The Half Sister Read online

  To my parents, with love.

  Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Catherine Chanter, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ‘Nellie the Elephant’: words by Ralph Butler, music by Peter Hart © copyright 1956 Chester Music Limited trading as Dash Music Co. All rights reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission of Chester Music Limited trading as Dash Music Co.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 124 2

  eISBN 978 1 78689 125 9

  Typeset in Dante MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Catherine Chanter

  In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

  – Leonardo da Vinci

  NARRATIVE VERDICT

  INQUEST TOUCHING THE DEATH OF VALERIE STEADMAN

  Inquest concluded July 2016

  Valerie Steadman died as a result of crush injuries to the pelvis and chest. Valerie Steadman would have died instantly as a result of these injuries and the delay in the arrival of the emergency services is not deemed to be a factor in this case.

  On the night of April 12th 2016, Valerie Steadman was staying at Wynhope House as a guest of her half-sister Diana, Lady Helyarr. She was sleeping in the guest room on the top floor of the East Wing known as the Tower.

  At 3.25 a.m. on the morning of April 13th, there was an earthquake of magnitude 5.4 (Richter scale) at a depth of 2.3 miles, the epicentre of which was approximately 3 miles from Wynhope House. An earthquake of 4.7–5.6 occurs in the UK every 10 years, an earthquake of 5.6 or larger every 100 years. Six buildings within a 10-mile radius of the epicentre suffered significant structural damage rendering them temporarily uninhabitable, a further 38 buildings suffered minor structural damage and there were a total of 3 fatalities attributed to the earthquake. Both the main section of Wynhope House and the adjoining Tower remained standing although structural damage to the joists joining the two parts of the residence was apparent.

  At 3.37 a.m. on the morning of April 13th, there was a lesser aftershock of magnitude 4.6 (Richter scale). The combination of the two tremors and the disturbance to the foundations of the building caused by the recent excavation of a basement extension led the Tower to separate from the main house and collapse. The quality of, regulations pertaining to, and planning in regard of, the excavation are subject to a separate inquiry.

  Valerie Steadman’s body was located beneath the rubble by the Fire and Rescue Service at the bottom of the staircase in the Tower in the area immediately inside and adjacent to the ground-floor front door at 10.09 a.m., April 13th.

  The door leading from the first floor of the Tower to the first-floor landing of the main house and the door leading from the ground floor of the Tower wing directly onto the drive were both locked at the time the earthquake occurred. Despite an extensive search by forensic services, the key to these doors has not been found.

  Minor bruising and cuts to Valerie Steadman’s knees and shins were commensurate with a fall on the spiral staircase in the Tower and were acquired prior to death. Bruising to both hands on the knuckles and damage to fingernails on the right hand were consistent with injuries likely to have been sustained while trying to open one or both of the wooden doors.

  As the doors were locked by person or persons unknown and for reasons not established and as there is no clear indication as to why the key was not readily available to expedite the deceased’s escape between the first and second shocks, and bearing in mind that had the doors been unlocked the deceased may have escaped alive, the consequences of the doors being locked are both significant and enduring and therefore the jury in this matter records a narrative verdict.

  Peter D. Merland

  HM Coroner

  Chapter One

  Over half of the sitting room is now a bright, brilliant dazzling yellow; the rest is rent grey. Whoever designed these flats in the 1970s in Bracknell never thought about the fact that the windows are too high to let you see out unless you stand up and too narrow to let the light in when the sun is low over the tower blocks opposite. It can get you down, if you let it, but this place where they have arrived is so much better than the prison they have escaped. Valerie has been singing along, but now she picks up her mobile and turns down the volume on the radio.

  ‘Sorry, who did you say you are again?’

  Less than two minutes later, because that’s all it takes, she is perched on the edge of the imitation leather sofa as if she has somewhere to go, knowing that there is nowhere to go from here, noticing that the Spring Sunshine has rubbed off from the paintbrush to the remote control to the cushion, the news leaving its fingerprints all over her life.

  ‘Oh, Mum,’ she says. ‘Not Mum. Not now.’

  There is no point in singing any longer. Valerie switches on the telly. The reporter is ill at ease, looking over his shoulder as if he is about to be attacked, but in fact the destruction behind him is something to do with a tsunami, not a war. It is all a long way away and the news leaves the victims picking through the wreckage and switches instead to people chanting the name of their new president and celebrating in their thousands, a young man with a child on his shoulders cheering to the cameras above the surge and the swell of the chorus. ‘This is what hope feels like!’ he shouts. That’s how Valerie’s come to think of herself recently, a woman with the weight of her young son on her shoulders, a load that both grounds her and leaves her light as air and dancing. Leaning against the kitchen counter with her first cigarette for a long time, she studies this, their safe place, and imagines her mother visiting at last, hesitating at the door with potted-up purple crocuses from the supermarket in one hand, making up for lost time in the other in a what-might-have-been parallel future.

  Valeri
e kicks the stepladder, which knocks the paint pot, which tips out a slow curl of a yellow tongue that licks last week’s paper spread out on the carpet, and a thin black cat springs from its sleep up onto the coffee table, rippling the scum on a cold cup of tea and sending part of a half-finished jigsaw of Elvis crumbling over the edge onto the floor.

  Some time later, the slam of the back door tells her Mikey is back.

  ‘I’m home.’

  Half in and half out of his anorak, the child first notices the smell of fresh paint and the proportion of the sitting room which has turned yellow while he’s been at school, and only then registers the fact that his mother is crying. Dropping his reading folder, he joins her in picking up the pieces of the broken jigsaw.

  ‘You all right, Mum?’ he asks.

  He doesn’t want to repeat the question or hear the answer, so he says nothing more, kneels on the floor and presses the cardboard joints back into their sockets, the two of them together quietly reassembling the letters above Elvis’s head – Promised Land. He hands her a glittery bit of the star’s suit, she slots it into place.

  ‘Come and sit here, you!’ says Valerie, patting the sofa.

  She budges up a bit, he sits cross-legged at the other end, picking at the hardened piece of glue on his school trousers which has not come out in the wash.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asks. ‘Is it him?’

  It is a physical pain in her chest, the knowledge that this is the first thing that occurs to him, only nine years old and looking over his shoulder. ‘No, love, no, and it’s never going to be. Where is he?’

  ‘Australia.’

  The day he looks at her when he says it, that will be the time when she knows he really believes it. ‘Paul’s gone and he’s never coming back.’ She pushes his hair out of his eyes. ‘But I have got some news. You know your nanna from Bristol? She’s passed on.’

  ‘Where to?’

  Valerie struggles to control the muscles in her face. ‘I’m sorry, love. What I mean to say is your . . . A doctor from the hospital rang up. Your nanna’s dead. I’ve lost her.’

  Mikey has lost a lot of things, like his swimming trunks for instance, and he has managed to get by without telling anyone that all term, but he’s never lost a person he loved, although for a long time it seemed to him his mother was hard to find. But now she’s lost Nanna and won’t ever get her back, he senses the depth of the sinkhole which has opened up in the half-grey half-yellow room and tiptoes as close to the edge as he dares.

  ‘Sorry about Nanna,’ he says, staring at the television where people are running screaming from the sea, dragging their children behind them, everything wobbling as if the world is built on a boat. He changes the channel to their favourite daytime game show where the jackpot stands at £2,500. This should cheer her up.

  ‘Don’t cry, Mum.’ He hugs her. ‘You’ve got me.’

  ‘I’ve got you, all right,’ she says. ‘And Solomon.’

  He’ll be out soon, she reminds herself, then they’ll be a family, nights in together with a takeaway and a box set, days out together with a picnic at a beach as golden as this sitting room. They will skim stones across the sea in summer and throw snowballs in winter and who can ask for more?

  ‘And Jesus,’ says Mikey.

  ‘And Jesus, of course,’ she says, ‘Sol wouldn’t want us to forget him.’

  ‘What happens now?’

  Valerie doesn’t know. ‘Now’ seems to be an unnatural combination of blank days stretching on and on in which there is nothing to be done because nothing can be done, and a terrible urgency to arrange the things she imagines need to be arranged: clear out the fridge in her mum’s house before things start to smell, feed her budgerigar, caged and peck-peck-pecking at the stripped millet, call the undertaker, order the flowers, but how she’ll pay for it all she has no idea. Money is tight since she walked away, but it has been a small price to pay. There is one person who has money and then some. Her sister. Big sister. Half-sister. Diana.

  Valerie blows her nose. ‘You get on with your homework, I’m going to phone your aunty.’

  ‘The rich bitch?’

  ‘Don’t you dare use language like that,’ says Valerie. ‘I should never have called her that.’

  ‘You said you haven’t spoken to her for years and years and years.’

  ‘I haven’t. I didn’t stay in touch with her or your nanna. Paul didn’t like it, did he? And Diana never called me.’

  ‘And you said she wasn’t a real aunty. You said she was only half an aunty.’

  ‘She’s family, Mikey, and family matters at a time like this.’

  People often assumed that the final straw with Paul must have been him beating her or something violent like that, but they were wrong. It was the joke notice he bought from a gift shop and nailed to the kitchen wall: ‘Never Forget, As Far as Everyone Else Is Concerned, We Are a Perfectly Normal Family.’ Family, there is no one else left now who understood her childhood except Diana, no one to mourn with except Diana, and not just her mum, but mourn all of it, the graveyard that was their family life back then. She takes a deep breath. No reply. Leave a message. Silence taps its fingers with impatience until she abruptly rings off. Your mum passed away, you can’t do that on voicemail.

  ‘How did she get to be so rich?’ Mikey asks later. He has brought his duvet and Penguin downstairs and put on Titanic because that might help. He likes the height of the waves and the sinking; she likes the kissing bits and cries at the ending, but, like most stories, this has a boring part at the beginning before it all goes wrong and that’s where they are up to now.

  ‘She married it, didn’t she?’ Valerie corrects herself. ‘To be fair, that’s not totally true. She walked out the house when she was sixteen and that was the last we saw of her, more or less, but I think she worked her own way up the ladder even before she met Sir Moneybags.’

  Later, there is trouble on the deck, the first mate is looking out through his telescope. Valerie calls her sister again. It’s getting late, but she hasn’t got her mobile number. There’s still no reply.

  ‘Why did she leave?’

  Shifting her position on the sofa, Valerie considers the question. ‘Truth is, Mikey, I don’t know. I never really understood.’

  They are jumping now, the passengers, choosing to hurl themselves into the churning sea, rather than die behind locked doors.

  ‘Anyway, maybe me and Diana can make up again.’

  ‘Doubt it,’ says Mikey. He reaches for his mother’s hand under the duvet, even as fingernails are slipping from the edge of the lifeboats. Nobody comes. Even though they are shouting across the icy sea, help me, help me, nobody comes.

  Chapter Two

  Positioned by the Aga in the kitchen at Wynhope House, Diana is eating grapes when the landline rings the next morning. She is irritated because they were sold as seedless but she finds that she is having to spit pips into the sink before she can answer.

  The conversation with Valerie propels Diana over to the long window where she stands rigidly, looking out at the magnolia flowers, plump and pink against the burned amber of the listed coach house on the far side of the lawns. With the phone to her ear, she knocks on the glass to scare the squirrel from the bird feeder and watches all the long-tailed tits take flight, then she sits awkwardly on the edge of one of the chairs. She says very little. She says, ‘Well, thank you for letting me know anyway’ and ‘Who phoned you?’ And then she says, ‘And I suppose I’ll have to pay for everything.’

  The call is over. Diana shakes her head violently from side to side as if to dislodge something disturbing her vision, runs her hands slowly up over her closed eyes and through her hair and clasps them tightly together for a moment before breathing out, a controlled breath through pursed lips, the sort that kindles fire from embers. When she opens her eyes, the subtitles on the morning news are describing several hundred dead in a tsunami and the image shows yet another body being passed from rescue work
er to rescue worker, hands above their heads, a crowd-surfing corpse.

  My mother is dead.

  In the wide wood-panelled hall, she pauses out of habit in front of a gilt-edged mirror. There is nothing wrong with her lipstick, nor with the lie of the jade necklace against her pale neck; it is not those things which made her hesitate, rather it is the bewildering combination of being more alive than she realised before, and yet older, and, yes, at forty-one statistically half way between death and birth. For a moment, time fractures and who is who in the mirror and when unsteadies her world and she almost starts to cry. In the doorway to the morning room, she hesitates. Despite its name, it is only in spring that the early sun streams through the large window as it does now, it is an alchemist, everything it touches turns to gold, the logs in the basket, the antique globe on the desk, even Edmund, his tanned arms, his auburn hair. The back of her husband’s head is all she can see from here.

  She clears her throat. ‘That was Valerie!’ she announces.

  In the leather armchair, he is sprawled with one leg cocked over the arm like a gorgeous boy, but he is scrutinising the financial pages with the casual interest of an older man who can afford to lose a little. He barely raises his eyes. ‘Oh God! Valerie! Your sister? What does she want? A blank cheque?’

  As if to catch her as she passes his chair, he reaches out his arm, but she slips away and stands with her back to him at the round mahogany table in the bay window, rearranging the yellow tulips.

  ‘My half-sister called to let me know that my mother has died.’ Diana sidesteps his awkward hug. ‘And for Christ’s sake, Edmund, don’t treat me like the grief-stricken daughter. When did I last see her? Years ago. It’s a bit of shock, that’s all, Valerie ringing up out of the blue like that.’

  The flowers are thirsty. She picks up the vase, but then has to sit down quite suddenly on the sofa and the tulips tip to the floor, a dribble of stale water trickling along the embroidered pathways of the Turkish rug. As Edmund replaces the tulips they feel curiously false, as if it would be hard to tell plastic from the real thing. ‘You sit there,’ he says. ‘Monty will look after you, won’t you, old boy? I’ll fetch us a drink.’