Almost three years after she left, my sister returned to Goshen. Summer was settling itself in nicely the day she arrived, her newly minted results tightly grasped in one hand – she would have to wait until April of the following year for her actual degree – and Philip in the other. Hebe’s boyfriend was news to us. A bolt from the blue. Like Circus, like Rose, like Mrs Spry, like me, we all kept our secrets inscribed on the cards that – in the manner of a good cliché – we played close to our hearts.
Philip, who was about the same age as Rose, turned out to be a local. Not that we knew Philip or his family.
By the end of that summer, Hebe had married Philip, moving back to the area with him to run the family farm which, his mother had finally admitted, took more than one old woman to work productively. From the start Hebe’s husband was essentially an unknown quantity. He was local, yes, in that everybody knew the Williams farm – showplace in its day was the main thing people said about it – but not that local, if you know what I mean. There was something not quite straight about Philip, that scared me in an abstract way. It was an edginess that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, unlike the reasons why I hated him, which would become many and clear-cut. Literally.
‘This place has changed heaps from my day. I remember it being a bit of a dump when I was a kid,’ Philip commented to Rose, who had continued to sort and stack bulbs on the back doorstep after Hebe had made the introductions. If he had been hoping to butter up Rose he failed. Rose was unbutter-up-able at the best of times. He did, however, succeed admirably in offending Mrs Spry, who might not have been quite as with it as she could have been but could add and subtract the years with the best of them. ‘Bloody cheek!’ Mrs Spry exclaimed later. ‘That Williams farm has gone to rack and ruin over the last thirty years.’
‘You’ve put a bit of money into it then,’ Philip continued conversationally, looking the place up and down, doing the sums, taking in the renovations that carried on continuously both inside and out of the old building. ‘Must be worth a mint,’ he concluded, with satisfaction.
Mrs Spry shuddered dramatically and fled, having made excuses that the luxury of her senior status afforded her. Rose said nothing. Philip, failing to notice the chilliness of the reception he was receiving, moved off the veranda and into the hall to continue with his inventory. He returned moments later and stood behind me, in the shadow of the door, watching Hebe and Rose talking in the sun that washed the faded boards of the Goshen’s veranda.
‘Bet you go off like a firecracker,’ he whispered into my ear, pressing himself into the small of my back.
I gasped in shock, but found myself unable to move away or say anything. Rose glanced up from her piles of bulbs and gave me a quizzical look.
‘You like that, don’t you?’ he breathed into my ear.
‘We’re getting married,’ Hebe told Rose. ‘We thought towards the end of the summer, when it’s not so hot.’
‘What’s the rush?’ queried our mother calmly. ‘It seems to me you’ve barely known each other five minutes.’
‘Well, actually, to be perfectly honest,’ Hebe confessed slowly, ‘we’ve been living together for about six months now, so it doesn’t feel all that brand-new to me, to us. Amazing coincidence, though, isn’t it? The farm and the pub only being a couple of miles away and none of us ever having met each other.’
The gulf of difference between Hebe and Philip loomed like a chasm cleaved between the hard grey rocks of circumstance, timing and history. Rose and I gazed thoughtfully into the infinite darkness of the blindingly obvious.
‘Yes, astounding,’ commented Rose without emotion, standing and stretching. ‘Connie, give us a hand inside will you.’
Philip groaned softly in regret and frustration as I stepped away from him. I felt dirty and powerful and frightened at the same time.
After dinner, Hebe and I retrieved a couple of boxes of books from Philip’s car and carried them to my room. ‘Pointless rebuying them,’ she said. ‘And Alistair would have wanted you to have them. They were always for you too.’ She pulled the books out carefully, novels piled to her left, other genres to her right. A thin, brown, much-washed jersey hung from the coathanger of her shoulders. Once the boxes were emptied, Hebe busied herself creating another category from the novel pile.
‘Find out what books you’re doing in your English papers. These will probably cover most of what you need,’ she explained, patting the new pile directly in front of her.
‘I probably won’t even pass,’ I reflected gloomily, recalling the disappointment of the year before and the discovery that I had missed out on getting my University Entrance by three marks. I had been made to stay back a year by a deeply unsympathetic Mrs Lark. Something about maturity. Like Hebe, I too would go directly to university from sixth form, for my sister was not the only one who longed to escape.
Hebe gave me one of her ‘yeah right’ looks for free and said, ‘Poor you, Connie, poor old you.’ She sounded just like Rose.
When I finally did get around to having a look at the prescribed texts that I was required to read and discuss over the next three years at university, I found that Hebe was right. There were very few books that I would have to purchase in order to fulfil the requirements of my English degree.
‘Get a head start,’ Hebe advised, handing me a mercifully slim paperback from the top of the pile.
‘Ta,’ I said and yawned. ‘I’m going to bed now. You may leave.’
Circus had already climbed into bed, burrowing under the sand-gritty covers until he reached the middle. He growled softly in his sleep when I took off my jeans and crawled in after him. My feet dislodged the book from the end of the bed where I had dropped it. It fell to the floor. The fringe of the bedspread reached over and pulled the book under, breath by breath, wave by wave. Circus twitched and yipped as he hunted Siamese cats in his dreams. I turned off the reading lamp on the bedside table. ‘Tomorrow,’ I promised myself. ‘I make a start on reading it tomorrow.’
Hebe and Philip moved into the main house on the Williams farm, with Philip’s mother, after the wedding. I came home on mid-term break, thankfully spared the indignity of bridesmaid duty. Declan McNally married them on what would have been a picture-perfect day, if Rose’s camera hadn’t inexplicably refused to capture it. What I remember most clearly about Hebe and Philip’s wedding day was Declan McNally resting his eyes on Mrs Spry as he murmured the vows for Philip to repeat.
It was late autumn when the discovery was made that the Williams farm was only leasehold and, what’s more, the lease had only two years left to run in its hundred-year tenure. The biggest kicker, though, was that it was Eli and Sissy’s crew who owned the lease.
It was about that time that Hebe had her first accident. Rose rang and told me that Hebe had tripped over one of the cats and fallen through the French doors – head first – out onto the porch at the Williams place. One night. After closing time at a pub, not the Goshen. All things considered, the damage was fairly minimal. The worst of the cuts were around her waist and belly, where the shards of glass remaining in the window frame entered her. Years later, fragments of glass would still be oozing their way out from under her skin.
From then on, Hebe became increasingly clumsy. I would come home on those innumerable breaks that university is famous for and find her with a black eye here. A broken collarbone there.
‘Do something,’ Algebra pleaded. To me, to Rose and, I suspect, to Han.
‘What?’ replied Rose. ‘Tell me what to do and I will do it.’
Conversations from that time were like that, fragmentary and unlocatable. Life continued. But I think we all spoke, slept and ate less. And worried more.
One night I woke, the cold, green of the killing moon chasing me from sleep. Needing a glass of milk, I drifted down the stairs towards the kitchen. The door was ajar, a thin electric halo radiating from the gap between it and the frame.
‘I’ll kill the fuckin’ bastard,’ I heard Eli say. ‘I’ll fuckin’ kill him.’
I pushed open the kitchen door. ‘Rose?’
Rose sat alone at the kitchen table, drinking tea and smoking a cigarette. She looked impossibly tired. Circus, lying on the floor beside her chair, wagged his stump in greeting.
‘I thought I heard Eli,’ I said.
‘Don’t be silly, Connie,’ said Rose. ‘Go back to bed.’