Free The Bad Sister by Emma Tennant Page B

sight to a hidden loch. But there was so seldom sun. The valley was steep. It looked, on a black day, as if its contours had been drawn with slashing lines on rough paper, and asif the lines contained our sentence, my mother’s and mine. For our sins, we should stay here forever. And as it was clear she had practically no money, there seemed no way of getting out at all.
    I’d seen the girl several times, the laird’s real daughter. I’d been up the narrow mud road that led to our exile’s cottage, and stared down at the large white house where she lived with her father and mother. She had a thin, bony, Scottish face, with grey eyes and fair hair, and always a slight smile of self-satisfaction at the corners of her mouth; she bounced an old red rubber ball against the wall of the kitchen garden as I watched her from the moorland above; sometimes her hair was tied in bunches and I knew it went a little frizzy in the rain. I was completely and obsessively jealous of her. I was her shadow, and she mine. By the time we went to the village school together, for we were almost exactly the same age, I think we both knew we were sisters. We fought in the school playground, which was a small stretch of concrete slung high in the hills, on the outskirts of the laird’s small village. I went up on the seesaw, which was made from the thick trunk of a felled tree, and she went down; she went up, her eyes excited, grey as the drizzle that fell continually on us, her hooked, bony nose and thin mouth hovering over me, while I was down on the ground. One day she got up and walked away when I was up in the air, and I came crashing down. The teacher looked the other way.
    My mother called to me from the kitchen to come in. It was the summer holidays: long, empty, grey days. Today the jeep would come along the mud track, over the top of the hill, and the laird and his party would spread rugs out in front of our cottage, on the sloping grass by the overflowing burn. In the gentle rain, watched by sheep, they would eat pies and hard-boiled eggs and drink beer and wine, leaving the cans and bottles for my mother to collect. Then, flushed, they would go slowly up the hill to their holes. I was never allowed to be there. But if the daughter was with them she would twist on her rug and gaze at the windows ofthe house. Her mother, fair-haired as her daughter, and self-contained, also with an expression of secret amusement on her face most of the time, never turned to look at the cottage. When she walked back to the jeep with the picnic basket after lunch, it was always head down, eyes on the thin grass by the track, and the sheep droppings, and the ugly colt’s foot that grew there, yellow and darkened with rain.
    â€˜Can’t you see it’s raining?’
    Of course; it was always raining. My mother was using it as a pretext to get me in from the grass in front of the cottage. She came halfway towards me from the back of the house. Her head was jerking in the direction of the track; she must have heard the jeep. I saw she was crying. My mother’s eyes were blue. When she cried they were like the water of the burn, bursting its banks. I went stiff, with anger at the life we led here. I stood my ground.
    â€˜You’ll be soaked. Anyway, they’re coming. Jane! Hurry up!’
    My mother scurried up the bank and disappeared round the back of the house. In the past she would have dragged me with her – perhaps a part of her now, exhausted by the repressions of the past years, wanted a showdown of some kind. Indecision as to whether to move or not kept me rooted to the spot. And the jeep reared up on the crest of the hill. The engine was roaring, in first gear, the wheels were coated with mud.
    â€˜Jane!’ My mother tried calling me one more time, from behind the window of the front room, and her voice sounded distant and resigned. I turned to face the jeep. Rain ran down the windows and the faces of