“He’s just now passing beneath the triumphal arch.”Tampax and vomiting, girl flesh bur-
geoning out of control. Thank good-
ness all that was over with.
“All clear!” she hallooed when she
had finished, popping her head, dowa-
gerlike in its wrapped towel, around the
door to Pippa’s room. Gillian was quicker
and lighter on her feet than her older
sister, worked harder on her appearance;
she had her gray hair chopped stylishly
short, and favored big dangly earrings.
Pippa was bookish where Gillian was
capable; she wore her hair pinned up, or
in a long plait on one shoulder, which
someone had once said—long ago, when
it was still a rich chestnut brown—made
her look like an Augustus John Gypsy.
Still, you could see the two sisters’ close
likeness: they were big and broad-shoul-
dered like their father, with forthright,
open pink faces, long, flat cheeks, an ob-
stinate, set jaw. Both sisters had recently
retired. Gillian had done something high
up in management for the National Grid,
and her husband had a business mak-
ing thermostats for heating systems.
Pippa’s husband worked on the eigh-
teenth century in the history department
at Leeds University; she had been the di-
rector of an archive at the city museum.
“Bathroom’s empty!” Gillian said. “You
should get in quickly before Serena em-
barks on any aromatherapy. I wish she’d
wash the bath out when she’s finished.”
“She’s up already,” Pippa said. “Look!
Worshipping in the garden.”
Gillian came to stand beside her, and
together they watched Serena dance in
the long grass, flitting like a sprite in her
tiered black cotton skirt and satiny top,
which she had most likely got at a char-
ity shop—she was solemn about waste
and recycling. Seven years younger than
Gillian, an afterthought in the family,
their father’s favorite, fey and fine-boned,
Serena had had whatever success she
wanted with the town boys and disdained
it. She exasperated Pippa and Gillian be-
cause she was intolerant and touchy, had
no sense of humor; everyone trod care-
fully around Serena. As a newborn, she’d
been very sick, with a hole in her heart;
their father, who was the headmaster
of the local secondary school and a lay
preacher in the C. of E., had prayed over
her cot in the intensive-care ward, beg-
ging God to save her. No doubt that had
affected her character.
Serena lifted her bare feet high and
thrust out her arms, and Gillian said
that she was doing Tai Chi. Serena must
have heard them murmuring, because
she turned her face up toward the win-
dow and smiled at them, without inter-
rupting the stately sequence of her moves,
and they could see that she wasn’t as
pretty as she used to be. In the strong
light she looked drawn and faded, herarms and neck skinny. The two of them
meant to say something dry and funny
about their sister, but they were am-
bushed then by a sadness that had mostly
evaded them, in spite of the fact that
they were here in their old home, wait-
ing most probably for their mother to
die, and for the end of their past. Sad-
ness made its claim on them now, wind-
ing through the daily clutter like a long
cool note played on a flute.I
t was Pippa’s turn to stay behind, while
Gillian and Serena drove off to their
vigil at the hospital. She got the strim-
mer out of its box and read the instruc-
tions, but recoiled from actually attempt-
ing to use it, all that crude noise and
violence erupting into the peace of the
empty house and garden. There was no
hurry, anyway. The others wouldn’t be
back till late afternoon—she had all day
to cut the grass and make something for
supper. Wandering around the down-
stairs rooms stuffy with heat, their light
thick with dust motes, the blinds at their
windows lowered to half-mast, as they
always were in summer, she pressed down
keys—startling herself out of her own
reverie—on the out-of-tune piano, which
none of them had played with any talent.
In the years since their father died,
their mother, Evelyn, hadn’t changed
anything in these rooms—less out of
respect than out of indifference. The
old-fashioned good taste and extreme
orderliness had been their father’s idea,
it turned out, not hers. Gradually, after
he was gone, the place had filled up un-
tidily with her hobbies—oil painting
for a while, then weaving, then the Uni-
versity of the Third Age. Photographs
of her grandchildren and great-grand-
children and the cleaner’s grandchildren
were propped at random behind orna-
ments on the drawing-room mantel-
piece; there were sacks of birdseed on
the teak sideboard in the dining room.
Also, she’d stopped attending church.
She’d surprised Pippa recently by insist-
ing that what she’d wanted all her life
was to run a farm, though of course there
had never been any serious possibility
of that—Evelyn’s father’s farm, adjoin-
ing the edge of the moor above the town,
had been passed on, without even a dis-
cussion, through the male line, to her
brother first and then to her brother’s
son. Anyway, Evelyn had always been