Selected Stories

A disappointment rose in Alicia, bewildering and muddled. The death of her own husband had brought an end, and her expectation had been that widowhood for her sister would be the same. Her expectation had been that in their shared state they would be as once they were, now that marriage was over, packed away with their similar mourning clothes. Yet almost palpable in the kitchen was Catherine’s resolve that what still remained for her should not be damaged by a fuss of protest over a confidence trick. The Guards investigating clothes sold at a jumble sale, strangers asked if a house-painter’s wife had bought this garment or that, private intimacies made public: Catherine was paying money in case, somehow, the memory of her husband should be accidentally tarnished. And knowing her sister well, Alicia knew that this resolve would become more stubborn as more time passed. It would mark and influence her sister; it would breed new eccentricities in her. If Leary had not come that day there would have been something else.

‘You’d have the man back, I suppose?’ Alicia said, trying to hurt and knowing she succeeded. ‘You’d have him back in to paint again, to lift the bits and pieces from your dressing-table?’

‘It’s not to do with Leary.’

‘What’s it to do with then?’

‘Let’s leave it.’

Hanging up a tea-towel, Catherine noticed that her fingers were trembling. They never quarrelled; even in childhood they hadn’t. In all the years Alicia had lived in the house she had never spoken in this unpleasant way, her voice rudely raised.

‘They’re walking all over you, Catherine.’

‘Yes.’

They did not speak again, not even to say goodnight. Alicia closed her bedroom door, telling herself crossly that her expectation had not been a greedy one. She had been unhappy in her foolish marriage, and after it she had been beholden in this house. Although it ran against her nature to do so, she had borne her lot without complaint; why should she not fairly have hoped that in widowhood they would again be sisters first of all?

In her bedroom Catherine undressed and for a moment caught a glimpse of her nakedness in her dressing-table looking-glass. She missed his warmth in bed, a hand holding hers before they slept, that last embrace, and sometimes in the night his voice saying he loved her. She pulled her nightdress on, then knelt to pray before she turned the light out.

Some instinct, vague and imprecise, drew her in the darkness on to the territory of Alicia’s disappointment. In the family photographs – some clearly defined, some drained of detail, affected by the sun – they were the sisters they had been: Alicia beautiful, confidently smiling; Catherine in her care. Catherine’s first memory was of a yellow flower, and sunlight, and a white cloth hat put on her head. That flower was a cowslip, Alicia told her afterwards, and told her that they’d gone with their mother to the ruins by the river that day, that it was she who found the cowslip. ‘Look, Catherine,’ she’d said. ‘A lovely flower.’ Catherine had watched in admiration when Alicia paraded in her First Communion dress, and later when boys paid her attention. Alicia was the important one, responsible, reliable, right about things, offered the deference that was an older sister’s due. She’d been a strength, Catherine said after the funeral, and Alicia was pleased, even though she shook her head.

Catherine dropped into sleep after half an hour of wakefulness. She woke up a few times in the night, on each occasion to find her thoughts full of the decision she had made and of her sister’s outraged face, the two tiny patches of red that had come into it, high up on her cheeks, the snap of disdain in her eyes. ‘A laughing-stock,’ Alicia said in a dream. ‘No more than a laughing-stock, Catherine.’

As Catherine lay there she imagined the silent breakfast there would be, and saw herself walking to Brady’s Lane, and Leary fiddling with his cigarette-making gadget, and Mrs Leary in fluffy pink slippers, her stockingless legs mottled from being too close to the fire. Tea would be offered, but Catherine would refuse it. ‘A decenter man never stood in a pair of shoes,’ Leary could be counted upon to state.

She did not sleep again. She watched the darkness lighten, heard the first cars of the day pass on the road outside the house. By chance, a petty dishonesty had made death a potency for her sister, as it had not been when she was widowed herself. Alicia had cheated it of its due; it took from her now, as it had not then.

Catherine knew this intuition was no trick of her tired mind. While they were widows in her house Alicia’s jealousy would be the truth they shared, tonight’s few moments of its presence lingering insistently. Widows were widows first. Catherine would mourn, and feel in solitude the warmth of love. For Alicia there was the memory of her beauty.

Gilbert’s Mother