Liz Nugent - Lying in Wait

Eventually, we all got used to her not being there. For the first year, I cried myself to sleep every night, wishing and hoping she would come home. Diana called me a baby and said that Mummy didn’t love us, but it wasn’t true. Mummy did love me once. I remember the feeling.

Mummy was very beautiful. I recall her quite well, even though all the photographs were destroyed. When I look in the mirror now I can still see traces of her, despite the fact that I am much older than she was the last time I saw her. She died sometime in the 1960s, alone and abroad apparently. I got a card from her on my wedding day, but I did not get to keep it. Daddy threw it in the fireplace. My twin sister, Diana, looked totally different from Mummy and me. Where I was fair, she was dark; my eyes were blue, hers were brown. My brow was high and she had no chin. She wasn’t pretty, but while she had not inherited Mummy’s looks, she had Daddy’s breeding. She was more refined than I. I remember Daddy saying that it was impossible to teach me any manners.

I clung to Diana after Mummy left, and I adored her with all my heart. We belonged to each other. But I valued our twin-ship more than she. It was annoying, to be frank, the way that she tried to go off and do things on her own and how she wanted to dress differently from me. She loved me, of course she did – one has to love one’s sister, especially if one is a twin – but as we got older there were times when I began to think that she did not like me. She would look at me sometimes with disgust if I forgot to chew with my mouth closed or if I licked my knife by accident. She rubbished my favourite books and said she preferred the classics. If I ever did something to upset her, she could go whole days without speaking to me. She said that she couldn’t wait until we grew up so that she could have her own house; I did not like to imagine a house without her in it, and cried at the thought. But I always forgave her quickly.

I wonder, if she had lived, would we be friends now?

For a while after Mummy left, Daddy withdrew into himself and spent long periods locked in the library, drinking brandy. Then he would emerge, drunk. He mostly ignored me because I reminded him of his wife. But he would take Diana on to his knee, telling her stories, giving her sweets and tickling her, giving her all the attention that used to be divided equally between the three of us. I was left to the care of our nanny and housekeeper, Hannah, who smelled of mothballs and snuff. Gradually, he began to love me again, although I could sense his suspicion that I would somehow betray him, and I suppose I did, though I spent the rest of my life making it up to him.

It was 1941, and Diana and I were to have a ninth birthday party, the first party since Mummy’s departure. We were terribly excited. We hadn’t even been to a party in the intervening years, I assumed because Daddy had forbidden it. All fifteen girls from our class had been invited, and Daddy had ordered us new dresses and ribbons for our hair. He had pulled string to get extra coupons. It was May, an unusually hot one, and trestle tables had been set up outside in the garden, laden with dainty sandwiches, jellies and trifles all covered with netting to keep the bees away. Bottles of cold ginger ale stood at the end in ice buckets. Bunting was strung between the apple trees. Daddy had decided the mourning period for my mother was over, and this was the first outward sign that he intended to re-engage with the world. He had invited his sister, our Aunt Hilary, and some friends too, a couple who laughed at everything he said and wore matching tank tops. The lady gave us a shilling each and professed how generous she was for the next hour. At the time appointed for the guests’ arrival, Diana and I were kneeling up on the chaise in the drawing room, our faces pressed to the window to see who would be first to arrive. Amy Malone came first and we knocked her over with our enthusiasm, leading her out to the garden, showing off the pond and the luncheon spread and the bunting and the large rocking horse that Daddy had presented us with that morning. We took turns and played for a while until it dawned on me that nobody else had knocked on our door. Where were they all? Daddy and the couple were talking at the far end of the garden as we ran in and out of the house to make sure that Hannah was listening out for the knocks on the door.

Half an hour later, nobody else had arrived and our friend Amy began to look embarrassed and uncomfortable. We sat on the edge of the pond, trailing our bare feet in the water.

‘Where are they? Why didn’t they come? Didn’t they want to?’ said Diana.

Amy shook her head and bit her lip. She looked like she was about to cry. It was clear she knew something. Diana grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back. ‘What is it? Why aren’t they here? Is it because of Mummy?’ She whispered it menacingly into Amy’s face.

I didn’t understand what Diana meant.

‘It… it’s because of your mother being… a loose woman,’ Amy said.

‘That’s not our fault,’ said Diana.

‘What do you mean?’ We had stopped mentioning Mummy a long time ago.

Amy said that the other parents thought that we might be a bad influence, but that her father, Dr Malone, had said that it would be cruel to punish us for something our mother had done.

I realized now that it wasn’t Daddy who had forbidden us to go to other children’s parties. We hadn’t been invited to them. I remembered how our classmates were often distant with us, though Diana and I were always so thrown together that I did not notice it as much as I might have, had we not been twins. I was shocked. Diana looked at me as if I was stupid.

‘Stop crying, you idiot. You’ll probably do the same thing yourself when we’re grown up. Everyone says you’re just like her. You’re not like Daddy and I. You’re common. You’re the one they’re afraid of. Not me!’

‘I am not common.’

‘Yes you are, Daddy can’t even look at you. You’re the exact same.’

It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to push Diana back into the pond. I didn’t snap. I was perfectly calm. I simply didn’t want her to say those things. She was being so unfair. I heard a crack as she smacked her head under the water, and when she struggled to surface, I sat on her chest to stop her. Right in that moment, I wanted Diana to drown. I wanted Diana to drown because if she was dead, she could never say those things again. Amy’s nervous laughter turned to tears.

‘Please let her up, Lydia, please . She’ll drown!’

I didn’t care. Amy became hysterical and ran off to get my father, who had disappeared into the greenhouses with his guests, no doubt to show them his melon-growing experiment. I was saturated now, as Diana thrashed around in the water beneath me, and soon she stopped struggling and became still. She had learned her lesson.

‘That’s better,’ I said, as I stepped out of the pond and pulled her up by the arm, but Diana crashed back into the water when I let her go and I was confused. I had wished really hard for Diana to be dead in that moment, but I hadn’t really meant it. She was going to be furious with me, and I would be in trouble for ruining the party. Daddy would be livid about our ruined dresses, covered with frogspawn and moss.

I pulled her up again, by the shoulders this time, but she wouldn’t lift her head and then I saw the blood seeping down the back of her neck. Daddy and his friends and Amy were running across the lawn and they were all shouting at me. Aunt Hilary ran indoors to get Hannah to telephone for an ambulance, and Daddy had pulled Diana out and laid her on the lawn, but she still wasn’t moving. He clamped her mouth open, but it was full of pondweed and he pulled it out in one long string of mess and saliva. He turned her upside down and held her up by her feet with one hand. Her dress fell down and everyone could see her knickers and I was shocked. Daddy thumped her on the back with his free hand. Daddy was crying and so was Amy and Daddy’s friends, the Percys.