Myfanwy Moore
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They moved to London. The young men in the bus had given them an address of a squat in Westbourne Park, but when they arrived it was boarded up; great Georgian windows barricaded by hardwood, as if shielded from an embarrassing comedown. As the sisters were beautiful they were adopted as muses by some art students, who let them share a room in their student digs for one pound a week, and helped them get jobs as secretaries in the art school. Trixie was the assistant to the Head of Sculpture and Bonnie the administrative help to the Head of Design. They pooled their wages and met in the pubs of South Kensington in their lunch breaks. There are several paintings of them from around this time. One, as nudes, was by an artist who went on to become very famous, but remains in a private collection, and is rarely documented.
The seventies saw the sisters marry. Bonnie to a man rather delightfully called Clyde, a publisher of high-end art books. Trixie to a sculptor, Kenneth, who soon made a lot of money with his bust of Winston Churchill, which was mass produced and resurrected on the desk of every headmaster in the country. They spent evenings in well-heeled homes smelling of patchouli bought in Camden Market, discussing the merits of art and books. Their lack of a serious education occasionally unseated them in a discussion, but the other would always be a back up, agreeing with quotes never said, constructing histories, flying by the seat of their Biba pants. Their mother, Celia, still living in the cottage and tending her chickens, would receive postcards from places as far flung as India from Bonnie, and from pretty rural villages that looked just like her own from Trixie.
The sisters decided they wanted children, planned their impregnations simultaneously, and rang each other the next morning to compare notes. They gave birth within the same week, in the summer of the Silver Jubilee. London was buzzing with free concerts and street parties, an endless cascading of blue and silver crepe paper. Bonnie had a water birth in their house in Highbury, Trixie a messy caesarean in the Royal Free in Hampstead.
A decade passed. Snow fell on the hills around the cottage, where they gathered for Christmas. There sat Bonnie and Clyde, red haired daughters Amber and Garnet, and unexpected new baby Alun, dark and mewing. Joining them was Trixie, chain-smoking, Kenneth, and their rather chubby children Daisy and Michael. Their mother Celia was at the head of the table, having supplied and prepared the turkey. It was one she had especially reared in the back yard, and killed with her
own hands on Christmas Eve in front of the two elder grandchildren, who were now refusing to eat it. Celia had become increasingly eccentric.
Five years later Trixie and her family moved out of London, and into the cottage, following Celia’s death after being kicked in the kidneys by the neighbouring farmer’s young steer. Bonnie stayed in London, only to be left by her husband several years later for a younger woman who, he said, “understood him”. After the divorce Bonnie followed Trixie out to the countryside they had both grown up in. She arrived alone. Amber was studying art history in Italy, and Garnet and Alun chose to live with their father in London. This was Bonnie’s only consolation: she knew how the children would cramp Clyde’s attempt at a new life. She found a place in the next village, acquired a dog, and was disliked and mistrusted by many, carrying, as an attractive divorcee, a similar status to that of a witch. Bonnie saw Trixie and Kenneth often, and for the first time in a long time Trixie felt complete.
But then they stopped talking.