The Half Sister Read online

  Like a child faced with jigsaw pieces which don’t fit together, Edmund screws up his face. ‘You wouldn’t have locked it, Di, would you? I suppose you were tired and a bit . . .’ He is going to say pissed, but underneath the understanding smile, there is something rather officious about these inquisitors, so he continues in a different direction. ‘After the funeral. No one would blame you.’

  ‘Blame?’ repeats Diana. ‘Blame?’

  ‘I suppose in time we can always ask Valerie’s son.’

  One theory, put forward by Edmund, is that Valerie might have locked the door herself, particularly if she was up to no good, taking drugs, for example.

  Diana clutches at the straw. ‘She was certainly off her head. She threw stuff round the room before she went to bed. She could have done anything, the state she was in.’

  ‘Threw stuff?’ Edmund is puzzled.

  ‘All that mess in the dining room.’

  It’s as clear as daylight in Diana’s memory: the glass smashed, red wine and meringue on the carpet and cigarette burns on the table, the sideboard ransacked, linen napkins flying like cream doves as Valerie demonstrated the worthlessness of their wealth.

  ‘I thought that was the earthquake.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t you ever listen to anything I say?’

  Consulting their clipboards, the SOCOs exchange looks that indicate they are used to being present when things fall apart. The man has been checking the wiring and wonders why the imitation candles in the alcoves on the stairs would have been switched off.

  ‘The electricity went out,’ says Diana quickly. ‘It’s still out in case you haven’t noticed, although for some reason the rest of the county appears to have power.’

  ‘No. They were switched off at the wall at the door to the landing,’ he insists. ‘Odd thing to do if you’re sleeping in a strange house.’ At that moment, something falls from the sky and hits him on the head. ‘What the hell was that?’

  That was a toy zebra, now lying on the gravel on its side, like dead horses do. Mikey is leaning out of the nursery window. He throws another animal, a lion on a green plastic stand with a model trainer in top hat and tails next to him, the handle of a whip raised and a thin black lash snaking down to the base.

  ‘What are you doing? Michael, stop that!’ shouts Diana.

  For a second he disappears, but then he is back. The toys are harmless, it is the manner in which they are thrown that is frightening. The last to leap to a crazy end is a gorilla in a cage, no more than three inches tall, one paw moulded around the bars, the other claws reaching through the gaps towards a tiny plastic key.

  The woman picks it up, shakes her head. ‘Bless him, he’s trying to communicate in the only way he knows.’ With a deep breath, she seems to be summoning her professional persona. ‘We’ve finished here for the time being. Apart from the tape.’

  The black letters slowly unravel the message on the yellow plastic. Site under investigation. Do Not Enter. Site under investigation. Do not enter.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Egyptian cotton sheets and feather duvet used to be her haven, but now even the bed is suspicious of Diana, turning her over and rejecting her, and she finds sleep of sorts only through the combination of pills and wine which keep her unconscious late into the morning.

  Mikey still insists on sleeping on the floor. As lightly, as softly as any new mother on tiptoe and tenterhooks, Edmund pulls the covers over him. Later, in the car with the ignition on, he listens to the nine o’clock news. Three days on and the earthquake has dropped from everyone’s headlines except their own and only warrants a mention because jitters in the market have hit property and building shares. It may be that his portfolio reads like a death warrant, but he has to admit to himself that they have been lucky. He says as much to Diana when finally, heavy-headed and fractious, she joins him in the kitchen and pours herself a glass of bottled water.

  ‘It could all have been so much worse,’ he says. ‘Look, the kitchen’s as good as new, isn’t it?’ He would have liked her to thank him for the work he has done this morning, clearing up while she slept.

  With her head in the fridge, Diana notices nothing. ‘I’ll need to chuck everything out today.’ There is something about a broken fridge, how dead it is, the quietly rotting contents. Should she say more, this morning? Just let him know that she locked the tower door? He’d call her a silly old thing, but he’d sort it out and then she wouldn’t have to have breakfast with a secret.

  ‘Perhaps we could still go away. We don’t need to cancel the Maldives, do we? All I can think of here is Valerie,’ says Diana, turning away from the rancid smell of the milk she is pouring down the sink. ‘Come back when it’s all sorted.’

  Tempting, but impossible, according to Edmund. Apart from anything else (and he thinks he means Mikey but can’t say so), he is going to have to spend a lot of time in London, the Stock Exchange has taken a bit of a beating, the government are talking about a freeze on fracking, which is just his luck and completely irrational (there have been tremors in the UK for centuries before fracking began), and then there’s the problems with the Riverside Development, the investors are making all sorts of ridiculous demands for geological surveys.

  ‘Can’t blame them,’ says Diana. ‘When the property developer’s own little excavation didn’t exactly stand the test.’

  ‘So it’s my fault, is it?’

  He doesn’t want to pursue this. He knows in his heart that it never works out well – builders doing you a favour in return for a contract on a new housing estate, planners and county councillors and heritage officials giving you the nod in return for lunch at a club in London with a man with a title. Nothing’s for nothing in this world, that’s what his father would have said. ‘All power corrupts’, that was another one of his, but Edmund never even thought of the bloody swimming pool and power and corruption in the same breath, and now Valerie is dead and a paper trail is required, and he finds himself sick to his stomach and a little shaky because Valerie is dead, died, here, at Wynhope, killed, and the pool is the bottom of the sea and Poseidon its angry god. And then there’s Mikey.

  Maybe breakfast will help. The toaster isn’t working, so he sits at the table picking at the bread then spooning out the marmalade to check for glass. ‘We haven’t even mentioned Mikey, what are you going to do about him?’ he asks.

  ‘What do you mean, what am I going to do about him?’

  ‘All right, what are we going to do about him?’

  ‘Not much until social services come.’

  ‘What, and then send him off with them?’ Edmund screws the lid back on. He doesn’t think small boys eat marmalade. He used to like strawberry jam.

  ‘Why, do you want to keep him here?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘What did you mean then?’ Diana stands at the sink with her back to Edmund. Only a thin strip of land separates the back of the house from the fields; whatever Wynhope promises from the front, backstage there is no sweeping avenue of trees leading to a Greek temple on the hill, just wire to keep the sheep out and rusted railings on which John hangs carcasses of vermin, in the way that conquering armies put heads on spikes so that the locals should understand the consequences of their actions.

  ‘I haven’t really thought of him staying here for ever.’ An image forms in Edmund’s mind: how it might have been if he’d had sons at Wynhope, if he’d been brave enough to have something he could risk everything for, including losing it.

  Wiping her hands over and over again on a dirty tea towel, Diana rounds on him. ‘Where else has he got?’

  ‘Keep your voice down. Just now it was you saying he’d have to go. Now you’re saying he has to stay. I don’t think you know what you want.’

  ‘No, I don’t know what I want, all right? My sister’s dead. My mother’s dead. It’s difficult,’ she screams. ‘Is that all right with you? For me not to know for once? For your lettings agent to have lost
the plot?’

  The back door opens.

  ‘Hooray.’ Edmund claps. ‘Thank goodness you’re here.’

  Mrs H puts everything right. Isn’t she always Little Miss Fixit, thinks Diana: honey nut cereal and fresh milk for breakfast for Michael; two supermarket carrier bags with things her grandson Liam has long grown out of, jeans, T-shirts, Lego. She even has the physique for helping small boys, the boy running into the kitchen and losing himself in her barely contained 40DD bosom. When he leaves the room, Mrs H comments that it isn’t right, still not speaking after all this time, but it’s a terrible thing to lose a parent, and they seemed close, didn’t they? Such a lovely lady and the two of them the splitting image of each other. She knows what she’s doing, pick-pick-picking at the scab. The last thing produced is the newspaper, Sir Edmund’s day wouldn’t be right unless he had his FT.

  ‘You certainly know the way to a man’s heart,’ Diana smiles.

  ‘And so do you.’ says Mrs H.

  And as if the housekeeper’s powers do not end there, just as Edmund opens the paper in the morning room, an injection of adrenaline shoots through the arteries of the house and they all find themselves laughing and cheering at the return of the electricity like children at a magic show. Only Mikey remains unmoved. Upstairs, there is nothing important in the nursery that needs switching on. There isn’t even any furniture to speak of, no curtains, no lamps, but Mikey has made this place his own. Monty waits for him on the landing, he is a very loyal soldier. The stairs to the nursery are not as narrow and steep as the ones in the tower and you don’t have the feeling that they’re going on for ever which is what he remembers about the steps in the tower, that and the wall. Although he tries, he can’t remember what it looked like at the end of the stairs or at the bottom or what was on the other side of the wall, but he knows for certain that here is where he wants to be now, alone, at the very top of the house.

  The door on the right has two keyholes, probably because that is where his aunt and uncle keep all their money. One is like the lock on his front door at home. The thought, loosely attached to the word, catches in the spokes of his thinking, but he pedals on. Yale. That key went to school with him in the secret inside zip pocket of his anorak so he could always get back in, even if Mum was asleep. What would happen now no one could wake her up? He doesn’t know; he doesn’t know where they have taken her either, but he thinks she will end up with Nanna in the cemetery along with the thousands of others, but he can’t ask. Will he ever go back to school? Or back home? Or did home fall down in the earthquake? He can’t ask those things either. He can’t ask anything, because his voice has stopped working and he has stopped practising in the mirror because he sort of quite likes it, not giving any more of himself away and not knowing.

  His nursery room is through the door on the left and that has locks as well, except he’s the one with the key now. From the moment he discovered it when the investigators came, he liked it. It has windows facing both ways. Out of the back, far below him, a lamb has got its head stuck in the wire between the field and the house; it’s twisting its neck one way then the other, and the more it struggles, the more it gets stuck. It’s a long way down from up here; if you jumped, you’d die unless you had superpowers and could fly. From the front windows, the drive is a grey crayon line across the park and he can’t really remember how that ends either. It just goes off the edge of the paper.

  Kneeling down, he pays attention once more to the faded box he found in the cupboards under the sloping ceiling. ALL THE FUN OF THE CIRCUS FOR BOYS AGED 7–10. CONTENTS: ONE BUILD-IT-YOURSELF BIG TOP, TWENTY MODEL ANIMALS AND PERFORMERS, ONE WIND-UP MUSIC BOX. There is no big top, whatever that is, and the thing that is probably the music box only rattles when he shakes it. Having taken it apart, Mikey understands that it has lost a handle and a spring and he puts it back carefully under the instruction leaflet as if he has never opened it. He does not want to be accused of something which is not his fault. Edmund has given him back all the models he threw out of the window and now he can see there are a lot more than the twenty animals it says on the lid. Someone must have made a bit of a collection. Propped up against the wall, he takes them out one by one and arranges them in a semi-circle around him. The fiercest animals are chosen first: the pair of tigers, snarling, one with his head turned to the right, one with his head turned to the left, then the lions, the troop of three elephants including a baby elephant, and the four white horses with plumes on their heads and acrobats on their backs. They all join the circle around him, evenly spaced. The dead zebra is revived, reunited with its brother, and the boy puts them side by side at one end and then the monkeys, hanging from bars at the other end. The outer defences are nearly complete. He shifts position because of pins and needles, and his sock catches the ponies, knocks them over, but with great precision he stands them back up again on the uneven carpet. The people ruin the circus. They are gaudy and ugly. The girls on the horses have pink blobs on their cheeks and white legs and stiff yellow hair so he prises them off the performing ponies, snapping their thin wrists where they are attached to red plastic harnesses and throwing them back in the box. The lion tamer breaks off easily at the ankles, leaving his feet in black boots attached to the base and the remains of his whip on the floor. The other people, the ballerinas, the grinning clown and the fat man in the blue waistcoat, they are all rejected.

  The animals are out of order now. Methodically he works his way round the semi-circle evening up the spacing and turning all the animals so they are facing outwards and he is on the inside. When the fire engine tries to get through, its siren blazing, the animals fight it back. When the plastic army tank advances on the circus, the animals do not surrender. Even when the soldiers in their brown camouflage with their machine guns plan to kill the horses, they rise again and nothing – nothing – can defeat the circus animals. The gorilla is broken free from his cage and appointed as his own personal bodyguard.

  The sound of a car door slamming interrupts his game. The woman outside with a badge round her neck is familiar. She’s staring up at the house, but doesn’t see him; no one would ever guess there was someone in the nursery if they didn’t know. They have come for him, he knew they would. His aunt is a liar. He feels sad that Edmund is a liar too.

  ‘I am so sorry about your sister,’ says the social worker, who introduces herself as Sarah.

  ‘Half-sister,’ says Diana, as she boils plain water for the decidedly plain boiled girl and coffee for themselves. Edmund and Diana both examine this thing called ‘the loss’, which sits at this table with them all day every day, the size and shape of it, the smell.

  ‘How is Mikey doing?’

  For the next few minutes they hand the boy round the table like pass the parcel; hesitantly, never quite knowing when the music is going to stop and you will be left unwrapping the paper, never quite knowing what you might find under the layers.

  ‘Diana, I believe you told the duty team that you’re happy for him to stay here,’ says Sarah.

  ‘For the time being,’ adds Edmund. ‘I believe my wife’s words were for the time being.’

  Sarah pointedly asks Diana what she would like to happen next. Breaking the piece of shortbread onto her plate into smaller and smaller pieces, Diana sweeps the stray crumbs from the table into her palm, then back onto the plate. She eats nothing. She takes the spoon out of the sugar pot and puts it ready for washing up before they have even begun.

  ‘We chose not to have children, we married late and, to be honest, we didn’t really want any,’ she begins.

  Edmund takes over. ‘That is why my first marriage ended,’ he explains. ‘I thought my first wife understood that I never wanted children, but it turned out she thought I’d change my mind when it came to it.’

  It could have been so different if he had changed his mind, because they were in love, he and Marguerite, head over heels and terribly young and Wynhope was everything to her, not the money or the status, but t
he way the poplars blew silver in the westerly wind, the dawn chorus colouring in the arboretum until it became a tropical jungle of song accompanying their early-morning lovemaking, the peace at the end of the day when the two of them sat in the rickety summerhouse and watched the grebe crossing the lake with her babies on her back. None of this would have happened. But they had taken different roads, and that, as some poet wrote, made all the difference.

  ‘And WNT,’ he added.

  ‘WNT?’

  ‘Wife Number Two.’ The social worker’s bound to be feminist and think that’s a politically incorrect way of referring to a woman. ‘She was the same, but different.’ Very different, probably a reaction against Marguerite who was fragile and held the future like a speckled blue eggshell. Children would have been just another asset for WNT.

  ‘The whole world mistakenly believes that a man in my position thinks about nothing other than having an heir.’ He downs his espresso in one. ‘You’re asking all the questions. We rather hoped you might have answers.’

  ‘I don’t know how much you know of Mikey’s story,’ says Sarah.

  ‘Enough.’ Diana puts the lid on the shortbread tin.

  ‘Because I thought the two of you had not been in touch for a very long time.’ Resuming calmly, Sarah tells them that Valerie was a single parent for three years, then found herself in a highly abusive relationship for four years which was undoubtedly very damaging for Mikey, and that she was extremely brave to have sought help and got out. ‘She might not have been particularly rich or empowered but Valerie really was a wonderful, loving mother to Mikey. She moved into a new flat, got a job, she was so positive, so full of hope.’

  The words ‘wonderful, loving mother’ spray themselves in graffiti across the kitchen walls. It’s a lie, Diana reminds herself; she witnessed Valerie drunk, sending the boy to bed on his own on the night of the funeral. She does not believe in wonderful, loving mothers.