The Sisterhood by Emily Barr Page B

dark brown furniture covered in dust sheets. The parts they did use had barely changed since my earliest childhood, and I knew, although I never went back there, that my bedroom was fully intact, and probably always would be, with its pink bedlinen and posters of musicians I'd never really known but had put up in an attempt to become like the other girls at school, to fit in. This was in spite of the fact that I'd barely ever brought a friend home. I knew the atmosphere in our house was weird, and I'd instinctively kept home and school apart. Tom did the same. He had millions of friends but, even though we lived in a chateau, they never came to visit.
    'Helen!' Mother widened her eyes in exasperation. 'Where is your coat , Helen? Come on in.' She tutted at me, and, as I reached the top of the steps, she reached for my hand. 'You're freezing,' she scolded. I shrugged, avoiding her face. I knew she didn't really care. She tried to act like a mother around me, and I had always known she was faking it. Now that I knew that she had abandoned a baby before me, I could understand why she was like this. She was one of those women who was never meant to be a mother. I wondered why she'd had two more children after running out on Elizabeth (Lizzie, Betty, Beth). Having failed so spectacularly the first time, she should have steered well clear.
    I stepped into the hall and stared into her face, trying to divine whether she wished she had aborted me. Abortion was legal when she was pregnant with me. It had even been legal when she got pregnant with Elizabeth. She shouldn't have kept having unwanted babies when she could have flushed us all away.
    She was looking at me, a strange expression on her face. Mother was fifty-eight but she didn't look old yet. She was tall, with long fair hair, like me, though she wore her hair in a severe chignon and I left mine loose. She should have been pretty, even at her age, but she was tense and her face was lined with pent-up worry and anger. I could never have asked her how she was feeling. I did wonder, though.
    We stared into each other's face, unspeaking. I wondered whether she was looking at me like she was because she knew that I knew her secret. Abruptly, she turned her back, and I followed her into the dining room, which was formal and oppressive, with portraits of people we didn't know on the walls. Her heels clipped across the parquet floor. My trainers squeaked.
    'Hélène!' My father was sixty-five, and he was the one who looked old, because he was.
    'Oui, Papa, ' I said, and let him hold my shoulders and kiss each of my cheeks. He handed me an aperitif, a glass of sweet wine, and stood and looked at me. They both did. I turned away. Self-conscious, I took a deep gulp of wine, and felt it go immediately to my head. They always made me drink in the middle of the day. It made me so drowsy that I had to go home and sleep all afternoon.
    'What have you been doing this week, Helen?' asked Mother, crisply.
    As if you didn't know, I answered silently. As if you didn't stand at the window watching my comings and goings.
    'Not much,' I told her, meekly. 'And you?'
    'You know what we've been doing. All the usual things that we do. But what about you? You don't seem to have been out and about. Do you have a plan?' She touched my arm. 'Have you thought any more about university?'
    I smiled, and shook my head. This was what I wanted to say: 'You can't wait to get rid of me, can you? You can't even have me in the house for five minutes without asking when I'm moving out.' I tried to let my eyebrows say it for me.
    Papa frowned. 'Think about getting some work, Hélène,' he said, in French. 'If you had a job in Bordeaux, I could drive you in, in the mornings, and I could pick you up afterwards. It wouldn't be a problem. You can go to university next year, in Bordeaux. You had good results. You need to meet people.' He looked at my face. 'We want you to be happy,' he added. I watched him looking at Mother,