The Bad Sister (25 page)

‘I was let in by entryphone – actually it turns out to be video,' Jean said, with some of the naivety of a countrywoman. ‘A woman who was tidying up in there let me into Eliza's ground-floor flat. I must say, I was most impressed.'

Robina Sandel and Mara had difficulty in avoiding each other's glances at Jean's reverence for the décor installed by Eliza – a good deal more sophisticated, as Jean pointed out, than anything she would have expected of her at art school in Oxford. The front hall, Jean said, had been mirrored with old glass so that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the rest of the flat began; and when you did go through, ushered in by … who was it … Grace …?

‘Yes. Roger Poole the gardener's wife,' Robina said, impatient already with these eulogies for a lifestyle of which
she could only disapprove. ‘She cleans for people round the gardens – on occasions.'

‘I was lucky, though.' Jean was breathless now with her description of the living room and its all-embracing mural, where every available surface was covered with what appeared to be ancient scenes. ‘I was lucky, I mean, to be able to talk to Grace. Because she enabled me to feel that there is indeed something the matter with poor Eliza's life: that she is, certainly, in desperate need of some assistance; and that I am the one to help her – as no one else would be able to do.'

As is evident from Jean Hastie's journal, filled in the evening after her encounter with the elusive Mrs Hyde, an element of fear – of panic, almost – had begun to take root; and Jean's efforts to eradicate it and return to the world of St John Chrysostom are almost pathetic to read.

Her sense, I believe, of the ‘closeness' of Mrs Hyde to Eliza Jekyll, gleaned from the meeting with Grace Poole in Eliza's empty apartment, had brought the subject with which she was concerned in her researches more close to her – for the journal, speculating on the nature of Original Sin and the irreconcilable split in each and all of us that came in the Garden of Eden, concludes that there is no hope for the human race unless we return to the position of the first Christians, viz., that we are indeed free and responsible for our actions.

No woman, however ‘down on her luck', has the right to demand of another what Mrs Hyde was clearly extorting from her friend and neighbour. Neighbour! That was where the closeness came in, and it riled Jean Hastie to confess to the bad night she suffered after her visit to Ms Jekyll's flat. But confess, in the confidential pages of her diary, she did. The old clock tower at the top of St John's Gardens struck five before she found sleep. And when she woke, to a pale and watery morning, it was as if the sleep had been no more than a loan to her from the choked cemeteries of the past, so many strange and vivid figures did she see parading on exotic shores.

It would probably be easy to point out that the Pompeiian mural in Eliza's flat was responsible for these dreams of an alien world. At any rate, Jean transcribes, on waking and downing coffee brought her by Robina in her basement bedroom, the following exchange with Mrs Poole (and not before confiding that, ashamed as she is of blurting Eliza's request to the German householder, she had felt Mrs Sandel's hostility to her curiosity and now was confident that she would receive help in her inquiries on the vexed subject of Mrs Hyde).

Jean writes:

I couldn't help wondering, as I stood in that room of Eliza's – quite small, in reality, if you measured it, but so cunningly done up you could honestly feel you were in a Roman villa somewhere in the heart of the Calabrian countryside (and that in February!) whether Mrs Poole knew something of what was going on between the two women … two women who live so close, as I thought with a sinking of the heart, that it's very likely they can hear each other through the wall or, even, have a communicating door. Not for the first time, as I asked Grace Poole whether Eliza was expected to come back soon, I felt that this proximity must force me away from the whole matter. It is none of my business, after all. Yet the very thought of having a woman such as Mrs Hyde so appallingly close made me hesitate again, when it came to walking out of the door at Mrs Poole's civil reply.

‘No, Eliza [that was how she called her] has been out some time, love.'

I weighed up Mrs Poole carefully before asking her the next question. She seems a homely type of woman, a bit sloppy in her habits perhaps, from the out-of-place pockets of untidiness in Eliza's beautiful room: a wad of tissues on a low table by the marbled wood fireplace, a sweet wrapper (of all things!) on the floor by the door to the hall. But she seems straightforward enough; and was straightforwardly disappointing, too, when she said she didn't ‘do' this place
more than once in a blue moon – ‘but there's a dinner party tomorrow night and so she asked me to come in'. By the time I got round to asking about ‘the other woman' (as I feel Mrs Hyde must be, in some way, in Eliza's sexual past – unless she's an ex-employee … or a member of the family who's in trouble? Hardly, no) Mrs Poole was, in the politest way possible, showing me to the door. There are niched blinds in the flat, which give an even more cocooned feel to the place, and she flicked one up a foot or so to pull the window shut before turning off the light of the central chandelier and making to go after me.

‘Mrs Hyde?' Grace Poole said as we stood a second in the darkened room, lit only by a beam of light from someone's house in the gardens. ‘Oh yes, she has a key. Not that I've seen her here, mind you. She'll usually go in her entrance, out front.' Then, looking at me with a sudden interest: ‘You a relative or something, dear? Come into town to see her, have you?'

[There was something about the whine of the London woman's voice, the obviousness of Jean's ‘foreignness' in these parts and the discomfort of standing any longer in such artificial conditions that made Jean move abruptly to the window – in the opposite direction, of course, to the door to the hall and the way out. Mrs Poole made a tut-tutting sound behind her.]

I looked out of the window just revealed to me by Mrs Poole, [are Jean's last words in her entry for Wednesday the eleventh of February] and straight into the basement window of a littered pipe-clogged kitchen. The windows were filthy – and steamed over as well – but I could see who was standing at the sink, face partially obscured by one of those old Ascot water heaters they used to put in thirty or forty years ago. It was Mrs Hyde all right, and she was peeling tatties with a sharp, serrated knife that had a red handle; her hands were red too, and the water was spurting out scalding, as if she couldn't care less for the heat. The poor wee bairns were there, and now and again she'd shout at one or other of them. A black cat was on the kitchen table – if you
could call a sagging strip of Formica with legs by such a name.

She looked up and straight at me. It was her bare bulb that lit Eliza's room.

Then I followed Mrs Poole back into the hall. And I nearly tripped over the umbrella stand, which I hadn't seen before! It just shows how these mirrors and trick paintings and that sort of fantabulasia can drive ye blind as a bat! Mrs Poole was quite irritated with me by now – and I with her, that I could be mistaken for a kinswoman of that monster across the way.

As I say, I tripped on Eliza's umbrella. A weird object: wood, with a parrot's head and a long, scarlet-painted beak.

I like a thing to be what it is, and no' pretend to be anything else – as my aunt Peggy used to say.

As it so happened, Thursday, the twelfth of February, dawned bright and clear, and stayed that way all day: so cold that birds sang and then stopped, on branches etched white with frost; but with a sun that everyone in London seemed to have forgotten, so that children skated shouting on frozen puddles and their women, mothers or minders, bent down for the first crocus or stretched for the egg-yolk yellow of forsythia against a wall.

The horrors of preceding days in the communal gardens of North Kensington seemed to have been blown away along with the bad weather. The great damp blanket of rain and cloud that had lain over the city with as much persistence as the Victorian fogs of the past, had brought with it the rustle of suspicion, the stifled tread in darkness of the murderer. It was true that the Notting Hill rapist had not yet been caught – but on a day like this, he hardly came to mind. The trees were so thin you could see through them. The shrubbery, so often a menace at night when, like a locked wardrobe, it threatened to contain all manner of
forgotten and execrable forms, had an innocent sparkle on deep green leaves. Tonight, too, would be bright and clear, with as fine a setting of stars as the cut-crystal, silver and bone arrangements of Ms Eliza Jekyll's dining table. There would even be a full moon, to guide those of the guests who preferred to stroll on such a perfect winter evening along the path at the back of the houses, to Eliza's garden steps.

Jean Hastie was one of these. She was, as she confesses in her journal (after a long disquisition on the bravery and freedom of the fourth-century St Perpetua at Carthage) more than slightly ashamed of the ‘uncomfortable feeling' to which she had owned the day before. And, although she would be loath to say that the change in the weather had been at the root of a return to her optimistic and cheerful manner, there was little doubt that the transparency of the evening and the pretty twinkling lights from the prosperous houses of Nightingale Crescent made her feel glad to be alive – and glad, too, that she had a delightful family to return to. like the hysteria in the gardens over the prowler, the schism in the Church after St Augustine – and the subject of his own overriding lust, cause of his theory of the inherited nature of man's sin – seemed far away to an ordinary, contented housewife such as Jean Hastie. She felt sorry, certainly, for those like Mara (who trotted beside her under a moon the size of a silver pomander, the inevitable video camera slung round her neck) and their tiny, claustrophobic view of the world. All London was there, after all, for the sampling (Jean had, after a successful day in the British library, stopped off at the National Gallery and seen the Impressionists on loan from Moscow and Leningrad). Only, as Jean dourly remarked to herself, it seemed that some women couldn't see it like that.

The women here, living as they did with a dangerous attacker in their midst, could think of little else – and their own position as women in regard to him and other men, of course. It is stultifying, Jean confides to her diary just before going to bed later that night, to find human beings restricted precisely by their need to redefine themselves, to
find ‘freedom'. And she swears, once this book is done, that she will take a long break from the subject and enjoy life in Fife without a further thought for Eve – or the serpent, for that matter. ‘W-O-M-A-N,' she says with determination, ‘is a word which will be erased from my typewriter.'

It wasn't surprising that the picture of a silver pomander comes up, when we hear that the enticing smell of Eliza Jekyll's cinnamon and clove punch wafted down almost as far as the back garden of No. 19 – and was certainly in evidence as Jean and Mara, at peace with each other tonight, strolled on a path icing-white by the side of dark, churned earth prepared for spring planting. Jean said something to the effect that she'd better be careful with the toddy this time around; and Mara, laughing, agreed: as if all the hobgoblins summoned that night at Robina Sandel's had lain in a bottle of house red warmed with a scrap of West Indian spices and a floating slice of orange. But, with all the back curtains of the residents' magnificent sitting rooms drawn back – as if on a night like this, with such a high, vaulted sky and a pantomime moon, it would be criminal to shut it behind the chintzy curtains – it was little wonder that there was a feeling of benign, neighbourhood watch: a truly communal spirit in the air.

Jean saw the family she had passed on her visit to Eliza by the Crescent way – sitting still in their front bay window but visible from behind, like going into the back of the Pollock's toy theatre she had had as a child. They were listening to music – Mozart, Jean recognized – and didn't hear the scrunch of her and Mara's shoes on the pebble path. But Mara waved to them all the same. ‘Jeremy Toller and his dear ones,' she said, surprising Jean with the bitterness and dislike in her voice. ‘They've done
nothing
to help catch the rapist. And Toller's a local magistrate!'

Before there was time for Jean to drop the hint – something she had been longing to do all day, when it came to explaining to Mara that there was more to the world than just this garden, threatened though it might be by evil – the two old friends had come to Eliza's steps and were beginning
to go up them. Neat flowerbeds, arranged in a radial petal design, lay to their left – the Tollers' garden, presumably, and tended with extreme care and forethought, some of the shrubs tied, staked and protected from the winter winds by loving hands. To their right, as Jean saw with a pang of dismay, was a very different story. And, as Mara made no comment on the contrast between the two plots of land, Jean Hastie decided to look straight ahead and arrive on Eliza Jekyll's terrace in a fit mood for an enjoyable dinner party.

It was hard, however, not to look down one more time before they stood outside the curtained french window at the back of Eliza Jekyll's drawing room and tapped (a prearranged signal) to be let in. For there was something almost ‘surreal – if that's the word', as Jean wrote later, before the further events of the night became known to her. A rotting pianola, reminiscent indeed of some Buñuelesque fantasy, lay in the garden adjacent to Eliza Jekyll's, its gashed keyboard and rotting marquetry long ago eaten away by rain and frost and squatted by passing cats. The garden, if so it could be called, seemed to have grown humpy, under a patchy covering of grass, as if a mass of botched graves had been attempted there; and under the window that looked out on all this lay, like a child's stick drawing of a man thrown sideways, the white rails of a broken plastic clothes horse. The light in the window was off, but Jean recognized only too well the chipped wooden sills and flaking cream paint of Mrs Hyde's kitchen. And it was with an even greater sense of resolution that she walked in through heavy, textile curtains to Eliza's painted room of trick colonnades and marble ante-chambers, among which her guests stood waiting to be introduced. She would relax as far as was possible during dinner, Jean told herself with her customary firmness. But she would have an equally firm word with Ms Eliza Jekyll before the night was out.