The Half Sister Read online

  To Edmund, the words are an epitaph carved on a gravestone, softened only by lichen. Wonderful wife to George and loving mother to Edmund. He never visits their graves in the village, doesn’t even go to the church; he keeps candles in his chapel instead.

  Sarah is continuing with her story: how after the refuge the department didn’t need to have any further contact with Valerie until she entered into a relationship with a man known to them, that they were hoping to marry, he was a very steady influence on her, and it’s such a shame for everyone that the man in question is not in a position to be able to care for Mikey. He would have been a great dad.

  ‘The famous Solomon, I presume,’ says Diana.

  ‘An illegal immigrant’ – Edmund summarises the position like a judge – ‘and in prison. We know. You can leave the icing off the cake.’

  ‘An asylum seeker,’ Sarah corrects him. ‘He received a prison sentence in January after a scuffle with police in a demonstration outside the Ugandan Embassy. We’re hoping it doesn’t conflict with his indefinite leave to remain. He’s a Christian activist and was a gay rights campaigner in Uganda. It takes a real man to combine those two.’

  A real man. So she’s allowed a stereotype, thinks Edmund, but in truth he knows exactly what she’s getting at. ‘It must do,’ he acknowledges and then turns to Diana. ‘I had no idea, did you?’

  Another awkward silence, then the various legal options for Mikey are outlined by the social worker. To Edmund, they sound like the additional conditions you complete when you hire a car at a foreign airport, always more costly than you thought originally and not really covering you for any risk at all.

  ‘Adoption?’ suggests Diana.

  Too old apparently and too damaged. Edmund is unsure whether Sarah is referring to them or to the boy.

  ‘So, unless you know differently,’ says Sarah, ‘there isn’t anyone else, except you.’

  The music stops and the parcel drops and no one is looking to pick it up. Outside, a cloud moves over the sun and the light goes from the kitchen. With the sun, goes the fight. The March wind is whipping up the rain, lashing it against the window. Everything out there is hostile like him and why he felt the need to be so aggressive, Edmund has no idea. The music to this game is not the jaunty pass-the-parcel songs from children’s parties when he was small, but the great works which he has come to know since, the requiems and passions and kyrie eleisons which heave and heal in the core of the split soul. It is the exquisite pain of Schumann’s Nachtstücke played by his mother in the early evenings in a terrible foreshadowing of her own passing. It is to this music that he unwraps the newspaper and string and there inside is a boy. It isn’t necessarily what he wants to find, he can see it is going to be a difficult and an unlovely thing, it will possibly ruin everything, but it is what he has won.

  ‘This is all rather silly,’ says Edmund, quietly closing the back door against the squall. ‘I’m sorry I’ve sounded so, how would you call it, so, unhelpful, but there’s no question, really, is there, when it comes down to it?’

  Straightening her paperwork and reaching for her pen, Sarah grimaces at him, a spot-the-banker look, and he feels her disdain running down the front of his shirt like spit.

  ‘Mikey must stay with us,’ he says. ‘We must at least try.’

  The pen, phone, paperwork stay suspended above the open handbag, the social worker looks as though she is not sure she has heard him correctly, but Diana is nodding in agreement.

  ‘Yes, this is the only safe place he can be. Safe.’ She finds herself repeating things a lot nowadays, like a stroke victim or a dementia patient, not certain the word matches the intended meaning, or maybe saying everything twice to make up for the boy not saying anything at all.

  Which is what happens when Mikey is given the chance to talk to the social worker alone. Wriggling into his interview position at the table, Mikey focuses solely on his KitKat, smoothing out the foil bit, screwing up the red part, and Sarah says how sad she is to hear what has happened to Mummy and how her job is to make sure that he is looked after safely in a family where he feels this and feels that, and on and on she goes, sounding like the television does at home when he’s upstairs going to sleep and Mum is downstairs watching a box set.

  Sarah shuffles closer to him. ‘Your aunty says you haven’t spoken since the earthquake. Is there anyone you can talk to at the moment?’

  Mikey swings sideways on his chair. The foil is flat and shiny as a river. He went to the river on one of their walks, he liked it, paddling, looking for monster fish under the bridge where Edmund says the water is as deep as secrets. No more secrets, no more lies.

  ‘Can you write something down or draw?’

  It looks like a three-year-old’s house – four straight lines, a roof, windows – but it isn’t finished; he adds an extra storey with another row of windows until it looks a bit like Wynhope. With the felt-tips emptied out on the table, he picks the black and scribbles a mess to the tower side and uses grey for smoke rising up from that mess, then with the red he puts faces in every single window. He chooses green for the garden, brown for an oversized dog, glittery gold for the chapel at the edge of the page and blue for the river. Somewhere in the back of his mind he can hear his mum singing about a yellow brick road, so that’s the colour he chooses for the drive, all the way across the page and onto the kitchen table. The only colour left is orange; with that he traces the outline of something that is at least as tall as the house. He is secretive as he colours, taking extra care between the lines.

  ‘Wow, that’s some tree . . .’

  Mikey looks afresh at the picture, then without warning kicks the chair to the floor, rips the page into pieces, pushes it deep into the rubbish bin and is gone, off, out into the rain. From just outside the back door, he hears them confirming what he already knows. He is staying here. He needs help to talk. What is news to him is that although he is obviously traumatised by the earthquake and the loss of his mother, he has a real sense of family, apparently they can see it in his picture, all the happy faces looking out from the windows at Wynhope.

  ‘Did he say anything to you . . . about that night?’ asks Diana.

  ‘Not a word, but he will, one day soon.’

  When Sarah is leaving, Mikey throws stones at her departing car and when that is gone, he throws stones at a baby rabbit frozen in fright by the lily pond, and when the rabbit flees, he throws stones, he just throws stones.

  Having picked the pieces of the picture out from under the banana skin and tea leaves, Diana places them on the table, eager to make sense of them and understand Michael. Maybe Wynhope can be a home for him. She will need to learn about children, but it is never too late; she could give something back, a different sort of restoration. Valerie is dead, there is a lot to make up for. Sliding the fragments around, Diana matches the line of the nursery windows and the column of smoke, constructing a picture of a possible family future until the last piece slides into place and the tall orange thing with the sticking-out bits is not a tree at all. It is a key.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Unable to cope any longer on her own, Diana is waiting for her own emergency services to rescue her. At her wit’s end, she has called Sally. Edmund is in London, of course. Having volunteered his services in bringing up the boy, he seems to have decided his is a non-executive position and the last month has been one long downhill slide.

  It started with their disaster being deconstructed at Wynhope, brick by brick. Once a team secured the site, lifted the beams, stacked the slates and towed away the great stone mantel, the SOCOs searched the rubble for the key for another two days. Crime or Untimely Death? A skip was placed beside the ruin. The bed which had been hanging over the edge of the splintered floor, its sheets sodden and the silk bedspread ripped, was lowered to the ground and unmade; the chest of drawers, the proud supporter of the porcelain potty, dismantled; Valerie’s pink wheelie suitcase, unpacked. Like opera bodies, the long red velvet curt
ains lay with their heads on scorched pillows, their feet in puddles of overnight rain. Even the state-of-the-art towel rail was only finally dumped when the pipework had been examined like intestines at a post-mortem; Diana felt that is what they wanted to do with her, open her up and see what dish she and the devil dine out on. She could have told them they were wasting their time, but she didn’t; now Michael was there to stay, it seemed unthinkable to say anything. She didn’t want to salvage anything, but Edmund rescued the embroidered sampler, even though the glass was smashed and the cloth looked as though it had been dunked in the Rivers of Babylon themselves and wrung out to dry. He put it in the third drawer down in his father’s old desk, his safe place. Finally, all that was left was stone. All colour gone. All softness. Cloth, tapestry, wallpaper, light, everything she had offered to the Wynhope tower, discarded.

  It became a sanitised ruin, the sort you might visit on holiday, jagged walls and roofless, a neat pile of slates and gargoyles stacked round the back because someone said they were worth a bit nowadays. Permission was granted to repair the inside of the main house and builders permanently sealed up what had been the landing entrance to the spiral staircase, although, as Edmund said, it was going to be a devil of a job to make good the panelling, listed buildings have to be perfect. Regardless of the imperfections lived out in them, thought Diana.

  The entrance to the pool was also blocked up. Nobody felt like discussing its future, although one of the men on site suggested it would make a perfect bunker when the shit hits the fan, and Edmund laughed along with him, agreeing they could put a few tins of baked beans down there and prepare to sit out Armageddon.

  Just as Wynhope looked a little more like itself, and even the boy looked a little more like an ordinary child, Diana also tried normality for size, attempting the things that mothers do, but there was always a wall. She called wakey wakey in the mornings and felt the mockery of the wall, laid out clean clothes at the foot of the wall, boiled eggs for the wall; she even tried sitting sit next to the wall to watch daytime television. At times, she was almost provoked to take a mallet and batter down the wall and had to clench her fists to stop herself. All the simple things she’d imagined a mother might do seemed impossible, even the vocabulary mocked her: play, read, stories.

  In the early days after the earthquake, like those who have been sick and slippered for a long time, everybody else in the area tried on their everyday shoes and stepped back out into the workaday world. Diana’s red slingbacks stayed in their tissue paper in their box in their upmarket bag in the bottom of the wardrobe. Edmund re-established his routine, managing to get up to London, but then returning stressed about the Riverside project, with evenings spent on the phone in his study with a slammed door and a raised voice. She didn’t ask too many questions. There had been bumpy rides before in the financial department, but they had a pretty good investment-shaped cushion between them and the hard place. When Edmund was home and available, the boy, like the dog, sought him out, but when it was just her and Michael, it was all about separation. Since she couldn’t find the middle path between her desire to feed him or starve him, hug him or slap him, she settled for distance, leaving him asleep for as long as possible, allowing him to spend hours shut away with his circus animals in the nursery upstairs. She thanked God for television and for the computer in Edmund’s study. They’d downloaded some game he liked called Lockdown, which looked violent and unsuitable, particularly for a boy who’d had his sort of experiences, but it kept him quiet and at least she knew where he was. When she fed Monty, she whistled and the dog came, full of love and expectation; when she needed Michael for lunch, she screeched from the hall to the nursery, but it was only her new best friend, the echo, who replied and she sat alone in the kitchen, the lunch she’d laboured over congealing on the table.

  This morning had been one of the worst. Just the sound of the tyres on the gravel at 7 a.m. quickened her heartbeat. Edmund leaving. Why this sudden need to be in the city all day every day? Hadn’t it been a joint enterprise, this rescue of the boy? Why was it down to her and why wouldn’t Michael speak, for Christ’s sake? And when was she ever going to be able to say something herself? And when would they bury Valerie? That thought started her crying again; she thought she might have stopped crying by now. As she lay in bed, calming down, she resolved to make this the day she got a grip. Mrs H has awarded herself a day off, so it’s just her and Michael. To begin all over again. That would be something. And there was something. Someone. A person outside the bedroom door, a shadow across the carpet. It was her. It couldn’t be but it was; it held its hand to its mouth as she did, peered round the door as she used to. See, there, Valerie, not a woman, but a child, all the years shrunk back to the beginning. In horror, she sat up and forced herself to recognise the visitor for who it was. It was just the boy.

  Later, she did her best to disguise her distress. Breezing around the kitchen to the beat of an unfamiliar music channel which sounded youthful and energetic, she poured out cereal which he didn’t eat and blackcurrant juice which he spilled on purpose and buttered toast which he chewed slowly and deliberately, always watching her, tracking her from the kettle to the sink to the larder and back to the table, like a drone. Forcing her earlier plans out from under the weight of his passive resistance, she suggested things to do, but ended up leaving him in front of the television while she stripped his sheets, damp and poisonously sweet with the smell of stale urine, and listened to the rhythmic drum of the washing machine as it made everything clean again. They would need a waterproof cover. She put her head round the door to ask him if he’d like to go into town to go shopping, but seeing him, cross-legged and motionless in front of a natural history programme about sea life with a jellyfish pulsing its translucent tentacles through the ocean, she realised she was too scared to risk it alone. Was she alone? The slam of the back door in the gusting April wind made her jump. The intruder laughing in the bathroom turned out to be the radio. No one could live like this for long.

  From the far end of the sofa, she asked Michael if he would like to talk about that night, what happened in the earthquake; she knew she’d like to, she said, she was sure it would help them both.

  ‘A problem shared is a problem halved, that’s what Edmund says.’ Diana thought a quote from his hero might convince Michael to join in.

  Not so. Louder and louder and louder the boy pressed the volume control until she could not make herself heard above the haunting song of the humpback whale gliding past the camera.

  The panic in her voice must have been alarming, given the speed at which Sally cancelled the hairdresser and come straight over.

  ‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ she says. ‘I know you are, I can see it in your face. And,’ she continues, ‘while I’m on a roll, for God’s sake, call me again whenever you need me. I’m back from the Caribbean now for a while. I need a rest.’ She winks.

  The sitting room has a chill to it, although the heating is back on; the whole of the old house still shivers in shock at its lost limb. It snowed briefly in the night, the same day the clocks went forward. Even if the boy won’t listen to her story, Sally will.

  ‘The thing is I never liked Valerie, not really.’

  ‘I know, you told me. But, darling, my brother drove his Harley into the back of an HGV on the M4, and I loathed him, but it doesn’t mean I was responsible for his death.’

  A great, cloudless sky of release is only one sentence away, if she can do it. This is the moment to jump. ‘But I was, in a way,’ insists Diana. ‘I was responsible.’

  Now, arms wide and hurtling, to fall and feel the truth open above her and guide her safely down. The briefest hesitation, then her friend, out of kindness, pulls her back from the edge. She is getting it all out of proportion and Sally isn’t surprised. Diana has so much on her plate, her mother’s funeral, this crap with her sister, the tower coming down after all the work she’d done there. And the boy on top of that.

  ‘Go
d, just talking about it makes me want another drink.’ Sally tops up the glasses. ‘It’s not as if you left her to die in a burning building.’

  The door which was open is now locked. Diana fastens her secret around her.

  Sally makes an offer. ‘Tell you what, you piss off and do your shop, and I’ll stay here with Mikey. He can’t be any worse than my ghastly, dysfunctional grandchildren.’

  ‘You love them really,’ says Diana.

  ‘I know I do, totally obsessed, in fact.’

  Diana drives, she just drives. It’s really only if Mrs H is there to stay with the boy that she can ever get out, and even then she doesn’t like leaving those two together. It’s a toxic combination. The car – the control and the power of it, the self-contained scented interior with its built-in sound system, sat nav, phone, internet – how it used to appeal to her to travel in her own world around her own world, but now a simple sense of a destination and someone for company would be enough. She recalls Valerie half asleep in the front seat on the way back from the funeral and her eyes lose focus. The layby seems like a safe place to draw breath, she’ll crash if she goes on like this. There’s a van selling burgers and tea, two lorry drivers in T-shirts are slouched at a plastic table, eyeing up her Range Rover. Posh bitch, that’s probably what they’re thinking, got it all sewn up. What do they know about her and how she’s unravelling?

  Not able to face the fluorescent noise of the out of town store, Diana makes her way to the local mini market and pushes the trolley like a pram. The miscellaneous purchases in it are lolling like a semi-conscious child, a cabbage for a head, a bag of frozen chips for a body, banana legs, a vegetative state. She’s forgotten her card. The queue behind her at the checkout waits impatiently while she scrabbles for another pound coin; the girl on the till says she can bring it next time, and the eyes of the shelf stacker and the old ladies from the sheltered housing and the teenager with her screaming toddler, all of them are mocking her. There goes the lady of the manor, she’s been taken down a peg or two.