The Half Sister Read online

  ‘He’s an amazing boy,’ says Sally as she is leaving. ‘Beat me at chess. Totally adorable, I could eat him, but God he’s going to be hard work for a while, Di, I don’t envy you . . . And no, I know what you’re going to ask. He didn’t say a word. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. If not, you can always get him a shrink. Harry’s children seem to virtually live at the clinic,’ she adds as she waves goodbye.

  In the hall the hands of the grandfather clock are cutting a bigger and bigger slice out of time, the hours when nothing has been said growing, the hours left when something could be said diminishing. As if to confirm the sense that the world is sealing her up in an impossible prison, the postman brings the formal notice from the coroner informing them that Valerie’s body can be released for burial, although the date for the final inquest has not been set, pending further police investigations.

  That evening, it is Edmund’s suggestion that they write down some ideas for the funeral to share with Mikey.

  ‘The advice online says if you start writing notes, you take away the incentive for mutes to talk, it’s called colluding,’ says Diana.

  ‘I hate it when you label him a mute like some retard from a Victorian fairy tale. Listen, we’re not talking about whether or not he wants fish fingers for tea, Diana. This is his mother’s funeral.’

  Edmund’s document is disputed by Diana like a legal proposition. ‘Why have you put buried? Cremated, that’s what she wanted. And what on earth do you mean by asking him if there’s anything else he’d like to tell us?’

  ‘How do you suddenly know all about the deepest end-of-life wishes of a sister you hadn’t spoken to for years? But, leaving that aside, I don’t mean anything by the last question. It’s just a sort of catch-all. Who knows what he’s bottling up? I haven’t even seen him cry.’

  At the kitchen table, Diana passes Michael a biro, and it turns into a silly little tug of war that makes Edmund laugh. There was an American programme she watched once about a medium who transcribed messages, unseen hands taking hold of her pencil, scratching violent and erratic words across the page. Opposite her, the boy is writing. Yes, he does want to come to the funeral. A little hesitantly, he writes ‘Solomon’, as a suggested guest, but then scribbles it out with a lightning storm of scratches which rip holes in the paper. Monty? Edmund shakes his head. The boy moves on down his questionnaire. No, he does not want to take part in the service. Is there anything else you’d like to say? It is deliberate, Diana thinks, the way he lets the pen hover over the question, the tortuous progress through the three capital letters. Y.E.S. There is something he would like to tell them, but the implication is not yet. The boy is like his mother, he enjoys watching other people suffer.

  ‘I know,’ suggests Edmund. ‘When I’m in London, I’ll buy you one of those little whiteboards with a marker. Then you can tell us whatever you want, whenever you choose.’

  Mikey makes good use of his present. Ha ha, he writes, and gives the board to Edmund, and the two of them sit giggling on the sofa, kids passing notes in the back row of the classroom at the teacher’s expense.

  The next message is also for Edmund: ‘Are you coming to the funral?’

  This is a test. Diana is curious to know if Edmund’s love for the child has limits. Yes, I’ll be there, he writes back, adding a smiley face. No limits then. It is all yes, yes, yes in this house now.

  In the end the funeral is a desultory business. Diana has resisted all Edmund’s suggestions about contacting Valerie’s friends and a stroke of genius prompted her to go on Valerie’s Facebook page and exercise her rights as a close relative to get it taken down, but not before she’d been faced with a river of online mourning.

  Loved you, Val. You were the best and I miss you more than I can say. Rest in Peace.

  You didn’t deserve this, but I know the angels will watch over you and keep you safe because you were a brave, strong, good woman, the best mother, the best friend.

  Val, against the odds you fought your way to freedom, you were an example to all women everywhere.

  No mother’s ever had such a wonderful son as Mikey. Who will look after him now?

  She played with the idea of what she might contribute, but in the end delete was the only button she needed.

  The notice in the paper says the funeral is family only, which means the three of them – and Mr and Mrs H, who according to Edmund are family. No one cries except Grace, not even at the grave in the village churchyard. The press are waiting at the lychgate, eager to cover this high society event with just the sniff of a scandal if someone were to turn over the stones. There is no reception afterwards, Diana has learned that lesson.

  Afterwards, back to Wynhope and each of them retreats: Mikey to the nursery, Edmund to his river where he can weep alone, and Diana to the drawing room where the double dose of pills she has taken in the morning finally kick in and she sleeps and dreams about not having enough food at a party and everybody going home hungry. Later, Edmund shakes her gently awake and suggests they should check on Mikey, he’s been on his own a long time for a day like this. He used to kiss her if she took a late afternoon nap; she’s glad he doesn’t try, she has bad breath nowadays when she wakes, something foul within her leaking out.

  From the door to the nursery, they can see the toys have been carefully arranged. The cars and vehicles are placed in one straight line over towards the wall, as if they are parked. The bricks are arranged in rows, each standing upright, with two or three plastic trees amongst them. The resemblance to a graveyard is unmistakable – the circus animals are grouped in the manner of mourners, the acrobats and the clowns and the lame lion tamer in one huddle, the chimpanzees and tigers sharing their condolences with the gorilla, and all of them clustered around the large cardboard box in the middle of the otherwise empty room.

  ‘I gave him that box, the replacement china came in it. I thought he’d like to play with it. Not this.’

  ‘Mikey?’ Edmund’s voice is barely audible.

  Diana creeps towards the box, lifts the lid. ‘A sheet.’

  The crumpled white cotton folds into nothing beneath her hands. Falling back, trampling the mourning circus animals, Diana is caught by Edmund’s arms. The box shifts, the sheet grows claws which clasp the sides, and a shape like that of a skull rises up. And there he is, the shroud falling from his shoulders, revealing a thin, pale naked body.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘Perhaps we should lock up the nursery. It’s unhealthy for him up there on his own for days, with nothing but those circus animals for company,’ says Edmund, but the boy resists fiercely and Edmund backs down. For once, Diana agrees with Michael.

  ‘It’s hard to find anything that makes him happy,’ says Diana. ‘If you take this away, God knows what I’ll do with him.’

  ‘It’ll drive him mad,’ says Edmund.

  ‘Madder,’ says Diana.

  ‘He needs friends. Why don’t you visit the primary school, like Sarah suggested?’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  Diana hoped that after the funeral her thoughts might be more easily marshalled, but there is still the inquest to come, the police investigations to complete, and the thought of Michael going to the local school, embedded in the community like a spy, is intolerable. Worst of all, there’s still Valerie. Louder than ever, Diana can hear her wheelie case outside on the gravel and Wynhope with a sore throat, creaking its welcome. To live with this level of fear is unbearable; she presses her long, sharp polished nails into her skin, the scars across her thighs reminding her of how she used to manage when she was a teenager.

  But for Michael to go away to school, that is a different matter.

  Fired up with a possible solution, Diana searches online for independent boarding prep schools, distance radius from Wynhope well over 150 miles, too far to do in a day. They can afford it. She treats Edmund’s financial hysteria with more than a pinch of salt; flogging one of the hideous paintings on the stairs on its own wou
ld more than cover the fees. Her only reservation is that if the boy goes away to school, he might say something, but can you imagine some tweedy Latin master ever believing such nonsense, let alone doing anything about it? Her impression is that private schools are a safe step away from the ghastly conspiracy of state professionals who keep phoning and trying to force them all into therapy. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

  ‘Would you like to go to school?’ Diana calls Michael into the study and shows him smiling children playing violins in sumptuous theatres or scoring tries under blue skies and autumn leaves, explaining that it’s not possible for him to go back to his old primary.

  For the first time, he looks her in the eye and nods. Not talking, exactly, but heading in the right direction.

  She seizes the opportunity. ‘I know you must be very lonely and unhappy and I’m sorry I can’t just make everything better. If I had a magic wand, I’d use it.’

  Michael touches her cheek.

  ‘I’m sure going to school would help a little, it’s what Mummy would have wanted you to do.’

  Her tears are on the tip of his finger. He tastes them with his tongue.

  In the evening, upstairs, reapplying her make-up, she watches Edmund walking through the dusk, the tulips forming a guard of honour for his slouched arrival home and she feels guilty at how she has been recently: screaming and arguing, the terrible things she’s said, the things left unsaid, how that must have felt to him, exhausted from all his problems in the city. Their increasing distance and fractiousness is all her fault. It’s not surprising he’s fast becoming an expert in ways to be absent. The London flat still has something of the bachelor pad about it; it’s not just now that she resents his bolthole behaviour. The pleasures of having a place to call your own are well known to her. She bought her first flat when she was working in an estate agent’s on the south coast, insider knowledge. From the outside it was a dreary place next door to a nursing home, and sometimes when she was coming home from work she would see their faces, the imprisoned sick, staring out at the dispassionate sea, and vowed she would never allow that to happen to her. Inside, she made it perfect, rarely inviting anyone back, spending a long time hoovering. This window has a very different view and Wynhope is home. Edmund must never feel the need to stay away ever again.

  ‘Michael and I have had a good day, haven’t we?’ She smiles as they sit down, bright sprigs of May blossom on the table and the Sauvignon chilled. She has made such an effort, for him.

  Raising his eyebrows in mock surprise, Edmund winks at the boy.

  ‘We’ve been finding out about schools and I’ve made a few phone calls.’ Diana is unstoppable with her lists of subjects, sports, the overseas trips, not to mention the number who go on to top public schools, just like Edmund.

  ‘Not as if I liked it there,’ he says, pushing the lamb chops around his plate, just like a boarding school boy might.

  ‘Well, that’s different, that’s because’ – Diana didn’t want to mention the dead word – ‘things were difficult for you, darling, but you can’t deny how it made you what you are today.’

  ‘And what exactly am I? Today.’

  Tension is protein for the boy, she can see it in the way he licks his lips. Diana clears the plates. ‘Only that it must have been such a help, knowing everyone who knows everyone in the City.’

  Screwing up his daffodil-yellow napkin, Edmund throws it on the table. ‘A fat lot of good that’s done me now. I’m sorry, Diana, sorry, Mikey. It was a good plan but there’s not enough money for school fees. Blame me, blame the ice age, blame who you like, but that’s the truth.’

  The door slams, the boy doesn’t even flinch; he just slides from the table and retreats to the nursery, like it is a well-rehearsed evacuation routine.

  It is nothing to do with the fees, Edmund admits to himself. It isn’t the cost of Mikey going away to school that he is worried about.

  ‘You can’t just pack up a problem and pay matron to sort it out,’ he tells Diana later as they get ready for bed.

  ‘Can’t I?’

  ‘No, you can’t. Not if I won’t pay.’

  ‘You’re not the one stuck here with him all day.’

  ‘You think I want to be in London?’ Edmund slips under his side of the duvet and picks up his most recent copy of the City Digest.

  ‘Yes, I do. You pay perfectly good talented people a fortune to run your little empire. You don’t need to be there. And you running for the train isn’t going to stop the index falling and you know it. They’re probably all sitting in the office praying that you miss the bloody thing.’ She continues from the bathroom, raising her voice above the running of the taps. ‘And don’t give me that crap about not affording fees. I can read the financial pages just as well as you. Yes, you’ve lost money on the fracking and the property shares, but it’s a drop in the ocean, isn’t it?’ She doesn’t expect an answer. She gets into bed and turns out her light. ‘But what really matters, Edmund, is that wherever you are, I don’t want to be here, at Wynhope, twenty-four seven all alone with a mute delinquent for company. I don’t want to be and I shouldn’t be, for all our sakes. So the local primary it is then and on your head be it.’

  The first day of the summer term Mikey slips into his new uniform, looks at himself in the mirror, touches his sweatshirt as if he has woken up from a dream, and then leaves for school without looking back. Diana returns from her first ever school run and makes herself a cup of green tea which she drinks on the bench under the catalpa tree, imagining she has been wheeled there by kindly people and left in the sun, as if no one has any more expectations of her in that present moment than that she should live. Alone at last, the boy gone, Valerie also, she holds something very fragile in her mind: hope. Surely Michael will do better now he is at school? Maybe he’ll make friends to play with, maybe he’ll play with her. Even if he says something, no one will believe him; in time he might not even believe himself, childhood memories are like that. Swirling the tea at the bottom of the mug, she reprimands herself for turning into a madwoman who has started to place her faith in curing warts with witchcraft and lets her mind wander to the memories stirred up by their first school visit.

  With thick tweed skirts and ponies, the women in Edmund’s social circle have an entirely different experience of education so she never talks about her schooldays with them, but at the village primary they were back chanting to her across the years, hands joined in one long line swooping across the tarmac:

  ‘Please, Jack, may we cross the water,

  to see your ugly daughter,

  to throw her in the water,

  to see if she can swim.’

  She was always the lead fisherman, whipping up the others to net the floundering ones; more picking than picked upon, if she’s honest, but that’s hardly surprising, she was in survival mode from a young age.

  It was a joke how easily this local headteacher was won over by her, her faith in the village school being by far the best place to help little Michael rebuild his shattered life, how the important thing was to keep the lines of communication open. The boy didn’t talk of course. Records from his previous schools in London confirm that teachers thought he was really quite bright, but his levels of achievement didn’t always reflect that; he was too tense, too tired, too quiet even then.

  ‘But I’m sure he’ll be chattering away nineteen to the dozen before long’ – that’s what the head said, and Diana knew that’s why Michael was smiling. You read about cases like that in the papers, children telling fairy stories to the adults and being believed. Or telling the truth and not being believed. She didn’t know if the staff realised how much the boy hated her: surely something that strong must smell.

  That interview was the Wednesday; the following Easter weekend was a close call as well. It may have been too late for her to tell the truth, but it was never going to be too late for the truth to announce itself. Sally arrived out of the blue with a bag full of
expensive chocolate eggs and the boys were full of excitement. Naturally Diana volunteered to hide them. Working her way around the gardens under the cheating eye of the bronze boy, she slipped the brightly coloured sweets in the dank gaps between the stones surrounding the lily pond, pressed them into the close soil between the tulips in the stone urns, and lastly she went into the orchard where she and Valerie sat and talked, once. She rested an egg on the broken sundial.

  ‘In the east I rise, in the west I fall,

  Again tomorrow I shall call.’

  Such misplaced faith they had in the unshakability of their world, her husband’s ancestors.

  ‘Warm, cold, warm, hot, hotter,’ she called across the spring garden as they searched, her words steering them well away from the camellias and the yew hedge.

  The key. Alone at last on this day, which is not just the first day of term, but the first day of some measure of freedom for her, Diana realises how completely everyone else’s voices have left Wynhope. John has cut his hours now they’re not at the lodge and it’s been declared uninhabitable, and Mrs H is more taciturn than ever with her. Edmund’s voice is only over the phone more often than not, and when he’s home, he talks a different language, if he talks at all. She’s given up even expecting to hear Michael. This silence is all hers, she owns it. Picking her way through the site of the ruin, Diana lets a forgotten brick thump from her hands onto the mud, one dull lump no longer of any significance. Standing above the now defunct skylights into the pool, she peers down and acknowledges this is an empty tomb. No gardeners, no news. Turning her back on it all, she waves at the bronze boy, a silly habit picked up from Edmund who salutes the statue in the way that other people appease magpies to ward off bad luck.

  One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a letter, four for a boy.