Free A Little Death by Laura Wilson

sisters, that was how you met them, on the whole. Sometimes they put the fellow down in company, embarrassed him by talking about some childhood thing when he’d forgotten it, or wished he had. Georgina never did that. No, it wasn’t that, too much the other way, if anything. Like looking into a magic looking glass that reflected you the way you wanted to be, rather than the way you were. There, that’s used up my stock of clever talk; I’m no good at that, things being like other things. Except that I’ve often thought that my sister’s mind is rather like one of Heath Robinson’s machines: you pull a string and expect a bucket of coal, but instead you get a boiled egg or a whack on the head with a shovel. A miracle of jerry-building. All the bits work after a fashion, but you never quite know what’s coming next.
    Going out with Georgie was always an adventure. I remember the first time we ever went anywhere in London together, it would have been just after she was married, we took a trip on the Underground and they’d just installed an escalator at Earl’s Court, it was the first onethey’d built. No one had ever seen moving stairs before, so there was quite a crowd. There was a man with a wooden leg riding on them, all by himself, he’d go up and then walk down, then back up again on the escalator, and Georgie took one look at him and said, ‘Do you suppose it’s eaten his leg?’ And of course no one wanted to ride on it after that, so we had it all to ourselves, we went up and down a few times until we got the knack of stepping on and off. It turned out the man with the wooden leg was employed by the railway company; they thought people would be afraid of a moving staircase so they hired this man to ride on it to show people how easy it was. But all this is whitewash, you know, the old whitewash on the wall. That was a song they sang in the First War:
Wash me in the water that you wash your dirty daughter in, and I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall.
    I’ve always admired courage in others and Georgie has great courage. I still admire her for it, in spite of everything. At night I pray to God to make me brave, but each morning I wake up with the same feeling of dread like a stone inside my stomach. I’m not sure, any longer, why I pray. Habit, partly. But I suppose if one is praying, one is making some sort of effort… but then again, why on earth should God listen to the prayers of a man like me?

GEORGINA
    Isn’t that the most extraordinary thing? There’s a certain type of woman—they’re usually servants, like that cook at Dennys—who will respond to absolutely any crisis by dishing out tea and sandwiches. Ada got into a frightful habit of that during the last war. It was bad enough being woken up night after night by Hitler, without Ada thrusting piles of beige bread under our noses at three A.M. Edmund used to keep the gin bottle under his bed, because Ada makes quite the filthiest tea you can possibly imagine. Edmund always says that any mouse who tried to trot on it would end up full fathoms five before it had time to shake its tail.
    Roland and Louisa and I sat round that kitchen table and stared at those lumps of bread and jam for hours— perhaps it wasn’t hours, but certainly it felt like a lifetime. The kitchen maid shut up all the doors and windows, and pulled the blinds so that we couldn’t see what was happening outside. The half-light made the bread and jam look grey. I thought perhaps it was going to be some kind of
test
, to see if we were able to eat it or not. Roland and Louisa were sitting opposite me, and they had servants standing behind their chairs, and when I looked round, there was someone behind my chair. I could hear Louisa crying, but no one spoke toher. The servants didn’t look at us. They were all looking at the floor so I did, too.
    Nurse came to my chair and bent down, and mopped my knee where I’d fallen over and put a bandage on it. She tilted