She thought she recognised the streets that they were walking through. When their father had driven Sheila over with her things at the start of the autumn term, Hilary had come with them; she had wanted to be able to picture where Sheila was, when she wasn’t at home. This shopping area was on a hill behind the city centre: it had seemed lively and fashionable, with tiny boutiques, cafés, a department store whose long glass windows were stuck with brown and yellow paper leaves. She had seen Sheila taking it all in from her front seat in the van, satisfied with her choice, impatient to be left alone to explore. At home they could only ever get lifts in to Cambridge every so often, and anyway their shopping there was dogged by waiting parents, ready with ironic comments on whatever the girls chose to buy with their money. Dimly in the dusk now, Hilary could see the Victorian Gothic university tower where it ought to be, over to her right. Manor Hall residence where Sheila had a room should be somewhere off to the left, up past a little triangle of green grass. The pinstriped jacket struck off left, and Hilary was relieved. They must arrive soon, and she would be able to put her case down, and be rid of her dreadful companion.
The road he took didn’t lead up past any triangle of grass but downhill; it was wide, busy with fast through traffic but not with people. They left the shops behind and it seemed all at once to be completely night; the pavement ran alongside a daunting high wall to their left. The steep hills and old high walls of this city were suddenly sinister and not quaint, as if they hid dark prisons and corruptions in their folds. Hilary followed the pinstriped jacket in a grim, fixed despair. In spite of the cold she was sweating, and her chest was racked. She thought that catastrophe had overtaken her. She had made an appalling mistake when she meekly followed this man out of the bus station, like a trusting child, like an idiot. The only form of dignity left to her was not to falter, or make a worse fool of herself screaming and running, not to break the form of the rigid relationship in which they moved. She thought he might be taking her somewhere to kill her with a knife. She wouldn’t say a word to save her life; she might swing at him with her grandfather’s suitcase. Or she imagined drugs, which she didn’t know anything about: perhaps drug addicts recruited new associates by bundling strangers into their den and injecting them with heroin. She didn’t ever imagine rape or anything of that sort, because she thought that as a preliminary to that outrage there would have to be some trace of interest in her, some minimal sign of a response to her, however disgusted.
The pinstriped jacket crossed the road, darting between cars. Following, Hilary hardly cared if she was hit. He struck off up a narrow precipitous hill with tall toppling houses facing on to the pavement on either side. Because of the effort of climbing she had her head down and almost walked into him when he stopped outside a front door. He pushed the door and it swung open. The house inside was dark.
— In here, he said, and led the way.
Hilary followed.
In the hall he switched on a light: a bare bulb hung from the ceiling. The place was desolate: ancient wallpaper washed to colourlessness hung down in sheets from the walls. Even in her extremity, though, she could tell that this had been an elegant house once. City lights twinkled through a tall arched window. The stairs wound round and round a deep stairwell, up into blackness; the handrail was smooth polished wood. Everything smelled of a mineral decay. They climbed up two flights, their footsteps echoing because there was no stair carpet. He pushed another door.
— She’s in there.
Hilary didn’t know what she expected to find.
Sheila was sitting with a concentrated face, rocking backwards and forwards on a double bed which was just a mattress on bare floorboards. She was wearing a long black T-shirt, her hair was scraped carelessly back and tied with a scarf. The room was lit by another bare bulb, not a ceiling pendant this time but a lamp-base without a shade, which cast leering shadows upwards. It was warm: an electric radiator painted mustard yellow was plugged in the same socket as the lamp. Hilary felt herself overheating at once, her face turning hot red, after her exertions in the cold outside.
— Thank God you’ve come, Hills, Sheila said.
She sounded practical rather than emotional. That at least was reassuring.
Pinstripe stepped into the room behind Hilary. He put on a shifty uncomfortable smile, not quite looking straight at Sheila, focusing on the dark tangle of sheets and blankets that she seemed to have kicked to the bottom of the bed.
— D’you want anything? Tea?
Sheila shook her head. — I’m only throwing it up.
— D’you want anything?
Hilary couldn’t believe he was actually talking to her. — No, I’m fine, thanks, she said.
— I’ll be downstairs, he said. — If you need anything.
They heard the sound of his footsteps retreating. Hilary put down her case: her hand for quite a few minutes wouldn’t ease from its frozen curled position. — Shuggs: what’s going on?
Sheila groaned: not in answer to the question, but a sound ripped from inside her, a low and embarrassing rumble as if she didn’t care what anybody heard. She rocked fiercely.
— I’m miscarrying a pregnancy, she said when the spasm seemed to have passed. — It’s a fine mess. Blood everywhere. Buckets of blood. You’ll have to help get rid of everything.
— I can’t believe this, Hilary said. She felt she was still somewhere inside the Bluebeard story she had been imagining on her way from the bus station. For a few pure moments she blazed with anger against Sheila. It wasn’t fair, for Sheila to have spoiled her visit with this, her so looked-forward-to chance to get away. Sheila’s mission had been clear and certain: to cut herself free of all the muffling dependencies of home and childhood. If she could succumb to anything so predictable as this melodrama — just what their parents would have warned against if only they hadn’t been too agonised to find the words — what hope was there?
— What are you doing here? she demanded. — What is this place?
— It’s a squat, said Sheila calmly. — Neil’s squat. I told them at Manor Hall that I was going away for a few days. They’re not to ever know anything about this, obviously.
— You’d be kicked out.
— Uh-oh, said Sheila, attentive to something inside her. Then she lunged from the bed to sit on something like a chamber pot in the crazy shadows on the far side of the room. Hilary tried not to hear anything. — Oh, oh, Sheila groaned, hugging her white legs, pressing her forehead to her knees.
— They wouldn’t kick me out, she said after a while. — It’s not that.
— And who’s Neil?
— That’s him, you idiot. You’ve just walked in with him.
Hilary hadn’t moved from where she stood when she first came in, or even made any move to unbutton her mac. She felt as if there was an unpassable waste of experience between her and her sister now, which couldn’t be crossed. Sheila had joined the ranks of women submerged and knowing amid their biology. She realised with a new shock that Sheila must have had sexual intercourse, too, in order to be pregnant.
— I don’t want Mum to know, that’s why, Sheila said. — I’ll simply kill you if you ever tell anyone at home.
— I wouldn’t, said Hilary coldly.
— I just can’t bear the idea of her thinking that this is the same thing, you know? The same stuff that’s happened to her. Because it isn’t.