Sisterland Read online

  ‘Forty-eight’s not old!’ their mother said. ‘I promise you, when you’re in your forties you won’t even think of yourself as middle-aged, let alone old!’

  Hilly looked at her. She had seen how the waiter – thirtyish and dark-eyed – had flicked a glance over Mum, Zoë, herself, then back to Mum again. No, no one would take Rose for middle-aged. She was tall, blonde, well-toned from exercise; she wore a green sleeveless top that showed off tanned shoulders and arms. Zoë – already taller than Hilly, though eighteen months younger – resembled her; Hilly did not. Resigned to the fact that she was never going to be as sleekly attractive as her mother or sister, Hilly had decided there were other ways to look.

  They started to eat. ‘Have some salad, Zoë.’

  ‘Don’t want any.’

  ‘Mmmm, delicious. How’s yours?’

  ‘Hot!’ Hilly said, having burned her tongue. ‘But scrummy.’ Potato, soft and waxy, in a creamy sauce flavoured with mustard, and topped with melted cheese that put strength against mildness. Green salad with the clean tang of vinaigrette. Bread, in chunks, that wasn’t quite the same as French bread in England.

  ‘So,’ Zoë said, lifting a slice of sausage with her fork, as if she expected to find something unpleasant underneath. ‘This time next week, you’ll have your results, Hill—’

  ‘Thanks for reminding me. Here was I thinking I might forget all about it, on holiday.’

  ‘You’re not worried, are you, Hilly?’ her father said, with a heaped forkful of sauerkraut halfway to his mouth. ‘Not really? You’ll have done fine, don’t worry.’

  ‘That’s what worries me. You and Mum assuming that.’

  ‘– and we’ll have Heidigran with us,’ Zoë continued. ‘How long’s it for, Rose?’

  Hilly saw the quick glance that passed between her parents.

  ‘You know the situation, Zoë. We can’t make long-term plans, not yet.’

  ‘So,’ Zoë said. ‘Let me get this straight. When you say she’s coming to stay with us, what you mean is she’s coming to live with us? For ever?’

  In the museum Hilly had seen children’s drawings in a display case, in crayon and coloured pencil. They might have been in an infant classroom – they showed mums and dads, houses, trees. Good children, she thought, or bored children, impatient with captivity: sit down quietly and do a nice drawing. While you wait. While you wait for someone to decide it’s time for you to die.

  Maps, photographs, posters, lists. Some of the exhibits were familiar to her: a yellow star marked JÜDE, even one photo, of Jewish children with a nurse, that she thought she’d seen before, in a book. Maps showed how many camps there had been: names she had never heard of alongside the ones everybody knew, the names like Belsen and Dachau and Auschwitz that had come to mean concentration camp and nothing else. Though even those must have been ordinary places once, towns or villages, oblivious of the weight their names would come to bear.

  She found Natzwiller-Struthof on the map, then her eyes flicked higher up the Rhine, looking for Cologne. Köln. That was where Heidigran had lived until the end of the war, when she had come to England as an orphan, both parents having been killed by Allied bombs. They were Hilly’s great-grandparents, yet they seemed so distant from her – no photos in the family album – that she had to remind herself that they weren’t just Heidigran’s relations, but her own. I am part-German, she thought. A quarter of me.

  People were moving slowly from exhibit to exhibit, not talking. Only a fretful baby cried, soothed and shushed by its father. The silence was making Hilly very conscious of herself. Why are we here? she wondered. What are we looking for?

  Much of what she saw was blunted by familiarity, as if its presence in the pages of history and on the exam syllabus meant that the Holocaust had to have happened, that it could not have been otherwise. But some items jumped at her with the shock of immediacy: a face, a typed instruction, a letter to parents from a young partisan due to be executed later that day, a line of children walking obediently towards a waiting train. This last looked so innocuous, as if they might be infants at school being led from their playground.

  There was a visitors’ book. Hilly caught up with her father, who was turning the pages. She saw comments in French and in German, one in English: ‘Will we ever learn?’

  Her father wrote a single word, ‘Heartbreaking’, and then his name, Gavin Craig. ‘Want to write something?’ he whispered.

  Hilly considered, then shook her head. She could not think of anything adequate.

  The waiter brought coffee, milk in a jug, sugar. ‘What shall we do tomorrow?’ Gavin asked, unwrapping lump sugar. ‘What’d you like to do, Zoë?’

  Zoë shrugged.

  ‘How about the castle – the Haut Koenigsbourg?’ Hilly reminded her. ‘You said you liked the look of it.’

  ‘Liked the look of it from here, I meant. Doesn’t mean I want to trudge round it for hours, staring at bits of rusty armour.’

  Hilly looked at her father; a look that said, Well, we tried. Since the conversation about Heidigran, which her parents had been trying to avoid, Zoë had gone into full-scale strop. Nothing would please her now.

  ‘The stork place?’ Mum suggested. ‘Or perhaps just a walk? We could do a good walk from Thannenkirch. Take a picnic, go up into the woods.’

  Zoë shook her head. ‘Too boring. Too hot.’

  Now that Hilly had been inside, the place would not leave her. Conversation and laughter from the other diners, lights trailing over the pergola and through vine branches, the clink of glasses, could not drive it out of her head.

  The sun had struck fiercely as she walked with her father down the slope towards the lower end of the camp. In the intervening space there were only marker stones, like headstones in a graveyard, each bearing the name of another concentration camp. Hilly heard crickets chirring in the long grass beyond the fence; a small aircraft droned overhead.

  An area hollowed out in the ground between two buildings had once been a cesspit and was now a memorial to members of the Resistance. There were wreaths and a flagpole. A man and woman stood there, the man taking photographs; the woman wore a long floaty dress, a white hat, sunglasses. They turned to walk away without looking at Hilly or her father.

  And the buildings. A prison block. Punishment cells. An execution room. Oven.

  Rooms where medical experiments had been carried out: experiments on humans. Rooms where the victims had been kept handy, like laboratory mice.

  ‘Dad. I think I’ll go outside.’

  ‘You OK?’

  Hilly nodded, though suddenly she was finding it hard to breathe. It was different here from the main part of the museum. Out of the sunlight the air struck cold. It was hard to believe that there wasn’t something left here, in the air, in the dust, getting into her lungs and clogging her ears in the echoey silence. She felt tainted by evil.

  ‘I don’t want to see any more. D’you mind if I go back to the car?’

  ‘Too much, is it?’ Her father put an arm round her and pulled her against his shoulder. ‘Come on, love. I know. Let’s go back to the others and get out of here.’

  ‘Who you writing to? Not Rubes again?’ Zoë leaned over Hilly’s bed to look, hairbrush in hand.

  ‘Every day. I promised. And don’t say Rubes.’ Sprawled on her front, Hilly moved a hand to cover the writing.

  ‘You’re mad!’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Might as well write mine, as well. Can I have two of your stamps?’

  ‘If you must. In my address book, inside cover, over there on that chest-of-drawers thing.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Hilly raised her eyebrows; this, for Zoë, was extravagant good manners. She watched her sister move across to the open window, against a gauze curtain that moved with the breath of air. Zoë was ready for bed, in a long blue T-shirt that reached to her thighs, her hair brushed straight down her back. Hilly could never look at her without feeling admiration
spiked with envy. Why couldn’t she have had Zoë’s willowy build, her effortless grace?

  ‘Which cards did you get in the end?’

  ‘These.’ Zoë showed two cartoon drawings of storks.

  ‘For Nadine, and…?’

  Zoë smiled. ‘Secret.’

  ‘Oh?’ Hilly said, rolling over. ‘Male secret, you mean?’

  ‘Secret secret.’ Zoë clasped the postcards to her chest. ‘Got a spare pen?’

  In the early hours of the morning, before the first grey light, Hilly woke to the sound of her own voice yelling. ‘No! No!’ She was forcing the words out against a constriction in her throat, a strangling tightness.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Zoë clicked the bedside light on. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nightmare,’ Hilly said, as the strange room came into focus. She put an arm across her face to shield her eyes from the brightness.

  ‘What sort of nightmare? God, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’

  ‘Can’t remember. I’m OK now.’

  ‘Go back to sleep, then.’ Zoë turned away, burrowed her head into the pillow, and reached for the light switch.

  Hilly lay still, aware of the rapid pounding of her heart. She did remember. She had been drawing a picture; she saw her hand clasping a black crayon, drawing with quick, confident strokes. What she drew was a high gate, strong and barred. Why hadn’t she chosen something else – trees, rabbits, daisies, a sun with a smiling face? The gate was already much bigger than she had meant it to be: huge, solid, fencing her in. And she must have drawn herself on the wrong side of it, as everyone else had gone through. There were guards – uniforms, badges, shining boots. ‘Sorry. You’re here now,’ said a voice. ‘You’re never leaving.’ She was alone. The others, tourists in bright-coloured clothes and hats and trainers, were chatting, holding each other’s hands, moving farther and farther away, and Dad was a small figure walking to the car, not even noticing he’d left her behind. Her hands were on the bars, reaching up; she saw spikes of barbed wire gouging them, and blood trickling over her palms and wrists. The guards stood and watched her, laughing. ‘Let me out!’ she begged them, knowing it would only add to their amusement. ‘It’s a mistake! I’m only a visitor—’

  Chapter Three

  A TOLD U UR BRILL

  ‘How’s it going?’ Hilly’s mother’s head appeared round the door of the bedroom.

  ‘Nearly done, thanks,’ Hilly said, from the floor.

  Her mother came farther in, stepping between a heap of shoes and a stuffed bin bag. ‘Oh, you’re moving out completely, are you? Books and everything? I didn’t mean you to go as far as that!’

  ‘Good excuse for a clear-out.’ Hilly nodded towards the bin bag. ‘All that’s for the shop. I did think of throwing out some old books, but it’s hard.’

  ‘Aha!’ Rose’s gaze fixed on a paperback, A Bottled-Cherry Angel , that Hilly had hastily put face-down on the carpet. ‘I thought it was a bit quiet in here. You’ve got sidetracked! Fatal, to start reading.’

  ‘Well, it’s good. Must be years and years since I’ve read it.’

  ‘Grade A in English Literature, and engrossed in a book for a ten-year-old!’ Rose teased.

  ‘Dad’s still got Winnie-the-Pooh.’ Hilly got to her feet. ‘Anyway, it makes sense to put all my books with Zoë’s. She’s got space on her shelves. The wardrobe’s more of a problem – you know how many clothes she’s got.’

  ‘Put some of your stuff in mine if it helps. Thanks, love, for being so good about this.’ Her mother sat down on the bed. ‘I don’t think I could stand it if both of you were being awkward.’

  Hilly digested this with the usual prickle of resentment. Good old Hilly. Reliable Hilly. Sensible Hilly never makes a fuss. Not like Zoë, predictably unpredictable, who’s allowed to indulge herself in sulks and tantrums.

  ‘Zoë’ll be OK,’ Hilly said, sounding more assured than she felt. ‘Mum?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Heidigran – the – her illness.’ She could not bring herself to say the word. ‘There’s no cure, is there?’ Why was she asking? She knew. She was being a little kid, wanting her mother to say, Don’t worry. Mummy will make it better. But this wasn’t going to get better.

  Her mother looked at her. ‘No, love, there isn’t. But what we don’t know is how quickly it’ll get worse, the Alzheimer’s. We’ll find ways of coping. We’ll have to.’

  Hilly thought of the times when her grandmother was clear-headed enough to realize what was happening to her; aware enough to be frightened by it. How awful, she thought, to lose your sense of who you are, the person you’ve always thought was you. If that goes, what are you? How lost you would be, how alone!

  ‘What’ll happen,’ she asked, ‘if – if it gets to the stage that we can’t cope? If she needs someone with her all the time, can’t be left even for half an hour?’

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.’ Her mother started pairing up the socks that Hilly, emptying a drawer, had tipped on the bed.

  Bad sign, Hilly thought, talking in clichés. It means she doesn’t know. Her parents had been reading all they could find – guidance leaflets from the health centre, books, information from websites – but they still didn’t know, not really, how it was going to affect them all. Alzheimer’s, the big A, was beginning to seem like a new member of the family. Heidigran was coming to live with them, bringing Alzheimer’s with her. Sometimes it was referred to as dementia, which Hilly thought was possibly even worse. My gran’s going demented. At least Alzheimer’s made it sound like Alzheimer’s fault.

  ‘The thing is,’ Rose said, looking in vain for the partner to a red-and-white striped ankle sock that Hilly was sure wasn’t hers, ‘not that we’re at that stage yet, but Heidigran’s always dreaded going into residential care. She made me promise I’d never put her in a home. And I wouldn’t think of it, not yet, but what if – like you say, what if we just can’t manage?’

  By now, Hilly could hardly believe that as recently as Christmas Heidigran had been with Grandad, living as they had always lived: busy, independent, apparently contented. Then Grandad had died in February – quite suddenly, after a stroke – and now A had made its presence felt, and everything had changed. Hilly’s parents were leaving for Heidigran’s, in Banbury, as soon as Dad got home from work; they would spend the whole weekend there, helping her pack, doing all the things that needed doing to a house when it was being left for an indefinite period. They were bringing her back with them on Sunday, and from then on this would be Heidigran’s room, not Hilly’s.

  ‘It’d be awful, putting her in a home,’ Hilly agreed. ‘But there’s you to think of, too. What about your job?’

  Her mother made a bleak face. ‘I’ll have to be flexible. She looked after me when I was little – now it’s my turn to look after her. Anyway,’ she said, in a brighter tone. ‘What are your plans for the weekend? More celebrations?’

  ‘Oh no, that was yesterday.’ Hilly still felt a glow of surprise when she thought of her GCSE grades: three As – History, English and English Literature – and the rest all Bs and a C. Better than she’d expected, and certainly good enough to let her go on to her chosen AS levels. ‘The shop tomorrow, and I’m meeting Reuben, maybe see a film with Tess.’

  ‘You’ll be OK, won’t you? There’s plenty of food in the fridge, and Valerie’s next door if you need any help.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Hilly couldn’t imagine any crisis that might be eased by Valerie’s presence. Valerie was a fussy, childless woman in her fifties who termed herself a housewife, with no sense of post-feminist irony. Wife to a three-bedroomed semi, Hilly thought; spouse to a house?

  ‘I’ve told Zoë she’s to be in at a reasonable time,’ said Rose, ‘and not give you anything to worry about.’

  ‘That’ll be fine, then,’ Hilly said, with only the faintest edge of sarcasm.

  With two of them sorting and carting, the room was soon cleared. They stripped the bed, a
nd Rose went downstairs for the vacuum cleaner. Hilly stood looking at the room that had been hers all her life, hers alone since the loft conversion had been made for Zoë four years ago, but was hers no longer. Denuded of her clutter it looked smaller, just a box with one window. It was oddly disturbing, seeing her territory stripped and emptied; as if she were being tidied up with it, plucked out of her habitat.

  She lugged the computer, a piece at a time, up the open stairway that led to Zoë’s room. It was lucky that the attic room was large – the whole upper floor of the house, with eave-space made into sloping cupboards you could crawl into. The spare bed, now to be Hilly’s, had always been kept here, usually strewn with several layers of Zoë’s clothes. Zoë had grudgingly cleared space for Hilly’s things, and as it was the summer holidays she had no school stuff on the desk; Dad had put in a new modem point, for the internet connection. Hilly arranged the computer – monitor, keyboard and printer – and crawled underneath to plug everything in. Zoë would moan about the space it took up, but would be appeased by being able to use it for homework and e-mails.

  To check that it all worked, Hilly switched on, clicked the on-line connection and then MAIL. ‘Receiving mail’, the message came up, and then, in her inbox, ‘Reuben Jones. Hot News.’

  She clicked, and read: ‘Xciting developments with S after I saw u yesterday! This is it – I’m in lurve. Tell u all about it, only not here. R.’

  ‘Where is Lurve,’ Hilly typed in reply, ‘and why haven’t you sent a postcard? You never know, I might want to go there myself one day. But seriously, can’t wait for a full update! See you 7, park? H.’

  From Friday to Sunday, while her parents were away, Hilly was supposedly in charge. The first night was fine. The second was not.

  They left after a quick pizza meal on Friday evening. Zoë was at her friend Nadine’s; Hilly went to meet Reuben in the park, at their favourite rendezvous by the round pond, halfway between their two homes. First to arrive, she sat on their usual bench, watching a family of moorhens bobbing among the lilies and walking over the leaves.