Absolute Hush (7 page)

Then Sissy began to scream. She threw back her head and let out enormous shrieks that were almost silent because of the
noise of the fire, and George knew that it was not pain or shock that made her shout but exhilaration. Then he began to scream as well.

Though they did not watch any more fires together, George and Sissy did everything else together. Until the Italian kiss. After the kiss, George wandered alone. For days he ambled along high-hedged lanes, slashing at marestail that was already unfurling.

He regretted now that he had never allowed Sissy to light fires with him, for he had seen excitement light her eyes when he had described flames roaring and smoking rafters falling. George chopped another marestail and watched with satisfaction the hollow stem snap and the proud plant fall. He had rejected Sissy, he decided, because fires were something else, not part of ordinary life, not something he did for fun or excitement, but a sacred activity that transformed him. Fire placed George in another kind of consciousness. As he began to gather suitable matches, to store away newspaper sheets, to steal little jars of paraffin, he would feel his usual heavy George personality begin to rise and lighten like yeast in the warm; like balloons being blown. He transcended his everyday self and turned into Loki, god of fire, walker of destruction, changer of the universe. Even his face became more spiritual in the presence of fire. His heavy eyes would glitter and the flesh of his cheeks shrink and harden. While the fire was burning, George would be filled with a wonderful bliss that was beyond excitement, beyond satisfaction, beyond thought. George had almost envied the pilot burning to death inside his plane in the haystack for if just watching fire could fill one with such glory, imagine what being consumed by it must do.

For George, Hell was a place of agonising ecstasy, and those in Heaven did not know what they were missing. George knew the pain of fire for he had been often burnt, yet so wonderful was the bliss that accompanied it that it was worth even ferocious pain.

At the very height of the burning, George never felt pain. Red
hot matter could cling to his arms without him noticing, though later he would be in agony with weeping sores and scabs sticking to his shirt-sleeves. He would walk over blazing boards without noticing, and then, for days after, limp on blistered feet.

Although George never told anyone about his injuries, Sissy always knew.

‘Why did you go and do it, stupid? Do you like hurting all the time?' she would scold savagely. The sight of George suffering always made her cross especially when she was unable to help him.

One afternoon when her mother was on her sofa, going through her magazines, Sissy sneaked into Elizabeth's bedroom.

It took her half an hour and a dozen sheets of lavatory paper to give herself a new mouth with her mother's lipstick. At last, equipped with a dear little cupid's bow reaching nearly up to her nostrils, she slipped softly downstairs and left the house.

The bright red mouth had taken up a lot of Sissy's face, but if it was mouth that was wanted then it was worth sacrificing a bit of face for, she decided.

She left the garden, tiptoeing quietly, like a bird leaving its cage after a lifetime of captivity. She had hardly ever gone into the High Street without George, and she felt quite nervous. But it was essential that she made this trip on her own. Sissy, feeling vulnerable and shy, threw back her shoulders, arranged her expression into its most bright and uncaring, and stepped out of the sunshine and into the pub. The men in the bar turned to look, and fell silent at the sight of Sissy with her enormous scarlet mouth. There rose a swiftly suppressed chuckle. Two old men playing darts turned, looked, then quickly – as though the sight appalled them – went back to their game.

Mr Lovage emerged out of the gloom.

Taking Sissy's hand, he said, ‘Kiddies not allowed in here, my darling.' His breath was heavy with the smell of beer.

Sissy's cheeks went nearly as red as her mouth. Everyone in the bar seemed to be staring at her. She tried to say, ‘I am not a kiddy. I am thirteen,' but the words wouldn't come out at all at first, and, when they did, her voice was terribly hoarse, so that Mr Lovage had to ask, ‘What's that, ducks? What did you say?' He was propelling her towards the door as he spoke, and they were both outside by the time he had understood her answer.

‘Yes, yes,' he said soothingly. ‘We all know you're a little lady now. But ladies don't go into the bar on their own, you know. Not nice ones that is.'

‘I'm thirsty,' muttered Sissy, catching sight of her blazing lips in the window glass.

Mr Lovage pushed her gently on to a wooden bench by the wall.

‘Sit there, ducks,' he said. ‘I'll bring you a fizz.'

While she waited, she examined her reflection in the pane and could not decide if she looked desirable.

She was sitting there, still drinking something almost as scarlet as her mouth, when George appeared, shuffling along the road, shoulders hunched, eyes down, lips pursed in a soundless whistle.

He pretended not to see her until almost the last moment, then he gave her a sideways glance and muttered, ‘Hello, Sis.'

‘Why can't you ruddy well leave me alone?' hissed Sissy furiously. ‘Why do you have to spy on me the whole time?'

‘I just happened to be passing,' lied George hollowly. He did not know what to do now that he had found her.

He sat down. ‘Like old times, isn't it, Sis?' he observed cautiously. ‘Sitting side by side and drinking fizz.'

‘Huh,' said Sissy, but she did not seem as furious as before.

Encouraged by what he felt was a softening of her mood, George reached out and took her hand. It was warm and a little damp.

They sat like this, silent, for some time, while passing people looked at the queer kiddies from the big house and smiled with sympathy and contempt.

George said, after a while, ‘Could I have a sip, Sis?'

Sissy passed her glass to him.

‘They wouldn't let me in,' she told him suddenly, with sobbing anger.

George shrugged. ‘You are too good for them, that's why,' he said firmly. Then, looking at her closely, asked, ‘What did you put that ghastly stuff on your mouth for?'

Sissy bristled. ‘It's to make men feel attracted to me,' she snapped, recovering some of her old form.

George gave her hand a squeeze and said, ‘I'm a man, and I don't find it at all attractive. I find it absolutely hideous, in fact.'

‘Oh,' said Sissy, shuddering with some wild emotion that might have been fury. But she did not stir or pull her hand away from his.

‘I love you, Sissy,' said George. ‘No one loves you as much as me.'

She turned and looked at him, her eyes wide with surprise. ‘But you're only thirteen. And you are my brother.' George nodded wisely.

He pulled a filthy handkerchief from his pocket, and gently began to wipe raspberry fizz and lipstick from Sissy's mouth.

‘I am old enough,' he said. ‘And who could possibly love you more than your brother?'

They stood up, still holding hands.

The men began to come out of the pub.

Mr Lovage passed them. ‘That's right,' he said to George. ‘You take your sister home. You're a big boy now and old enough to look after her,' and told the others, ‘That's a nice young boy, and I don't believe a word of what the wife says about him.'

‘I love you, Sissy. I love you better than anyone or anything in the whole world,' said George to Sissy.

‘I am a man now, so you don't need to look for anybody else,' he whispered as he closed the Plague House gates behind them.

Then all Sissy's disappointment floated away and she became filled with relief at not having to go around the village searching for a man, and with happiness because George had grown up just in time. She put her arms round his neck and kissed him on the mouth in exactly the same way as the Italian prisoner had kissed her, and George's mouth felt and tasted nicer.

An airman cycling past saw them kissing and, not knowing that this was a brother and sister, let out a wolf-whistle and shouted, ‘Could I have a turn too, darling?'

‘Nobody but me is ever going to have a turn at kissing you again,' whispered George to Sissy.

Elizabeth, standing by the Rose Room window, watched her children coming through the Plague House gates and thought there was something odd about them but, no matter how hard she looked, could not make out what it was.

Sunlight trailed across her soft silk dress and quivered like water as Elizabeth shivered and thought that she no longer knew the children of her body. They were twins and had always been just the same height, but now Sissy was taller than George, and Elizabeth did not even know when it had happened. There was something else, though, that made her feel as though they had stopped being just faulty reproductions of herself and Tim and had suddenly taken on separate identities of their own. She sighed, tired of being constantly confused by these outlandish children. Then, troubled, she resumed her needlework. Drawing the mazarine crimson into the wing of a mythological bird, she experienced a slight and inexplicable alarm.

Caressing the thread until the strands lay even, wishing it was her mind, not silk, being soothed, she tried to recover her thought but could not. The plump children looked sordid and unhealthy. George had pimples and Sissy red stains on the corners of her mouth as though she was a dribbling toddler. And she's really a teenager, Elizabeth's heart cried out in outraged anguish.

Pinching her lips together and stabbing at her cloth, she began to anticipate Sissy grown up and away, leaving Elizabeth to Lovage-enhanced graciousness, and then felt instantly dismayed because she did not want to seem, even to herself, a woman who did not love her children. It was graciousness that
Elizabeth sought, and peace she needed; and somehow the older Sissy got, the more difficult it became to feel either in her presence. Beauty was as necessary to Elizabeth as was food to other, grosser people and, the other day, she had caught a definite whiff of BO from Sissy's armpits so that she had had to turn her head swiftly away as she suggested cautiously, without taking in too deep a breath, ‘Why don't you have a bath, dear? The water's hot.'

‘Huh. So you think I stink, do you?' Sissy had said, squaring up with blazing eyes.

When Sissy had been little, Elizabeth would have simply picked her up and carted her, struggling, to the bathroom. Adult dignity is not affected by the kicks and screams of reluctant toddlers, but Sissy's blaring accusations had left Elizabeth smarting. She sewed and told herself hopefully, ‘I
must
love her—I wouldn't even part with her for school …' then dived aquamarine in, groaned aloud, and thought that only these children could create such muddle and conflict in a mother's mind.

Sissy, holding George's hand, came into the house where she had been born, and was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation that she was entering for the first time. She looked round, craned, stared, as though she had never before seen the blistered portraits of white-faced young men in dead black velvet, the shelves of dulled pewter, the faded silken bell-tassels and swooping plush pelmets.

‘It all looks new, as if it comes out of someone else's life,' she whispered, as if sound would wake the watching painted eyes, tug the bell pulls till the ringing reverberated, and alert Elizabeth and Mrs Lovage. ‘I feel as though I don't recognise my own home.'

George looked at her and asked, alarmed, ‘Did they give you beer in the pub, then? You must be drunk,' and Sissy, putting her hands against her stomach as though she had a premonition, said, ‘I just feel something is going to happen. I can feel it in the walls.'

George said, his voice low, ‘Which room, Sis?'

‘But it's not bedtime,' said Sissy, her breath very fast.

Ten minutes later, Elizabeth heard a small sound, glanced up, her fear reawakening and saw Sissy and George reflected in a bellied looking glass, tiptoeing. For two hundred years the slow liquid of the glass had crept and freckled, so that the children were bent and blotchy, as, peeping furtively, they crept past, dragging something behind them.

Elizabeth put her sewing down, rose and strode to the door. The children were now halfway up the servants' staircase.

‘What are you doing? Where are you going?' Elizabeth demanded harshly, offended because they had tried to slink past her, unseen.

She waited, suspicious, and they stared back, blankfaced, while a tide of heavy tapestry began to flow from among their legs like woollen urine.

‘Why have you taken the Nymph Quilt?' Elizabeth demanded, angry because she had expected to find cigarettes, alcohol, her lipstick, the sandalwood soap from London, and felt confused by the bedspread.

The children shifted nervously, as though if she looked at it long enough it might enable her to guess.

‘It's precious, you know,' Elizabeth said. She leant forward trying to read their thoughts, but their pale pudgy faces were closed down like shops on Sunday. Perhaps, thought Elizabeth, they were trying to sell the quilt. She wouldn't put it past them.

She remembered when they had tried to sell the back gate to the Any-Old-Iron man. Elizabeth had been just in time to see the fellow poised to rip the delicate eighteenth-century wrought-iron masterpiece from its hinges.

‘I given Missy Sissy and Master George a shilling for it,' the old man, who had a mental age of ten, had told Elizabeth. ‘I didn't mean no harm. Don't get me into trouble, please, Missus,' then had burst into tears.

Elizabeth had ordered the children to return the shilling, but apparently they had spent all but twopence on chemicals for curing the skin of a rabbit, and Elizabeth had paid the man back herself and compelled the children to perform tasks in compensation.

‘That's right, love,' Mrs Lovage had said approvingly, watching Sissy furiously wash the luncheon dishes. And to Elizabeth, ‘It's not so much the money as their characters.'