What most tore and worried at her as she contemplated the situation was that what had happened, what appeared to have happened, was not the act of the sister she had thought she had known. Like an eruption, the events of Saturday had overlain with alien matter all her familiar features. But, on reflection, that was not the right image. The ash and rock of a volcanic explosion buried and obscured. Saturday’s cataclysm had revealed. It had shown Catriona a different Flora, a Flora who was more like Catriona herself.
She was stunned by this epiphany. Her image of her sister, from earliest childhood, had been founded on the concept that they were polar opposites – in appearance, in everything.
Little Flora was the blondest of blondes, and wore her hair either in long and luxuriant straight tresses, or wound and plaited into complex braids and chignons, from out of which her bright complexion shone like a sun. Young Catriona’s abundant black hair had a naturally stiff and awkward curl, and it surrounded and hung in tangles over her face, obscuring her pale features, like streaks of dark cloud across the moon. Flora was a neat, clean and tidy girl. Catriona was constantly rebuked for her personal habits; she cared not a fig for clothes or cleanliness and her room was always a mess. Flora was animated, effervescent, social, loving parties and company. Catriona was quiet, dour, shunned society, and hated social gatherings. Flora had had boyfriends and admirers by the dozen. Catriona was aloof and cold, and scorned any boy who came near her.
As they grew up, Catriona even as she loved and cherished Flora, was inclined to patronise, even to have some measure of contempt for her younger sibling’s character, regarding it as less interestingly complicated than her own. Flora, she decided, lacked intellectual or emotional depth. She did not read the kind of books that Catriona read; she did not think about the kinds of issues which her sister constantly pondered; she did not respond to the power of literature or the arts generally, with one exception: she did like some music. This taste, though, was another area of difference between them.
Flora loved folk songs, genuinely traditional or in the style of Bob Dylan and his followers. The better to enjoy these, she taught herself to play, or rather, in her modest words, strum the guitar and sing along to it. On several occasions, the endless repetitions of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ or ‘Blowing in the Wind’ provoked Catriona to fury, the only occasions when they had had real rows. Catriona’s prejudice – and perhaps her jealousy, as she could not herself play a note – blinded her to the fact that Flora actually had some real talent, which she later exploited to her advantage.
This ability was the only one that had given Catriona the least pause, however. In everything to do with school, the elder had been far and away the champion. She had been the keenest and most driven of scholars, top in every subject, whilst Flora, with no sense of shame, had bumped along at the bottom of her class, a cheerful, unaffected presence who regarded the classroom activities as a distracting irrelevance compared to the important things in life: personal grooming and appearance, physical health and fitness, make-up, and fashion.
Not that she had been a troublesome pupil, far from it. She had always been polite, helpful, and, ultimately, uninterested. The only thing the school offered in which she could have excelled was drama, where she proved, like her sister, to have a natural talent as an actor. Typically, though, although she loved costumes and dressing up and being a presence on the stage, she found plays boring, the learning of words tedious; yet another aspect of education which held no interest. As soon as she was able to leave school, she left, with only a few paper qualifications.
Her first job was as a junior dogsbody in a travel agency in the West End. In no time at all she had revealed a flair for the work. Her people skills were good, she was told. She was being groomed for management. But Flora had had her own ideas. She had saved her money assiduously, and one fine morning, just after her eighteenth birthday, she resigned from the agency, but not before she had bought a clutch of budget air tickets. For the next year, she travelled the world, seeing the exotic destinations that she had spent her days selling to customers. She took her guitar, and worked bars and clubs and cafes en route, or busked in the streets.
On her return, her travel bug had not left her. She had applied to British Airways and been accepted for training as a flight attendant. Catriona remembered, guiltily, the scorn with which she had greeted Flora’s proud announcement. She knew now what she hadn’t known then: that it was actually incredibly difficult to get onto the training course, still less to pass it with such élan as Flora had managed.
By that time, Catriona had her starred First and was beginning her doctoral research. The fact that her sister was an air hostess was not something she wished to broadcast amongst the sage and serious feminist community of St Hilda’s College.
Flora had flown for several years. Then she had met Bill Jesmond and married him.
That was the first thing her sister had done which Catriona had found did not accord with her view of Flora’s character. However, this going against type did not raise her opinion of Flora, rather the reverse. Bill was the last man in the world Catriona could have imagined any lively, attractive young woman wishing to marry. He was a tall, rather gangling and awkward man. Though he was only thirty-five and his chestnut curly hair bore no hint of grey, he talked and behaved as if he were at least ten years older. He was undoubtedly brilliant, possessing a string of chemistry degrees from the Cambridges in both England and the United States, but, despite this intellectual achievement, he was, as a personality, unspeakably dull.
As Flora was always at pains to point out, their relationship did not begin as a plane-board romance, but in New York’s Central Park, by the skating rink. Flora was with another girl who had come in on the same flight, and Bill, a researcher for a multinational pharmaceuticals corporation in Cincinnati alone during a business trip to the city, hearing their clear English voices with a pang of nostalgia, had overcome his natural reserve to engage them in halting and diffident conversation.
They had lived in the States for three more years, where Charlotte had been born. Then Avalon Corporation, Bill’s employer, had taken over an English company, and he had been the obvious choice to return to head its research department, based at Wychwood Court, a country house, formerly a girls’ boarding school, near Cheltenham.
At Catriona’s first meeting with her brother-in-law, Bill made no secret of his male chauvinism. A woman’s brain, in his view, was not suitable for academic work, and besides, he regarded literature, the focus of her interests, as unworthy of sustained intellectual attention by anyone, male or female. Poetry, novels, plays, he thought of as lightweight entertainment for an idle hour or two. Art and sculpture were merely forms of decoration. His main pleasure outside his work was playing and watching a variety of sports.
Bill had straightaway picked up the habit of addressing Catriona through Flora, referring to her as ‘your sister’. ‘Would your sister like another cup of coffee?’ ‘Is your sister coming with us this afternoon?’ He avoided situations in which they would be forced to converse together by themselves. If they were left together in a room, he would immediately mumble an excuse and find something to do in another part of the house.
Her visits en famille were consequently infrequent and rather a strain. She preferred to keep in touch with Flora by twice or thrice weekly phone conversations. If Bill took the call, he did no more than grunt a greeting, then she would hear him yell out to Flora, ‘Your sister’s on the line!’
In fact, the few weekends Catriona did spend in Gloucestershire were only tolerable because Bill was out for much of the time, either jogging around the countryside to keep fit, or playing cricket, tennis, squash or golf. Even at weekends, he would go over to the laboratory for hours at a time, pleading that an experiment needed attention or that results needed to be run through the computer in time for the return of the technical staff on the Monday.
Flora seemed to accept this workaholism. He was hardly ever around to share bedtimes or to read stories or simply to have fun with his daughter. Flora, in contrast, was devoted to Charlotte. She seemed to enjoy the demanding but dull routines of motherhood. Physically strong, she used to joke that, after having four hundred adult babies to cope with on an international flight, only one