Myfanwy Moore
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An extract from Sisters, Sisters
Bonnie was a fifty seven year old divorcee. She lived in a converted dairy by the post box on the green of a small village in Devon. She had a chocolate Labrador called Mildred. She fervently denied having an affair with her sister’s husband.
Her sister Trixie lived in the stone cottage where they were born, a mile away in the neighbouring village. She hadn’t spoken to Bonnie for four years. Their villages were linked by a narrow single-track lane. Twisting between overgrown hedgerows, it was used mainly by walkers or tractors. Everyone else used the larger B road that wound its way alongside, heading towards the cultural hive of the town some ten miles away.
When they were little the sisters were “closer than nature,” their mother, Celia, said. But she herself was a strange woman, paying more attention to her chickens and an elderly mare, letting the girls get themselves dressed and off to school on their own. Bonnie, dark with long brunette plaits, and Trixie, taller with light curls, would walk hand in hand along the narrow track to the school, where they were the youngest in the sole class of thirteen. The teacher, Mrs Selby, felt the number was unlucky, but no matter how many children left to take their place in the big wide world, others would always come, making the number up to thirteen again. If she had been asked to describe the sisters at that time she may have said, “They were quiet, always together. They loved painting. And they were popular with the boys. Well, Bonnie was. I think Trixie could be a little bit, well, tricksy.”
No one knew who was older. They lied from the time they could talk, declaring they had come into the world together, at the same time on the same day in the same year. This is what the skies had decided for them. They shared the same birthday, it was true, but Bonnie was actually one year older than Trixie, to the day. After Trixie was born, Celia would recoil at her husband’s touch, and he soon upped and left with a plain girl who used to come and help neuter the bullocks.
Celia had been married young, but grew up fast. She had to sell off the family’s farm when her husband left, but kept the cottage, the barns and the chickens. The sisters left the village school at sixteen, then took the bus daily into town for a year of secretarial lessons. They learnt typing and shorthand, and how to wear skirts that remained at a respectable length when bending over for a pencil. Each evening on the bus home they would look through women’s fashion magazines and stare at the exotic birds of paradise nesting within their pages. They would copy the poses, shorten their skirts, and giggle at the bus conductor. The late spring air seemed alight with fecund possibility.
On the field adjoining the cottage was an abandoned bus from the thirties, with a curved wooden roof. It was long and low, and slunk beneath the briars. The young cousin of the farmer next door lived in it, in return for helping out on the farm. He had come from London that summer and the girls could hear the chords of his guitar fetch them over the corn. One evening they sneaked right up to it. The young man was strumming while his friend lay on the step in the open doorway, smoking what the girls assumed were drugs. Bonnie tripped over an old boot in the briar bush, and they were discovered. From that time on most summer evenings were spent in the bus with these young men; languid evenings, warm and golden. At first the sisters were mute and admiring, but then they became more familiar, teasing and testing. By the end of that summer they were virgins no more, could roll a joint, and play and sing ‘Scarborough Fair.’ They vowed they would leave the countryside, their mother, and the cottage they had been born in. And they did.