The Half Sister Read online

  Most of all, of course, she was a mother. Mikey was everything to her. This is another reason why I write. That last visit I promised her that if anything should ever happen to her – and was God preparing us for this? – I promised her that I would take care of Mikey. He is like a son to me. You will know yourself by now what an incredible boy he is, everyone who meets him loves him, he is blessed with wisdom and empathy beyond his years. Actually he has had to grow up too fast and needs to be given the chance to be the little boy he is, to be loved and looked after like a child. The most bitter thing for me is that I cannot fulfil that promise now, but I am sure God has placed him with you so that he is safe at this terrible time in his life.

  With your permission, I have included a card for him so he knows I have not forgotten him and again, with your permission, I would be so happy if you could write to me with your address so that I may visit him in September when I will be released. In truth, no prison is worse than the cell I am living in now with walls built of grief. I am sure it is the same for you and I do not forget that you have also lost your mother.

  I pray that you will not judge me as a prisoner, but as the man your sister loved and who in turn loves Mikey.

  I also pray that Jesus will be with you and your husband as you care for him and that He will watch over all of you at this difficult time.

  Solomon

  Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river.

  With the letter, the card and the photo in her hands, Diana stumbles down the garden, through the arboretum, pushing the branches out of her eyes and tripping on the roots. These things cannot be thrown away, cannot be kept. Lie, lie, lie cries the buzzard overhead. Speak, speak, speak bleat the fledglings, open-mouthed in the nest in the ivy on the back wall. That’s what they used to call her, at home, liar, liar, pants on fire, but at times it has been her best friend, her lying self. Edmund never lies. The first time Edmund ever brought her here the bluebells and wild garlic were out as they will be soon and they sat here, on this fallen tree, and breathed in the scent of limitless loveliness, and so she sits down, on that same fallen tree, and tries to find that same breath, but she is dizzy and sick with the pain of the photo and the letter and the thought of who she has become. Until now, it has always been the argument she remembers, the mess, but it wasn’t all like that. She and Valerie had their time in the garden, and Solomon is right, there was hope.

  It was all squandered. Here she is, squatting in the shrubbery like a tramp. The past is bitter at the back of her throat and she wretches, the leaf litter of the forest floor seething inches from her face, a million small things grown grotesque: twisted bark and broken twigs, shoots and soil and nettles and the tiny flowers of the wood anemone shining a white light through her shuttered gaze. The sickness is so deep within her, she knows she must purge herself before she rots from the inside out.

  In Edmund’s study, Diana chooses pen and paper for the connection it offers. The problem with speaking is that you are never in control, never know what the other person hears, or what they might say next: all conversation is an improvisation like that. Writing can be planned, redrafted, amended until it is right, and writing stays. When everything else moves on, there will always be a record, a true record of what happened that night when Valerie was locked in and she had the key. And even before.

  An end to things seems so close. Diana draws the long, straight first line of the personal pronoun. I. The paper slides away beneath the nib, the pen is reluctant to spill its ink, the page lies white and unbroken as the nausea returns, and she cries out for help, but there is no one left between the echoing ceiling and the shuddering earth. The spasm starts in her right hand, she wants to swallow, but her throat is closed and dribble trickles from her lips that she cannot wipe away. Convulsions have ownership of her body, all control is lost – the floor, the falling chair, the dark.

  A hint of a black eye, breath smelling of vomit, and Diana scrubbing at the blood on the carpet, that’s what Edmund finds when he comes home with Michael at lunchtime. Is she all right, what does she mean she fainted, that isn’t normal, should he call for an ambulance? No, not normal, not natural, she has fainted before, but Diana knows this is a loss of consciousness of a different sort. She doubts there is a physical remedy for this disease.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘What the hell do they want?’

  Edmund is patting his pockets. He thinks the police have come for him; recently it seems he is always waiting for the knock on the door, whether it’s from the Financial Conduct Authority or planning authorities, who knows. The Spotless Angels are hiding in the downstairs cloakroom, they think they’ve come for them. Michael is hiding behind the cedar tree. They’re all wrong. It’s obvious who they’re here for.

  Once Detective Inspector Penn and another younger man whose name she has already forgotten are in the drawing room, Diana carries in a tray of tea. Wriggling on the sofa, Michael is fiddling with the handcuffs attached to the officer’s belt.

  ‘Don’t touch those,’ says Diana.

  ‘No harm done,’ says the policeman.

  He touches them again.

  ‘Edmund?’ Diana nods her head towards the door. ‘And the dog.’ She calls after him. ‘Sarah came yesterday with a box of his things. Maybe he’d like to play with those?’ She turns back to the police officers. ‘There’s no point in him staying, I’m afraid he still hasn’t spoken since that night.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says D.I. Penn. ‘If we do need to, we’ve got specialists who work with drawings, those sorts of things.’

  ‘Why on earth would you want to put him through that? It’s not exactly a mystery what happened to his mother.’

  It is a bit of a mystery, it turns out. Edmund returns and the police confirm there were high levels of alcohol in Valerie’s blood, but that alone did not account for why she was unable to get out of the tower, and Lady Diana was probably the worse for wear herself that night, isn’t that the case?

  ‘Yes, I was a little drunk, that’s not a crime, is it? That bloody dog’s back again. Edmund?’

  It’s easier when Edmund isn’t in the room.

  The detective resumes. ‘So the difficult bit to piece together is why your sister couldn’t open the door after the first tremor.’

  They never get it right, do they? She was never her sister. ‘Half’ is a very small word. Little sister. Baby sister. Diana’s mind wanders. Baby grand. There always used to be a little key in the walnut box on top of the piano, Diana is sure of it; it had a plaited yellow-and-red cotton thread tied around the end, what can have happened to it? Now she finds herself on the other side of the room, opening the lid, taking out the little glass and silver pots one by one.

  ‘I understand you could hear her screaming?’

  There is a button you push to reveal a concealed compartment beneath, maybe that’s where the answer is.

  ‘Diana, my darling, what are you doing?’

  She does things now with someone else’s arms, sees things with someone else’s eyes, someone else’s body on the bed, and her own face staring at the ceiling. Flushed in the face, Diana tries to pull herself together.

  ‘I’m sorry, can you repeat that?’ She takes her seat again.

  ‘You could hear screaming.’

  ‘I don’t think I ever said that.’ Diana begins to repeat her version of events, yet again, straightening the teaspoons into a line, but they’re losing interest. Her words have no impact compared to the row coming from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, that’s the child.’ Diana jumps up, her knee hits the tray, the milk spills. ‘I’m sorry, this place is a madhouse. It’s impossible to think straight.’

  To which the police reply that they are going to need to take a statement anyway so it might be easier for her to make an appointment and come down to the station.


  After they have left, Edmund mutters something about not knowing what the hell is going on around here any longer and is she sure she didn’t bang her head when she fainted because she certainly looks as though she’s lost her mind. The study door is slammed shut. She hammers against the wood.

  And would it be surprising if I’ve lost it? After everything that’s happened? Losing my mother and sister within a week of each other? Locked up here on my own, you don’t even talk to me any longer. You treat me like the nanny. I don’t even know what you think any longer. You might as well not be here.

  No reply. She wants to cry and she wants to cry in her own bed, but even that is impossible because something terrible has happened in her beautiful bedroom: shoes, handbags, jumpers and coat hangers with things on them and coat hangers with nothing on them strewn over the floor; everything swept off the top of her dressing table, make-up, scent, jewellery, photographs scattered and smashed; even the bed is disturbed – the bedspread crumpled and the duvet and the fitted sheet pulled off from three corners as if there has been a savage rape. Up until now it’s just been keys and notes, faces sometimes, but whatever this is, it’s out of control, wreaking a terrible destruction on her, breaking into her things, possessing her spaces. Diana falls onto the bare bed, exposed, as if she, like the mattress, is never meant to be seen like this. The boy is skulking at the door. Her fingers find the edge of the sheet and she pulls it up to cover herself.

  ‘What were you doing in my room? Come on, tell the truth.’

  Off the bed now, she moves towards him. He backs away, he has a face which is full of knowledge and planning and entirely blank at the same time.

  ‘Go on, what were you looking for? Say something.’

  As she pushes him up against the wardrobe, the boy is so thin and loose-boned that he rattles like a puppet, but his vow of silence is fixed, him and his mother, members of their own closed order. He’s had his chance, she’s tried to make her peace, and now it’s too late.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ she whispers. She’s so close to him now she can smell Valerie. His face is between her hands. ‘All this crap about not talking, just say it, you know you want to, you know you can.’ Her hands tighten, fasten, lower, his neck. ‘Go on, speak, speak.’

  What she might have done next does not happen. Edmund is there. The three of them wrestle for and against each other, in a pitch-and-toss sea of chaos. Eventually the boy ducks away from her grappling hands and runs from the room.

  ‘I can’t go on.’

  ‘I’m here now. It’s the trauma of it all, it’s the loss, it will pass.’

  Even in her distress, she knows that Edmund is just looking for the stepping stones of his clichés to save himself from losing his footing and drowning; her madness is too deep a river to test.

  ‘It won’t, it won’t ever be better because I . . .’ He’s holding her, not like a husband, but like some sort of jailer, gripping each arm too tightly. She cannot look him in the eye. ‘Because I . . .’

  Steering her towards the bed, Edmund sits her down and slides his grasp to her shoulders, arm’s length. ‘Because you nothing, darling. This has got to stop. Look at the state you’re in. You’re driving yourself round the bend.’

  Having checked the landing to make sure Mikey is not listening, Edmund closes the door and leans against it. He doesn’t know if he’s trying to keep things in or out.

  ‘It all started because of the earthquake. It changed everything,’ whispers Diana.

  ‘Did it? Didn’t it start with your half-sister? Wasn’t that what all this was about, you asking Valerie over? About things that happened between you long before the earthquake?’

  ‘But I never got the chance, did I?’

  Dominoes are actually what Edmund’s thinking of, how when he was very young he used to line up columns of his grandmother’s ivory dominoes on the hall floor because he loved the rattling, clattering sound they made on the tiles as they fell. Backwards dominoes. Valerie stayed the night, Diana’s mother died, we dug the pool, some arrogant arsehole of an ancestor built a tower with money he made because the world had gone mad for sugar, in fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue, ten thousand years ago the ice began to melt.

  ‘When you think about it, it isn’t really about the earthquake, or Valerie, it could have been anything.’ Edmund moves to the window; from there he can see the trees that line the bank. ‘You can’t step in the same river twice.’

  ‘What’s that particular cliché meant to mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, it just came to me. That you can’t go back, I suppose. Or that everything changes.’ It’s a beautiful afternoon. He could be fishing, the mayfly will be perfect this evening, the banks will be giddy with the smell of wild garlic, and when he stands in the pool and reaches into the river to release the fish, the water will be soft and slow with summer warmth. He talks with his face to the window and his back to the room. ‘You see, when you stand in the water, you know that’s just one moment, you, the rod, the fish, the fly, the circle of the current around your waders and all the things that have happened upstream drift past you, I don’t know, fallen branches, feathers, rubbish even, and then it takes it all away downstream, even that perfect moment of you being there. It’s gone and that’s fine as well.’ He turns round and shrugs, a little embarrassed. ‘That’s fishing as therapy. The miracle of the river cure, I keep saying you should try it one day.’

  ‘I’m too tired for your Oxford philosophy, Edmund,’ says Diana. ‘Besides, people who live in glasshouses, or own them, they really shouldn’t throw stones.’ She repositions the radio alarm clock on the bedside table.

  Taking his cue from her, Edmund starts untangling the coat hangers and finding pairs for the shoes. ‘All I’m thinking is that Mikey needs therapy, that’s what Sarah recommended, wasn’t it? But so do you, Diana. Fishing or whatever else.’

  The digital numbers are flashing 00:00. She focuses on resetting the time, hour by hour, minute by minute, until everything is caught up with the present. Does he have any idea what he’s asking of her? Maybe he does. And he could help if he wanted to. Come home earlier, spend some time with her, and not just the boy and the river, massage her feet again like he used to, watch a box set together, sit at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and talk while she makes supper for God’s sake. They’re only small, ordinary things, but they would make a difference. He’s locked her into this contract, he can help get her out. She’s lost her voice but he’s still talking.

  ‘. . . before you do something . . .’ He has a bottle of her Chanel in his hands and is breathing in deeply as if trying to find the words to describe the essence of it all.

  ‘Something?’

  ‘Something you’ll regret.’

  Later, as Edmund leaves the room, he speaks one last time before he closes the door behind him. ‘I’ll help in any way I can, Diana, but I’m no psychiatrist.’

  An apology was presented the next morning on the whiteboard, no doubt under duress from Edmund who explains that Mikey was upset with the box of things from the social worker. Apparently there was no Elvis jigsaw, no Penguin, nothing from Solomon and no photo of his mum. Edmund can’t imagine how awful it would be to have no photo of your mother. Diana just needs to look in Edmund’s study to see how true that is, it’s like a shrine in there. Anyway, what’s done cannot be undone. After the bedroom episode, she burned the picture of Valerie, Solomon and Michael, and the letter and the card. It was wrong, but she was very angry and now they’re just ashes in the wind. And, besides, she has more important things to worry about: today she’s expected at the police station to make her statement.

  The Fly and Salmon is a particularly pretty pub on the river out of town. Edmund agreed it would do her good to get out and have a chinwag with Sally. That’s as close as Edmund gets to counselling; spending an afternoon teaching Michael to cast a dry fly is as close as he gets to surrogate fatherhood. Never mind. Diana is feeling mu
ch stronger today and in the mood for celebrating for the first time for a very long time.

  ‘God, I love it here except for the effing name.’ Diana laughs as she and Sally take their seats on the terrace. ‘If someone mentions fishing again, and as for the chapel . . .’

  ‘What about the chapel?’

  ‘I wish that had come down in the earthquake. Edmund takes the boy with him, priest and bloody altar boy, for Christ’s sake.’ She is a little flushed from the wine and she can’t feel her keys in the bottom of her handbag.

  Checking over her shoulder, Sally whispers, ‘You’re not saying there’s anything funny going on?’

  ‘Oh God, no! Don’t be ridiculous.’ But now that Diana thinks about it, it is almost as if Edmund has fallen in love with the boy, and, of course, there is something funny going on. She orders a couple more glasses of fizz. The interview at the police station is over; she was dreading it, but it turned out to be something of a saving grace. Nowadays her downs are very low, but the rare moments of hope energise her into a manic happiness which instructs her to put on more make-up than usual and plays her speech on fast forward.

  ‘Edmund got me a solicitor. That shows you how much or how little faith he has in me,’ she tells Sally. ‘He said it was better to be safe than sorry. I love that.’ She dismisses Sally’s attempts to defend Edmund with a wave of her hand – just wait for this, the important bit of the story is still to come. ‘Anyway, I went through the same ghastly rigmarole with the police: Valerie was locked in, where was the key, who else was there, who locked the door et cetera et cetera ad infinitum to use Edmund’s Latin. They mentioned Mrs H, of course.’