You Must Be Sisters Read Online Free PDF

fifteen-year-olds … But oh dear, she would so like to know just one or two! Wasn’t it silly, to try so much to be separate and yet want so much to be part of it all, too. Silly and adolescent, to sneer at something just because one was left out!
    Might as well go on looking at the tree. If she turned round someone might lurch towards her or, worse still, think she looked all wistful. Which she was, of course.
    She looked at the branches; she felt expanded, soothed; just herself, alone with the tree. Much better than all those lurchers and gropers behind her. Since John, she was off that sort of business.
    But she couldn’t look at it for ever. She turned round, avoiding eyes yet perversely wishing she’d be intercepted in her avoiding, that somebody would want her. She saw the holly again and felt a lurch of homesickness. Actually, it swamped her; that ache when one is in a strange room, perhaps trying to sleep, with alien voices along the corridor and shadows in the corners, hunched shadows with long noses. Nineteen, and she hadn’t grown out of it yet!
    ‘Do you want to leave too?’
    It was Mike, lanky homely Mike; she could have hugged him.
    They left, and together they walked up the street. After the party the air was silent, pressing in on their ears like the stillness after the telephone has been ringing and ringing and then has suddenly stopped.
    ‘Dreadful party,’ he said.
    That solved that, then. How nice that it had been the party’s fault; she felt much better. Nice, too, to have the familiar, known old Mike. She could tell him things, bony, public-schooly Mike who came – wait for it – from Norbiton. He didn’t seem to mind that.
    What happened next she could only blame, later, on the wine. Or perhaps on the need, at this particular homesick moment, for someone to lean against.
    That was just what she was doing now, actually – leaning against him. They were back in his room at Hall and he’d just made some tea. Side by side they were sitting on his bed; he was rummaging through a book.
    ‘I’ll find it in a minute. It’s so gorgeous, you must hear it.’
    As usual, books lay scattered all over the floor. Mike was often seized with the urge to read out poems that he liked; the books lay where he’d discarded them. In his messiness he was as bad as she was.
    ‘Don’t be bored. It’s here somewhere.’
    She wasn’t bored, she was reassured. An hour ago she’d felt so vulnerable, so newly-peeled amongst all those loud unnoticing people. But now she was safe. She relaxed against his tweedy jacket. Warming to him, she felt quite bold. She took the sleeve of his jacket between her fingers.
    ‘You have hideous clothes,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Why can’t you get anything trendy?’ If only he weren’t so nice and Norbitonish he could really be quite fanciable.
    ‘Ah!’ he cried. ‘Got it. It’s Wyatt.’ His voice grew resonant; his poetry boom.
    They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
    With naked foot, stalking in my chamber
…
    Leaning against that shabby tweed, she listened to his voice and felt more and more soothed. It was nice to have somebody to sit beside, to lean against. A body. In this mass of people, someone to cling to. I’ve been needing one, she thought. Not an original observation, but a true one.
    …
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall
,
    And she me caught in her arms long and small
,
    Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
    And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?
    The boom changed to his ordinary voice. ‘What an image, isn’t it!
Her loose gown did from her shoulders fall
. So, well, erotic somehow. And yet so restrained.’
    She stayed leaning against him. Feverishly, he thumbed through the pages. ‘There’s another lovely one I want to read to you …’ His hair fell over his eyes as he bent down close to the book, scrabbling through the pages. She kept herself against him.
    ‘It’s somewhere here,’ he muttered. ‘A super lyric,