Absolute Hush Read online

  Absolute Hush

  SARA BANERJI

  For Joanna

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter 1

  George and Sissy hid among the cow-parsley, and above their heads bees bumbled heavily, tipping pollen down the twins’ shirts.

  ‘I can hear your heart beating,’ whispered Sissy, while Elizabeth prowled through the garden like a lioness in search of prey, whimpering loudly over a wasted cucumber, her feet scrunching fallen Victorias because when she was upset she didn’t care about anything.

  ‘She’ll get plum juice on her socks,’ whispered Sissy, and a giggle snorted down her nostril.

  But George’s heart was beating too heavily for him to be able to reply.

  ‘Your heart sounds like the engine of a German bomber,’ whispered Sissy.

  It was war-time.

  ‘Brr—rrm brr—rrm,’ she said. ‘Definitely faulty.’ Patriotism made German machinery sound inferior to British.

  ‘Shh,’ said George, and then he whispered pathetically, ‘Do you think she’ll really do it this time, Sis?’

  ‘I know you’re there,’ came Elizabeth’s voice, deep with anger and shaken with tragedy. ‘I can tell you’re skulking in the bushes.’

  ‘Anyone who kills themselves for the sake of a cucumber is potty,’ hissed Sissy.

  Elizabeth had grown the cucumber and George had cut little notches all the way along its body. Actually Elizabeth had grown several but only a single one had reached maturity, the others having succumbed to some vile virus which reduced them in their early stages to squidgy rods upon the grass.

  When Elizabeth had first wept and threatened to kill herself, secretly, very secretly, Sissy had laughed. George had laughed a little too, but it had been tempered with the shivering of fear. Although they were twins, Sissy was always better able to cope with the extravagant behaviour of adults.

  ‘I wish I didn’t mind so, Sis,’ said George as they crouched, shivering.

  Elizabeth’s footsteps began to retreat and her wails recede through the plum and apple trees.

  ‘Oh, the ingratitude! Oh, the cruelty! When they know what I have gone through for their sakes!’

  George and Sissy even knew how painful Elizabeth’s birth pangs had been. They had often been told how George had been stuck most agonisingly for three and a half hours.

  ‘Didn’t it hurt George too?’ asked Sissy.

  ‘Stuck where?’ George asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t have screamed,’ Sissy said.

  George took his sister’s hand in the cool green of their hiding place.

  ‘I wish I was brave like you,’ he muttered.

  Sissy let out a defiant laugh.

  ‘Which would you rather, Sis? A smacking, or that she killed herself really this time?’

  ‘Oh, George,’ said Sissy reproachfully. ‘Just imagine how we’d feel if our mother committed suicide because of us. Just imagine.’

  George tried to imagine. Succeeded. And gave a little shudder of horror.

  He said forlornly, ‘You’re right. A smacking would be better.’

  They crouched silent under the froth of cream flowers, both thinking. Perhaps they were even thinking the same thing.

  ‘You needn’t worry, really, Georgie,’ said Sissy. ‘I’ll take the smacks. I’ll tell her it was me.’ She was the strongest, the protector. ‘But all the same, why did you have to go and do it?’

  He shrugged, the movement sending down a snowstorm of petals. Sissy put her arms around his shoulders, hugged him, and said, ‘Well, it’s a pity, but it’s done now, so we’ll have to make the best of it. You’ve got little white flowers in your hair. Like stars.’

  George shook his head hard, setting the cow-parsley tossing and nodding, sending out a cloud of flowers, pollen, and frustrated bees. Sissy caught at the stalks hopelessly, grabbed at the summer air, insect-filled, tried to subdue the floating and the shaking, said, ‘Oh, gosh! I hope she doesn’t see this from the house.’

  Elizabeth clacked over the flagged kitchen floor, and told the charlady, ‘The ingratitude of children!’

  ‘My hubby’s got a whole frame of cucumbers almost ready, dear,’ said Mrs Lovage soothingly. ‘I’ll bring one round in a day or two.’

  ‘That’s not the same,’ snapped Elizabeth ungratefully. ‘That’s not the point at all.’

  Getting the point, Mrs Lovage said, ‘I expect you could make it into a nice salad, even now. You slice off the blossom end and rub it against the cut part. A bitter froth will come out and you throw that away. You’ll find the rest tastes as sweet as sweet.’

  Elizabeth was not listening. She had seen a white puff, like a cloud of smoke, like a doodlebug exploding in a distant town. She peered through the window, marking the spot, then moved swiftly towards the garden door, towards the clump of cow-parsley where they, she now knew, were hiding.

  ‘Or if you just left it on the stalk it might grow on and only have a few little scratches on it to tell the tale,’ Mrs Lovage called after her. ‘My hubby once carved “Madge I love you”, that’s my name, “Madge”, on to a pumpkin when it was little. And it grew into a great huge thing with the words, “Madge, I love you”.’ Mrs Lovage sighed, scrubbed, and remembered how the neighbours had kept looking over the lines of fences, watching Mr Lovage’s avowal of love swell with the seasons. She had hardly had the heart to cook the pumpkin after all the attention it had received and the lovely thing it had said. No one else had had anything like that written on their pumpkins.

  Under the umbrella of tossing flowers George pressed his face into Sissy’s neck and breathed. The skin of her neck was very white and soft, and had a special smell that was just Sissy. He was so close to her that the tiny brown mole at the nape of her neck looked blurred. Her hair was cool and heavy like the tassels of unripe sweetcorn. It was the colour of unripe sweetcorn too. And it too had its own special smell, one that he would always remember, although it had no name. He would, later on, smell beeswax candles burning, or hay drying, and be transported back momentarily to the smell of Sissy’s cool hair shielding him, while the footsteps of Elizabeth approached again, angry sorrow tramping the ground until it shuddered, until at last the very bit of moist earth on which Sissy and George crouched began to tremble too, and the plants parted to reveal their mother’s blazing face.

  The house was called the Plague House. At the time of the Great Plague a wealthy merchant had had it built as an escape from infected London. He had had a moat dug round the house, presumably to keep out strangers in times of infection.

  Once, during some hot summer, Sissy and George had dangled their feet in the moat and visualised frantic plague-infected people trying to cross the muddy width of water.

  ‘It’s not very deep,’ Sissy said. ‘I can’t see how it can have kept anybody out. Perhaps the intruders were weak with illness and that’s why they couldn’t cross it.’ A terrible idea occurred to her. ‘Perhaps the moat’s full of bodies.’

  George swiftly withdrew his toes and eyed the water with a shudder.

  For a week after that they made a tree house in the cypress on the lawn, hid among the urns and statues in the shrubbery, played hide-and-seek in the pleached beech
walks, and pretended to each other and themselves that the moat did not exist.

  But then Sissy thought of a way of making a raft out of stoppered bottles lashed to a plank and the corpses were forgotten.

  ‘It will be your fault if George falls into the water and drowns,’ Elizabeth said to Sissy. ‘Then you will know what it’s like to mourn.’

  Sissy stared at her mother with glittering eyes, making Elizabeth add doubtfully, ‘If you know what it’s like to love, that is … ’

  Elizabeth let out a sound that was halfway between a groan and a sob to indicate that she, Elizabeth, knew what it was like to love. And to mourn.

  ‘I am suffering all the time,’ she would tell Sissy, when Sissy had been especially defiant. ‘You should consider my feelings because of my sufferings.’

  Tim, Elizabeth’s husband and Sissy and George’s father, had gone missing somewhere over France in the first months of the war.

  Mrs Lovage had told her husband, ‘Poor thing. It must be terrible for her, never knowing. And having to bring up those little kids on her own. It’s hard at the best of times, bringing up children, and that Sissy, well … ’

  Sometimes, when Elizabeth thought of her lost husband, she would grab George as he went toddling by and hug and kiss him while tears ran down her face.

  She would say into his neck that she had wetted with her crying, ‘Oh my darling, my darling, my darling! You are all I’ve got now.’

  She would set George on her knee and point to the photo of her soldier husband. ‘Look, this is your Daddy, George. Say “Daddy”.’ And then she would weep again and sob. ‘If only I were dead I would not be suffering like this.’ She would pull George’s plump little dirty hands up over her shoulders and round her neck so that the child’s forced embrace became a substitute for his father’s.

  ‘What are whacks, Mrs Lovage?’ George asked after the episode of the cucumber. ‘She’s always saying, “I should whack you”, but I don’t know what whacks are.’

  Mrs Lovage laughed. ‘It’s smacking children when they’re naughty!’ Your mother’s got the patience of an angel in spite of all her troubles!’

  George told Sissy, with a chuckle of relief, ‘Whacks are only smacks, Sis. Like you give me when you’re cross.’

  ‘I knew that all the time,’ Sissy told him grandly. ‘You didn’t have to go and ask Mrs Lovage. I could have told you that.’

  ‘You should have, then. Instead of me worrying and worrying about it,’ George grumbled.

  Elizabeth never struck the children. ‘It’s not in my nature,’ she would say, drawing them to her. ‘No matter how naughty you have been. Perhaps it is because I have spoiled you that you are both so bad.’ Instead she thought up other punishments.

  She dragged Sissy’s bottle raft towards the cellar because Sissy had done the naughty thing to the cucumber. ‘You shan’t have it back until you properly repent.’

  ‘How?’ asked Sissy, desperate because she had at last managed to get the raft balanced and seaworthy.

  ‘You might say something like, “I am sorry I have hurt my darling mother”,’ suggested Elizabeth.

  Sissy said, ‘I am sorry I have hurt my darling mother,’ but the words that came out sounded mocking.

  Elizabeth continued to bang the fragile dangle of bottles down the cellar steps, and there came a tinkle as glass broke. Sissy glared but said nothing.

  Elizabeth, seeming not to notice the broken glass, went striding back to the house saying, ‘That is not what I call proper contrition.’

  By the next morning Sissy had become frozen into a furious sulk.

  ‘I cannot understand your insensitivity,’ said Elizabeth at breakfast.

  Sissy wriggled in her chair, tried to avoid her mother’s dark glasses-obscured gaze, and pretended not to notice that Elizabeth’s rasher of rationed bacon had been transferred to her plate. She would not eat it. When she got to that rasher she would pretend to be full.

  ‘I can’t eat a thing,’ murmured Elizabeth. ‘I feel altogether too upset. I only have my children now. No one else in the world. At least you two should have some consideration for my feelings.’

  Sissy swallowed a mouthful of fried bread. Her throat was dry but she would not let Elizabeth see.

  George, who had safely shrugged off the danger of being punished for the destruction of the cucumber, now began to behave as though he had shrugged off the guilt as well.

  ‘Sissy’s been awfully naughty, hasn’t she, Mummy?’ he mumbled through a mouthful of bacon.

  ‘I forgive her,’ murmured Elizabeth, giving Sissy a reproachful look. Then she gave a choking sound that could easily turn into sobbing.

  ‘Here. Have my egg as well,’ she told her daughter: ‘Eat it. I might as well starve. I have nothing else to live for now.’ With a swift and almost aggressive movement, she tilted her soft egg on to Sissy’s plate.

  Sissy gazed at the tumbled egg. Its yolk slowly split with a gush of yellow. Her face went red. Her eyes became hot as though tears were stinging to get out, though of course she would never let them.

  ‘You know I hate eggs,’ she cried.

  ‘I am trying to feed you. To nourish my child,’ moaned Elizabeth. ‘It is my duty to feed my children.’

  Sissy hunched her shoulders and glared into the yellow mess that had leaked over even the food she liked.

  ‘Eat it up,’ cried Elizabeth. ‘I have sacrificed the last egg in the house for you.’

  Sissy stared and did not move.

  Elizabeth let out a strangled cry and leapt to her feet, tipping the milk so that it splashed across the cloth. Blackberry jam dripped on to the little pat of butter.

  ‘I can bear no more,’ she cried, holding her hand to her throat. ‘I think my heart is breaking. I think it is broken already, in fact.’

  She said savagely to Sissy, ‘Don’t you have any pity for me at all? Don’t you feel sorry for me in the least?’ then rushed from the room.

  The two children sat stunned, hearing their mother’s voice receding up the stairs. ‘What is there for me to live for now? Oh, why was I ever born?’

  ‘Do you think she’ll do it this time?’ asked George.

  After a short silence, during which both children kept their gaze fixed on the doorway, George said nervously, ‘I can’t hear her any more, Sis. Perhaps she’s dead from hunger by now. She didn’t eat any breakfast. She gave it all to you.’

  Sissy said nothing.

  There fell another long slow pause, then George said, ‘If you don’t want it really, Sis, could I have your bit of bacon. And the egg?’

  Sighing, yet relieved, Sissy pushed her plate in front of her brother.

  ‘Have it all,’ she said. ‘I can’t eat either.’

  George let out a little shriek. ‘Sissy! You might die as well as Mummy. If both of you are dead, what’ll I do? Who’ll look after me?’

  ‘Oh, you’re so selfish, Georgie. All you think of is yourself. Anyway, nobody dies of starvation if they just miss out a single meal.’

  ‘Suppose she doesn’t eat her lunch either?’ George whimpered.

  Sissy fixed her brother with a stern eye, while he, his mouth tight with eggs and bacon, looked back at her apprehensively.

  ‘Now,’ she said sternly. ‘Why did you slice Mother’s cucumber? I want to know, Georgie. I insist you tell me.’

  ‘I was going to write on it like Mrs Lovage’s husband done,’ whimpered George.

  ‘But you don’t know how to write,’ Sissy frowned. She was ahead of him in this respect. ‘You don’t even know how to write on a bit of paper, so how could you write on a cucumber?’

  ‘That was the trouble,’ moaned George. ‘So I thought I’d do quite a lot of it. The bits I knew. So I sort of did the straight bits … I was going to ask you how to spell “love” and … ’

  ‘Yes?’ Sissy leant forwards and waited tensely.

  George, suddenly confused by her intensity and aware, without properly understanding why,
that what he said next was going to be of significance, muttered, ‘I didn’t know how to spell the other word.’

  ‘What other word, George?’ There was a growly sound in Sissy’s voice that alarmed George.

  ‘“Mummy”,’ he whispered. ‘I was going to write “I love you, Mummy,” on the cucumber.’

  Sissy stared at him for what seemed like ages, and the colour drained from her face.

  George knew he had said something wrong, but did not know what, and could not think how to make it all right again. He looked down at his shoes while his heart bounced against his ribs.

  At last Sissy cried shrilly, ‘I wish I’d never got punished instead of you for it! I wish you had been the punished one!’

  Chapter 2

  When Elizabeth’s children came guiltily out of their hiding places after doing something naughty, their faces would be set in rigid masks of sullen endurance, their emergence from shadows emphasising their paleness, the straight heavy bleached hair and the plump whiteness of their skin.

  When they came out from under the cow-parsley after the cucumber episode, for instance – and the comparison was no sooner in her mind than she banished it – the soft white children with their peevish expressions reminded Elizabeth of maggots.

  Mrs Lovage often commented on how the children seemed to have entirely favoured the father, and said, ‘It must be such a comfort to you, in your great loss, dear, still to have him so strongly in his little ones.’

  George and Sissy’s father had been a short, plump man, whereas Elizabeth was tall and slim.

  Elizabeth had said, ‘It would have been nice if they had taken after me a little bit.’

  ‘They will, dear, when they’re bigger,’ Mrs Lovage soothed her. ‘Children are always changing. They go from one phase to another like yo-yos.’

  To Elizabeth, these children when they were very small – even though they did not look like her yet – had been utterly hers, and she liked to hug and kiss them and press her face into their yielding cheeks and stomachs. She would suck, wet-lipped, at their skins as though deriving nourishment. She breathed into their tummy buttons and blew vibratingly behind their ears. These passionate kissings aroused sensations that eased some wild appetite in her that was neither for food nor sex nor love, yet somehow a mixture of all three. To her, the children, George and Sissy, were equally kissable. She got the same satisfaction from kissing, hugging, either one. The yard or two of child body was all one to her. It smelled and felt the same, it satisfied in the same way.