Sammy got up awkwardly from the rug by the side of the bed and hobbled over to Amelia, thrusting his dry nose into her hand inquiringly. “Poor old boy,” Amelia said to the dog. She gently shook Julia awake and told her Victor was dead. “How do you know he’s dead?” Julia asked, foggy with sleep. She had a livid red mark on her cheek where her watch had dug into her.
“Because he’s not breathing,” Amelia said.
A
n almost festive air had been created between them by Victor’s departure, and although it was only six o’clock in the morning, Julia, as if following some prescribed postmortem procedure, poured them a large brandy each. Amelia thought she would be sick if she drank it and surprised herself by enjoying it. Later, they walked, quite drunk at eight in the morning, to the local Spar to buy provisions, filling their basket with things that Amelia would never normally have bought—bacon, sausages, floury white rolls, chocolate, and gin—giggling like the little girls they had forgotten they ever were.
Back at the house they made bacon-and-egg rolls, Julia eating three for the one that Amelia had. Julia lit up a cigarette the moment she had finished eating. “For God’s sake,” Amelia said, waving the smoke away from her face, “you have some kind of oral fixation, you do know that, don’t you?” Julia smoked in a theatrical fashion, making a performance of it, as she did of everything. She used to practice in the mirror when she was a teenager (as Amelia remembered it, a lot of Julia’s younger life had been practiced in the mirror). The way Julia was holding her hand up to the morning light revealed the ghostly silver thread of the scar where her little finger had been sewn back onto her hand.
Why had they had so many accidents when they were young? Were they trying to get Rosemary (or indeed anyone) to notice them, to single them out from the melee of
Amelia-Julia-Sylvia?
Even now, Julia and Amelia were clumsy, always covered in bruises from bumping into furniture or tripping over carpets. Last year alone, Amelia had dropped a heavy pan on her foot and trapped her hand in a car door while Julia had sustained a whiplash in a taxi and sprained her ankle falling off a stepladder. Amelia didn’t think there was much point in seeking attention once you were over forty, especially if there was no one to give it. “Do you remember the way Sylvia used to faint?” she asked Julia.
“No. Sort of.”
Every time she remembered Victor was dead, Amelia felt giddy. It was as if someone had lifted a great stone off her body and now she might be about to rise up, like a kite, like a balloon. Victor’s corpse was still tucked up in bed upstairs, and although they knew they should do something, phone someone, react in an urgent way to death, they were overcome with a kind of indolence.
In fact it wasn’t until the next day that they journeyed to the Poor Clares’ convent and, after an interminable wait, spoke to “Sister Mary Luke”—the ridiculous name that, even after nearly thirty years, neither of them could get used to. When they told her that Victor was dead, Sylvia looked astonished and said, “Daddy? Dead?” And just for once her saintly composure slipped and she burst out laughing.
As a nun in an enclosed order, Sylvia was so excluded from normal life that it never occurred to them to consult with her about the funeral. By then they had already decided what to do with him anyway. After the undertaker had eventually removed Victor’s body, Julia had produced the gin and they proceeded to get horribly drunk. Amelia couldn’t remember when she had been so drunk, possibly never. The afternoon gin, sitting on top of the morning brandy, made them almost hysterical, and somewhere in the midst of this alcoholic orgy they tossed a coin to determine Victor’s final fate.
Julia, histrionic as usual, was cross-legged and clutching onto her crotch, saying, “Oh God, stop it, I’m going to wet myself!” and Amelia had to run outside and be sick on the lawn. The damp night air almost brought her back to sobriety but by then it was nearly dawn and Amelia had claimed heads but the coin had come down tails (which was a one-in-two probability, thank you, Daddy) and Julia declared that “the old fucker was going to be burned.”
A
melia was awake early, too early. She wouldn’t have minded if she’d been at home—her real home, in Oxford—but she didn’t want to rattle around on her own in this place and Julia wouldn’t be up for ages—Amelia sometimes wondered if her sister’s genes hadn’t been spliced with a cat’s. Julia scoffed at the “provincial hours” that Amelia kept—Julia hadn’t been in her bed before two in the morning since they arrived, emerging bleary-eyed at midday, begging hoarsely for coffee (“Sweetie, please,”) as if she had been on some great nighttime quest that had tested her nerves and spirit, rather than having spent the time slumped on the sofa with a bottle of red wine, watching long-forgotten films on cable.
It had amazed them when they discovered that Victor—who neither of them could remember ever having watched television—not only owned a huge wide-screen set but also subscribed to cable—and to everything, not just sport and films but all of the X-rated channels. Amelia had been shocked, not so much by the “adult” content of these (although it was disgusting enough) but by the idea of their own father sitting there, night after night, in his old armchair watching
Red Hot Girls
and God knows what other filth. She was relieved that Julia—usually so airily tolerant of the shortcomings of the male sex—was as horrified as she was. One of the first things they did was to get rid of the armchair.
Amelia only watched the news and documentaries on television, occasionally the
Antiques Roadshow
on a Sunday, and was astonished at the absolute crud on offer twenty-four hours a day. Did this supply some sort of narrative in people’s lives? Did they honestly think that this kind of balderdash was a high point of evolution? “Oh, lighten up, Milly,” Julia (predictably) said. “What does it matter what people do? At the end of the day we’re all dead.”
“Well, obviously,” Amelia said.
A
s soon as they cleared the house of Victor and his worldly goods they would be able to put it on the market and be done with it. Or at least, get it ready to put on the market, as Victor’s solicitor had muttered “probate” with a kind of Dickensian gloom. Nonetheless, the will was entirely straightforward, everything divided down the middle, with nothing going to Sylvia because (apparently) she had expressly asked for nothing. “Like Cordelia,” Julia said, and Amelia said, “Not really,” but, surprisingly, they had left it at that. They were fighting less since Victor’s death three days ago. A new air of camaraderie had been fostered between them as they raked through Victor’s clothes (fit only for garbage) and dumped pitted old aluminium cooking pans and maths books that disintegrated at their touch. Everything in the house seemed unsavory somehow, and in the kitchen and bathroom Amelia wore rubber gloves and cleaned constantly with antibacterial spray. “He didn’t have the plague,” Julia said, but without conviction because she had already boiled all the sheets and towels that they were using.
Even though it was July and hot, Victor’s house had its own damp, chilly climate that seemed unconnected to the outside world. Every evening since their arrival they had lit a fire and sat in front of the sitting-room hearth with the same kind of devotion that prehistoric people must have afforded flames, except that prehistoric people didn’t have Victor’s extensive cable package to entertain themselves with. During the daytime it was startling to wander out into the weed-choked garden to get some fresh air and discover a hot, white Mediterranean sun beating down on them.
A
melia was sleeping in Sylvia’s old room, the one Sylvia had slept in until she discovered her absurd, inexplicable vocation. She had already converted to Catholicism, of course, which drove Victor to apoplexy, but when she gave up her place at Girton, where she was due to start a maths degree, to enter the convent, it seemed as if Victor might actually kill her. Julia and Amelia, still at school, thought that renouncing the world and entering an enclosed order was an unnecessarily dramatic way of getting away from Victor. (Were they really going to cremate him tomorrow, burn him into ashes? How extraordinary that you could be given the license to do that to another human being. Just get rid of them, as if they were rubbish.)
And, of course, Sylvia didn’t have to deal with any of the aftermath of their father’s death. What a fantastic form of avoidance being a bride of Christ was. Julia enjoyed telling people that her sister was a nun because they were always so astonished (“
Your
sister?”), but Amelia felt embarrassed by it. God spoke to Sylvia on a regular basis but she was always coy about the content of these conversations, just smiling her holy smile (enigmatic and infuriating). Anyone would think God was an intimate acquaintance, someone with whom Sylvia discussed existential philosophy over bottles of cheap wine in the snug of a quaint riverside pub. God and Sylvia had been on speaking terms for almost as long as Amelia could remember. Did she really think he spoke to her? She was delusional, surely? At the very least a hysteric. Hearing voices, like Joan of Arc. In fact, it was Joan of Arc she used to speak to, wasn’t it? Even before Rosemary died or Olivia disappeared. Had anyone ever entertained the possibility that Sylvia was schizophrenic? If God spoke to Amelia she would presume she had gone insane. Someone should have paid attention to Sylvia’s oddness, they really should have.
Sammy, sprawled full length at the foot of Amelia’s too-small single bed, began to whimper in his sleep. His tail thumped excitedly on the eiderdown, and his paws made ghostly scrabbling motions as if he were chasing the rabbits of his younger days. Amelia would have left him to this happy dream but then the thought struck her that, rather than chasing something, perhaps he himself was being chased, and that the noises he was making were the sounds of fear rather than excitement (how could two things so opposite seem so similar?), so she hauled herself into a sitting position and stroked his flank until he was soothed back into a calmer sleep. His body felt hollow with age. Sammy was the only living creature that Amelia could remember Victor treating as an equal.
She supposed she would have to take Sammy back to Oxford with her. Julia would say she wanted Sammy, but she would never manage with a dog in London. Amelia had a garden in Oxford, she owned the upper half of a small semidetached Edwardian villa, just the right size for one person, and shared a garden with her downstairs neighbor, a quiet geometrician at New College called Philip who seemed to have a complete lack of sexual interest in either gender but who had a dog (albeit a noisy Pekingese) and was handy at fixing things and therefore constituted the perfect neighbor. (“Or serial killer,” Julia said.) He wasn’t a gardener, to Amelia’s relief, and allowed her to get on with as much mulching and digging and planting as she liked. Amelia believed in gardening in the same way that Sylvia believed in God. Like Sylvia, she had been converted. She didn’t know she was a gardener until she was thirty, when she had planted a Queen of Denmark rose one November and the following June had watched as blossom after blossom burst forth. It was a revelation—you plant something, it grows. “Well, duh,” Julia said (like a moronic teenager) when Amelia attempted to explain this miracle.
She had been in Cambridge only a few days and yet her other life, her real life, already seemed a world away and she had to occasionally remind herself that it existed. Part of her wanted to stay here forever and blunder on into an argumentative old age with Julia. Together, perhaps they could keep all the dread and loneliness of life at bay. And she could get to grips with Victor’s garden—there were years of neglect to make up for. She would have liked to lie there for hours, planning out beds (delphiniums, campanula, coreopsis, veronica) and redesigning the lawn (A water feature? Something Japanese perhaps?), but she climbed reluctantly out of bed, followed loyally by Sammy, and went down to the cold kitchen, where she filled the kettle and then slammed it on the hob to show how annoyed she was that Julia was still asleep.
A
melia was in the dining room, boxing up an endless parade of crockery and ornaments. Julia was in the study where she was supposed to be. She had been in there since they started clearing out Victor’s goods and chattels, and said (melodramatic as ever) that she thought she might be under a spell that condemned her to be trapped in there forever. Victor’s dank, airless lair had remained a black hole throughout the years and was now piled high with all kinds of dusty papers, files, and folders. It was like a bonfire waiting for a match. They had pulled the curtains down, and Julia said, “Let there be light!” and Amelia said, “It’s quite a nice room really.”
Julia was so badly affected by the dust in the house that, as well as all the medication she took (she treated it like sweets), she had started to wear a face mask and goggles that she’d bought in a do-it-yourself place. You could still hear her chesty cough from half a mile away.
Amelia was surprised that when midday came around Julia hadn’t sought her out to suggest lunch. When she went looking for her she found her leaning against Victor’s desk, a troubled look on her face. “What?” Amelia said, and Julia indicated one of the drawers to Victor’s desk. “I broke the lock,” she said.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Amelia said. “We have to go through everything. And technically it all belongs to us now.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. I found something,” Julia said, opening the drawer and removing an object, handling it delicately like an archaeologist removing an artifact that might disintegrate in the air. She handed it to Amelia. For a moment Amelia was puzzled and then suddenly she was stepping into space, as if she’d walked through a door that opened onto nothing. And as she fell all she could think of was Olivia’s Blue Mouse, clutched in her hand.
“Y
ou like him.”
“No, I don’t.” They were making supper together, Amelia poaching eggs, Julia warming baked beans in a saucepan. They were both at the frontier of their culinary capabilities.