The Half Sister Read online

  ‘I know you’re sad,’ she reassures him, ‘but he’s not a good man. He only wanted money. Your mother always went for the bad apples. Now he’s back behind bars, there’s no use you hoping for anything else. Or anyone else,’ she adds. ‘That isn’t how this is going to end.’

  The next morning she decides she’ll be the one who goes to church. Monty is a good enough babysitter, the boy is busy in the nursery and he’s never going to try to escape. She assumes he’s too frightened. He’s hardly left Wynhope apart from going to school and he’s certainly made no friends in the neighbourhood, adult or child.

  Following the narrow path across the meadows, she puts her feet in their footprints, taking possession of their pilgrimage, through the brittle grasses scratching her bare legs, on past the lake which is stagnant and stifled by algae. The key to the chapel is easy to find. Intent on desecration and revenge, she barges inside like a drunk in a library, but stops short: there is no wealth to lay waste to, no sanctity to spoil, only a stained tablecloth on a makeshift altar and bird mess splattered on the pulpit. Edmund lights these candles, one, two, three; of course, the third is for Valerie and she feels indescribably sad for him, for them both, for all of them, clutching at false gods, grasping at straws, as Edmund might say. Shaken, she sags down onto the hard pew and weeps: such highs and lows, one minute all energy and fight, the next the drabbest of women, drained. Damp and dust and fungus sap her energy until an incomprehensible restlessness and the suffocating breathlessness of the place force her to her feet. She walks the walls. The faint inscriptions and his ancestors’ epitaphs are impossible to decipher, even the leather on the front of the Bible on the lectern is marbled by mildew. The pages cling to each other, they weigh so much more than she expects. She heaves them from Genesis to Deuteronomy, Kings, Psalms. Here is number 137. By the rivers of Babylon, just like the little girl sewed.

  O daughter of Babylon, who are to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

  Like a kite snagged on barbed wire, she gets caught on that verse. Tearing the page from the Bible, she folds it and slips it into her pocket; she doesn’t understand why, but destruction is on her mind. The scratch of the crow in the rafters drives her from the chapel.

  Back in Edmund’s study with a glass of wine, she takes inspiration from a text of a different sort, the framed cartoon on the wall showing a despairing man with his mouth gagged, his hands tied behind his back and a pen untouched on the desk in front of him. The caption reads: ‘For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been.”’

  Like a bee, the unthinkable, once thought, loses its sting. Rivers of Babylon. Daughter of Babylon. The psalm in her pocket offers her another line: ‘Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’

  Who would have guessed the Bible is so full of answers?

  The other useful thing is the fishing map of the river. Edmund doesn’t need to refer to it, he knows the lie of the river better than he knows their own bed, but he’s dug it out of his estate paperwork recently for Michael. It shows every beat and bend and the average depth of every pool. She thinks of him now, casting around for the truth in Outer Mongolia.

  The pretence is walking Monty. In the orchard, she picks up a small hard apple which has fallen too early from the tree. She knows it will be sour, but she bites into it anyway and then spits. The river is like a magnet, it draws her through the park, late summer low water, stones showing their skulls and wigs of green hair above the dribbling stream and islands joining hands with the bank. The putrid smell is that of a puffed-up body of a drowned lamb, but that’s upstream and she’s paddling downriver to the first pool, a favourite of Edmund’s. Last year she brought a bottle of wine down, which they shared on the wooded banks as the sunset transformed the water into liquid gold. She doesn’t understand the river like Edmund, everyone knows that. She tosses the bitter apple into the water and studies its journey; as Edmund says, the river carries everything away. Accidents happen, like if the boy had fallen from the window, for instance, no one to blame, just one of those dreadful things. Late evening would be best, with the mist whispering up the river, muffling the cries, blurring the lines. Here is a ledge where anyone might sit, squirming their toes in the stream and summoning the courage to swim, where anyone might lean over to count the trout, a ledge where anyone with a slip of a step and a scream might slither skinny-dipping deep, out of their depth while their aunty prepares the picnic.

  This isn’t so much a plan as a thing which might happen. She can sort of see it as it is when it has happened; her comforting Edmund as he packs up the circus animals in the attic, the two of them planning to spend Christmas in Cortina d’Ampezzo to get over it all, but the actual happening, that is divorced from her agency. Other things she tells herself as she treads carefully over the cattle grid on her way back, minding the gaps, holding tight to the rails: this child is never going to grow up and be happy; he is doomed to a lifetime of secrets and lies, of depression and self-loathing, because even if Edmund can create some false childhood idyll for him now, it will not last, not through the guilt of adolescence, not through the replayed pain in adult relationships. The truth is the rest of his life will draw on an infected tap root which will feed the sap with parasites and poison. If he could kill himself, he probably would. Like Valerie, who unlike her never got away, Michael is caught in a cycle; all she will be doing is setting him free.

  The boy does not come downstairs the whole of the rest of the day. She hears him carrying things down from the nursery, but what he is doing or why is beyond her. She leaves a tray with his favourite toast and strawberry jam, a banana and a glass of milk outside his bedroom door, watched over, but left untouched by the loyal dog. When she wakes in the morning, it has gone.

  All of the next day will have to be lived, with the Spotless Angels in the house, the contract mowers in the garden. The intolerable hours might wear away her stone resolve. The solution is a day out; she can upload pictures of the boy and her enjoying themselves and message them to Edmund for when he comes back from the wilderness and into range. They will form his memories and her defence.

  In contrast to her wired enthusiasm, the boy sulks about the visit to the wildlife park.

  ‘I’ve been there before,’ he lies on his board.

  ‘Go,’ urge the cleaners. ‘Get fresh air. Your aunty very nice to take you out for day.’

  ‘You’ll like it when you get there,’ insists Diana, winking at the cleaners.

  ‘Monty?’

  ‘No.’

  Oh, and what a thing she makes of it, popping little treats into a bag for the journey, promising pocket money to spend in the shop, saying he can take a photo on her phone so he can send a picture to his uncle. For most of the journey, Michael lies flat on the back seat so she can’t even see him in the rear-view mirror, and in retaliation against his passive-aggressive stance Diana assumes a position of false jollity and sings loudly, working her way through her limited repertoire of children’s music, getting louder as they get nearer, the one about the zoo, zoo, zoo and for he’s a jolly good fellow and so say all of us, and so say all of us and Humpty Dumpty who even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put back together again. Even she recognises the mania sitting on her shoulder, joining in with the chorus. Once she’s stopped and switched the engine off, the silence is intolerable. She flings open the door so that the car can fill up with the everyday hum of the outside world, but inside, Michael slumps like an imbecile, kicking his trainers against the back of her seat. There are sideways glances from the family parked next to them, their children jumping up and down as children should.

  ‘It’s change, I’m afraid.’ Diana sighs to the mother. ‘Children with his difficulties find it very hard.’

  The other woman softens, peers into the back of the Range Rover and encourages Michael – look how her children are excited, what fun it will b
e when he sees the animals. In response, the boy slides from the car and Diana whispers her thanks with the apparent gratitude of a harassed carer doing her best in difficult circumstances. It isn’t that far from the truth. The day, her plan for the evening, her vision of the rest of her life with Edmund, it is all within her control and she is so credible, everyone believes her, there is nothing she cannot do. If anyone were to be asked if they saw anything that day, the family in the next car would bear witness to her dedication, her first and last day in the role of loving mother.

  ‘Don’t cry, love,’ says the woman to her. ‘It’ll be all right once you get in there.’

  Is she crying? Diana thought she was laughing.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  But now she is crying. Michael is asleep in the back, ice cream smeared on his jeans, his face striped like a tiger, and an origami swan squashed on the seat beside him. In his hand, he is clutching the two plastic antelopes he chose in the shop where she was sure his lips moved as if he was saying thank you. And she is crying.

  It’s hard to drive in such a state of exhaustion; she’s not safe, not really. The road disappears in a mirage of faces. It was a face which started it. Valerie’s face in the booth at the ticket office taking all her money. Then there she was again behind the counter in the café, complexion as white as the cups and saucers, and again, behind the chain-link fence of the aviary feeding the screeching birds, and again, in the dark tunnel of the reptile house where a hand reached out for her hand and she took it. Out the other side into the fresh air and free from her, but then there were wolves behind wire on one side and swans on the lake on the other, and Diana remembered they only sing when they are dying and she had to hold tight to the railings to steady herself.

  Everywhere there were children, hundreds of them, flapping their elbows and imitating the penguins, bigger children grimacing as they tried to pick up little children the better to see the animals, children in pushchairs with sticky lips reaching out their open palms to her as they passed as if they were offering pardons, and children half asleep, one eye open, thumb in mouth, draped across the shoulders of their fathers. It was all but impossible to stop herself touching the children; in fact, in the playground she did, she picked up a toddler who tripped in front of her and immediately the girl became a body, heavy and dead in her arms, and the mother was running towards her in a red anorak and Diana doesn’t know why she has done what she has. She’s not the sort of person who kills children.

  ‘Don’t worry, love. I was just saying thanks, that’s all,’ said the mother. ‘Where are your kids?’

  The screams in the playground were a jarring symphony played on broken strings and cracked pipes, animals noises snorting and roaring, birds as well, the sound of wings against wire, and children clapping their hands on the merry-go-round. ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round,’ they sang, ‘all day long.’ It’s not possible to live like this. If only she could stop the faces, the noises, the singing – above all, the singing.

  ‘Are you all right, love?’

  Gathering up the disparate parts of herself, Diana organised words into a sentence. She’s fine, thanks, her boy is up there on the castle, and she laughed, as women do, standing together in playgrounds with dry leaves and crisp papers swirling around their feet and nothing but love in their eyes. It was a brave attempt, but it would not hold. All around her, children were dying; they were falling from the slide, cracking their heads on the ground, pulled bleeding from the jaws of wolves, lifeless in the arms of fathers who found them with their legs broken, floating in the lake while the swans swam by and sang their song. It was she who pushed them, held their heads under water, dropped them wriggling with excitement behind the bars.

  ‘He’s the one on the top of the tower on the wooden fort. Can you keep an eye on him for a moment, while I pop to the ladies’?’

  Once in the yellow cubicle, Diana shut herself in, squatted on the floor amongst the dropped toilet paper. Someone was knocking persistently – is everything all right in there, can you hear me? – but Diana’s tongue was swollen, pushing against the membrane of her mouth, choking her throat, breath thickening, thought dumb. More banging. She observed the strange electricity activating her right hand, aware of a distance between her self and her fitting body. Open the door, they were saying, but they didn’t understand the risk they were taking, unlocking her cage. The voices said they were coming in. Her face was pressed against the grime on the parts of the waste pipe which were difficult to clean, but the tremor was receding and then a man called Donald, who said he was from the park’s medical team, but who knows, was unlocking the cubicle from the outside and later leading her past the staring holidaymakers to a room with a bed and a green blanket. Unable to answer their questions, she was given a pen and paper and asked if she could write something down for them, her name perhaps.

  ‘My sister couldn’t stop crying once,’ Donald said a little later, over a cup of tea. ‘It didn’t stop until she told someone why. She was having a breakdown.’

  The word is important to Diana. She tries hard to hold onto it as if it were a piece of driftwood in the sea and she is drowning. When she heaves herself up onto it, she remembers why.

  ‘My dad died attending a breakdown,’ she says. ‘He was an RAC man. If he hadn’t, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘She got it all off her chest, talking to someone. Promise me you’ll do that?’

  Finally, Diana did talk: she talked about how she was alone, how she’d always been alone and her mother dying of a heart attack when no one expected it, too soon, too late; the earthquake and the falling tower and her sister, her half-sister, buried; the black man who came knocking at her door and her fear that the boy would die and Edmund and how far away he was and how far away he had been for a long time, further and further away, a man, barely more than a shape, someone small in the distance climbing the pink mountains, creeping over the horizon, everybody gone, taking their voices and their thoughts with them. Slowly, she felt the surges of grief for the ruins of her life subside and she looked around the first aid room and realised she was finally in the right place because she was ill. They were debating whether she was stable enough to look after the little boy who was waiting outside; she should have told them the answer, but she was not sure they would believe anything she said and with good reason. Besides, Donald had made his diagnosis – post-traumatic stress, understandable given what she’d told them. None of it her fault, they would help her to phone there and then to make an emergency appointment with her doctor.

  The receptionist at the surgery offered a ten-minute appointment that evening. Donald said that he didn’t think ten minutes sounded long enough to put things right, Diana wasn’t sure there were enough minutes left in the life of the world to put her right, but they both agreed it would be a start.

  ‘Strike while the iron’s hot,’ she said. ‘Edmund’s always saying things like that.’

  ‘He sounds like a sensible man, your husband.’

  Outside, Michael was waiting for her, his black eyes full of suspicion.

  ‘Bless him,’ said the other medic. ‘We’ve been doing face painting and making paper swans, but he’s been so worried about you, he hasn’t said a thing.’

  Because she did not know what she could do to ever make it up to Michael, she did the one thing she could manage and explained that he collects circus animals. With Donald’s help, they negotiated the crowded gift shop and Michael chose antelopes, alert and beautiful, with sad eyes and long antlers and in the rear-view mirror she can see them now, being taken back to join the circus in the nursery.

  Wynhope welcomes them home. It has been so hot, even the sunflowers planted by Edmund and Michael back in the spring are sagging from the shoulders. It is a parched place, the dog panting under the cedar and a dry dust spiralling up behind the car, and like a wounded animal Diana seeks water and shade. Her only thought is to put physical space between herself and the boy �
� two hours, surely she can keep him safe for two hours? He’s taken the toy antelopes up to his room; it warms her to think he likes them. Once she imagined buying him a children’s book of Greek myths for his birthday, a cake with candles on the kitchen table at Wynhope and the three of them singing together, later reading the stories with him at bedtime. If she gets better, these things are still possible. She never set out to be a monster.

  So he goes to the nursery and she leaves the house to walk the time away. On the doormat she panics when she picks up a card from the local police, how can they have known what she was planning, but this is just the officer coming to take her statement about Solomon, sorry to have missed her, contact this number to arrange another time. There is so much to put right.

  By the bridge, she edges uncertainly down the bank to the river, holding on to thin branches for safety. Blessed by the quietness and silence of the drops which fall from her hand onto her forehead, she sits. She just sits. This is Edmund’s river, she wants to slide in and swim in him, trusting him completely to hold her head up so that she can breathe, trusting him to take her with him downstream, the two of them surrendered to the current and everything it’s brought with it, and out into the ocean, believing in him and a wide, open future. This evening, someone, a nurse maybe, will find a sponge fresh from the seabed and dip it in cool water, gently strip from her these clothes which have been stuck to her body for so long and bathe her, wash her hands clean, lift her arms one by one, finding the raw places under her breasts, the sore places between her legs, then the nurse will lead her to a bed with clean, white cotton sheets in a room with no door and an open window where the sun comes in and there will be no more shaking or screaming, or footsteps, or keys or locked doors. And they will bring her food and they will bring her water and Edmund will sit next to her and he will say, I believe you, and he will kiss her and make everything better; only he can do that for her. And even Valerie and even Michael will forgive her because Diana is sorry, so sorry.