70 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
garden. He always thought it was a fox.
We jammed Mum’s knitting machine.
‘Bunty’ was the comic we wanted to
read, and he said it wasn’t suitable. We
were only allowed ‘Look and Learn.’”
“It’s a treasure trove,” Serena said.
She stood blocking their view of the
television, with a cardboard box in her
arms, reading aloud from papers inside
it. “ ‘Chairman Philippa Anne Styles
drew the meeting to a close with three
cheers for Bunty Club members for all
their hard work on doing wrong. Vice-
Chairman Gillian Elizabeth Styles sec-
onded the motion.’ Who knew you were
such budding bureaucrats? And actu-
ally wasn’t it usually me doing the wrong,
under orders from you two?”
“You enjoyed it,” Pippa said briskly.
“You wanted to be in the club. And we
knew you wouldn’t get in as much trou-
ble as us if you were caught, because you
were little and they always said you didn’t
know what you were doing, though I’m
sure you knew perfectly well.”
Serena dropped the box on the car-
pet; her sisters knelt heavily beside her
to unpack it, exclaiming over the con-
tents. There were the minutes of club
meetings and lists of enemies and bad
deeds, a top-secret codebook, homemade
badges covered in Fablon which fastened
with safety pins on the back, a dried-up
ink pad, a date stamp turned to the fifth
of October, 1969. “Miss A. S. Styles was
permitted to enter the meeting on strict
condition of sharing all sweets and other
grub etc.” All the paperwork was typed,
the individual letters not quite aligned
and indented deep into the paper, wa-
vering between black ink and red; they
had acquired a typewriter when the par-
ish office bought a new one, and it had
seemed Biblical in itself, presiding over
their playroom, as ancient as Methuse-
lah, too heavy for them to lift, its action
thunderous and punitive. When a locked
tin cash box rattled intriguingly, Pippa
levered it open with a screwdriver, and
they were perplexed by what was inside
until she recognized the club’s Sacred
Objects: a bone, a screwed-up page from
a prayer book (“We spat on it,” she said),
a wrapped razor blade, their father’s
bronze medal for swimming, a gold ring
set flashily with a green stone.
“A stolen ring,” Pippa announced, sud-
denly quite certain. “We actually stole it.”
“No! Who from?”
“No idea. I knew once, but now I’m
simply blank. Not from our parents, ob-
viously—anyway, it isn’t their kind of ring.
Imagine Mummy wearing this! The name
of the victim ought to haunt us, oughtn’t
it? So much for a bad conscience.”
“We could have it valued.”
Pippa dropped the ring back into
the cash box. “Best not, perhaps.”
The textures of the past rose around
the sisters like an uneasy dream, alien and
stale and intensely familiar. For twenty
minutes, it was intoxicating, hilarious.
Then, in the present, they began to be
bored and their knees were stiff. Gillian
still insisted that she didn’t remember the
club. She was distracted by the television;
she and Pippa had visited the palace at
Knossos a few years ago with their hus-
bands, who hadn’t got on; Pippa had
sprained her ankle while clambering on
the ruins. It was an awful holiday.G
illian had given her mobile num-
ber to the hospital. She left the
phone charging on her bedside table,
and was woken very early the next morn-
ing by its ringing; whatever her dreams
had been, they dispersed in that instant,
iridescence breaking up on the surface
of deep water. Abruptly she sat up in
bed, pressed the green circle without
fumbling. The same nurse who’d been
on duty the day before said in an emo-
tional voice that the sisters should come
to the hospital at once. They would leave
as soon as they were dressed, Gillian
said. Leaping up, sick with excitement
and dread, she crossed to the window
and parted the curtains, looking out into
the garden’s subdued blue light as if she
had to check that it was still there: the
massy forms of the apple trees, the black
incontrovertible bulk of the shed, birds
stirring, invisible, in the undergrowth.
This was the exceptional, the awaited
day. She was seized and rigid in its ten-
sion. She needed to go to her sisters at
once and wake them, tell them to get
ready, yet she had the revelation for this
one moment to herself; alone, she rose
to its occasion. Through the open win-
dow came the cool long breath of earth.
Then, finally, she remembered the
Bunty Club—not all the funny detail
but the actuality of it, the clandestine
meetings in the shed, crouching on the
plank floor among all those dangerous
tools they weren’t supposed to go near,the splintery walls fragrant with creo-
sote, her arms wrapped tight around
scabbed knees, feeling scalded and en-
thralled by what was forbidden. The
shed had been ripe with the smells of
tomato plants, 3-in-One oil, mealworms
for the bird table, crusts of cut grass
souring on the blades of the mower;
beams of brilliant light from knotholes
pierced the stuffy dimness. Her thighs
were wet with sweat under her shorts,
and her silky shoulder-length hair tick-
led her freckled arms, which tasted sun-
baked as she sucked at her own skin,
leaving purple marks.
Clever Pippa had got the idea for their
club out of the storybooks whose con-
tents she seemed to absorb so effortlessly
and with actual pleasure. Before Pippa
grew into a teen-ager, and lost her nerve,
she had been so full of ideas, running in
the garden and in races on Sports Day
with such flat-footed eager assurance, her
plait flicking bossily behind her, her plain
long face raised to the sun. Gillian had
adored and envied her, felt herself form-
less and dull by contrast. When their fa-
ther called Gillian his sensible daughter,
it had sounded like a consolation prize.
The house was still quiet; her sisters
hadn’t been woken by the phone ring-
ing. Important with her mission, Gillian
went out onto the landing, calling their
names in a low voice, raising her hand
to knock before she poked her head
around their bedroom doors into the
fusty half-light. She had the odd sensa-
tion of resuming some ceremonial left
unfinished a long time ago; then she re-
membered how fervently she and Pippa
had prayed, after Serena was born, for
her to live. Their actual baby sister, when
eventually she came home from hospi-
tal, had been problematic and prosaic,
and not the all-transforming mystery
they’d thirsted for. Was this the mystery
now? Gillian tried to imagine their
mother calling them in from the garden
for tea, standing in her apron in the
kitchen doorway—but the indefinite
figure wouldn’t come into focus, dissolv-
ing like her dream. In their bedrooms,
her sisters were rousing from sleep, lift-
ing their heads to stare at her, confused,
embryonic in the cocoons of their du-
vets, not yet ready for her news. ♦NEWYORKER.COM
Tessa Hadley on the bonds of childhood.