The Half Sister Page 17

  ‘It didn’t answer anything.’

  ‘Maybe not. But there’ll be no more questions either. Closure, I think that’s what Mikey’s therapist lady will say and I agree. Here, raise a glass. To the future. To the three of us.’

  Clink. Clink. Silence. Narrative verdict. As she sips the champagne, it strikes Diana that it is a contradiction. A verdict is a final act, a definitive line and a shutting down of options, but a narrative? Where a narrative begins and ends is a different matter, and wherever this particular story began, Diana is sure it has not ended. Valerie’s death sits somewhere in the middle of a longer saga; like a box set, it has already outlived its original characters and future episodes are drafted, if not recorded. Edmund, of all people, should understand the long game.

  Outside the lodge, the press love the present moment. It has it all, this story: family turmoil amongst the upper classes, a whole new take on the earthquake which ran out of steam months ago. Some of the reports move from Diana to Edmund, not only the property developer who failed to safely develop his own property but also the irony of his substantial investments in the oil company whose well is under investigation as one of the contributing causes of his own downfall. For two or three days a cluster of campaigners hang around the end of the drive with placards – hoot if you hate fracking. The horns sound a different song to Diana. She hears hoot if you hate wealth, hoot if you hate the upper classes, hoot if you hate me. Later, Edmund tells her the protestors are already behind the times, that he’s sold his fracking shares and taken the hit. Somehow it no longer appeals, pressurising the past to fuel the future.

  ‘In fact,’ he says, ‘apart from the Riverside Development, things are falling into place at last. What with that and the inquest being over, I thought the timing was ideal, but given the state you’re in, now I’m not sure I should go away at all.’

  Every year, Edmund makes a pilgrimage to an exotic location in search of the perfect fly-fishing experience. This year it’s Mongolia. It costs a fortune, which was never a factor in the past, but to some extent the pressure’s off now the market’s recovered and, anyway, it was paid for months ago, ‘before all this’, and it would just be money down the drain if he cancelled now. Just as he is hesitating, thinking he should stay, Diana is realising how very much she would like to be left alone.

  ‘Just go,’ she says. ‘God knows we need a break. Not just from here and Michael, but from each other. It’s all been too much and, yes, yes, I’ll be fine with Michael and Michael will be fine with me.’

  The school will have Michael back for the new term, she reassures him, she’ll arrange for the cleaners to come more often so she can have a bit more support, and she might ask Sally to come and stay for a few days, or the temporary nanny, Michael got on with her so well. Yes, good idea to get back in touch with Mrs H, but he has more than enough to do, so she’ll see to it, she lies. And when he comes back, they can start again.

  He kisses her for the first time for a long time. ‘I hope so, Di,’ he says. ‘I really hope so.’

  Outside in the sunshine with Michael, Edmund prepares to leave. The two of them are sitting at the garden table examining his ten-foot number 7 rod, while, inside, Diana considers the possibility that she is in fact the one with the catch: the boy is hooked, she can reel him in. There will be no Edmund to release him, no visitors to Wynhope to see him flapping breathless in the net. Fourteen days. The silence cannot go on and he knows that. In a clear, undiluted way she allows herself the terrible thought that this heaviness she feels is the weight of hate: his face, thin and pathetic like his mother’s, like his grandfather’s; his latent sexuality with his feeble penis and sordid interest in her bathroom cabinet; his mutism, elective, deliberate and punitive. He is a thief, stealing Edmund away from her, and he needs to be caught. He will speak. They will sort it out once and for all. If she puts hatred at the top of her virtual reality flow chart and discounts carrots because she has nothing to offer, what sticks can she beat him with to break the silence? There is nothing she can take away that has not already been lost, except perhaps the dog. The threat to send Mikey away and the threat to keep him are both as self-defeating for him as they are for her. Long after he has left Wynhope and grown up, if he has not spoken, he will still hold all the trumps and be prepared to play them. Michael and Valerie, partners at the table in three-handed poker. However she solves the problem, it needs to be a solution which will hold. Be permanent in some way. If he was dead, for instance. Imagine that.

  Footsteps on the gravel, they’ve finished their fishing game. In the mirror, she appears quite ordinary. Unthinkable things are helpful only in that they show where the full stop comes at the end of a sentence of spiralling thoughts. Or a comma, at least.

  On the front of the card which Mikey has made for Edmund there is a picture of a fish, coloured in like a rainbow.

  Dear Edmund

  Have a nice holiday. I hope you catch loads of fish and take some photographs on your phone to show me when you get back.

  Thank you for looking after me and taking me to the chapel and teaching me fishing. You are a very kind man and I love you a lot. I want to stay with you forever at Wynhope.

  Mikey xx (and Monty woof woof)

  A late summer storm is gathering, the back door slams shut in the wind, and the dog scratches at it restlessly, whining to be gone with Edmund. Children are like dogs, Mrs H said once, neither of them can cope with suitcases. Patting the card in his pocket, Edmund finds time to kiss Diana goodbye. He can’t wait to get away from her and, given the state of their marriage, probably wants to stay away as well. He spends longer hugging Monty than her. He is only reluctant to get in the car because of the dog, Wynhope and the boy; all he will be looking forward to is coming back to the dog, Wynhope and the boy. She is an extra in this scene, a walk-on servant. Fuck you, she shouts silently across the lawn, fuck both of you.

  Side by side, Diana and Michael wave goodbye, her hair blowing across her face and heavy splats of rain falling one by one onto the gravel. The anger in her retreats, gets smaller and smaller, until it is out of sight, and then her love curls, swells and breaks over her, tosses her and leaves her bruised and gasping. It laps at her loneliness, leaves her shivering on the shingle. Diana understands. All she wants is Edmund back, but she cannot have Edmund without the boy and it is impossible to lose the boy without also losing Edmund.

  Checkmate.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  At supper time, Diana and Michael circle each other in the kitchen, a macabre tribal dance where touching is prohibited. With Edmund gone, reality seems suspended. The boy puts himself to bed, she positions herself outside the door and listens; not for a reply, it’s his breathing that interests her. Downstairs, wine in hand, she turns on the television because noise helps. It is a programme called Dear Future Me, in which people compete to have the opportunity to fulfil their dreams.

  ‘I don’t think about the obstacles,’ says one of the contestants. ‘They’re just fleas on an elephant.’

  Fleas have a way of biting in the night and Diana lies awake, scratching at her thoughts. The heatwave whispers with her paranoia and she grows feverish with fear. It seems to her that Valerie is back and playing fast and loose with space and time. Sometimes at 3 a.m. she’s out on the landing crying as a child cries; other times, in the morning, as Diana sits at her dressing table, her half-sister is sitting on the end of the bed behind her, swinging her legs and waiting to play. Whether it is the house or her own soul that needs exorcising, Diana does not know, but after one particularly tortured night she falls to her knees in the morning and prays. She doesn’t know to whom she prays, but she prays. She prays that she might be free from the past, from Valerie, from the guilt of what she has done, what she has not done, what she might do. She prays for someone to rescue her because she was wrong when she told Edmund she could manage on her own. Thought only in her head and not spoken, the prayers close over the room like ice on a pond, so she
forces herself to voice them out loud and crack the terror open.

  ‘Save me from Michael. Save Michael from me.’

  Opening her eyes, Diana is embarrassed, as if the dressing gown on the end of the bed is mocking her and the fluttering curtains are giggling behind her back. She gets off her knees, creeps to the window like someone reaching dry land and squints into the fierce September sunshine. The oaks lining the drive are made sombre by the end of summer and even the grass in the park is thin and exhausted. Then she spots someone. He is a long way away, but he is definitely walking towards the house. She is not expecting anyone, no one comes to Wynhope any longer. The stranger reaches the cattle grid and seems to hesitate. She can see he is a youngish man in a short-sleeved white shirt and beige slacks and he is black, and therefore Diana concludes he is a Jehovah’s Witness and hides behind the curtains. The bell sets the dog barking, but she waits until there is nothing left of it at all in the air. It rings again. Peeping out, she notices he is not carrying a Bible. Maybe she’s wrong. On impulse, she decides to answer. After all, if nothing else, this is another human being. Cautiously, she opens the front door. The man is apologetic for bothering her and surprisingly polite; he actually sounds quite well educated for, well, for someone like him. He says he’s looking for work, particularly gardening. If he wants to leave his name and a contact number, Diana says, she’ll get her husband to call him if anything comes up. The pause is a fraction too long: Sonny is a false identity and the phone number is lacking a digit, of that she’s sure. With Edmund away, she’s vulnerable – the wealthy always are – and this man is obviously a foreigner. It’s as though history and geography have slipped, seeing someone like him at Wynhope. Her hand hovers close to the panic button, but Monty is leaning against the man’s crisp, clean trousers, looking up for affection and wagging his tail, and it’s enough to make her hesitate.

  ‘It’s beautiful here.’ He indicates the swing on the lawn. ‘How many children do you have?’

  ‘Just the one. He’s not ours,’ she explains. She should stop there. It’s what fraudsters do, lure you into conversation, but the words blurt from her and she’s like a child telling everything that’s happened in a hurry. ‘We’ve sort of fostered him. His mother was killed in the earthquake.’

  His sadness seems genuine as he turns away, embarrassed by his emotion. ‘I am so sorry.’

  Stepping from the porch out onto the drive, Diana indicates where the tower was, tells him about the child she is left with, all that she is left with.

  ‘Jesus said suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not: for such is the kingdom of God. Luke sixteen, verse thirteen. And that’s what you’ve done. You will be blessed for looking after him.’

  Religion. She was right after all, but nevertheless it’s strange: she prays and then some priest comes up her drive? Mumbo jumbo. There again she believes everything else that trespasses into Wynhope from one world to the next, so why not this? In Edmund’s study the landline is ringing; it jolts her back to the here and now.

  ‘Please answer it, I can wait,’ the man says. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  It’s impossible to stop the scam calls which have proliferated recently. Edmund says it’s because they’ve made an insurance claim. They all promise reconstruction and payouts on a scale she can only dream of. She hangs up abruptly and turns to look at the stranger. Something about seeing him framed in the doorway suddenly makes her recognise him from the photograph. Solomon. The prisoner. The illegal immigrant. He said in his letter he’d be out in September and here he is, come sniffing after his dead girlfriend’s child. The thought frightens her, that someone just unlocks a cell door and people like him are free to do whatever they like, and wasn’t he put away for attacking someone? This will be about money, she guesses, blackmail and unsubstantiated claims from the past. Well, he’s not the only one who can be a conman.

  ‘Solomon,’ she cries. ‘It’s you, isn’t it? Valerie’s fiancé? Why didn’t you say so?’

  How sorry he is, he loves the boy so much, he promised Valerie that he’d look after him if anything ever happened to her, so he has come. ‘I did write,’ he says, ‘but I never heard back. I’m sorry about the lies, I didn’t know how I’d be received. I did not anticipate being welcomed like this. Forgive me for doubting you.’ Then he adds, ‘But one thing is true that I said, I prayed and God led me here to Wynhope.’

  Oh, how she reassures him, regrets not receiving his letter, sympathises with his loss, agrees what a special person Valerie was, and would he mind just waiting there while she fetches Mikey? It takes her no more than thirty seconds to make the call. Has the boy heard Solomon? He’s not come down. She asks her visitor to give them a few minutes, this is quite a shock for Mikey, he needs a bit of time, she’ll return in a minute.

  Clasping his hands together, Solomon closes his eyes. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he calls back, either to her or to his god, who knows, then he backs away from the house, across the lawn. When he’s parallel with the pond, he stands in a strange mirroring of the bronze boy with his arm raised. Taking advantage of his distance from the house, she bolts the front door, checks the back door, and waits on the landing just in case Michael makes a run for it. Why are they taking so long? She thinks she hears them, but the sirens are on the radio, it must be the news or some crime drama.

  ‘Mikey.’

  Suddenly, she can hear Solomon shouting outside, ‘Mikey, don’t worry. I’m here for you now.’ There is an increased urgency and panic in his voice. ‘Mikey. No. Stay back from the window, just wait. It’ll be okay.’

  There are bars across the window, aren’t there? Now she thinks about it, she isn’t sure. Are they on the front or back windows? Not both, she knows that. If he falls, he will surely die. It would be a hideous thing to happen, but it would be Solomon’s fault and it would be over – the boy tumbling through the air, soundless, the body, thud on the mud of the flowerbed, crushing the crimson dahlias – a line drawn under this whole terrible saga and a new future possible, no, not even a new future, a return to the old present. Should she run up to the nursery or out to the garden? Once again she is frozen, only jolted out of her rigid passivity by the arrival of the police. Not just a car, but a van load of them, padded out and pumped up. Triple-letter score on this one: asylum seeker, offender, a man released on licence after assaulting a police officer. Against the van, Solomon is being held with his arms behind his back, black head flat on the white bonnet.

  ‘One word, let me have one word,’ he is begging. ‘The boy, up there.’

  The handcuffs are secured, confidence returns to Diana, and she unlocks the front door. ‘He needs to go. He’s trespassing and harassing us,’ she cries. ‘This isn’t good for my boy, can’t you see what it’s doing to him?’

  What they see is a child on the top floor with his head stuck between the bars and what they hear is a strange bleating, difficult to listen to, impossible to interpret.

  ‘This man is not his father, he has no rights here, he needs to go. Please.’

  Everything is hanging in the balance. The police are loosening their hold on their prisoner; the panic and the distress of the boy is shifting attention away from locking up Solomon to setting the child free.

  ‘There’s something not right here,’ says Solomon, sweat, or is it tears, trickling down his face. ‘Look at the boy, don’t you see how desperate he is?’

  The crackling radio conversations are inaudible to Diana, but she can tell the police are changing their mind.

  ‘Jesus brought me here for a reason, to save the child. There’s evil at work here.’

  One mention of God is all it takes to convince the police that Solomon is indeed dangerous. With renewed conviction, they bundle him into the back of the van, all the time Solomon shouting that he’ll make sure someone knows the truth. The doors are closed, the engine started. She’s happy to give the two remaining police officers a few details and agrees to someone coming
in the next couple of days to take a full statement, but what she’s not expected is that they’ll want to see the child. They do that, they explain, when there’s been a domestic. With their hats off, they wipe their foreheads and wait in the shade of the cedar tree for her to produce the goods.

  The body curled in the corner of the nursery does not acknowledge her. He could never have jumped; the bars at the front do go all the way to the top, it’s only the rear windows looking out over the field that are dangerous. He’s not going anywhere and he knows it. Back in the hall, she explains completely honestly that Michael is highly traumatised by this prisoner from his mother’s dubious past turning up out of the blue, that he doesn’t want to come down, so is it really necessary to add to his distress? No, apparently not. They remember the terrible tragedy of the earthquake and they only need to look around to see how lucky the child is to have her as his guardian. Goodbye and thank you.

  No one is ever going to believe Solomon’s word against hers. With a sort of hysteria born from relief and success, she starts to sing.

  ‘Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday, christened on Tuesday.’ Counting the stairs to the attic in time to the beats of the rhyme, she regains control. ‘Died on Saturday, buried on Sunday, that was the end of Solomon Grundy.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  God. Religion. Even her stepfather crawled to church on high days and holy days for confession. Diana is furious with herself for so nearly falling for the smoke and mirrors, on her knees praying for forgiveness; she even took the arrival of Valerie’s bit of stuff as the angel Gabriel. Enough. The boy is quite defeated, he complies with an early bedtime and lies like a rag doll.