Liz Nugent - Lying in Wait

All the time I was thinking, ‘What is wrong with everyone? She’ll be fine. ’ I waited for her to shout at me and complain to Daddy about how awful I was. I knew it would take her a very long time to forgive me this time. But she still wasn’t moving. Had I gone too far?

Everything changed. The upheaval was far greater than after Mummy went away. I never returned to school. That night, while everyone was at the hospital, Hannah packed a trunk for me. Aunt Hilary told me Daddy had instructed her to take me to her home in Wicklow. I wanted to wait for Daddy and Diana to come home, but Aunt Hilary would brook no argument. I didn’t want to go, but not even Hannah would look at me as Aunt Hilary carried me into the car while I kicked and screamed. I did not speak for a week. I desperately missed Diana and Daddy and couldn’t understand why I could not return home.

Aunt Hilary lived with a friend – a thin woman with bony fingers and long loose grey hair, Miss Eliot. She was a retired schoolteacher and agreed to give me daily lessons. Early in that first week, I determined to eavesdrop on their conversation. I lay on the landing with my nightgown drawn down over my feet and my ear to the floor. It was clear from what they said that Miss Eliot, unlike my Aunt Hilary, was at least prepared to give me a chance.

‘She’s just a child,’ said my tutor. ‘She has no idea what she has done, she’s too young to realize.’

‘There’s just something about her. How could she do it? I can’t wait for Robert to take her back. I can’t keep her for ever.’

‘He needs time, Hilary. First Michelle abandoning him and the girls, and now this? He has to keep her out of the way to contain another scandal. Nobody knows that the girls were fighting at the time. As long as everyone thinks Diana just tripped and fell in, it will be dismissed as a terrible domestic accident.’

‘In barely three feet of water? But that Malone girl, Amy, she said that Lydia sat on her in the water. That sounds deliberate. It’s not something that should be ignored.’

‘Children say all sorts of fanciful things. And people drown in shallow water all the time. Anyway, Robert said Amy’s father is a good sort. All the other parents had boycotted the party because of Michelle. He was the only one to send his child to the party in the first place.’

‘I’ll bet he regrets it now. Oh Lord,’ said Aunt Hilary, ‘it’s too, too awful.’

‘I know, but we must do what we can to help. That child upstairs will be scarred for life, we must make her realize that it wasn’t her fault.’

Aunt Hilary made a snorting noise, but Miss Eliot said, ‘You can’t seriously blame her, she’s a child!’

It dawned on me then that I had killed my best friend, my worst enemy, my twin sister.

At the end of that first week, Miss Eliot explained that my sister had died but reassured me that it was an accident, nobody’s fault, and that it was an unavoidable tragedy. Dry-eyed, I asked her how it had happened. She turned her head to one side and fixed me with a look.

‘Don’t you remember? You and Diana were… playing in the pond?’

‘Yes?’

‘And Diana banged her head. Do you remember?’

‘Yes.’

I wrote Daddy lots of letters to say that I was very sad and missed him and Diana. I begged him to come and visit me or bring me home. He did not reply. Miss Eliot said he was very busy and there were fuel shortages because of The Emergency and nobody was allowed to drive. I suggested he could have cycled, but Miss Eliot said I was being silly.

I saw Aunt Hilary at dinner times. She would watch me warily and correct my table manners. At bedtime she would come to my room and ensure that I had said my prayers and asked for God’s forgiveness. I said my prayers with gusto, although I could hardly believe any longer in a God who would allow my mother to run away or let me kill my own sister. Aunt Hilary remained distant with me, but I determined to give her no cause for complaint whatsoever. Even at the height of summer, the small house was cold. As autumn turned to winter, it was absolutely freezing. Its setting was idyllic, but we lived in the permanent shadow of a mountain. We stayed in the kitchen as much as possible, where the range was located. Food was being rationed, and awful, disgusting things appeared on our dinner plates, but I ate every morsel without so much as a grimace. I remembered my manners and never raised my voice or stamped my foot. I tried to be ladylike at all times. Just like Diana.

Christmas came and went without a visit or a note from my father. Aunt Hilary and Miss Eliot tried to be jolly with me, but the forced merriment was transparent as water.

By the time I returned to Dublin after ten months, I was fizzing with excitement and had quite forgotten that things could never be the same. I travelled in a jaunting car with Miss Eliot, who left me at the door with my trunk. ‘What a fine house,’ she said. ‘I had no idea.’ Everyone said that when they first saw Avalon. We said our goodbyes and I promised to write. ‘Everything will be all right, little one. You are not a bad girl.’

There was only one bed now in our bedroom, and the wardrobes contained just one set of clothing, most of which had become too small for me. Hannah had been replaced by Joan, a good deal younger but almost mute. Diana was missing. And whereas, at Aunt Hilary’s, I had missed her sorely like an inexplicable sadness, on my return it felt like an amputation. I ran through the house, up and down the stairs, looking for signs of life. I went to the hole in the wall behind the writing desk under our bedroom window and retrieved the scarlet lipstick that I had hidden there since my mother’s departure. Diana had laughed at me for keeping it, but I had found it under the skirting board in Daddy’s room, and for the first year after she left, it still smelled vaguely of her perfume. I sniffed it now, but the scent was gone.

Downstairs, I stopped short at the kitchen window and noted that the pond had been drained and filled with soil. The silence ate into my bones and I went to the piano and played and played until I heard Daddy’s footsteps in the hall.

I ran full pelt at him and grabbed him around his waist, pushing my head into his upper stomach, trying to reach his heart. At first, he held his hands outwards, not wishing to touch me, but I would not release him and then I felt the warmth of his large hand on my skull and his other hand slowly enveloped my shoulder. He pulled my face upwards and looked into my eyes. ‘We must start again, you and I. We are all we have.’

It was easier not to talk about Diana after that, though she smiled at us from the framed photographs on the mantelpiece.

A new home tutor was appointed and Daddy chose all the subjects that I should study: Latin, music, art, literature, sewing and such like. I worked very hard and excelled at everything. Daddy said my posture needed attention and a ballet instructor was brought to the house, a tiny French woman. We had plenty of space, so a barre was installed upstairs, and there, in the newly named dance room, I jetéed and pliéed and walked en pointe until my toes bled. I loved Madame Guillem. She treated me like her own child, although she never mentioned whether she had children. She took me under her wing and explained everything when my body began to change. She told me that I should be mixing with girls my own age, but I didn’t want to. Madame Guillem told Daddy that I was the best student she had ever taught. When I was sixteen years old, she suggested that I apply to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School in London. I was horrified and terrified at the thought of being sent away again. Daddy thought it would be a good idea, but by then I had begun to notice the way he sometimes looked at Madame Guillem, and I didn’t like it. One day, I saw him help her to put her coat on and he held on to her arm the way he used to with Mummy. She smiled up into his face. Was she planning to get me out of the way? I have learned that you can never trust anyone. I gave up eating until the idea of ballet school was abandoned and Madame Guillem had been dismissed. I still practised to stay toned and supple. There was a mirrored wall behind the barre upstairs, and I liked to think that the girl in the mirror was Diana and that this time we were identical twins, dancing a duet.