My sister Christine always wanted to go into advertising. Sometime back in the mid-Eighties, she took me along to a dinner in St John’s Wood with that friend of hers, the trainee therapist and, her work associate, an account manager with one of the bigger and better firms. Perhaps to impress his new girlfriend, the account manager spent the entire evening dominating the conversation with a sales-pitch about what a fantastic operation he worked for, how everyone was treated equally, right down to the receptionists and doorman. The chief executives were such nice guys—hard headed, but reasonable. Everyone really looked up to them. He even reported, perhaps for my benefit, that these philanthropists went in for sponsoring opera and avant-garde art, buying into the higher emotions, as it were.
‘But,’ I asked, as he paused to fork some buttered
parsnips into his mouth, ‘don’t you have any sense of metaphysical worthlessness?’
The momentary silence was only underlined by the sounds of plates and cutlery.
‘What on earth do you think?’ was all he said, returning to his slogans and the tale of his tribe.
‘I can just imagine what he thought of you, you spirit broker!’ my sister laughed as she drove us back to her flat. Putting the Peugeot into fourth, she was accelerating out across an almost empty Waterloo Bridge in the early hours of a Sunday morning. Having managed to go easy with the spirits after dinner, my head was already clearing as the Festival Hall and the Hungerford Bridge went by. Along the river, beside the Savoy, the pleasure-boats’ lights still glinted on the murky Thames below.
‘By the way,’ she said, after a few minutes’ quiet as she threaded her car through that maze of roundabouts and exits heading south, ‘I happened to meet an old friend of yours last Saturday.’
We were held up at yet more traffic lights; the road in the other direction was deserted, tempting her to inch forward out across the junction.
‘It was at Belle’s wedding … Isabel, come on, she was at university with you. I was her lodger, remember, till she and her bloke decided to take the plunge.’
‘So who was this friend of mine?’
‘Alice something-or-other … at least that was the maiden name, if I could only remember it, the name she said you’d know her by.’
‘How come she knew we were related?’
‘She recognized a family resemblance!’ my little sister said—a tall slim blonde, still in her twenties, eleven years my junior, with a broad white smile, a tiny turned up nose and hazel eyes.
There was a grinding noise as she crunched the gears.
‘If I were you, I’d get someone to look at that.’
‘And this is the man who wouldn’t know the difference between a clutch and an embrace!’
‘You should use that on someone more deserving,’ I said.
Tower blocks and red brick terraces, miles of deserted pavements went by. The earliest morning traffic was just an occasional car moving smoothly past shadowy segments of grass, dimly sketched out by a neon streetlamp among the leaves of Clapham Common.
‘So what was she like then?’
‘Isabel?’
‘Alice.’
‘Homely Scottish mother,’ my sister said, ‘with three or four kids. Still managing to keep her looks. Husband a schools inspector. Living somewhere up in Shropshire. Converted farmhouse type of thing. Thinking of going back to teaching when the kids are a little older. Not quite your type, I’d have thought.’
‘Funny, that’s exactly what she said.’
My sister made a tricky right-hand turn across the carriageway.
‘Curious coincidence, you answering that flat-share ad,’ I found myself saying to half-change the subject.
Alice and Isabel were inseparable at university. When she graduated, Isabel, practically a Sloane Ranger from birth, managed to wangle herself a stopgap job in a theatrical costumier’s near Drury Lane. But within a few years she’d presumably started her training as a child psychotherapist. Come to think of it, wasn’t it Isabel’s encouragement that decided Alice on giving up and moving down here? Following a frankly admitted homing instinct in your choice of final-year placements, you too had made the journey south.
‘She did ask after you,’ my sister conceded.
‘Isabel?’
‘Alice! And she spoke rather warmly of you too, I’d say … Did you have some kind of a thing going on back then, or what?’
‘Sort of.’
‘What sort of “sort of”?’
‘The usual sort —’ and I crooned the hook to Just One of Those Things.
‘And what did your wife think about that then?’ she asked. ‘Can’t imagine Mary didn’t find out. You being such a hopeless liar, and all.’
‘Well, yes; but we weren’t exactly living together at the time.’
‘Interesting,’ she mused, ‘and I always thought of you two as the ideal couple, the great inseparables, two peas in a pod, all your eggs in one basket.’
‘The ideal couple: as if we were yoked together …’
‘She wanted to know if you got married in the end,’ my sister continued. ‘She asked if you had any children.’
‘Naturally, you filled her in on the details.’
‘How could I?’ She laughed. ‘You never tell me anything!’
‘Come on,’ I said, niggled by her harping yet again on that bit of family myth, ‘you know we got married.’
‘You must admit, though, you do tend to keep things to yourself … things like this Alice whatever-her-name-was.’
‘And what if there’s nothing to tell?’
‘Now I don’t believe that for a moment. Everyone’s got skeletons to rattle, but if anyone so much as touches your cupboard door, up come the defences, on goes the mask, and there you are, standing on one leg with a distant look in your eyes, gazing off somewhere and saying precisely nothing!’
‘Have it your own way,’ I shrugged.
‘So how is Mary?’ my sister asked.
‘She’s fine. Fine. Getting on with her things as usual.’
‘See what I mean?’ she said, glancing at the lighted dash. Outside, an orange glare of street lamps only seemed to emphasize the dark. ‘What Alice said was that everybody used to admire your mind; but you weren’t exactly a social success.’
That was nice of her, I thought, remembering her legendary tongue.
My sister was trying to get the car into a gap between two white transit vans a little way down from her ground floor flat.
‘Sometimes I do think it’s a pity we lost touch,’ I said.
‘Really? It’s a long time ago. Things are bound to be different. She seemed such a comfy motherly kind of person. Difficult to imagine you two arm in arm and walking down a street together, talking about metaphysical worthlessness.’
For the summer after she graduated, Alice had found a job on an educational program at the Brooklyn Museum. The experience visibly changed her: she’d bought herself a New York bohemian wardrobe, had let her hair grow longer and waved it. The other people working there had been such enthusiasts. They really believed in experimental art. The moment of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Op, Minimalism, Conceptualism, the entire shooting gallery. Even the kids in their school parties seemed to be wild about it. Alice would say she really woke up in New York. She was used to adopting a canny reserve, but her co-workers didn’t see the point of that. It was as if she were insulting them with her lack of superlatives. The whole thing had come as a revelation and release. She was going to become a curator. Back in England, she’d quickly found herself missing the excitement.
‘Actually, she was a dedicated follower of poetry and painting. I learned a lot from her.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, Joan Eardley … and Louise Nevelson … and Arp, Jean Arp: she was the first person I ever heard pronounce their names.’
‘So it wasn’t just her body you were after?’
‘What? No: absolutely not. She didn’t say that, did she?’
But that didn’t deserve a reply, so after manoeuvring back and forth a few times, my sister got the Peugeot parked the way she wanted near the curb. Then she turned from the windscreen a moment and produced one of her parody daggers looks: eyes narrowed, lips pursed, head tipped to one side.
‘Belle told me Alice had had an awful miscarriage. The baby died in her womb when it was already developed. The doctors knew, of course, and so did Alice, but she had to go through with the delivery anyway. Poor dead thing … a terrible experience, Belle said.’
There was a moment of blankness between us. The stillborn child had made her vivid in her life without me. My sister switched off the engine.
‘Maybe I should write …’ I was thinking out loud and unheard as I slammed the passenger door. ‘You don’t happen to have an address, do you?’
‘No, though I could easily get one—but really, I’m not sure it’s worth it. I mean she was quite interested in what’s happened to you. But, you know, just so she could file you away. I wouldn’t imagine you had anything very much in common with her, you know, even if you ever did.’
Now I couldn’t help feeling a sharp twinge of irritation at the way my sister’s words had seemed to write off that fretted fondness and desire, the mixed emotions starting up inside me, completely uncalled for and caught inside, like a puzzle with a missing piece.
‘What’s that supposed to mean, then—“if you ever did”?’
But by now Christine had the key in her blue front door.
‘Well, honestly, I can’t begin to imagine what she ever saw in you!’