Читать книгу The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown, Элеонора Браун - Страница 10

Chapter Four

Even if it hadn’t been summer, had been fall or spring or winter, if the campus had been alive with students and more than the skeleton crew of staff that kept the town on life support during the long, slow pull between graduation and orientation, there still wouldn’t have been anything to do at night. Maybe a concert by a visiting performer, or a misguided experimental piece in the black box theater would take you through to the anemic hour of nine or so, but then what? Bean had always been a night owl, had more than once been caught by Rose reading under her sheets with a flashlight when we were children and had fully embraced the ethos of the city that never slept.

And now here she was back in Barnwell. Our parents had drifted toward sleep in stages, like a series in tableau, here doing the dishes, then sitting on the sofa reading, then their voices talking softly upstairs, and now silence. Rose had taken a long walk, and when she’d gotten back Bean had been nearly desperate enough to suggest a game of Spite & Malice, a card game we had played as children that was terrible with only two players but would have at least whiled away some time, worked her into sleep. But Rose had been grouchy and silent, so Bean had thought better of it and curled up on the sofa with a book until Rose, too, had stomped up the stairs, taking her ill will with her like Pooh’s little black rain cloud.

‘This would never happen in New York,’ Bean told her book, a weepy novel she had discovered half-read in the pantry.

The book remained, unsurprisingly, quiet.

The whole drive home she had pictured her stay in Barnwell, imagining an ascetic, nun-like existence that would serve as spiritual penance for what she had done. She would wear drab colors and eat dry bread and her skin would take on the cinematic pallor of a glamorous invalid as she modestly turned down creature comforts. But the reality of that hair shirt was beginning to chafe already. It was Saturday night, for crying out loud. At this hour in the city, she would only just be getting ready to go out, and here she was seriously considering going to bed.

‘Ridiculous,’ she told the book, and shut it firmly. There was gas in the car, and she had a few tens folded in her wallet, not that she was going to be buying her own drinks. Some lonely yokel would be more than happy to take care of that for her. She slipped up the stairs and into her room, opening the closet and flipping through her clothes until she found something acceptable – not good enough for New York by half, but too good for any of the bars around here. Her makeup and hair took barely any time at all – that was one benefit of being someplace with such low standards – and then she was out the door into the night, lighting a cigarette as she eased the car out of the driveway in neutral, the lights off until she hit the street, just like old times. She was Bianca again, or nearly so, if only for the night.

Bean carried the burden of Bianca Minola’s name as heavily as Rose carried Rosalind’s. Rose might argue that Bianca’s hardly burdened her – to be the perpetual belle of the ball, argued over by multiple suitors, beloved by her father, described, after one meeting, ‘I saw her coral lips to move, And with her breath she did perfume the air; Sacred and sweet was all I saw in her . . .’ How difficult is that?

Truthfully, the three of us look almost exactly alike (we have been slightly suspicious of siblings who do not resemble one another; it seems to be, somehow, cheating), but Bean has always been the beautiful one. Okay, so she has spent far more time at the gym, beating the odd figure bestowed upon us by our parents – our mother, mostly – into submission: the Scarlett O’Hara waist and small, lifted breasts, the spread into muscular arms and broad shoulders, the ballooned hips and thighs. And Bean, too, has spent fortunes at hair salons, taking our thick but notoriously independent and undeniably dull brown hair to the best stylists. She is like a parent dragging a difficult child to stiff-necked, tweedy psychiatrists, desperate to find the one who will understand.

Even if you look at us together and see that our eyes are identical: large, cow-brown, slightly too close together; our noses the same straight, strong, broad-bridged lines; our mouths identically thin-lipped but wide, you might still say Bianca is the beautiful one. We are all our father’s daughters – Your father’s image is so hit in you – but it is Bianca who turns that face into beauty.

She pulled the car into the parking lot of a bar a few towns over, spritzing a sample bottle of perfume into her hair to blur the smoke. The door gave its aching groan when she opened it and she tilted across the gravel in her heels until she hit the sidewalk. She felt better already. A little male attention, a few shots, she’d be as good as new. She could be Mother Teresa tomorrow. As long as she wasn’t too hungover.

There were bars closer, but one had boasted that it was karaoke night (um, no) and the parking lots at the others had been sadly empty. She could hear the noise from outside, classic rock on the jukebox, the smell of beer seeping over the doorsill. Bean took a breath and stepped inside.

No one turned to watch her as she walked through the door. She did a quick survey of the layout and headed to a seat toward the side of the bar where she could accurately eye her prospects. The bartender eased toward her slowly, took the towel off his shoulder, and gave a cursory wipe to the sticky wood in front of Bean. ‘What can I get ya?’ he asked. Bean let her eyelashes flutter as she considered the meager selection.

‘A double shot of Jack and a bottle of whatever light you’ve got,’ Bean said. She looked up at him from under spider legs of mascara, but he had already turned back to the refrigerator. He wouldn’t even do in a pinch anyway, she decided, eyeing his back. A little old, his belly gone soft, his eyes rheumy and red from alcohol. She could do better.

‘Five-fifty,’ he said, sliding the bottle and the glass onto the counter in front of her.

She began to reach for the cash in her bag, then stopped herself and pulled out her cigarettes instead. ‘I’ll run a tab,’ she said. He shrugged and walked away.

The jukebox howled out a tinny guitar solo as Bean drained the shot, letting the alcohol burn down her throat until it became too much to bear, and she gulped at the watery beer to cool the fire. The room blurred pleasantly, and she smiled as she turned slightly on her stool, resting a bare elbow on the sticky bar.

A group of women huddled in a booth near the back; Bean could just see the tops of their heads bobbing as they shrieked with laughter. A post-work happy hour. She knew the feeling – the giddy relief of being furloughed from the office for the night, the flush of adolescent excitement as the talk turned to sex, the camaraderie forged in the trenches and celebrated over drinks, the feeling that, as a group, you have achieved something momentous simply by surviving the workday.

By the jukebox, a few couples had formed a makeshift dance floor in between some of the tables. Bean watched them sway for a moment, and then skipped her eyes over them.

The pool table looked promising. A group of men, early thirty- something, playing a (poor, by the looks of it) game of pool for beer money. One of them was in a suit, his tie loosened, sleeves rolled up, but the rest were in T-shirts and jeans. Thick-bodied ex-athletes with once-handsome faces, now gone swollen and sad from alcohol and disappointment. Trapped in these one-horse towns, their best days behind them, the way she’d sworn she’d never be. The way she now was.

Bean had always had a way with men. There were women prettier, and smarter, and thinner, and funnier, but Bean had something special. When she was only twelve or thirteen, she had gone to performances at Barney and had drawn the gazes of the college boys who might have been – hopefully would have been – appalled if they had known her age. And when she discovered how to sneak out of the house on Friday and Saturday nights and follow the sounds of hysteria and beer, she had learned to flirt through the haze of smoke and noise, how to kiss without making any promises, and how to reel a man across the room with only a look.

She lifted her beer to her mouth, the neck hanging between two fingers, and shook back her hair. The one in the suit. He’d do. She signaled for another shot and tossed it back before taking her beer and her cigarettes and moving to a high table nearer to the pool players.

‘Nice shot,’ she observed when one of the T-shirts overshot, sending the cue ball hopping over the edge, where it rolled under her chair.

‘Sorry,’ he said, kneeling to recover it.

‘Not at all. I like a man on his knees.’ His head snapped up and he looked at her, startled, then smiled.

‘That could be arranged.’

Bean didn’t reply, only smiled and took a sip of her beer, wrapping her lips around the opening just so. He tossed the ball in the air, nearly missed catching it, and backed toward the table.

‘As you were,’ she nodded, dismissing him. The others were looking now, running their eyes over her. She crossed her legs, flipped her high heel so it hung from her toes, and lit a cigarette with a sigh. Like shooting fish in a barrel. This is a gift that I have; simple, simple.

A game later, the man headed to the bar and brought back another beer and shot for her. ‘You up for a game?’ he asked.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘As long as you don’t mind losing.’ He laughed as she hopped off the stool with a practiced toss of her hair and took the stick from him.

Bean was drunk enough that it was deliciously easy to play her part without thinking – to brush up against the guy in the suit, to lean just right against the table, to get one of them to settle that pesky tab and keep her supplied with drinks.

But then there was a rush of heat coming in the door, and a gaggle of girls piled in. Maybe they were over twenty-one, but they were definitely girls. Their hair dyed too brassy, sprayed too high, their shorts too short, their makeup too thick. But they, unlike Bean, were on the right side of thirty. And they, unlike Bean, were willing to play dumb, and giggle their helpless way from the bar to the pool tables, preening and posing. The air in the room seemed thinner and the lights dimmer as Bean watched the men’s heads swivel, one by one, turning away from her, showing her that they’d only been using her to pass the time until something better came along. Exactly what she’d been doing to them. A lump formed in her throat and she swallowed hard. Was she going to have to fight for this? She’d never had to fight for attention before, and now she was going to have to do it for these men who hardly seemed worth having in the first place?

‘Ladies,’ the man who had first approached Bean said, and his voice was a throaty purr. ‘Join us?’ The men around the table had gone slack-jawed and simian, beer bottles held limply in their hands, pool cues leaning against the wall and the tables as they admired the display of raw young flesh in front of them. Bean felt as though she were folding in on herself like an origami crane.

The girls looked at one another, consulting, in the way that girls of that age do, as though they are constantly arriving at a telepathic agreement before making even the slightest move. ‘We don’t even know how to play!’ one of them squealed, and the rest burst into giggles again.

‘Give me a break,’ Bean said. She walked to the wall and chalked her cue, running her hand with firm, practiced strokes along the wood, and then blowing gently, her lips puckered just so. The men ignored her. One of the girls gave her a pitying glance, and Bean caught her breath as she recognized the look – she’d been cocky enough to give it herself once or twice – of a woman so confident in the unearned beauty of youth that she could afford to feel sorry for someone like Bean. And instead of feeling superior, Bean felt as though she were in the wrong, as though she had tried too hard, was overdressed and overage and just plain over. Any fight that had been brewing in her burst into steam, like water thrown on a fire.

‘We’ll teach you,’ one of the men said, and Bean watched the way their chests puffed out, peacock-proud, at the thought that they could rescue these helpless women from the dangers of the vicious pool table.

There was a rustle of activity as the girls shimmied their way around, pretending that they didn’t know which end of the pool cue to use, and the men sidled into place beside them, swapping partners like they were all in some complicated square dance with an absent caller until everything settled down. One of the girls bumped into Bean, pushing her up against the edge of the table. ‘Should we just start over?’ one of the guys asked.

Bean, who had been winning the last round with her partner, restrained the urge to whack him over the head with her pool cue. She looked to her partner to support her objection, but he looked like he was about ready to dive headfirst into the prodigious cleavage of one of the gigglers. Bean twisted her body, placed a hand on her toned hip. Nothing. She flipped her hair. No response. One of the men leaned over and whispered something in his partner’s ear. She shrieked with laughter and he tilted back, draining his beer bottle, looking pleased with himself. ‘Fine,’ Bean said, and moved back from the table again. One of the men stepped forward and racked the balls.

She stepped back into the shadows, fumbling for her glass with one hand while she watched the show unfolding in front of her. She drained the shot, not even tasting the bitter liquid, but the buzz of the bar receded and her vision tunneled out. In the darkness by the wall, she felt as though she’d stepped off the stage straight into the audience. Because there was no doubt about it – this was really happening. She wasn’t waiting in the wings for her chance to come back onstage. She’d been replaced by a group of far inferior understudies – women who were louder and dumber and uglier and tackier, but who were inarguably younger.

The alcohol had turned sour in her stomach, and she realized she had to get herself home somehow now, since clearly she wasn’t going to get even the runt of that litter of men. Not tonight. And while Bean wasn’t usually one to walk away from a challenge, she could see the way this would play out, and she didn’t like the image of herself fighting with these silly girls over these worthless men. There was so little dignity left in her life, she didn’t want to waste it on them.

Since the men had paid her tab, Bean asked the bartender to call her a cab and went and waited in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of her car and smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching people drift out of the bar as the night grew old and the hope drained slowly out of it.

What did this mean for her? What do you do when you are no longer the one worth watching? When there are women less beautiful, less intelligent, less versed in the art of the game who nonetheless can beat you at it simply because of their birth date?

The cab pulled up and Bean flicked her cigarette into the gravel. She leaned her head against the window, cool from the air-conditioning against the heat of the night. What would she do now? Who could she possibly be if she was no longer Bianca? Who would want Bean? She felt cruelly sober, probably could have even driven home, and regretted that the last of her cash was going to go to pay for this ride, and that she’d have to ask someone to drive her back to the scene of this humiliation in the morning so she could get her car. A waste. Her whole night, her whole life. Wasted.

‘Get up,’ Rose ordered Bean. She kicked the foot of the bed for good measure. ‘Fie, you slug-a-bed.’

‘Jesus, Rose,’ Bean moaned. ‘It’s not even seven. Shut the hell up.’ A lock of hair caught on her dry lips and she shoved it out of the way before rolling over and burrowing back into her pillow.

‘Mom has an appointment in Columbus at eight. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.’

‘Goody. Shove off.’

Rose’s nostrils flared and she put her fists on her hips, glaring down at the covers piled on top of Bean. She was clearly the one who’d turned the air-conditioning down so low last night, buried as she was under a feather duvet. In June. Out of pure meanness, Rose reached out and yanked the covers off of Bean, who howled in protest and yanked them back.

‘Your mother is sick, you selfish brat. I told you last night we were going up for her next round of chemo, and you said you’d come.’

‘I did?’ Bean asked curiously, peering up at Rose’s glowering silhouette against the sunlight. It seemed remarkably unlike her to have agreed to something like that. And frankly, she didn’t remember it. Ever since the night at the bar, she’d been putting herself to sleep by drinking, and last night had gotten a little fuzzy after she’d polished off the bottle of wine she’d found in the refrigerator. Maybe she’d been in one of those happy drunk moods. Or more likely she’d agreed with whatever she assumed would make Rose shut up fastest.

‘Yes, you did. Now if your highness would kindly get dressed, we can leave. It’s not bad enough I’ve got to get them ready, now I’ve got to worry about you, too?’

‘I’m up,’ Bean said, tossing aside the covers and sitting up. ‘I’m up.’ The ‘bitch’ at the end of the sentence was understood.

Our parents listened to the radio the entire drive, while Rose sat in the back and seethed, and Bean marinated in the fumes of alcohol seeping out of her skin and tried not to vomit. The toothpaste had helped with her breath, but not at all with the dehydrated headache of white wine the morning after, and the minty taste on her thick tongue made her throat feel clogged.

Inside the hospital, Rose led the parade. Bean veered off toward a coffee cart, Rose yanked her back in line. Bean watched our parents walking together, the stroll of the long-partnered. Our father is an inch shorter than our mother, his hair shot through with gray, his neatly clipped beard gone respectably salt and pepper. They always walk with her arm in his, his free hand darting up a thousand times an hour to adjust his glasses, their steps matched perfectly, knowing each other’s gait. But at the doors to the outpatient clinic, Rose halted and sent our parents through alone. As the doors slid open, our father turned and kissed our mother lightly below the line of the silk scarf on her forehead. She accepted the tenderness like a benediction.

‘We’re not going in?’ Bean asked. She’d found the end of a roll of mints in her purse and popped one, only slightly linty, into her mouth. She snapped it with a firm crunch and grinned at Rose’s frown.

‘Only one visitor allowed. There’s not enough room. We’ll wait outside.’

‘We can’t go in? Then what the hell did we come up here for?’

‘Moral support.’ Rose hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and about-faced toward the seating area.

‘I could have been moral support at home,’ Bean grumbled quietly, but she followed along, procuring coffee on the way. ‘How long does this take?’ she asked, settling into the seat beside Rose.

Rose glanced at her watch. ‘We’ll be out of here by noon, I’d say. They have to check her blood first, and then the pharmacy has to put together the treatment, and then the chemo itself takes a few hours.’ She produced a book from her bag and opened it pointedly.

‘What are they going to do?’

‘He reads to her, usually. You did bring a book, didn’t you?’

Bean reached into her purse and pulled out a thick paperback, the covers hanging by the barest edges. Rose nodded and turned to read her own book. Inside, our mother would sit in one of the forgivingly vinyl hospital recliners while a tube dripped benevolent poison into her veins, and our father perched his reading glasses on his nose and read to her.

How can we explain what books and reading mean to our family, the gift of libraries, of pages? Even at Coop, the tiny professor-run cooperative school we’d attended, a refuge of overly intellectual families, we were different. ‘What do you mean you don’t watch television?’ one girl had asked Bean. She was new, her parents visiting professors who passed in and out in one calendar year, their sojourn so brief Bean cannot even remember the girl’s name. She remembers only the strange furrow to her brow, signifying the complete and utter incomprehension at the idea of a life without.

Except to us, it wasn’t a life without. It was a life with. For Rose, a life where, after our weekly trip to the library, she cleared the top of her dresser and set out her week’s reading, stood them on their ends, pages fanned out, sending little puffs of text into the air. One of her friends, a little girl with sunken blue eyes and parchment skin, laid her costume jewelry out in the same way, and even then, Rose had recognized the metaphor, standing in her friend’s white wicker bedroom, looking at the sparkle of paste, to her, dull by comparison. For Bean, a life where the glamour and individuality she sought was only the gentle flick of a page away. For Cordy, always slightly detached no matter how many people surrounded her, clucking for her attention, a life where she could retreat and be alone and yet transported.

In college, when it became clear people might think there were more interesting things to do than read, when it was apparent the only books appropriate for decorating one’s room were textbooks, weighty and costly, worth only their end-of-the-semester resale value, we were faced with a choice. Rose, who had never paid attention to the requirements of cool, carried on reading, her one concession choosing a single room after her first year, though this was probably more due to her penchant for cleanliness than for fear of being unmasked as a reader. Bean spent afternoons in the library, having discovered the classics room, filled with huge leather armchairs and ottomans, and walls lined with books into which she could escape. Cordy, as mindless of convention as Rose, but never bearing its stigma in the same way, read everywhere: walking to class, during class, on the quad while Frisbees spun above her head, in bed at night while her roommate and her friends played cards on the floor, and once by a basement window at a keg party, where just enough light from the streetlamps spilled in to allow her to turn the pages. The difference between Rose and Cordy in this respect was that Rose, upon interruption, would fix the interrupter with a baleful glare, keep the book open, and reply curtly until a break in conversation allowed her reentry into the world in which she had been basking. Cordy would close the book, or slapjack it down on its open pages, and join the fun.

In New York, Bean chose the subway because of the reading time it afforded, free of questions but not of distractions – the frotteurs, the over-the-shoulder-readers, the panhandlers, the nosy parkers with opinions going spare – though Bean rapidly learned to dispatch each one of these with ease while keeping one eye moving down the page. She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. ‘A few hundred,’ she said.

‘How do you have time?’ he asked, gobsmacked.

She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don’t spend hours flipping through cable complaining there’s nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces? I am reading!

‘I don’t know,’ she said, shrugging.

This conversation, you will not be surprised to know, was the impetus for their breakup, given that it caused her to realize the emotion she had thought was her not liking him very much was, in fact, her not liking him at all. Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let’s just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.

It hadn’t really sunk in to Bean what our mother’s illness meant until the third day after the chemotherapy treatment. Everything hurt our mother. She was cold, but the blankets felt heavy and hard against her skin. The barest sliver of light coming through the curtains made her turn her head away, slicing through the delicate skin of her eyelids with scalpel-like precision. She was bored, but our reading to her made her head ache until she begged us to stop. Lonely, she would call to us to be with her, and then beg us to leave, as if our presence made it harder to breathe. She vomited and then asked for food, and then vomited again. Bean hovered uncertainly in the hallway outside our parents’ room, stepping in and then out again with each changing request.

‘Is it always like this?’ she asked Rose, who was standing at the sink doing dishes, handing them to Bean, who dried them ineffectively with a wet cloth and then put them vaguely where they belonged.

Rose shook her head, put her lips in a thin line. A soap bubble floated up from the sink and she jabbed it with a finger, watching it pop in the sunlight. ‘This is bad. I read that it gets worse throughout the treatment, but I didn’t expect this.’

‘I hate not being able to do anything for her. How long will it last?’

‘Usually it’s only a couple of days – maybe longer this time, since it’s so bad. I’ll have to call the doctor and ask. And then she’ll be tired for a few days longer than that. She’s got an appointment to get the size of the tumor rechecked, and then they’ll schedule the surgery.’

We washed and dried in uneasy silence for a few minutes. Outside, the sounds of summer continued – the buzz of bees, shouts of children free from school, a sprinkler whisking in circles. It seemed wrong and harsh for there to be such happiness in the world at that moment.

‘Is she going to die?’ Bean asked uncertainly. Her voice shook a little, and she stared hard at the plate in her hand, watching the streaks of damp disappear into the air.

Rose snapped off the faucet. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t even say it. She’s going to be fine.’

‘But . . .’

‘Don’t.’ Rose held up her hand, her fingers wrinkled and white from the water. She wouldn’t meet Bean’s eyes. ‘We can’t even think about it. It’s bad luck.’

Bean said nothing. She finished drying and put the last dishes away and then disappeared into the living room.

Rose went upstairs and peeked in the door to our parents’ room, looking at the dim shape of our mother lying on the bed. She was sleeping; Rose could hear the steady whisper of breath. When we were little and had nightmares, we would slip into our parents’ room and beg to sleep in their bed. Our mother rarely agreed to this, usually walking us back to our own beds and giving us a kiss as protection against the darkness. Now she only shifted slightly, her mouth falling open as she slept. Rose felt the urge to crawl into bed beside her. Instead she tiptoed back down the hall and down the stairs. Bean had assumed her position on the sofa, a book held loosely between her fingers. On the floor beside her was a glass of water she’d tipped over.

An impotent fury caught in Rose’s throat. ‘Bean, look at what you’ve done.’

Bean bent her head slightly so she could see over the edge of the sofa. She lifted a hand enough to right the glass and then went back to her book.

Rose stomped into the kitchen and returned with a towel. Kneeling, she dabbed at the water on the floor and then, less successfully, the rivulets of liquid already soaking into the edges of the rug.

‘It’s just water, Rose. Relax.’ Bean tugged at one of her nails with her front teeth. Having the acrylics removed had exposed the weakness of the nails beneath, and they constantly folded in on themselves, tearing down to the nail bed so the edges of her fingers were always bloody and sore.

‘Water causes damage, Bean.’ Rose finished mopping up and pushed herself to her feet. She restrained herself from throwing the wet towel onto Bean’s perfectly made-up face in order to prove her point.

Bean looked up at Rose and then waved her hand dismissively. ‘Move along,’ she said. She hooked one leg over the top of the sofa and went back to her book.

‘You are impossible. Do you have any idea what life would be like without me here?’

‘It’d be a hell of a lot quieter, that’s for damn sure,’ Bean said. She bit another nail, tearing the white off, and spat it into the air.

‘I do everything around here. Everything.’

Bean sighed and rested her book on her chest. ‘Which is precisely the way you like it. Now, do you want to talk about what’s really bothering you, or would you prefer to shut the hell up and let me read?’

‘What’s really bothering me is the way you just come back here and take everything for granted, like we’re here to serve you. You get to go out all night and no one says a word. And I’m sick of running around like Cinderella, cleaning up your messes.’

‘No one’s stopping you from going out, Rose. Go wherever you want. You’re free and twenty-one.’

‘Right. So I’ll just go off to England and live with Jonathan. How’s that?’

‘Fine with me,’ Bean shrugged. She lifted up her hair so it spread out over the arm of the sofa, like Ophelia drowned in the brook.

Rose sat down, the wet towel still clutched in her hand. ‘Don’t be silly. I have to be here to take care of Mom.’

‘They have people for that, you know. I like to call them doctors.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Okay. Then how’s this?’ Bean sat up, putting her book down beside her. Rose winced at the broken spine, the leaves of the book spread out like a bird’s wings. ‘How’s about you stay here until Mom is through her treatment, and then you go to England and wherever else Jonathan wants to go?’

‘I have a job. I can’t just leave it.’

‘Does Jonathan get a salary?’

‘Of course.’

‘Do they put him up in housing?’

‘In Oxford they are, but in the next position, who knows?’

‘Then you don’t need to work.’

‘This may shock you, Bean, but not everyone works exclusively for the money.’

‘Of course they do. That’s why they call it work. If we got paid just to sit around and look cute, they’d call it something else entirely.’

‘I don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t work. I don’t want to be a housewife. I don’t want to be like . . .’ Rose censored herself, but the sentence was hanging in the air and Bean pounced.

‘You don’t want to be like Mom? This may shock you, Rose, but I’m fairly certain Mom could have worked if she wanted to. It’s not like Dad was keeping her in some kind of pre-suffrage dungeon. Besides, I’m not suggesting that you never work again. I’m just saying that you don’t have to worry about a job right this very second. Lots of people would love to be in that position. Me, for one.’

‘I don’t exactly see you running right out to get a job.’

‘I’m gearing up for it.’

Rose huffed and looked out the window. The afternoon was gathering into gray clouds. There was a storm coming. She pressed her hands together and then pulled at each finger, stretching the muscles, while her mind played over the future. Planning to leave after our mother was better would make it look like she didn’t care, like she saw our mother’s brush with death as an inconvenient delay to her own plans. What kind of daughter – what kind of person – thought like that? And what if she planned to leave and then our mother didn’t get better? What if it turned out that she was sitting around, plane ticket in hand, waiting for our mother to die?

‘What if she doesn’t make it?’

‘You just said it was bad luck to say it.’

‘I know. But now I can’t stop thinking about it.’

‘Don’t get so dramatic, Rosie. I was just saying. It’s not going to happen.’ Bean turned back to her book.

Rose fidgeted with her fingers nervously for another minute, until Bean put down her book and looked at her, long and hard. It wasn’t like Rose to look ill at ease, and it made her a little nervous.

‘What will I do? What will I do if she dies?’ Rose asked, and she spoke so quietly the words seemed to disappear in midair.