When she heard the car in the drive Lea came running. She was only in underpants, with gawky sunburned arms and legs, and her navel protruded from her belly. She leaped into Robert’s arms, almost knocking him over. The lunch table was laid under a parasol in the garden which sloped up to an undulating terrain covered with heather and juniper bushes. They sat down, and Monica’s mother called several times in vain to the younger sister, carping and impatient, as you call to a child who will not break off her game. She did not appear until the barrister shouted her name in his deep voice with his head half-turned towards the house, bent over and expectant, with restrained irritation.
She must have been in her early twenties. When she sat down between Robert and Monica, he felt surprised they were sisters. Where Monica’s movements were angular and effective, there was something indolent about Sonia. She moved at a slower tempo and lingered over each thing she did, as if she had to ask herself what she was actually engaged in, whether it was spreading cottage cheese on crispbread or pushing her untidy hair away from her soft, heart-shaped face. Her dark hair was a mass of curls and longer than Monica’s, which was smooth and cut in a practical style. She wore a silver ring on one big toe and spoke with a slight drawl, pronouncing the s’s like a schoolgirl in a way that irritated Robert. Her long batik dress had faded in the wash and hung loosely around her. Monica never wore dresses.
She was the wild one of the family. That’s what they had called her when she was small, the little wild cat. They had been unable to control her, the barrister and his check-skirted wife, and she was sent to boarding school at fourteen. After leaving school she went to Israel, stayed in a kibbutz for six months and when she grew tired of picking oranges she went to Jerusalem where she attended dance school and fell in love with an American. She accompanied him when he flew back to New York, their relationship was probably at an end then, but to everyone’s surprise she succeeded in getting admitted to Martha Graham’s school. Her father paid up without protest. To make sure she didn’t come back, Monica had said with a smile.
After lunch she pulled her dress over her head and started to do tai chi on the lawn dressed only in pants like Lea, who watched open-mouthed. The barrister changed his brown leather shoes for a pair of chunky clogs and began weeding the rose bed, his pipe clenched energetically between his teeth. Their hostess went indoors to lie down. Robert and Monica sat in deck-chairs reading. Now and then he stole a glance at Sonia, who went through her long drawn-out movements with a self-satisfied, contemplative expression. There was something frail about her torso, out of proportion with her strong arms and muscular legs. Her breasts were small and childish, as if not fully developed, and her hips were as narrow as a boy’s.
Late in the day Robert and Monica drove down to the beach with Sonia and Lea. Sonia sat in the back playing mouse with a hand on Lea’s back, tickling her neck and under her chin. They both giggled as if they were the sisters. When Sonia tickled Lea in the side she doubled up laughing and happened to kick the driver’s seat, which was too much for Monica who asked sharply if they wanted to end up in the ditch. Robert turned round. They sat quite still in their corners peeping at each other, red in the face with suppressed laughter. Monica bit her under-lip and gazed stiffly at the road in front of her. He laid a placatory hand on her knee, she jerked it aside and he took his hand away.
She seldom mentioned Sonia. She had left home when her sister was five, but even though the little wild cat then had her parents to herself she had nourished an implacable jealousy of her sister. Once when Monica had brought a boyfriend home Sonia bit his finger so hard he had to go to casualty. At that time their father was in his mid-sixties and more remote than ever before, and their mother, who was fifteen years younger, seemed to wilt at the prospect of starting from the beginning again. She did have a life herself, as she said sometimes to her grown-up daughter. Monica asked why on earth she had had another child then, but her mother merely assumed a distant expression. It had been an accident.
Little by little Robert heard the stories of how Sonia had cut their mother’s underclothes into small pieces with the kitchen scissors, poured ink over the case documents in her father’s study and emptied a bag of sugar into the petrol tank of his new Volvo. The high point had come when at the age of fourteen she got one of the boys in her class to telephone a bomb threat to the Supreme Court one day when her father was appearing there. Monica could recall how her sister had sat, arms crossed with her eyes on the carpet while her father asked her why she hated them so much. She made no reply, but when he asked if she would rather not live with them, she had looked up and said yes.
She was taken at her word. According to her own account Monica tried to persuade their parents not to send her to boarding school. But what she had feared did happen. Sonia’s hatred towards her had just grown formidably deeper. Her silence and enforced good behaviour when she was home on a visit was worse than all her terrorist whims. It was not until Sonia was at sixth-form college that they had come to an understanding, said Monica, yet Robert sensed a lack of genuineness in Sonia’s smile when she finished her tai chi and flopped down smiling on the grass beside Monica’s deck chair. At lunch-time he had noticed her sending brief, calculating glances at her elder sister, who listened intently to her father and replied to his questions in her higher and somehow diluted version of his antiquated diction.
The sun hung low above the pine trees behind the sand dunes and the orthopaedic hospital. It was an old seaside hotel from the Twenties, and Robert only had to look at the white-washed functionalist building to hear a distant echo of sentimental saxophones. More than once Monica’s mother had described how her husband had proposed to her on the dance floor there, in his white dinner jacket. He corrected her every time, it was black, but she persisted with rare stubbornness. It was white. After all, it had been the only time anyone had actually proposed to her. The foaming crests of the waves sparkled in the low sunlight. The Sound was dark blue and melted into the misty sky behind the Swedish coast. The Kullen promontory over there was nothing but a frail grey finger pointing out into the blue. Robert held Lea’s hands, she squealed when he pulled her through the surf. The sun cast a reddish glow on Sonia’s and Monica’s bare backs as they waded out. Monica was slightly taller than her sister but he thought they resembled each other seen from behind, sway-backed and slim. They laughed as they plunged in and vanished, each in a flower of foam and bubbles, to reappear a moment later a little farther out.
Sonia came out first, she thought it was too cold. Her lips were blue and trembling, she had goose-flesh on her thighs and breasts and her dark nipples stood on end with the cold. He handed her a towel. She smiled and turned her back while she dried herself. Monica crawled along the furthest reef with long, measured strokes. Her forehead and cheeks caught the sunlight when she turned her face towards them for a moment. He told Sonia she had changed since he last saw her. She certainly hoped so. She smiled again and wound the towel around herself and sat down beside him. He looked at their fluted shadows in the sand. Lea squatted a little way off, she had made a small hill of wet sand and was decorating it with mussel shells.
He offered Sonia a cigarette, she didn’t smoke, he lit one for himself. How long was she staying? For a month, then she would go back. She talked about New York, where she shared an apartment in Little Italy with a Belgian girl. Actually there wasn’t much Italian in Little Italy, the Chinese had taken over. Really . . . She asked if it wasn’t a strain for Monica and him to work at the same hospital. A strain? Yes . . . She smiled at his uncomprehending expression. He said it was really very practical. But didn’t they get on top of each other? He waved to Lea when she raised her head and looked at them. She had a shadow of wet sand on one cheek. You don’t get much time to do that, he replied, and anyway they worked in different departments. She nodded in agreement and looked at him with feigned attention, as if she was not really listening.
He had changed as well. She dug her toes into the sand. He smiled and