The Sister Read Online Free PDF

per second, which can fulfill a lifetime in a day. I imagine a young Vivi getting out, the girl I remember her as, quite forgetting I should be expecting someone I won’t recognize. Instead, out steps a young man, no more than twenty-five, with thick dark hair and a smart blue suit. I’m stunned. Where’s Vivi? Perhaps he has nothing to do with Vivi at all. My wave of excitement crashes around me. Has he the wrong house? Another person come to offer to buy it from me, leaving an obsequious letter when there’s no answer? But instead of coming towards the porch, the man walks round the car and opens its back door, the one nearest the house. Now I know
she’s here.
    A decorative walking stick is thrust out of the car onto the muddy gravel, the man holds out his arm and, leaning on the stick with one hand and taking the young man’s arm with the other, Vivien emerges, guided like royalty. My face is pressed to the window but she is too close to the house for me to see her clearly. All I can see is the top of her head, gray like mine, but while my hair is long and lies flat against my head, hers is cropped short and obviously shaped. She walks to the back of the car, stops and faces the house. She plants the stick firmly on the ground in front of her, both hands resting on the pommel at the top, one over the other, her feet slightly apart for balance, and surveys Bulburrow Court. All the while the young man is collecting bags and boxes and hangers of clothes wrapped in plastic, and piling them outside the car. Vivien takes in the house slowly, looking crossways from one side to the other. I can imagine what she is seeing: the windows, a few cracked, others smashed with boards replacing the glass; gargoyles, exact copies of those from Carlisle’s twelfth-century cathedral, whose farcical grimaces scared us as children; the corbels that hold up the porch; escutcheons carved under the mullioned windows, the battlements above. It is easy to imagine what she can see, but what memories does every window of each room stir in her? What emotions do the dark gray haunting stones bring, or the enormous quoins at the base of the house, each made from a solid piece of granite, the almighty foundation stones of our lives, holding up for generations the framework of our ancestry?
    As she is gripped in her consideration of the house, so I am gripped by watching her from above, all at once desperate to know what is going through her mind.
    Her head lifts as she studies each section slowly, methodically even, and I am about to make out more of her features when her eyes begin to run diagonally, crosswise, towards the top of the porch, and up, to the arch of my window…. I pull back into the shadows before she spots me, but as I do, it strikes me that I have seen a ghost. Maud. I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t even tried to imagine what Vivien would look like but I’d never considered she’d be so like Maud. I feel like a little girl again. I don’t dare look out of the window now for fear that I will meet Maud’s all-knowing eyes. I’m numbed with indecision, for a moment paralyzed. I can’t tell you how many minutes go by before I am slowly aware that the goat’s-head knocker is being rattled from side to side (rather than banged as a stranger would do).
    I glance at my clothes. I’ve been so busy wondering what Vivien would look like that I haven’t considered the impression she’ll have of me. I’m thinking now of how I might appear to her, but because I never check myself in the mirror these days, I can’t really decide. My hair, I know, must be pretty unruly, like a vagabond’s I should think, and whereas I can tell she’s made an effort with makeup, I don’t have any. Quickly I undo my ponytail, run my fingers through my hair in an effort to comb it and refix the elastic band. I check the front of my navy cardy and pick off a couple of specks of something white and crusty, toothpaste, perhaps, then go down to answer