‘Well?’
‘Nothing doing.’
‘Nothing? No sex since Edward? It must be over two years now?’
Marianne hesitated. She wasn’t about to tell her sister. It was six months after she had parted from Edward. Sunday morning. Callum is staying with his father. She hasn’t slept well, still in her dressing gown, she is sitting up in bed. Dorrie is visiting and has brought her a cup of coffee. Dorrie is comforting her – she leans forward, her red hair falling across her face, and kisses Marianne on the cheek. The kiss turns to a hug and then they are lying face to face on the bed. Dorrie moves closer and kisses her gently on the lips. Shocked by the sudden intimacy, Marianne doesn’t know how to respond. She feels the heat from Dorrie’s body and wants to pull her closer but something prevents her. Dorrie is caressing her – stroking her face, feeling her breasts through her nightie – but Marianne is frozen with indecision. Now Dorrie’s hand feels cool on her bare thigh. She knows she wants to be touched but she does nothing, and says nothing. To her immense relief Dorrie doesn’t stop.
Later that timeless Sunday morning – as it glides deep into the afternoon – she becomes more confident. The touch of skin on skin, the smells and tastes of another body, re-awaken her senses, dormant since Edward threw the manila envelope to her across the kitchen floor. Her anxiety about the scarring across her pelvis subsides – helped by Dorrie’s jokes about her own bodily imperfections. Seldom has the proximity of another person felt so good.
‘No. No men in my life at present.’
‘I still can’t believe that Edward left you because of that affair twenty years earlier in Russia.’
‘I suppose there were some other things around the edges.’
‘Like him not being so faithful himself?’
‘No, no – not at all. Edward wasn’t like that.’
‘Are you so sure? When I stayed with him that time I visited you in Moscow, I overheard some phone calls – I mean, I didn’t like to say anything with you being so badly injured – but I had my suspicions…’
‘I’m sorry, Claire, you don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘OK, if you say so.’
England may be a green and pleasant land, thought Marianne, as she gazed out of the car window, but surely nothing can match Vermont at the end of May for its multiple shades of green, its absurdly luxuriant grass populated by the ubiquitous black and white Holstein cows, the emerald green of the beech trees and the lime green sugar maples. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.’ She had always loved the opening words of that psalm. From the bedroom of her childhood home she could see the distant hills changing colour with the seasons. ‘From whence cometh my help.’ She had misunderstood the psalmist in those days. She didn’t understand why help would come from the hills but perhaps it was because they rose up towards heaven, because they were closer to God.
Sitting in the back seat beside her sister, Marianne watched as the hills gradually disappeared and the Burlington road entered the coastal strip alongside Lake Champlain. While her mother drove them to the hospital with Aunt Edith beside her, Marianne had a sudden recollection of being taken to see her great-grandmother a few days before her death. She remembered how upset she had been to be dragged away from their mountain holiday. When she thought about it now she realised Gran-gran had never been a real person to her – just something old and smelly, sometimes in a chair with a blanket over her knees, other times propped up in bed. Usually she had seemed cross and visits had been intolerably dull. Even her dolls had been more real to Marianne than this old woman.
Visiting her beloved father now would be a wholly different experience. A fit and active man of seventy-five – a retired doctor who hardly ever sought medical advice for himself – he had begun to suffer from sore throats and indigestion. His own doctor diagnosed a virus and prescribed antibiotics. The sore throats didn’t improve, he began to suffer from difficulty in swallowing, saw a specialist, had further tests, and suddenly he had oesophageal cancer; a six-centimetre tumour in the gastro-oesophageal junction.
That diagnosis had been eighteen months earlier. Marianne had flown over to visit and found him in robust spirits, but chemotherapy, an operation, followed by another bout of chemo had taken its toll. Now the only hope was deemed to be a further operation. They had been warned that despite – or perhaps because of – his medical background, he was not coping well with being a patient. She wished she was seeing him alone, or perhaps just with her mother.
‘When will they operate?’ said Claire, leaning forward to speak to her mother.
‘Tomorrow, I think – they postponed it for a couple of days so you can see him first.’
‘Does that mean they think he won’t survive the operation?’
Marianne watched as her mother flinched at the bluntness of Claire’s question. ‘Don’t be silly, of course he’ll survive – the doctors wouldn’t do it if they didn’t think it would help him. It’s just that… well, he’ll be very weak for a while afterwards.’
The visit to her sick father proved even more difficult than Marianne had anticipated. Confronted simultaneously by his wife, his sister and his two daughters, the suffering man had looked acutely uncomfortable. It was not that he was displeased to see his daughters, Marianne later surmised, but to be seen in this state of vulnerability – hairless, shrivelled, eyes sunk in their sockets, his face a mask of pain and anxiety – was obviously torture to a man who had spent his life curing the sick and being the bedrock for his family.
Marianne longed to throw her arms around him and cry, but somehow the etiquette of the occasion seemed to preclude any overt show of emotion. They made stilted conversation – showed him photographs of their respective children and told him what was happening in their lives – while their mother and Aunt Edith talked as if he would soon be home and cured from this temporary indisposition.
After their visit, Marianne’s mother went to do some shopping with Edith while Marianne and Claire walked from the hospital, past the imposing buildings of the university and down College Street towards the lake, remembering the time when Burlington was the biggest metropolis they had known.
‘You’re limping,’ said Claire.
‘How observant. I’ve limped for twenty years – since the plane crash.’
‘I never realised.’
‘You saw me limping in France.’
‘I must have forgotten.’
Turning in to the Church Street Market Place, they stopped at a pavement café. Marianne gazed across to the mock-Georgian City Hall building, such a solid and comforting presence from her past. She watched Claire look down the pretty street as if seeing it for the first time; her body language suggesting that, while she was prepared to sit there for a coffee, this was not where she belonged; it was not London and certainly not Paris.
‘Callum will be disappointed if I don’t have a Ben & Jerry’s,’ said Marianne. ‘It’s the only thing he remembers about coming here before.’
‘Well, it is about the only thing Burlington is famous for.’
For a while the sisters sat in silence. There was much that could have been said: their father was clearly dying, though their mother seemed to be in denial, but neither felt able to articulate their thoughts. Eventually Claire said, ‘You know I can’t stay very long.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Assuming the operation goes OK I’m going to fly back at the weekend.’
Marianne shrugged. ‘If you have to.’
‘What about you?’