Bright Girls

Four Big Sister, Little Sister

Mum died when I was one and Rachel was nearly four. I don’t remember a thing about her of course. I used to think I did, but then I realised that all my memories were photographs. Rachel doesn’t really remember her either, which is even worse. All those years Mum spent playing pat-a-cake with her, and being patient and kind, for nothing! Nowadays, whenever I see some toddler kicking off in the supermarket and the mum trying to negotiate and be all reasonable, I feel like going up to her and saying, “For God’s sake, just smack him! He won’t remember!”

I can’t say I “miss” her because you can’t miss someone you never knew, but sometimes, when school work’s piling up, and things indoors are a bit disorganised, and Dad’s too preoccupied with his job to notice, I can’t help thinking that one parent isn’t quite enough. I suppose it must be like being an only child. You wouldn’t spend all your time grieving about the brothers and sisters you don’t have, but now and then you’d look at those big, boisterous families and feel a twinge of envy.

It’s only in recent years that Dad has talked to us about how he coped or rather didn’t cope when Mum died. He’d always talked about Mum of course, so that we would know how wonderful she was and never “forget” her, but not once about himself and his own feelings. To begin with, Nanny Chris (Mum’s mum) came to stay and look after us while he was out at work. After a while, they had a bit of a falling out because she didn’t approve of the way he let us sleep in his bed, and he thought she was too strict about mealtimes and TV rations, so she went back up to Scotland in a strop and we didn’t see her for some time.

That was when Mum’s sister – Jackie – came. She was only twenty-five – ten years younger than Mum – but she gave up her job in London and left her flat and her friends, and moved into our spare room in Oxford so that she could take care of us all until Rachel started school and I went to nursery I suppose Dad must have paid her. She wouldn’t have done it for nothing.

It all worked well for about a year, and then Auntie Jackie started to make friends of her own and go out in the evenings a bit more. Before long she’d got a new boyfriend and wanted to move him into the spare room with her. Dad was furious and said he didn’t want some strange bloke in the house with us when he wasn’t around, and they had this huge row and Auntie Jackie walked out. Within three months, she and the boyfriend had got married and moved to Chicago, where he was from, and we didn’t see her again for another eight years.

The rest of the family was outraged that she had deserted us, convinced that the husband was some sort of gangster and it would all end in tears. Which it did eventually, but nothing like as soon as the family had predicted (and no doubt hoped). After twelve years she came quietly back to the UK, and with her share of the divorce payout, she acquired the house in Brighton and started up her business.

During her time in America she had sent gifts at birthdays and Christmas, and cards signed “from your loving Aunt”, and at Dad’s insistence we had dutifully replied with bland reports of our progress and copies of our school photographs, but as far as we knew, Dad never wrote to her himself.

There had been just one visit, the year that Nanny Chris died. I’m afraid to say that it was the memory of this that had given me a pessimistic view of Auntie Jackie’s reliability

I am ten years old, standing in the wings at the school concert, sucking nervously on the reed of my clarinet as I listen to Elizabeth Gallup play Minuet in G on the piano. Although I can’t see them, I can sense, from the occasional distant cough and rustle, the bulky presence of the audience beyond the stage. Even so, I am surprised by the storm of applause that greets the end of Elizabeth’s performance. The hall must be full. I am on next. A lone, metal music stand, like an instrument of torture, glints coldly in a shaft of light from the high hall windows. For a moment I am completely paralysed: my eagerness to perform, to show off and be applauded is brought down by a crippling attack of stage fright.

Something I have known all along, and buried, rises up now: I am not meant to be here, playing in this concert. I am not good enough. It is a mistake.

“Ruth, I’ve put you down to play a solo in the school concert,” my clarinet teacher said at the start of a music lesson, three weeks ago now

“I’m not Ruth. I’m Robyn,” I said. Ruth is a year older. She has done grades. The teacher faltered for a moment before her smile was back in place. “Of course you are. Robyn. Well, you can play something in the concert too, Robyn. Why not?”

The wooden boards, stripped of varnish and slightly soft, quake underfoot as I cross the stage and balance my single sheet of music on the solitary stand. It is mid-afternoon, the hall is uncurtained and well-lit, and I can see the faces of the audience as clearly as they can see me, clearly enough at any rate to be sure that Dad and Auntie Jackie aren’t among them. She is supposed to be here. Dad has taken the day off work so that he can collect her from Oxford station and bring her along. It was a firm arrangement, a promise, and I have been boasting to the whole class for days about my aunt coming all the way from America to watch me. If she doesn’t show up, everyone will think I’m a Big Fat Liar, the sort of girl who invents fantasy relatives to make herself look important.

As my damp, nibbled lips close around the mouthpiece of the clarinet, the other buried thing chooses this moment to surface. I have never, in all my practices, even in the privacy of my own room, played this piece all the way through without mistakes.

If I can just get through the first bar without a misfire. I can never seem to recover from an early squawk. I fill my lungs and attack the first long note, and it emerges pure and clean. Relief.

From the back of the hall comes the swish and clump of the double doors opening and closing as Dad and Auntie Jackie creep in late. Heads turn at the disturbance. I falter, squawk, lose my place in the music and then, just as I find it, the gust of air admitted by the swing doors comes rolling up the aisle towards the stage like a giant wave, snatches my flimsy sheet of music from the stand and lifts it high in the air, where it swoops to and fro above my flailing hand before wafting slowly down into the audience. I turn and bolt into the wings to general laughter and applause.

I was slightly surprised when Auntie Jackie finally returned to live in England that she didn’t get straight back in touch. She and Dad had patched up their quarrel by then and we were her only living relatives, but Dad explained that she probably felt guilty and wouldn’t want to make the first approach in case it was rejected. Besides, Brighton was 110 miles from Oxford – hardly a feasible distance for a day trip. He also had a theory that Mum’s death had hit her harder than he’d appreciated at the time. He’d been too caught up with his own sorrows to notice anyone else’s. “Your mum was always the good, clever, sensible sister who everybody loved. And Jackie was the difficult, wayward one who was always in trouble. She once told me she felt that people were secretly thinking that the wrong sister had died.”

“That’s terrible. Poor Auntie Jackie,” said Rachel, identifying immediately with the naughty sister.

Dad was wrong though. Guilty or not, she did make the first approach: a letter arrived addressed to me and Rachel.

I know I’ve been the world’s most useless Aunt, but I kept you all in my heart while I was away, and never stopped thinking of you…Now I’ve had time to settle in and find my feet, I want you to know that I’m here if you ever need me. Blood is thicker than water, I appreciate that now…

“She’s got a good heart,” Dad conceded, when he read this outpouring, which ran to two pages of badly spelled scribble. “And if it ever came to the crunch, I know she’d be ready to help out.”

When the crunch came, within six months of this casual remark, and we needed somewhere to run to, Auntie Jackie’s had been the obvious choice.

Five The Bucket and the Bell

That first evening at Cliff Street Auntie Jackie made us a prawn stir-fry with noodles, which we ate in the kitchen – the only communal area now that I had taken over the basement. This proved to be the one edible meal she could make, and she soon abandoned proper cooking altogether.

Unfortunately I couldn’t do justice to her initial efforts as about two mouthfuls in I began to feel queasy and had to go and lie down. By ten o’clock my stomach was in spasms, my head was in a bucket and I was puking myself inside-out. Living in Oxford I’d witnessed quite a lot of public vomiting – you really had to watch where you put your feet in Freshers’ Week – and I’d always had a horror of being sick. It was such a disgusting spectacle.

“Sorry” I said to Auntie Jackie in between torrents, as she discreetly wiped the toe of her shoe with a tissue.

“You don’t think it’s the prawns, do you?” she said, passing me a wrung-out flannel so I could mop my face.

I shook my head. I knew the culprit was the fishy ham: traces of the strange, beige film were floating in the bilious slop in the bucket. Besides, I hadn’t eaten any of the prawns.

“No, I bet it’s those sandwiches,” said Rachel from the doorway “I thought they smelled funny at the time. Thank God I never ate mine.”

“Do you think we should ring the doctor?” Auntie Jackie asked her. “Or your dad?”

We had only called him a few hours earlier to say that we’d arrived safe and well. It seemed a pity to phone and retract the good news so soon. The two of them conferred in low voices for a moment and then Auntie Jackie disappeared upstairs.

“Poor old you,” said Rachel, stepping just inside the sickroom with extreme reluctance, and covering her mouth and nose. “You’ll be all right, won’t you?”

I nodded weakly I was experiencing the momentary relief that follows violent puking. Auntie Jackie returned a few minutes later and shone a torch in my face.

“Ow What are you doing?”

“Does your neck hurt?” she asked, snapping off the torch.

“No. Why?”

“Just checking you haven’t got meningitis. Excuse me. Do you mind?” she lifted my T-shirt and peered at my pale flesh, apparently satisfied.

“You need to drink plenty of fluid,” she instructed me. “But sip, don’t glug. Do you want me to sleep in here tonight?”

I shook my head. I wanted to curl up quietly and die, without any fuss, and that was something best done alone.

They withdrew to the kitchen, and I could hear the murmurs of conversation and the comforting domestic noises of washing up and tea-making. Just before she went up to bed, Auntie Jackie came in again to bring me some fresh water. In her free hand she was holding a large Swiss cowbell. “This is the nearest thing I’ve got to an emergency cord,” she said. “If you want me in the night for anything, ring this and I’ll come down.” It let out a soft clong as she set it down.

When she had gone, I lay there feeling sorry for myself for a while. There were no curtains on the window and the street lamp outside gave just enough light to pick out the shapes of the furniture. I could see the double bass, and the candles in the fireplace, and the papier-mâché pig sitting on the window seat, and the picture of the punting nuns, which made me think of Oxford, and I wondered when or if it would ever be safe to go home.

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