The Bad Sister by Emma Tennant Page B

peeling, plunging hands in flouronly a tiny distance above that quiet smile, that dark head and white face. Did they do this together too – cook in her flat: did Tony stare at her hands kneading and wringing and coiling and straightening as dispassionately as he glanced at mine?
    I crept up to Tony and touched his back, which was turned to me as always when he slept. He gave a grunt, a sigh. He had knowledge locked in him that could never be extracted. He was like a sealed pyramid: I wandered, lost in the labyrinth of speculations that lay around his inner knowledge. Yet, if he were really brought to account, Tony would probably be surprised at the idea he might love her more than me or the other way about. There were as many strands to him, as there are to all of us, as veins in the body. Why did I feel I had to be the other half of him – or, for that matter, of the girl? Why this terrible need for joining, unless we were all perhaps two creatures once.
    The restlessness couldn’t go on. I knew from the implacable appearance of his back that Tony wasn’t going to turn and hold me. I hated myself for only wanting him so ferociously because the existence of the girl had come to light again. I wondered if Meg had sent her, as a challenge. And I thought of Gala’s words, that I should get rid of my bad sister.
    It drove me mad, that she should be standing so patiently out there, waiting for Tony and me to come to an end, waiting to take him calmly from me. Only a short time ago I had been dreaming of my escape from him. Now she was there … she could wait as long as she liked but I would never lose either of them. Now – if I didn’t let go – I had them both in the palm of my hand.
    I got up and pulled on my skirt. I went to the kitchen, took the jeans and jacket out of the washbasket and substituted them for the skirt, which I threw in on top of Tony’s musty-smelling shirts. The jeans went on without difficulty: as I lay in the dark bedroom I must have gone through my metamorphosis. I found my sandals in the corner of the kitchen. It was a warm night – warm in thekitchen, at least, with the cooker and the feeling of safety from the food, bread and spaghetti on the shelves. I didn’t go to the window and look out, at the moon and the street lamps. Anyway, the moon had gone, risen, tugged away to a higher part of the sky. The light from the streetlamp came up at the window in a blue haze. I was going down the stairs, into the terrors of the hall, and out.
    How bright it is. Even before I open the door I feel the brightness, which is trying to burst through the keyhole, and in at the hinges: a strong, white brightness, almost blinding. Day as it might be constructed by beings from a lightless planet after hearing descriptions of the phenomenon: a force nine laboratory daylight. I half close my eyes before stepping out. This is day as you must remember it when you are lying dying in the night. Day as white as ice and without shadows.
    There are no signs of the street around me. I feel the block of flats at my back slip away like a heavy liner going down the estuary into the sea. Grass at my feet. Fields. Little flowers, yellow and white, which also look more invented or remembered than real – they are too neat, somehow, too well placed. I might be in a painting, or in a housewife’s embroidered tea towel of the ’thirties, for a house with Jacobean chimneys, and a garden with dark red roses, and a reddish cow are all arranged straight on in my line of vision. There are no hills, and the width of the white sky is oppressive: it’s like being under an eyeless head. Clumps of trees make an impressionistic fuzz behind the house. There is even a plume of smoke from one of the tall chimneys. What a comforting scene! How peaceful! I know I live there. But I hate it. I am afraid of it. Why do I have to live there? Why do I have to walk over the field, on a path