Ten

Beryl Graham was trying very hard not to think of her sister.

It ought not to have been difficult: after all, even after Alisha came to work at the university fifteen years ago, their meetings had been irregular.

When she had first known that Alisha had bought a house nearby, Beryl had entertained a romantic notion that they could be reconciled: she had imagined them perhaps even sharing a house, helping each other along what Beryl perceived to be the ever more intractable and unnegotiable path of old age. She had fondly imagined keeping Alisha’s house while her sister pottered with some dusty thesis or other in which the world was no longer interested. Alisha’s work was, to her, a foible, a kind of weakness that had to be tolerated and occasionally indulged, rather like discussing her health or the failings of the Labour Party, an animated discussion for a limited period on a subject that neither of them could have any possible effect upon.

It had come as quite a shock to discover that, after her twenty years of working abroad, Alisha’s attitudes had not been mellowed by her age. At a time long after she ought to have retired, Alisha had become, if anything, more astonishing. In Beryl’s mind, her sister had forsaken anything even mildly approaching decency. She smoked, for one thing. And not just cigarettes. The house would sometimes reek of what Alisha called grass, a disgusting habit in anyone, least of all a woman of Alisha’s upbringing. And then there were the friends: young people, thirty and forty years Alisha’s juniors. She had them up at the house, she went to faculty parties, and she stayed for weekends in God knew what circumstances, at addresses that had remained a mystery to Beryl.

Alisha had looked so wrong, too. She dressed herself in jeans, or Indian skirts, or even, sometimes, in overalls. ‘It’s for my work,’ she told Beryl once, as she was packing a document case. ‘For heaven’s sake try and understand. I go into pits, Beryl. Underground, Beryl. I look at machinery. I go into derelict warehouses. It’s my work.’

But Beryl did not understand.

She refused to understand. She came to clean every week as a kind of martyrdom, a paid cross to carry, a symbol both of her selfless willingness and Alisha’s selfish egotism.

Beryl Graham wanted a real sister. Someone to come with her to the WI. Someone to read the paper with. Someone to pick up in her car on a Sunday morning, and go to church with, and to sit with in the lonely, overpolished pews. Someone dressed nicely in a suit, who knew the right page numbers for the service, and could turn her own page for her when her hands were fixed in their occasional rigid arthritic clutch. She wanted to able to introduce Alisha to those women who had pitied her for having no family, no children, no grandchildren. She wanted to be able to say, ‘This is my sister Alisha. She lived in America for a while, and now she’s come home.’ Alisha who had done perhaps something rather interesting in teaching, but whose life in that was now over. A person who was as redundant and respectable as herself, a nice pleasant person, useful for fêtes and the sewing circle.

It wasn’t much to ask, was it? To have a proper sister who kept her company.

But it was too much for Alisha. Going down the path to the church now, Beryl’s mouth turned down in a grimace of despair.

And now Alisha was dead.

And she couldn’t even die in a respectable fashion.

Beryl pushed open the church door. From inside came the reassuring flavour of godliness: strong tea, damp, and flowers just past their best. She looked up at the stained-glass window closest to the font, at a Christ surrounded by saints, a portrait in blood red and gold and green. Under Christ’s feet lay the wretched sinners, their tautly clothed Victorian bodies descending into the ground, their hands reaching up to beg for divine intervention before they were consumed in hell. They had vacant, colourless eyes and pinched little faces. Crying for forgiveness. Begging for mercy. Christ’s face was averted from them as if He couldn’t bear to see their degradation. Others clung to Him, to the hem of His cloak—the righteous ones, secure in the prospect of heavenly bliss. As Beryl gazed upwards, she saw Alisha’s expression—that of surprised superiority—in the faces of the sinners swiftly disappearing through a hole in the ground. She couldn’t see Alisha in the blessed, who lined up so regimentally behind their Saviour on the grassy slopes of Elysium. She shuddered slightly, with something like sensual gratification. Poor Alisha was to burn in eternal fire for all she had done.

For she had certainly sinned.

I mustn’t think of it, Beryl told herself. But she did. With some satisfaction.

Walking up the aisle, nodding to the two or three other worshippers gathered for midweek prayer, Beryl’s mind reverted to the photograph. She settled in a pew, took the hassock down, and knelt on its slippery leather surface, her knees clenched tightly together, the hands clenched even tighter on the shelf before her. She closed her eyes.

Immediately the girl in the picture sprang to her mind. The naked back, the rounded shoulder. The angle of her posture, like a dancer reaching to the floor. Alisha had had a naked girl in her bedroom. She had taken a photograph of a naked girl. And she had kept the photograph in her room.

Beryl pressed her hands tighter, until her painful knuckles showed white.

She could still see the computer screen, still see the colour reflected on the faces of the policemen, the blue wash in the shadows. Someone who knew their Bible had put that message on the screen. Beryl had racked her brains all day yesterday, trying to decode, to decipher in her own mind, if the words were a joke, or a serious message. The kind of people that Alisha knew were not above taking God’s word in vain. Alisha herself had done so many times. And yet … there was something coldly penetrating in the words. No punctuation, no exclamation marks, no cryptic little aside at the end. No quotation marks either, as the police had pointed out. This phrase was close to someone’s heart, held a meaning. They didn’t hold it apart from themselves by showing a reference. It wasn’t a footnote like the ones in Alisha’s books, with a chapter and verse. It was personal, breathed out. A message, a fluttering line of letters.

Even trying to sleep last night, Beryl had been preoccupied with it. It wouldn’t leave her head. It was as if she had caught a virus, a virus composed entirely of words. Words forever linked to Alisha’s face. And a girl in a picture.

When the service was over, Beryl did not move from her seat. The other half-dozen members of the congregation filed out, and the vicar extinguished the single candle on the altar, went into the vestry and came out dressed in jeans, a white shirt and blue linen jacket. When he saw Beryl still sitting there, he gave a little start of surprise.

‘Miss Graham,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

She opened her mouth to assure him that she was and, to her horror, a little mewling cry came out. She fumbled for her handkerchief and stuffed it against her mouth, but the sobs seemed to have taken her over. Tears splashed down on her hymn book.

‘Whatever is it?’ he asked.

‘It’s my sister,’ she said. ‘She died.’

Reverend York took her into the vicarage.

There, ten minutes later, while she sat on a minimalist sofa in his immaculate study, he brought her a cup of sweet tea.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she told him. ‘I can’t think what came over me.’

‘No doubt it’s shock,’ he said.

‘I didn’t cry at all yesterday,’ she whispered. ‘Not even when the police showed me her picture, and it had been taken when she was dead, and …’

‘The police?’ York echoed.

She glanced up at him. ‘She was found in her car, miles away from here.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Somewhere on the south coast.’ He took her cup from her. She blew her nose. ‘We were apart for so much of our lives,’ Beryl murmured piteously. ‘And now we shan’t be together at all.’

The vicar nodded sympathetically. ‘She taught at the university,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve seen her there once or twice,’ he told her, conversationally. ‘She was always very busy.’

‘Yes,’ Beryl said. Then she registered what he had said. ‘You go up there?’ she asked.

‘That’s right. Once or twice a month,’ he told her. ‘There’s a kind of revivalist group there. The students.’

Beryl fixed him with a suspicious gaze. She had thought that he was a sound traditionalist. Not one of these happy clappers. ‘Revivalist?’ she asked.

‘A kind of praise service and a talk, and a chat afterwards.’

Beryl’s face fell. She could just imagine it. A lot of noise. No dignity, no control. All crossed-legged on the floor, swaying about. Some sort of music going on that was not a proper hymn. Bare feet and holding hands. She shrank back from York as if he had admitted being the carrier of some contagious disease.

‘A chat,’ she said.

‘Yes. Alisha came to one or two.’

He could not have said anything that astounded Beryl more. To be told that he was some kind of closet evangelist was bad enough, but to hear that Alisha—godless, heartless from the day she had been born—had come to such a meeting … it was too preposterous.

‘Alisha?’ she said. ‘Not Alisha.’

‘Oh yes,’ he told her. ‘Not often, you know. But sometimes.’

‘But …’ Beryl’s mind raced. In a few short seconds, she travelled from a state of complete astonishment to one of total betrayal. Alisha had believed. In however misguided a fashion, she had believed. She had gone to church. A kind of church, anyway. She had gone to church with the students, sat on a floor somewhere, talked about …

She looked away, shuddering involuntarily.

It was an invasion. That’s what it was. It was invasion of her own territory. For God belonged rather nicely, rather exclusively, to Beryl herself. She knew Him, she understood His rules. She could recite the services word for word. Beryl had a relationship with God, the only kind of truly intimate relationship that she had ever had. Beryl gave herself up to Him secretly behind the prayerbook pages, in the draughty silences, in the wet Sunday evenings, in the solitary Lent Wednesdays, in the small strict corrections to her spirit, in the empty wastes of her heart. He was a remote and critical ruler, one to whom she took gifts, a tax on life, a levy on joy: she took Him her time and loneliness, she knitted them into clammy-fingered offerings. Her soul was made up of Christian Aid packets and brass-cleaning rotas and in having a good hat to wear at Easter and Christmas. She was not excitable, or rash, or talented, or optimistic, and the sweetness in her nature had long since matured into sanctimony, but she belonged in church, was a little humble cog in God’s mysterious plan, and Alisha—Alisha most emphatically did not belong. Alisha could not be saved.

‘Alisha won’t get to heaven,’ she said.

The vicar leaned forward, to catch her words. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she retorted.

‘God’s mercy is infinite,’ York said. ‘You can rest assured of that.’

‘I don’t want to be assured of it,’ she told him.

He paused. ‘We all have our ways of coming to Christ,’ he said, quietly. ‘I think perhaps Alisha was finding a way.’

Beryl spluttered with indignation. ‘With all those students,’ she said. ‘With all those drug addicts and the like.’ She was suddenly finding it difficult to breathe.

He smiled. ‘I don’t know very many addicts,’ he said. ‘But those I do know are addicted to alcohol and live in this parish.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘Most of the boys and girls are very nice. You would like them. Girls like Alisha’s friend.’

Beryl managed to get to her feet, where she drew herself up to her full height. ‘I don’t want to know them,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know anyone like that.’

And she went out of the vicarage, stumbling over the cat lying in the doorway, and finding a curse in her mouth. She hurried down the path, in a frame of mind she could not put a name to, rubbing her hands against her coat before she put on her gloves, as if to wipe away anything that might have touched her in the last hour.