. It’s an old photo, scratched and faded, of Vivi and Arthur gripping each other tightly. They are sitting on a low stone wall and Vivi is holding one hand splayed protectively across her rounded tummy. I peer more closely at the photo. There’s no doubt: Vivi looks pregnant. They appear to be a beautiful example of an adoring young couple, a new baby on the way to bond them into a family as well as to each other. I bring it closer to my eyes, trying to fill in the scratches and faded parts as best I can. Vivi is looking at Arthur. Her happiness is transparent. It makes me smile to see it, and she’s clinging to Arthur with her other hand as if she’s worried he might fall off the photograph. He is upright, stiff and sober-looking, and stares straight at the camera—a proud new parent perhaps? But I find it baffling. I can’t remember seeing this photo. I don’t know how on earth it could have been taken.

I snap the brooch shut and plop it into the green handbag. I decide to go to the landing, to my lookout, and wait for Vivien to come home, but I can’t get the image of her and Arthur out of my head. That young, spirited Vivien was the one I had clearly remembered for all these years, before she turned up again yesterday and started to replace it with the older, less recognizable version. But it’s seeing Arthur again that’s thrown me. I’ve never forgotten the snatched time we spent together, but over the years my memory must have distorted his appearance. I’ve been remembering a fully grown, self-assured man, as if his image had grown old with me, but I’m mistaken. Seeing that photo has made me realize that the only man I’ve ever been intimate with was little more than a boy.

I remember clearly the first time Arthur and I had sex.

Nineteen sixty. An easy, breezy summer’s day, almost two and a half months after Vivi and Arthur were married, Arthur was sent to me by train to try to make Vivi a baby. I watched him alight from the far end of the nearside platform at Crewkerne station. It was only then, while he walked the length of the platform and I studied his long slim legs striding boldly towards me, hugged in corduroy, that I felt a small slight panic of reality: I was going to have sex with this man and his long slim legs. Arthur didn’t mention it—and neither did I—as he greeted me, or during the fifteen-minute car ride home from the station, or when we parked the car in the drive, or as he greeted my parents. We didn’t mention it while I showed him to the small burgundy spare room off a half landing in the west wing of the house, with its high single bed and pretty window overlooking the sunny silky meadows below. But, of course, all that time it was the only thing I was thinking about.

In 1960 people hadn’t started to admit freely that they couldn’t have children. The boom in fertility treatments, which changed all that, didn’t happen for another twenty years. If you were married and couldn’t have children, you either said you didn’t want them or you got them from somewhere else and often no one was ever the wiser. It was always a private affair, at times a dirty little secret. It wasn’t that surrogacy was a bad word; it wasn’t even a word yet, though up and down the country private agreements along those lines were being forged, as they had been for generations, among close family or friends.

I was never going to disappoint Vivi up there on the ridge that day, however much her suggestion had surprised me. It wasn’t so much that I’d decided, out of compassion, to give my sister the baby she so desperately wanted. I didn’t even consider turning her down. She’d made me feel so honored: Vivi had chosen me to be the mother of her baby. In the same way that I’d never have stopped her sharing my bed this morning, despite the intrusion and discomfort, I wasn’t going to turn down the chance of securing that everlasting kinship with Vivi by having her child.

Vivi was adamant that the surrogacy must be kept secret from everyone—apart from the three of us—so that there could be no possibility of the child stumbling across the truth of a lifelong lie and hating us for it, or of anyone else finding out for that matter. She said that having a secret from your child for their own good was one thing, but for a child to grow up amid a secret that everyone else knew was wrong and unkind.

Vivi especially didn’t want Maud and Clive to know yet. Of course, they knew she couldn’t have children but, for reasons I have never understood, she felt they’d be opposed to the idea.

“I said they might be against it,” she corrected me, as we huddled together in the cold on the ridge that day. “I don’t think they would necessarily,” she said quickly. “I don’t know what they’d think.”

She wanted us to get pregnant, before we let them in on the secret, in case they tried to stop us. She said at best they’d give us lots of opinions that would confuse us, and it should be for us, and us alone, to decide.

“I can make up my own mind, Vivi, and I’ve told you already that I’ll do it,” I assured her.

“Thank you, sweetie, I love you. You’re my best friend as well as my best sister,” she said in a pure rush of love that made me feel dizzy. “I just want it to be our secret to begin with, Ginny,” she said pleadingly. “We’ll tell them as soon as anything happens.”

“As soon as I get pregnant?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “When you’re pregnant they can’t put us off.” She laughed.

I decided it came down to the difference in how we viewed our parents: Vivi had always seen them as working against her, while I always thought of them as on my side. If I could tell them once I was pregnant, I couldn’t see how it would make much difference to do as Vivi wanted. So it was agreed.

“Promise, cross your heart and hope to die,” she’d said.

“I promise.” I’d sincerely crossed my heart with my right hand to secure the pact and seal our fate.

We were still up on that frozen ridge when she told me her entire stratagem. Ostensibly Arthur’s visits to Bulburrow would be on business—an idea for a new wholesale bakery to supply the area—although they’d happen to correspond with my monthly estrus. She’d got it all worked out, as always.

So there we were, Arthur and I, alone for the first time in my bedroom, which was farther down the landing and on the opposite side to my parents’ room. It was the afternoon, just before teatime. Maud and Clive were busy in other parts of the house.

The first thing Arthur said to me, almost formally, was, “Ginny, I need to know that you understand what you’re doing, that you know you’re giving the baby away. It will not be your baby. You will not be its mother. Vivien will. Are you sure you want to do that?” He said it so very s-l-o-w-l-y and c-l-e-a-r-l-y, as if I were an idiot.

“Yes,” I said, my single-size iron bed looming between us as an overwhelming symbol of the enforced intimacy of the very near future.

“But you need to think about it,” he said, rather puzzlingly.

I find it a struggle to understand the complexities of people I know best, let alone decipher those I don’t. Surely in giving him the answer I’d already thought about it. I’ve learned that it’s futile to challenge anyone about why they say what they say, or mean what they don’t say. Mostly I try to humor them, saying and doing what will please them most, and hope it all becomes clear later. So, on the other side of that bed, which was glowering up at us in the hope of unification, I tried to act like I was “thinking about it” for a few seconds, as if “thinking about it” was something you did rubbing your chin and gazing skyward, but what I was really thinking was how odd it was that I’d never discussed the surrogacy with Arthur directly, not once. I’d only ever talked about it with Vivi. Occasionally she alluded to Arthur’s opinion on this and that aspect of the arrangement, but mostly she talked about it furtively and covetously, as if it were only our secret, which made me almost forget that Arthur was involved at all. She’d talked about how we would watch the child grow and progress, how she would teach it about the city and I would teach it about the country, so that I’d come to regard it as Vivi’s and my baby, not his. I’d considered him an inert part of the process, a catalyst—necessary for the reaction to happen but remaining unchanged at the end.

So until that moment I’d never actually considered Arthur’s feelings. I wondered if this last-minute deliberation meant he wasn’t as keen as Vivi on the idea. Perhaps he was looking for a way out, but I didn’t know whether it was because of the baby or because it meant having to have sex with me. Then I said, as thoughtfully as I could feign, “It’s not my baby. I will not be its mother. I understand that.”

He considered my response slowly and, for whatever reason, decided it would do. “Good,” he said, and relaxed. “Shall we get undressed?”

I quickly stripped off my skirt, underpants, blouse and bra and stood naked by the bed. When I looked up I found Arthur with his back towards me and a towel fastened round his waist. He was struggling to undress beneath it, as if he were changing on a crowded beach. Modesty about our bodies made no sense to me when we were about to do something as intrusive and intimate as sex.

“Oh,” he said simply, when he turned back to me holding, with one hand behind his back, the towel that covered him. He was looking intently at my face, as if he didn’t want to be caught ogling my body, but I couldn’t help staring at the towel. I would have liked to see the equipment we had to work with before we got started. This was sexual reproduction for reproduction’s sake only, so surely we could be matter-of-fact about it. We stood there uncertainly, hovering in hesitation.

“Are you nervous?” he asked.

“A bit,” I lied, my eyes shifting from the carefully placed towel down to the floor. I should have been nervous, I know, but I was far too preoccupied with the practicalities of the situation, and once I get an idea in my head I find it difficult to think of anything else until I’ve resolved it. How, exactly, from this position, the bed between us, him covered up, were we going to end up with his penis depositing sperm into my uterus? I was more confused than nervous.

“Well, don’t be,” he said kindly.

My room was a bright daffodil yellow, richly augmented by the late afternoon sun stretching gloriously through the window. I’d selected it—the daffodil—when I was too young to know better and insisted that the ceiling as well as the walls should be done in the chosen color. Maud had painted it herself, directly over the Victorian wood-chip paper, which had raised swirls all over the ceiling.

When I was little I liked it because when I stared up at it from my bed and half crossed my eyes, enough to make them lazy, it was easy to lose my focus in the swirling ceiling. It would take a minute or two to get my eyes into it, to lose perspective and start to see the shapes and patterns in other dimensions. Once I’d got my eye in, it was quite impossible—without looking away first—to see the ceiling as flat again. Sometimes the swirls would be shooting away from me, and at other times they were spiraling out of the paper towards me so that if I reached up I could put my hand straight through them. I’d lie there in the light evenings or the early mornings of my childhood, moving them about and watching them dart in and out of the room.

Sex didn’t hurt, as Vivi had said it might, and it didn’t give me any pleasure, as I’d wondered it might. Instead, as I lay as still as I could under him, I watched the yellow spirals on the ceiling above me, dancing in and out like lively springs, and was astounded that this frenetic, mediocre act was what we were made for. This, apparently, was what men and women craved, not just when they wanted a child but for the act itself. After all, it’s all we’re required to do in life—by the laws of nature—to ensure the continuation of our species.

I can’t think why but at that moment I thought of a stag beetle with his shiny black armor and huge, fierce-looking antlers, as long again as his body. With such an outfit you’d assume he was a great warrior, yet his fearsome appearance is a mystery to naturalists. He doesn’t fight once in his monthlong life. He doesn’t even eat. His sole purpose is to lug his cumbersome body around in search of a mate and, once he’s mated he dies, his formidable weaponry an unnecessary encumbrance.

Arthur’s head was buried in the pillow beside me, his mouth close to my ear. I smelt his musk and listened to his strained irregular breathing and I thought of all the forces driving him to do this. His arms were on either side of me, solid in rock-hard tension, his elbows locked at right angles to give him a little height, and I could see his sinewy upper body immaculately taut, powerful. Every slender muscle had a job to do and I marveled at the force in the thrust of his bottom, even for a thin man.

At last I felt Arthur’s whole body go rigid in involuntary spasm and wondered if there was any other moment, apart from ejaculation, that so many of a man’s muscles contract at the same time. I imagined the little packages of ATP and lactic acid being busily shunted and exchanged deep within the filaments of his muscles, a powerhouse working at full capacity.

When he’d finished and withdrawn, I flipped my legs to the head of the bed and stuck my feet and bottom up on the wall above me.

“What are you doing?” he asked then, rolling off the bed.

“I’m just helping them.”

“Does it?” he said. “Help them?”

“Vivien thinks it might. It’s on her list,” I said, referring to a list of helpful hints and instructions she’d sent me, but Arthur was looking at me strangely, at my legs. “It’s not one of the things I have to do but just something I can do if I want—”

“Ouch, what happened to you?” he interrupted. “Did you have an accident?”

“Those?” I tried to sound casual. “I always have bruises,” and I tugged at the sheet to cover up the marks of Maud’s outbursts.

“Sorry.” He looked embarrassed, as if he’d just pointed out a deformity he shouldn’t have mentioned, and went into the bathroom.

I felt his sperm trickling inside me and along the inside of my thigh. I checked that he was out of the room before I felt between my legs with my fingers. I had an urge to rush to the lab upstairs, smear the glistening liquid onto a slide, drop over a coverslip and push it under the X1000 lens. I’d have liked to see them swimming.

We did it once more that day and three times the next. The rest of the time we actively ignored each other, not only aware that we had to keep our baby-making plans secret from Maud and Clive, but also, perhaps, in a subconscious effort to balance out the impossible intimacy we were to have three times a day.

I’m sitting at my lookout on the landing, staring at my toes protruding from the ends of my slippers in their thick woolen socks. Did I tell you that three months ago I had to cut the tops off my slippers, at the very end, to let my toes stick out? My feet get so swollen that they felt as if they’d been crammed into slippers two sizes too small. Every step made me wince with pain. It’s such a relief to have them out.

It’s while I’m sitting here on the window seat, trying to wiggle my toes up and down, exercising them, that I finally catch sight of Vivien, walking back up the drive. At the same time, I hear the faint whirr and chink of the bracket clock in the hall as it passes the half hour. Something inside the workings has become misaligned. It used to strike the half hour properly, with one full, rich note, but over the last few years it’s been muffled and the sound shortened, stripped of its echo; a chink, not a chime. Luckily, I can still hear it from the parts of the house I frequent, and when I do, I always check it against both of my wristwatches to make sure they’re all keeping time. Right now, they are in agreement: it’s four-thirty in the afternoon, and Vivien’s been out since five past one.

Three and a half hours since she left the house—without a word—and the light is fading, but here she comes meandering slowly up the side of the drive, close to the beech hedge. She stops awhile to bend down and fiddle with her boot, then starts off again, dusting the beech hedge casually with her hand as she goes. Where has she been? I try to imagine all the places she might have been but, to tell you the truth, I can’t even think of one. There’s something strange about the way she’s walking, a manner that I can’t quite put my finger on or explain in words. She’s running her hand along the side of the hedge as she walks, childlike, knocking off some of last year’s crumpled brown leaves that seem to cling tightly to beech right through into spring.

I hurry down the stairs, giving myself plenty of time before she reaches the house, and shut myself into the study behind the kitchen.

The study has two doors off it, one to the kitchen and one to the hall. I’ve decided that if she goes into the kitchen I’ll time my entrance to happen upon her there, and if she goes straight upstairs I can pretend I’d just decided to leave the study as she starts up the stairs. Either way I’ll be able to ask her where she’s been. I plant myself by the bookcase, equidistant from the two doors, ready to go one way or the other. Vivien goes straight upstairs. Once she passes the study door, I count her footsteps up five stairs, then open the door.

I freeze, hit by the unmistakable stench of sherry. The smell unleashes a little remnant of fear and unease that burrows its way out onto the skin of my arms, crawling between the hairs. It’s the smell of Maud. I back away from the door and close it again, quietly. I wait until I hear Vivien’s footsteps pass above me to her room before I go quietly to my own.

Chapter 15 In Remembrance of Pauline Abbey Clarke

Once I’m in my room, I rearrange the pillows at the head of my bed, stacking them up so I can sit and admire the sleepy Bulburrow valley through the south windows. Outside the breeze leads the tips of the creeper’s new shoots in a quivering dance, each one searching for a partner to entwine. Maud said she’d planted the creeper because it was my namesake—Virginia. She said she liked the idea of me creeping all over the house forever, and I remember that then she laughed a lot because I asked her what she meant by that and she said I shouldn’t be so serious about everything.

I can’t help thinking what a shock the smell of sherry has just given me, and the memories it’s inflamed. I’d forgotten how fearful I was of Maud when she was drunk. There’d be so little warning. One moment she’d be humming to herself, happily inebriated, and the next she’d have grabbed a weapon—a mug, a brolly, a book or whatever else was close to hand—and lashed out at me in unrestrained fury. But—I think I’ve mentioned this before—I always forgave her for what she did, I knew she couldn’t help it and, somehow, she more than made up for it when she was sober, with her sublime reassurances of love, when she’d lay her head on my lap, or squeeze me tight and kiss me. It was at those times that I thought we’d never been so close, and that we’d never needed each other so much.

I could cope with the violence. That was easy—I could rationalize it. It was the incessant insults I found hardest to bear. I knew not to believe a word of it, I knew not to listen and, thanks to Maud herself, I knew how to lock myself in that place in my head where I can go and not hear. But there was one that came up over and over again, the one about how I’d ruined her life.

“You’ll never know how much you’ve ruined my life,” she’d shout, grabbing my face in her hand as if she wanted to grind it to dust. I always thought how lucky it was that it was me, not Vivi; that I was able to detach myself from it in a way that Vivi’s mercurial personality would not have permitted. But it was this theme, that I’d ruined her life, that came up the most, that all the others would culminate with, the one she’d repeat over and over in different ways and, by the end, I couldn’t help but believe—in a little part of me—that she truly thought I had.

Once or twice I let myself wonder what on earth I might have done to make her think it, but mostly I knew it was nonsense. Her life would have been ruined without me to cover up her every misplaced step, to shield her outbursts from her husband and her other daughter. She couldn’t have coped without me.

I made sure Maud never knew that her gibes got to me. I remained impassive and unaffected, even though I saw the danger in that too. I saw the pattern but I couldn’t stop it. The more resilient I appeared, the more Maud wanted a reaction and the more vicious her behavior became. Only now, looking back, can I see that a clash was spiraling out of control.

I stretch over to pull out the drawer at the top of my bedside table. It lost its handle many years ago so I have to pull on the screws that once fixed it and stick out two inches apart. The drawer is stiff, but once I wangle it out enough to slip my fingers into the top, I can wrench it all the way. There, lined up neatly, are two full rows of cannabis tea bags, each like a perfectly crafted marble with the muslin gathered in a spray at the top and a length of cotton thread for manipulating it in the mug. I don’t like to use them unless it’s absolutely necessary and I’ve exhausted all the other ways to alleviate the pain in my joints. It’s not that I’m moderating myself. It’s just that I so much prefer the two rows in the drawer being full. When there’s a gap the bags slide about as I open or close the drawer, upsetting their careful alignment.

I lift up a bag and smell it. I like the idea of the smell more than the smell itself. My favorite thing is to take them all out and line them up on the bed. Then I pick up each one in turn—as I’m doing now—and roll it in my fingers, admiring the handiwork, the immaculate rows of small, even stitches along the seams. As I study it I picture Michael working at his late mother’s kitchen table, his fat, practiced fingers carefully folding the muslin, gently pulling the stitching to gather and tie it at the top.

I like to believe he thinks of me while he’s stitching. I feel that he and I have a small connection and not only because our families go back for three generations in an employment partnership. We are both quiet and, I should imagine, similarly misjudged. Besides, I’ve known him all his life. Soon after his birth it became evident Michael was a near clone of his mother, missing out on all his father’s failings. He was born big and gentle and calm, and soon disclosed a big heart and a small intellect. But, like his mother, Michael was a grafter, and after she died he took over nursing his father patiently through his final ailing years. No other son would have put up with the childlike tantrums of that cantankerous man, until one glorious cold and cloudless day when Michael was collecting blood-blue sloes from the hedges along the willow walk and his father was choking slowly to death at home. For many years Michael was haunted by the ghosts of guilt, believing they were the actual ghosts of his father’s celestial fury.

It took Michael several years to understand that he had, in picking the sloes that day, secured his freedom. He rebelled gently, admitting his hatred of gardening—the only education his father had given him. I released him from his duties in the Bulburrow grounds and allowed him to continue living in the Stables in return for nothing. With the scrapings of a lifetime savings his father had forgotten to, or not got round to, spending in his own lifetime, Michael bought a big motorcycle and a small tent, about the size of our hanging pantry. He hired it that first year to the Jeffersons at Christmas for mince pies and carols, and for some yearly gathering at the Liberal Club, then to Ethel Phelps in the gatehouse lodge to extend her conservatory for Stan’s seventieth. And then he bought another slightly bigger tent—about the size of the kitchen study. Throughout the following summer, he hired them out for events and parties in the neighboring villages, Saxton, Broadhampton and Selby.

I could swear Michael showed no sign of strategy, cunning or business, but now he has sixteen marquees, enormous ones, the size of the drawing room and library put together, with all the trimmings for weddings and funerals, and all of life’s ceremonies between. Michael never needed or cared for anything but that which he couldn’t have: a loving father. He still lives at the Stables, he still rides his bike and he still looks as if he works in the vegetable patch, but I know that he’s now the wealthiest man in the village. His late mother would have laughed and loved him just the same, but he would never have been able to make his father proud.

He had acquired some cannabis seeds from his biker friends and, with the expertise in tending plants that his father had drummed into him from an early age, he used the remaining peach houses in the walled garden to grow a celebrated line in skunk, as he calls it. Like me, he lives alone, and although I wouldn’t be so bold as to claim a friendship, Michael and I have a long-term connection. He visits me irregularly—about twice a month—to deliver my groceries, take out my rubbish, block up new drafts, tell me the briefest of village news and, if necessary, to top up my supply of his personalized brand of herbal remedy.

The second time Vivi sent Arthur to Bulburrow, he telephoned quite unexpectedly from Crewkerne, an hour and a half before his train was due in. I wasn’t ready for him. I’d had a long bath and scrubbed myself clean. I hadn’t yet peeled the potatoes for supper or finished rearranging the dried flowers in his room. I shoved aside the vase and the oasis I’d been piecing together in the back pantry, grabbed some King Edwards from the sack and threw them into the sink to remind me they needed to be sorted. Thankfully the place wasn’t in too bad a state. Recently, I’d been spending much more time on the housework than my moth work, much to Clive’s disapproval.

One of my biggest regrets is not talking to Clive about Maud at this time. If only I had, he might have done something before it was too late. I didn’t know to what extent he thought she was drinking. He’d seen her drunk, of course, but he couldn’t have known how badly she’d deteriorated. At the time I was trying to avoid the subject so that I didn’t find myself having to pretend I knew less than I did. Maud was relying on me.

Arthur was waiting for me by the station entrance as I pulled up in the Chester. The passenger seat was overloaded with Clive’s boxes and tools, so Arthur volunteered to squeeze in beside the apparatus in the back with his bag on his knees, facing the back windscreen.

“I’m sorry you had to wait,” I said.

“Not at all. I got an earlier train,” he shouted, competing with the full choke as I turned over the Chester’s engine. “So, how’s it all going?”

“Everything’s ready,” I shouted back. “I’m sure the timing will be right this time.”

“What?”

“I’m sure I’ve got the timing right,” I yelled, trying to throw the words over my shoulder while I watched the road. “Maybe this time is going to be it.” In the mirror I saw Arthur craning his neck round stiffly, apparently still aware that he was in a chemical factory, to look towards me in the front.

“I didn’t mean that, I just meant how are you?” He half-laughed. Our eyes met briefly in the mirror before I flicked mine back to the road.

“Virginia…,” he said, seriously now, like I was about to be told off. I wanted to move the mirror: it had brought him too close. “You do know it could take years?”

“Oh, no! I’m sure it won’t,” I said, a little appalled. I kept my eyes fixed on the road. I’d never imagined that these illicit meetings between Arthur and me would go on long. I’d never thought they might become less detached, less functional, that we might actually begin to get to know each other, that we might form a bond of our own, a friendship.

“Really? What makes you think it won’t take long?” Arthur asked.

The truth was I hadn’t thought about it. “Well, Vivi has worked out the chart really carefully and I’ve checked it as well. We think we’re right on timing so there’s nothing stopping—”

“Ginny,” he interrupted, “there’s more to making a baby than preparations and timing control.”

“Well, that’s if the sperm are—”

“I didn’t mean my sperm.” He laughed loudly. We were coming down the hill into the village, passing the new bungalows on the left. “Ginny, let’s go for a drive. Let’s not go up to the house yet.”

“Drive? Where to?”

“Don’t you have a favorite place?” I didn’t answer. “Somewhere with a view?”

“No.”

“Come on, Ginny. Anywhere…,” I slowed and took the right-hand turn between the ivy-clad stone pillars, into the corridor of yellowing limes that escorted visitors up the winding drive. “A beauty spot?” he added, with gentle impatience.

I had lots of favorite places: places I’d go caterpillar or moth hunting, places I’d walk and think and breathe and study. Or treacle the trees. But they’re rarely beautiful: behind the mobile homes on the cliff walk between Seatown and Beer, where at this time of year I’d hunt through the thorny scrub to find the Oak Eggar caterpillar hibernating in its hairy orange-and-black coat; the bog at Fossett’s Bar, where two streams meet and overflow, and marsh reeds grow in thick unsurpassable clumps, and I’d wade in to find the long silky cocoon of The Drinker tapered to the stems; the railway station, the one we’ve just left, to the disused square of land behind it, where the tall wire fence has fallen in so you can squeeze through and be in the company of some of the rarest wildflowers in the West Country; better still, the dump behind the Esso garage on the A303 at Winterbourne Stoke where, on a day of good fortune, I’d find the distinctively bulbous cocoon of the Elephant Hawk-moth tangled among the moss and litter on the ground, or Golden-rod Pug caterpillars, starting on a feast of ragwort. These were my favorite places, my beauty spots. Like the insects I studied, I’ve never been attracted to manicured beauty. To us, weeds are wildflowers and untended scrubland a rare and forgotten paradise. Dorset’s true wildernesses have quietly become the disused dumps, the unworthy wasteland, the boggy, the bleak and the barren. Certainly not a place to entertain guests.

“No,” I said again, “not really.” The truth was, I didn’t relish the idea of walking and talking with Arthur. I could cope with our monthly sessions being purely clinical, impersonal, but I didn’t want to get to know him. I was happy to have this baby for Vivi if Arthur remained a catalyst, an inert part of the process. I’d have preferred him to be a total stranger.

“So you don’t have a place you go to be alone sometimes,” he said, softly now, so that I had to strain to hear him. In the mirror I could see he was looking straight ahead, out the back window, but it felt as though he was peering right through me, inspecting my every secret.

“Or a place that you like to walk?” he suggested. We’d reached the final bend, just before the house came into view. “Come on,” he pleaded finally. “Let’s not go home yet. Let’s just stop here and walk.”

I pulled up at the side of the drive and turned off the engine. “We can walk to the brook if you like,” I said.

“I’d love to walk to the brook,” Arthur replied quickly, enthusiastically, and opened the rear door.

I smiled for the first time since I’d picked him up, but so that he wouldn’t see it. Something that was tight within me relaxed a little, something I hadn’t known had been tight until that moment. Much later I came to realize that Arthur had a wonderfully natural way of putting me at ease. Looking back now, I might have known—by the end of that first walk—that he was never going to remain, for me, an inert part of the process.

I led Arthur behind the line of fir trees that run along next to the fence marking our eastern boundary. The lowest branches reach a foot above my head and splay out over the top of the fence so that between it, the tree trunks and the dense layering of branches above us, a dark walkway has been created, which I’ve always called the Tunnel Walk. It was dim, but shafts of light collided through the trees in pretty spectacle and it was good to walk. I looked up, privately scanning the branches, increasingly taunted by the desire to stop and shake them and examine the fall. I’d not have hesitated had I been on my own, of course, but I knew it might seem an odd sort of habit so I refrained. Instead I guessed at the fall; mostly needles and cones, with a smattering of beetles and bugs. I’d look for any wasp apples, preferably without an exit hole so I could watch the wasp emerge in vitro back in the lab. But what I’d really be hoping to spot was the Puss Moth chrysalis, cocooned on the tree trunks and expertly disguised within the surrounding bark.

I was proud that Clive had taught me to see the world around me without the blind ignorance with which most people must wander it. Where others see a small, dreary spider crawling up a fence, I might see a wingless female Vapourer; where I see an exquisite, harmless Bee Hawk attracted to sugary jam, others swat a pestilent wasp coveting their picnic; where I see a hibernating Eyed Hawk, others might step on an old dried-up leaf.

At the end of the Tunnel Walk we emerged into the glare of daylight beside the brook, which languished thickly through the mud. Four ancient crack willows stood woven together, huddled at the water’s edge. I picked up the end of a wispy branch that stuck out a little over my path, holding it up first above my head and then Arthur’s, as though I were disentangling his path. But my expert eyes had already scanned the underside of the leaves for the fresh-feeding signs that told me the Eyed Hawk had already hatched.

I led Arthur over the beech tree bridge—a weeping copper beech that had split down the center of its trunk, sending one side to traverse the brook.

“You must have had great fun growing up here,” Arthur declared, his arms outstretched as he walked across.

I’d never thought about it as a particularly unusual place to grow up. He followed as I jumped off the beech onto the narrow footpath, overgrown with brambles, which follows the brook to St. Bartholomew’s church.

“Where did you grow up?” I asked.

“Lancaster Gate,” he said. “Pure Londoner.”

“Lancaster Gate sounds exciting.”

“It’s beautiful. The houses overlook Hyde Park. But this is the place for children.” For the first time I wondered what sort of childhood my child would have, what sort of space it would find to play in and how different its life would be, compared to mine, if it lived in London. It was as if Arthur was thinking the same.

“I think children should be brought up in the country, with all this,” he said, waving an arm in the air. He was in the lead now, picking his way. Whenever he came across a bramble that spanned the path he untangled it and held it back for me, like a gentleman opening a gate, then let the thorny sentinel spring back after I’d passed. It was just a little endeavor, I know, but it made a big impression on me. No one had ever shown me such courtesy before.

“Do you think you might move out to the country, then?” I asked.

“I’d love to, but Vivi’s such a city girl, isn’t she? I don’t think she’d ever want to move out. She’d go crazy.”

Vivi, a city girl? Did he know Vivi had hardly stepped into a city until five and a half years ago? Did he know that she knew as much about the country as I did? That she knew the name of each bird that sang outside her window, and whether they sang for a mate, a territory or as a decoy? That she knew which animal had eaten a nut by the way the discarded husk had been opened? Did he not know how quickly she’d assumed a city personality and denied the country one?

We reached the tiny graveyard, bound by the brook on one side and the church on the other. It was another of my favorite spots, but I didn’t want to let on that I frequented the local graveyard, so I stepped among the headstones looking, as if for the first time, at the inscriptions, names, dates and epitaphs, that I knew already by heart. Since its first occupant, PAULINE ABBEY CLARKE (Forever Remembered, Forever Missed), died in 1743, I should think the tiny graveyard was filled pretty quickly with Pauline’s family and friends. In any event there had been so much pressure from the village that the rector had had it extended into a section of his garden next door. All the new dead now went through a gap in the hedge to the garden extension, but even that seemed to be filling up fast, leaving the elderly with the great dilemma of vying to outlive each other, yet at the same time competing for a spot in the ever-diminishing allotment.

But—as I was telling you—in that original bit of graveyard that Arthur and I were in, there were no gravestones as late as the twentieth century, so neither Pauline Abbey Clarke nor any of the other dead there had actually been missed or remembered for an awfully long time and, luckily for the wildlife, that meant nobody had taken too much care of the place. In spring it was a refuge for unruly weeds and insects, and on a warm evening, the moths emerged from their winter capsules in such abundance that although a moth is near silent, the air would shudder with the throbbing of fresh wings.

“I love graveyards,” Arthur said, to my surprise, as we stood side by side reading Pauline’s inscription.

“Do you?” I wasn’t surprised he loved them but that he admitted it so easily. I’d never allowed myself to say it for fear of what people might think. I knew that the villagers had spotted me there at dusk. Sometimes moth hunters need to be nocturnal, like their prey. But when I was spotted after dark in a rarely visited place, not least an eerie place like St. Bart’s graveyard, clutching a halogen lamp, a tin of treacle and a rug to keep me warm, I knew that the next day Mrs. Axtell and her friends conjured up all sorts of sinister stories. I could tell from the way the children looked at me that they had been scared at bedtime, their eager imaginations fed with tales of the numinous qualities of my character.

But Arthur was an outsider and didn’t come with prejudice. He was a townsman and didn’t think like the neighbors.

“Do you want to see inside the smallest church in the country?” I offered.

“Yes, please. I love churches too”—he paused—“but I can’t explain why.”

He didn’t need to. I’d stopped going to church for services, even though as a child I’d never missed a Sunday, but now and then I’d go in secret, on my own, just because I liked that eerie, nostalgic, adrenaline-fueled feeling that you can’t help sensing, after a childhood of churchgoing, when you walk into a spiritual place and wonder whether you’ve made a terrible and timeless mistake in rejecting God and letting down your soul.

It was more a chapel than a church, tiny but disproportionately tall. It had three rows of wooden benches either side of the aisle and windows so high that they didn’t shed much light on the proceedings far below. At the front stood a simple wooden altar and behind it, screwed into the brickwork, was a near-life-size painted carving of Christ wrapped lithely round his cross, crowned with a gold wreath, his pink skin shredding off in long thin flakes down his legs. At the back, on the dusty floor, there was a small stone bowl used as a font, and next to this, taking up a disproportionate amount of room, St. Bartholomew, carved in stone, rested in a coffin pose, hands crossed on his chest, eyes closed and peaceful, robe perfectly arranged and sandals pointing neatly to the roof. A wooden pew was pushed up next to his feet. When Vivi and I were children the prime spot to sit was right beside him, so you could rest your elbow on his toes.

“Look over here, Arthur.” I was sitting in the prime seat and Arthur joined me. “The sole of St. Bartholomew’s left sandal.” I nodded towards it.

He leaned forward across my legs to peer more closely at the effigy’s foot, and I was uncomfortably aware of his chin brushing my lap.

“V…I…V,” he read slowly, then laughed, pulling himself up. “Naughty.”

“It was my hair clip, though. Over many Sundays,” I informed him. “She had short hair then. Sometimes I wonder if she grew it only so she could have her own readily available supply of hair clips for desecration.”

“Really? Did she do it a lot?”

“Oh, she’s left her mark everywhere around here.”

“I’d like to follow that trail. It would be fun.” He opened his palms, as if they were a book he was reading. “An insight into the life of the young Vivien Stone through her vandalism,” he read dramatically. “Nobody’s going to file down St. Bartholomew’s feet now, are they? Her mark will be here forever. There’ll be children in two hundred years time saying, ‘Viv used to sit here,’ and trying to imagine what sort of person she was.”

I had the vague impression that Arthur himself was trying to work out what sort of person she was. As we sat in the church, thinking and talking about the one person we loved so much, studying the marks she’d once inscribed, sitting upon the seat she’d once touched, I felt as if the sister I’d known so intimately all my life was becoming less tangible, less obtainable, that she had evaporated into an ethereal, almost divine presence to be remembered and worshipped. For a surreal moment I imagined that the altar and the hymn books and the small dim windows high above us had all been designed for Vivi, that unattainable of gods. Also, in our shared silence, I thought of how at ease I was feeling with Arthur and how, in so many ways, we were similar—our love of the country and of churches, his genuine interest in Clive’s and my research.

We made our way home and he continued to ask questions about Vivi, and although they weren’t particularly probing, something made me wonder if I ought not to be answering them. Somehow I felt that if she knew about our walking along the brook and talking about her in the graveyard, and finding her graffiti in the church, she would have added them to the list of things that were very much not allowed.

“Right,” Arthur said, as we approached the house. “It’s about time you told me your family secret.” Although I could see he was smiling and I should have guessed he was teasing, I thought for an awful moment that he was going to question me about Maud’s drinking. “I want to know,” he continued authoritatively, “how you can tell a cannibal caterpillar? That look you were all talking about.”

“Oh, that,” I said, relieved, and I had to think for a moment how to put something I’d only ever known by instinct into words. “Well, they’re usually a lot less hairy than their brothers, and sort of…”

“Sort of?”

“Twitchy,” I decided finally.

“Thank you,” said Arthur, courteously holding open the front door for me.

As I said, that was only the second time Arthur had come down to try to make a baby for Vivi, and after our stroll to the church, I relaxed in his company. More than that, I began to enjoy it. Neither Maud nor Clive questioned why Arthur came, or how long he was staying, and for the next few months his visits melded calmly into the pattern of normal life. With Maud drinking more heavily each week, and Clive and I up to our necks in research, Arthur’s visits became, for me, a respite from the predictability of Bulburrow life. I thought of him when he wasn’t there, and looked forward to his arrival, counting the days until he broke the interminable cycle of routine. When he came, as well as our baby-making sessions, we’d walk and talk and I even felt him inch into some of the space that, until then, Vivien had always filled in my small circle of life. And, to tell you the truth, I believed, even though he never said it and I never asked, that he looked forward to seeing me too.

At the same time I increasingly despaired that my days had become embroiled in deceit. On the one hand I had the baby to keep secret from Maud, and on the other, I had Maud to keep secret from the rest of the world. My life took on the form of a treacherous board game, the people within it the counters. But I was playing on my own, for and against myself, discreetly moving the counters, making sure each one was winning while ensuring that none of them were aware that they were being played.

During the seventh month’s visit the trouble started.

Arthur and I had sex twice that day and I went to bed early. It was around ten o’clock in the evening when I woke up thirsty and went, sleepy-eyed, down to the kitchen to get a drink of water. I switched on the dim kitchen light and moved to the cupboard for a glass. As I bent to reach for one someone grabbed my hair, jerking me backwards. I yelped, doglike, as I was dragged away from the cupboard and onto the floor. I was still half asleep and slow.

“You little whore!” Maud shouted. “You fucking little whore! What do you think you’re doing? How dare you? You slut.” She was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing all week—her green wool trousers, which were designed to have a stiff crease down the center, and a sloppy blue jumper of Clive’s, now heavily stained.

“Whore!” she shouted again, as she tried to rip out my hair and punched my head.

“No.” It was all I could manage to say. I tried to tuck my head between my legs.

“You’ve ruined my life and now you’ll ruin your sister’s too. Oh, no, you won’t!” she screamed. “I’ll kill you first! I’ll kill you!” She pulled me by my hair towards the Rayburn.

“No,” I said again, weakly, groaning at the pain in my scalp. But she didn’t mean it: her mind was distorted. It was the drink talking.

“Whore!” she yelled again. I’d curled up into a ball, burying my head into my body, but she was kicking me, I think as hard as she could, big, unrestrained swings aimed for my head and stomach, but instead striking my hands, forearms and shins as I protected myself. She was shouting throughout, but I didn’t hear any more of her words. I was focusing on the blows, each adding pain to the last, and ensuring that she didn’t break through my defenses to my head. It seemed to last forever and then, all of a sudden, the lights went out.

Maud stopped kicking.

“Look! I’ve something to show you!” I heard Clive’s urgent and unusually enthused voice. It was pitch-black. He was in the room and I heard him moving towards us.

“Everybody, look,” he continued. “Can you see it? Virginia? Maud?”

Neither of us spoke.

“Is it not glowing? Can you see it glowing?” Clive urged. I’d grown a little more accustomed to the light and could now make out the figures in the room. I was sitting up on the floor in front of the Rayburn, leaning on my right hand with both legs casually out to the side, as if I had been caught at story time. I congratulated myself on my quick recovery and repositioning. Maud had slunk at least fifteen feet away from me, near to the pantry door. She had her back to the wall and was relaxing heavily against it. Her hair was bedraggled, her face rouged with anger and, in the dimness, she looked little more than a wayward child.

It was then, as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I began to make out what she was holding. It was the heavy iron skillet, which she must have picked up from the stove just before Clive had walked in. She was holding it downwards in both hands, arms extended, resting it on her knees. I’ll tell you now, when I saw that skillet in her hands, I truly believed that had we not been interrupted she might well have carried out successfully her earlier death threats. Clive was in the middle of the room, by the table, thankfully between Maud and me. He was holding something at eye level, a test tube. He had his back turned slightly to me and directed himself at Maud.

“Maud,” he said gently, “can you see it?”

Maud said nothing. She wasn’t looking at him but at the skillet.

“I said, ‘Can you see it?’” he repeated vehemently, and when she didn’t answer he said, “Maud, I’d like you to concentrate on this for a minute.”

She didn’t move.

“Look up!” he demanded.

Maud lifted her head slowly, but as soon as she saw him, she dropped it again. She couldn’t look at him.

“What is it, Clive?” I asked, intrigued.

“Well, Ginny, my dear”—he turned to me—“I thought it was the Brimstone fluorescence, although it doesn’t seem to be working now,” and it was easy for us all to see that not a glimmer of hope radiated from the test tube. He’d failed, poor Clive. But—now here’s something that might surprise you—Clive should have been bitterly frustrated, angry, disappointed even; months and months of pedantic work and effort, all for no result. Instead, he said glibly, “Oh, well,” and then, “Shall I take that, Maud,” as he removed the skillet from her hands, “or are you about to cook us some steak?”

I would have laughed but I didn’t. It was rare for Clive to make a joke, although he’d probably thought she was about to do steak.

It was the most merciful coincidence that Clive appeared when he did, not a moment too soon, although quite what he was doing there at that time with his tube of nonfluorescing fluorescence I have not been able to fathom to this day. Inadvertently, he had saved me from the skillet in Maud’s grasp and yet he still seemed oblivious to the tension in the room.

“Lights!” he barked, as if we’d just finished a rehearsal, and they flicked on, whipping away the secretive screen of half-light and flooding us with stark reality. There was Arthur at the entrance to the kitchen, stage-managing the switch. Arthur too? What was he doing in the room? I thought. And when had he arrived? I was confused. I can’t put my finger on why, but the whole episode had an air of performance.

I started to fumble around on the floor, pretending I’d been interrupted in looking for something I’d dropped. I needn’t have worried; nobody seemed to think it odd that I was down there. Then I saw Clive throw the skillet into the sink and along with it—to my utter amazement—his test tube of precious nonfluorescing fluorescence, then go to Maud, who still looked fixed to the spot. I watched as Clive put his arm round her waist, lovingly, I thought, and half escorted, half carried her out of the room.

“Good night,” he said cheerily, but I was a little disappointed. I couldn’t believe that Clive, of all people, would throw away half a year’s hard work on a whim in the middle of the night. Perhaps we just needed to purify it further. Perhaps the Woods glass was set incorrectly? I was looking at the sink and deciding whether or not to go over there and save what I could of the substance when Arthur strode up to it and ran the cold tap. That was it. Anything that might have been saved a moment ago had now been washed away. I had to stop myself thinking about it.

Arthur helped me up from the floor.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I replied, but I had to bite back the pain that shot through my legs and arms, all the while pretending to search the floor anxiously, dreading him asking what I was looking for, knowing that if he did I’d be completely flummoxed. My face was hot and stung, my cheek tight with swelling below my left eye.

“But poor Clive,” I continued. “He’ll be really disappointed, after all that hard work. It didn’t even fluoresce.”

“I’m sure he’ll get over it,” Arthur said rather dismissively. “Would you like a glass of water to take to bed?” he asked, holding one out to me.

“Yes, please.” I took it and, looking down intently, wished him good night into the water.

Later, in bed that night, I understood that I should have told Maud about the surrogacy. Either that or I shouldn’t have presumed she’d be too drunk to notice. Of course she thought I was a whore. What else could she think? It was my own fault.

Chapter 16 A Nuclear Test and Titus

On Good Friday, just two days after the skillet incident, my mother, Maud, died—at fifty-four years old—shortly after five in the afternoon. She and Clive had spent the entire day together. Clive had packed a picnic all by himself and they’d driven to a little cove on the Dorset coast called Seatown, which isn’t a town at all but a beach full of pebbles with high limestone cliffs rising up on either side of it and a lone guardhouse perched halfway up the hill. It had been their favorite picnic spot during my childhood summers, but that day was still wintry and they drove the car almost onto the beach and picnicked looking through the windscreen at the stormy sea and beyond. I don’t know what they did for the rest of the day but they were out in the drizzle in the car until midafternoon, while I worked alone in the laboratory upstairs.

It happened around teatime. I was iodizing some white-mantled Wainscot caterpillars in prep to section them, when I heard Clive shouting my name. “Virginia! Virginia!” I knew something was up. I’d never heard Clive shout before.

“Virginia, quickly!”

I raced downstairs and found him at the bottom of the wide hall stairs, clutching the thick oak newel post for support. His breathing was heavy and he was staring at the floor by his feet.

“It’s your mother,” he said. “She’s fallen down the steps.” I looked about me, not understanding. “The cellar.” He tilted his head in the direction of the cellar door, which I now saw was open.

I walked over to it and peered down the steep stone steps. I could see only the darkness. I looked back at Clive. He was very still, very quiet, leaning on his post. Was he too shocked to go to her? Was Maud really there?

“Down here?” I asked softly.

He nodded.

I flicked on the light and illuminated Maud at the foot of the steps. She was lying perfectly still on her back, her hands and legs splayed out wide to the sides, like a child acting dead.

“What does she look like?” Clive asked quickly. “Is she moving?”

“No.”

I knew she was dead, but I went to her anyway, listened and felt, unsuccessfully, for any sign of life. Clive clutched his post. I called for an ambulance, then tried halfheartedly to resuscitate her, but she reeked of so much alcohol that I became light-headed with the vapor.

Finally I went to Clive, prised his hands from their post and held them. He was in shock.

“She would have died instantly, Clive,” I told him, “and she wouldn’t have known a thing about it. She was too drunk.”

“Thank you,” he said.

There was a long silence. Poor Clive, I thought. What a shock it must be to face, so suddenly, the end of nearly thirty years of marriage. Then a really strange thought popped into my head. I have no idea why, and I’m sure you’ll say there were far more appropriate things to think at the time, but I was simply hoping that they’d enjoyed their car picnic a few hours before.

Then I thought of the stories of their early love affair, when they’d had to keep it a secret from her father. I thought of them in the photograph on the table in the drawing room, the one taken before I was born on what looks like a Parisian balcony (although I’d never thought to ask them), and the adoration with which they are gazing at each other.

I think almost the instant that you hear of somebody’s death, it’s a bit like when someone comes back again after a very long time: all those moments you’ve had with them pop immediately into your head, all the most loving moments, from a more distant past. And never the more disturbing ones since.

“Virginia,” he said, “I left the cellar door unlocked. She must have mistaken it for the kitchen one.”

“It’s not your fault, Clive,” I tried to reassure him, but he didn’t look up.

“Go and phone Moyse,” he said. “Go and phone Dr. Moyse.”

“Clive. There’s no need—”

“Just phone him, please, Ginny. I want him to see her.” With that, he took himself off and locked himself into his small study behind the kitchen.

I’m not proud of it—far from it, believe me—but I think you should know that from the moment I saw Maud’s lifeless body splayed out on the cold stone at the foot of the cellar steps right up to this very day, I have not shed one tear for her, nor felt one pang of sorrow. At first I thought it must have been the shock. Her death was so sudden that I thought perhaps I hadn’t yet given myself a chance to believe it and feel it. For years afterwards I searched for my grief, thinking it had somehow become trapped within me and just needed a nudge to be released. Each day I waited, and when I felt that rather than getting closer it was moving farther away, I’d spend hours thinking of her, of my childhood, reminding myself of the comfort and love and wisdom she’d given me. I’d think of picnics by the river, the lardy cake she’d make on our birthdays, the smell of her hairspray, the feel of her skin and her lips, and I’d insist that the tears and the grief should pour out of me. But they never came, and it wasn’t because I didn’t love her, miss her and want her.

I must have been too busy. I understand that now. I’m too practical, that’s my problem. It’s the scientist in me. Until I forced myself to reflect on her, I remember thinking less about Maud and more about how everything was going to work now, the house and the family; how it would all fit into place. More so as, believe it or not, Maud’s death wasn’t the only life-changing thing that happened that day. I haven’t yet told you the extraordinary thing Clive did when he’d finished up in his study.

But i’ll start where I left off. Clive locked himself into his study. Dr. Moyse, of course, came “as quick as he could,” which was all a bit too quick for my liking and, once he was there, he wouldn’t leave me alone. He stuck to me like a limpet, taking me to a quiet room upstairs so that, he said, I didn’t have to see my mother’s body being covered up and removed, or get involved with the other proceedings of her death that Clive was busy dealing with. I wouldn’t have minded. Perhaps it would have helped me grieve.

Four hours later—almost ten in the evening—after the police had taken their statement, Maud had been taken to the mortuary, the cellar door had been firmly locked and the house had finally fallen silent of strangers, Clive emerged from his study and sat me down at the kitchen table. He put four hard-backed A4-sized notebooks on the table and on either side of them three piles of typed papers and letters. Then he handed me a binder, opening it to reveal its first immaculately typed page. It was titled: BULBURROW COURT: TERMS OF…DEPENDENTS, ESTATE HOLDINGS, ACCOUNTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF…

Before I had a chance to read any further Clive made his shocking announcement: “I’m leaving Bulburrow and my whole estate to you and Vivien. I am moving to the Anchorage retirement home on Paul Street in Crewkerne. The address is in the last section of these notes.” He talked as though it were a recitation. He didn’t look at me once but concentrated on the paperwork in his hands or on the table. “I have organized my affairs so that you can easily take it on from where I’ve left off. I’ve written you a detailed list of recommendations in here to cover most eventualities in the years to come. As I’ve put here”—he flicked a few pages over and pointed to a section; I saw his hands were trembling—“first of all, you need to sell the glasshouses to pay off some outstanding debts. I’ve resisted selling them for the past few years but now I’ve determined there’s no other choice. I’ve already had one conversation with Michael about it and I think you’ll find he’s able to offer you a good price. I’ve written to my colleagues, letting them know of my retirement, and to the Royal Society, the British and Natural History museums in London. I’ve instructed them to address all future research to you. I’m leaving in the morning.”

“But…” I had no words. I stared at the neat piles in front of me. I didn’t believe a word of it. He was still in shock. He needed a good night’s sleep.

“I think you need time to think about this,” I managed finally.

“I’ve thought about it for a long time,” he said—but he couldn’t have. He didn’t know what he was saying, what he was doing. “Here is my paper.” He handed me the last few sheets he held in his hand. The article was headed: “Nomophila noctuella, a West African Visitor.”

“It’s in Lepidopterologist–Atropos this week and the Journal of the Society for British Entomology in two weeks’ time. And it’s being considered for Nature.”

“Nomophila noctuella? That tiny moth from the Robinsons on the drawing-room sill?”

He nodded. “It was radioactive. That’s why I didn’t poison it. It would have invalidated the results.”

“Radioactive?”

“Yes, contaminated by radioactive dust from a French nuclear test in the Sahara desert. The half-life was exactly the same. It had to have been there,” he said unenthusiastically.

I’ll admit I didn’t understand the significance at first, not until I had scanned a little of the opening statement: “Micro-moth Nomophila noctuella… definitive proof of the staggering 3,000-mile migration from West Africa by its contamination with radioactive dust by French nuclear test,” it read dramatically.

Radioactive! Who would have guessed? I didn’t presume to understand the ways in which Clive worked sometimes but it was impressive. Fairly impressive. No one had yet proved that any moths or butterflies, weighing in at a maximum of around two grams, were able to fly the vast distances they were suspected of flying. But Clive had proved it—with this little moth, at any rate.

“Congratulations,” I said, but I too was finding it hard to muster enthusiasm. He stuck out his chin and scratched the hair at the top of his neck.

“Well, I did it, so I thought I’d retire,” he said halfheartedly.

“Yes, you did it.”

He was already three years past retirement age, but whenever the issue had been raised he’d always refused to contemplate it. He wouldn’t retire, he had said, until he had made his mark on the world. Clive had lived with an overdeveloped need for recognition. Maud had said it was a man thing. I looked down and scanned his neatly constructed paper. We both knew it wasn’t important enough for Nature, and proving one journey of a little-known moth hadn’t exactly fulfilled his lifetime’s ambition, but perhaps we also knew it would have to do. Besides, it’s possible to feel very important indeed, for a time, within the world’s exclusive community of lepidopterists, as the first person to have used radioactivity as a tracking device. It might also have been of interest further afield, perhaps even to the entire entomology world. If he were to walk through the corridors of the Royal Entomological Society in London during the next couple of weeks, I’m certain he would have attracted more than a few outstretched hands and passing praises.

“What about the Brimstones?” I demanded, thinking of all the work we’d done over the summer.

“I ran out of time for that,” he said.

I was amazed at how easily he was giving it up.

At that moment a car screeched up the drive and we both knew it was Vivi. She’d left London as soon as she’d heard and we’d been expecting her. We went into the hall to greet her but as soon as she stormed in I could see, beneath a face bruised by sorrow and tears, that she was livid. She marched straight past me and followed Clive into his study without greeting me. Now I think of it, I don’t think she greeted Clive either. She didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at me, although I was standing right in front of her. I’m not sure why I’m bothering you with such a trifling detail, but I do remember thinking how odd it was. I know memories shouldn’t be trusted, that two people’s recall of the same event can be unbelievably different, that even their perceptions at the time can be paradoxical, so I accept that my own recollections may be distorted, but I remember it as being the strangest entrance. As soon as Clive saw Vivi he turned his back to walk towards his study, without a word, as if he knew she was going to follow him, as if the entire movement had been choreographed.

Dr. Moyse, who’d been lurking about since he’d arrived and making himself scarce at what he considered the necessary moments, latched on to me again with his unnecessary comforting as I went upstairs. I suspected he and Clive had agreed not to leave me alone in case I collapsed beneath the weight of my grief, which they hadn’t realized was eluding me. At times I could hear Vivi’s voice from the study, puncturing the silent aftermath, sometimes strained and sometimes angry, and then her bursting into tears. I presumed Clive was informing her of his rushed retirement plans and her reaction, as expected, was a little more explosive than mine.

I didn’t get to see Vivi at all during her visit, which lasted well into the night and early morning in discussions with Clive. The last thing I overheard before I finally fell asleep was an argument, not between Vivi and Clive, but between her and Dr. Moyse. They were in the hall and Moyse, who had been discharged from his duties, was at the front door, about to leave. I think it must have been lack of sensitivity on his part, but I heard him say something like, “Even your mother would have understood, Vivien.” At that, she hit the roof. I’ve never heard her yell so loudly and I was scared.

“Don’t you presume to come in here and tell me what my mother would have wanted. She damn well wouldn’t!” she screamed.

By the time I got up the next morning, Vivi had gone. And that, I can tell you now, was the last time she ever set foot in this house until yesterday.

The following morning, a Saturday, Clive carried out his itinerary to the letter and by nightfall, just a day after Maud’s accident, Vivi and I had acquired our parents’ entire estate, along with its outstanding debt.

I spent the next three days from dawn to dusk scrubbing the house, closing and locking the rooms that, on my own now, I wouldn’t need. I’d left lots of messages for Vivi. I wanted to see her desperately but Arthur had said she was too shaken to come. Finally, on Tuesday, she phoned and said she’d gone to see Clive at the Anchorage but she still wasn’t coming to the house.

On Wednesday morning I got in the car and drove through the high-hedged lanes, up Bulburrow hill and down again to Crewkerne. I parked outside Gateway and walked the short distance to the cobbled square, where the town hall stood in the center with a huge bronze statue of the man who had founded the town’s first paper factory. According to the inscription, Titus Sorrell turned round Crewkerne’s ailing economy in the mid-nineteenth century. I’d arranged to meet Clive there, on the bench outside The George. When I sat down an elderly man joined me, planting himself at the opposite end. I looked at the clock tower. Eleven-thirty exactly. Titus surveyed his empire smugly while pigeons fought to perch on his shoulders, desecrating him front and back.

At 11:33 Clive arrived. He sat down next to me and we both looked ahead at Titus and his pigeons for a while. Finally he said, “I’ve been thinking that if you could find a way to tag other species radioactively you could make some great progress with migratory patterns. There’s been so little research in that area, Ginny. The society might like that.”

I didn’t reply. At that moment I didn’t care what the society might like and I could hardly believe that he could.

“Yup,” said the man at the end of the bench eagerly, and for a few seconds I thought, perhaps, that I’d walked into someone else’s conversation. The man and I exchanged a pleasant look. Perhaps he’d only worried it was his conversation because no one else had replied. I glanced at Clive, who stared distantly at the cobbled square and the statue. He seemed altogether older—a real old man—and something else had changed about him too. It was as if Maud’s death had shaken the character out of him, his enthusiasm for life and everything that made him who he was, turning him limp.

“What did Vivien say?” he asked after a while.

“I haven’t seen her. She won’t come to the house.”

There was a long silence.

“You’ll tell her I love her, won’t you?” he said at last, and, although that should have been a happy tribute, there was something too absolute and eternal about it, and I couldn’t help feeling a little sorrow spill from my heart.

Two men bailed out of The George, shouting at each other and scaring the pigeons to the safety of the clock tower. When they had passed, the bravest of the birds flew down to reclaim Titus’s head.

“I’m pregnant,” I said, in a moment of unnecessary candidness. It was true, but I wasn’t so much telling him because he should know it, but because I wanted to tell him something happy, or perhaps to shock him—anything, in fact, to get a recognizable reaction from him. All he said was, “Very good.”

“Congratulations,” followed the old man on the far end of the bench.

“Thank you,” I said to both of them.

After a short silence the other man said, “Are you eating broad beans?” I found it impossible to know if he was now talking to me, or to Clive, or to the pigeons we were all looking at, or to some imaginary person, and I didn’t know whether to reply or to ignore him. I ignored him.

“You must eat broad beans,” he ordered firmly, “if you don’t want a spastic.”

“Thank you,” I told him, now understanding it was directed at me, and that he must surely have lost his marbles.

“Every day,” he said.

“Every day,” I repeated.

“Then you won’t have a spastic. Nobody wants a spastic,” he observed finally. There was a silence.

The old man leaned forward on his stick in a posture suggesting that he’d had his say and now he was finished.

Clive looked at his watch.

“You’ll be all right,” he said, and again I thought it might have been to either of us. “Well, I must be going now. I have flower-pressing class in ten minutes.”

And he went.

When I got home Arthur had let himself into the house. He was in the kitchen, waiting for me. It was lovely to see him and he gave me the first hug, a great big, long, silent one, that anyone had offered me since Maud’s death.

“I was worried about you on your own,” he said, letting me go.

“I’m fine. How’s Vivi?”

“Not good, I’m afraid. She says she’ll never come back.”

“Oh no.” I sighed, and felt the pain of my entire family crashing down round me. I wanted to find a way to bring them back, to hold them close.

“I think she feels it was…preventable,” he said.

I thought of the cold steep cellar steps and the darkness of the stairwell. I thought of how the two doors stood side by side, like twins—the same moldings, the same handles—but one with a deadly drop on the other side. I thought I was perhaps the only person who knew quite how drunk she would have been, how perfectly preventable it might have been, had she not been drunk.

“She won’t even talk to me about it. All I know is that she’d been quarreling a lot with Maud.”

Had she? It must have been on the telephone because Vivi hadn’t been home for months.

“Didn’t you know?” he said, as if it was impossible for me not to.

“No. What was it about?”

He didn’t answer for a while.

“I think she was worried about everything,” he said vaguely. “You know how Vivi always worries about everything,” but I had no idea what sort of everything he meant.

Just then the phone rang. There was silence when I answered it and I knew it was her. “Vivi?” I asked. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Ginny, it’s me,” she said quietly.

I couldn’t tell if she was crying, or angry, or tired, or all of them, but I knew she wasn’t herself. “Are you okay?” I asked, wishing I hadn’t as soon as it was said.

For a while she didn’t answer. “Oh, wonderful,” she said sarcastically. “Is Arthur there?”

“Are you angry with me?” I said.

“Not especially.” She sighed. “I’m angry with everyone and everything.”

Well, that didn’t make any sense to me, and such a broad sphere of anger doesn’t naturally offer a starting point to help, so I didn’t try. I decided, as always, to come back to the practical issues. “When shall we have her funeral?”

“We’re having it next Friday,” she stated. “I’ve already arranged it with the rector.”

“And Clive? Does he know?”

“I have no idea, darling,” she said.

“I’ve just seen him,” I said. “He says to tell you he loves you—”

Vivi butted in. “I’d like to speak to Arthur, please. Has he arrived yet?”

I handed the phone to him and went into the back pantry to find some eggs to make a cake for tea. When I came back Arthur was staring disconsolately out the kitchen window at the gloomy day beyond, the phone call over. I was surprised how glad I was that he had come. I was usually happy with my own company—I’m extremely self-sufficient—but I was so much happier now that Arthur was there. I didn’t want him to leave. I studied his back for a moment, his thickly knitted navy polo-neck, the black curls at the back of his head, slightly bowed shoulders, and I thought how wonderful and thoughtful and interesting he was, and how comfortable and easy I felt with him. I cracked an egg against the side of the mixing bowl and he swung round, surprised that I was back in the room. I smiled into the bowl and imagined the baby growing inside me—our baby—and, I’m ashamed to admit, allowed myself to fall into a daydream that Arthur and I were married and we lived here with a houseful of children, as it had been when the evacuees were staying all that time ago.

I pulled myself out of it quickly. “How was she?” I asked.

“She and Clive have completely fallen out,” he said, glancing at me and widening his eyes.

That must have been why Clive was worried about her, I thought. My family was disintegrating before my eyes, despite my efforts to keep it together. I cracked three more eggs, one by one, against the side of the bowl. “It’s not the time to fall out, for goodness’ sake, not when Maud’s just died. She would have hated it. It’ll be something ridiculous. Was it about the will?” I asked.

“I don’t know, she won’t tell me, but she’s consumed by anger. I’ve never seen her like this before. She’s turned into a raging bull,” he said, clearly exasperated. “And I don’t know how to calm her down,” he added, staring out of the window onto the drive.

“Oh, Lord. She must be unhappy about something in the will or in Clive’s handing over the estate to us,” I reasoned, “but she ought to just tell me and then we might be able to sort it out, talk it through. I can’t be expected to guess what’s got to her. I’ve never been able to and she knows that better than anyone.”

“It’ll pass, I’m sure,” Arthur said optimistically. “It usually does with Vivi. But at the moment she’s refusing to go to the funeral if Clive’s there.”

“What? Of course he’ll be there!” I sat down heavily and resolved to talk to her about it the next time we spoke, try to patch things up between her and our father. Why was it that I was the only person who didn’t fall out with my family? I thought, as I added two cups of sugar and one of flour to the mixture.

“Does she still want a baby?” I asked, worried their plans might have changed.

“Oh, yes, she definitely still wants a baby,” he said, without hesitation.

“Oh, good, because I think she’s got one.”

“What?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“Really?” His face broke into a smile. “I’m going to be a daddy,” he said as he sidestepped a chair to embrace me. We stayed like that for a long while, long enough for it to feel as if the embrace was welcome for other reasons than the baby. It felt more like comfort than joy.