The Half Sister Read online

  A black Labrador gets to his feet and rests his heavy head on Diana’s knees. Her hand reaches out to stroke him, offering him soft repeated condolences which she cannot accept herself. She can hear her husband collecting a bottle from the sideboard in the dining room.

  ‘Damson gin. Best medicine!’

  The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up to the elbow and usually she likes him like this, the holiday tan against the city white cotton, but today it all feels faintly absurd, the pseudo workmanlike uniform, and when the hairs on his arms brush across her, she thinks she is noticing too much. Diana drinks urgently; Edmund sips. They do not speak. She holds out her glass, he takes it from her, leaves it empty on the tray, and speaks before she can ask.

  ‘She wasn’t ill, was she? If we’d known . . .’

  ‘If we’d known, what?’ She cuts him off. ‘We would have driven down to Highbridge every weekend to take Lucozade and hoover the stairs? Anyway, it was a heart attack.’

  He doesn’t touch her, his fingers close in on themselves and he occupies them, playing with the empty glass. ‘How is Valerie?’

  ‘Sobbing and hysterical. Probably pissed.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s sad.’

  Getting to her feet, Diana collects the glasses, uses a tissue to dab at a spot of spilt gin. ‘Of course, I’ll have to pay for the funeral since we’re so stinking rich and she’s still, what did she say, getting things together after leaving that man who beat her up. What was his name? Peter, Paul?’ She replays the conversation. ‘To be fair, she didn’t actually say stinking.’

  Following her example, Edmund sets things in order in the morning room, checks the date before folding the paper.

  ‘Ash Wednesday,’ he notes, poking the log back into the grate, regretting the fact that they hadn’t had pancakes; his mother could toss pancakes so high they stuck to the ceiling.

  ‘What’s that?’ Diana has already left the room.

  ‘Nothing.’ He follows her into the kitchen. ‘When do you think the funeral will be?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to come. Now don’t just stand there fiddling with your car keys, you go on to London. I’m fine.’ She waves her fingers at him. ‘Off you go and play with your money.’

  It always rankles when she says that, but he never retaliates. After all, she’s probably right. His investments are well looked after by the grown-ups he has employed to manage his businesses, his appearances at the office not much better than a child wanting to help wash the car, and probably equally as unhelpful. Nevertheless, after kissing the dog goodbye, Edmund leaves the house and says good morning to the bronze statue of the boy in the middle of the lily pond as he does most mornings, then he crosses the lawn and heads towards the garages. The builders have finished work on the tower, and the ridiculous underground swimming pool is dug if not watered. He is pleased that the quiet morning is finally all his, undisturbed by the clatter and clang of the scaffolding and the army of strong men singing along to the radio. Usually in March, daffodils and white blackthorn against winter trees would connect him to the present, but today is all about the past. Death follows each footprint left in the wet grass. Forty-one years ago in October, he was ten. Rain and a headmaster’s study and the mute video of the Firsts playing rugby in the mud and the slanting rain beyond the window, and there was a great-aunt he barely knew confirming his mother was dead. Then five years after that, playing tennis with himself against this very stable wall and counting each hit, seventy-four, seventy-five, seventy-six, he might have even got to a hundred had it not been for the crack of a shot, that second literally split. Like the atom, he thinks, a decision was taken and then the one irreversible moment when destruction was loosed upon the world and nothing could ever be the same again. Everyone had been just a little embarrassed at the service, as if, rather than committing suicide, his father had dropped a bit of a clanger. He has never attended a funeral since.

  When he reaches the stone bridge towards the end of the half-mile drive which leads from Wynhope House to the road, Edmund stops the car and, disregarding the red mud on his city shoes, slides down to the river. It has rained heavily overnight and the stream is sullen. Cupping his hands in the coloured water, he baptises himself all over again, allowing the cold flood of mourning to pour over him; it still does this, bursts the banks even after all these years.

  In the time between leaving his estate behind him and arriving at his office in London, the first-class carriage transports him through a no man’s land of suburbs and sprawling new housing, neither countryside nor city, neither the weight and warmth of his encompassing history nor the ice-shining gleam of his future returns. Something grey and in the middle where everyone else lives, but he doesn’t seem to belong. In the office, he stares out over the Legoland structures around him and thinks that nothing is for ever; he watches a barge moving slowing down the Thames beneath him and thinks perhaps some things are. Mounted on the wall, the small television is permanently tuned to News 24, not so much for the disasters tumbling and flooding and exploding and terrorising the world in the background, but for the market summary which streams along the bottom of the screen and for the red and green graphs in the corner like a life-support machine, showing which way the world is heading.

  Twenty-four hours gone, and Mikey writes about his dead granny in his English book as part of a ‘telling stories in the first person’ exercise. His teacher asks him if it is a true story, then says she is sorry, he must be very sad, which he isn’t but doesn’t like to say so. Valerie posts it online and watches the sympathy scroll in, a black tide arriving in waves over the screen. Over lunch, Edmund tells his accountant; he hasn’t planned to, but the news has filled him up with thoughts of dying and they spill over the edge and soak into the conversation about profit and loss. And Diana stands alone at the front door at Wynhope. She is not wearing quite enough given how cold it is for March and the bronze boy is a poor substitute for a listening ear.

  Chapter Three

  In the following week, between buying some new red slingback sandals for their week in the Maldives and preparing for a dinner party, the ridiculous, overwhelming sense of loss Diana experiences at unexpected moments bewilders her, swamping her without warning in a deluge of sadness, although she cannot name what she has lost, nor does she really have anyone to share her loss with. In the glasshouse, for instance, cutting lilies for the hall table, yellow pollen falls on her cream mohair jumper and she realises that moment will be stained for ever by the death of her mother. Having walked away from home long ago, she never expected this death to matter so much. It is some days later that the idea comes to her that she can invite her half-sister to stay after the funeral; the boy can come too if necessary. She shares the idea with her one and only confidante. Sally is something of a saviour; in her sixties, two facelifts down and loaded up with money from her last divorce when she took the chief executive of an oil company to the cleaners, her friend is a breath of fresh air, at least that’s how Edmund describes her.

  At the kitchen table, the two of them flick through magazines and make small talk until Diana decides it’s late enough, opens a bottle of wine and shares her idea.

  ‘So that’s the plan. Reconciliation. What do you think? Good idea?’

  ‘Well, since you haven’t told me what it is you need to reconcile, it’s a bit hard to say. But, as my lovely niece would say, what’s not to like?’ says Sally. She points at the picture of the Red Sea on the front of the Sunday Supplement Travel Magazine. ‘If it goes well, you can pop along and help out the Israelis and the Palestinians.’

  ‘Reconciliation’s probably the wrong word,’ Diana says. ‘Apology, that’s maybe what I mean.’

  Pulling out the chair next to her, Sally pats the seat. ‘Ah, so the truth will out. Come, sit, what sin did you commit, sister?’

  ‘Well, let’s say a sin of omission.’

  ‘How fascinating. I’ve often wondered when we get to the pearly gates how they’ll
weigh up the bad things we’ve done and the good things we’ve failed to do. Which is worse, do you think?’

  ‘Seriously, I want to apologise because, when I walked out at sixteen, I knew what I was leaving her to. Perhaps I should have stayed and looked after her.’ The drizzle that falls against the window is soundless and smears the glass, the world outside as smudged and speechless as the past.

  ‘And look where you’ve ended up. I still suffer from kitchen envy every time I come here.’ Sally indicates the sheer beauty and technical perfection of the room in which they are sitting. ‘Well done you, you’re the one that got away.’ Emptying her glass, Sally finds her umbrella. ‘The only thing I’d say is that it can be very difficult making up. You get psyched up, throw yourself at their feet and then it all backfires. Believe me, I tried it several times with the ex. I’d say go for it, but it’s not a one-night stand, darling, it might takes months, years. And with those words of wisdom’ – Sally kisses Diana once on each cheek – ‘your priestess needs to hit the road and pray that God in the form of a policeman with a breathalyser isn’t waiting at the end of your fabulous drive.’

  The next morning, Edmund wonders if Diana has changed her mind, now she’s had a chance to sleep on it. God knows he hopes so.

  ‘Valerie’s all I’ve got left,’ says Diana, swilling the Alka-Seltzer round the glass, watching the tiny white crystals cling to the edge, the vortex of water in the middle. ‘She’s the only one who can . . .’

  Edmund spoons the dog’s meat from the tin into the bowl. ‘Who can what?’ It never fails to make him feel very happy, watching the dog eating his breakfast.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Clean slate, that sort of thing. Things that can be said, once and for all.’

  Like Monty whining at the door, Edmund wants to get out. Although he and Diana have travelled widely in their three short years of marriage, the past is a country neither of them is particularly comfortable in visiting, the passports to those places hidden deep in drawers that are overfull and difficult to open. Hovering at the back door, he calls his questions through to her: ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘It’s a very long time ago and you don’t want to hear all that.’

  He hugs her. ‘Silly billy,’ he says, ‘And here’s Monty.’ He ruffles the dog’s ears. ‘He doesn’t want you to be sad either, do you, Monty?’

  The next day, Diana makes the call, almost as if Valerie is there beside her, sisters in their stockinged feet supporting each other through their memories, and she will say I am sorry and Valerie will say none of it was your fault, it was all his, I believe you. No reply. She has to leave a message because phones are not allowed in prison and Valerie is visiting Solomon.

  Chapter Four

  On the way from the station to the prison, Valerie sits as she always does, if she can, on the top floor at the front of the bus. The next stop is the shopping centre where the road goes under the walkway from the multi-storey to the supermarket, all the people in the air above her crossing from one side to the other. It seems unreal that your mother should be dead while you’re on the number 52. Through the glass windows of the first floor of the department stores, figures are swimming between racks of clothes like goldfish. She bought her mum a cardigan from there last Christmas, but in the years Paul kept them apart her mother put on weight and it didn’t fit. Finally, the bus picks up speed, out through the town, the drives of the houses getting longer the further out you go. Take Diana. She has the longest drive of all. Valerie smiles to herself. Solomon would say you shouldn’t judge people by the length of their drive.

  At HMP Brackington, the ladies’ room is packed. Relatively speaking, she is a new girl at all this but she’ll never become an old hand; Solomon is over half way through already. She puts her pound coin in the locker and is about to close the door when her phone beeps.

  ‘Can you and Michael come to stay at Wynhope the night after the funeral? Hope so. We can catch up again after all this time. Di.’

  Of all the things she is expecting, this is the least likely, but her number is up on the board and she barely has time to process the invitation before she has to start the long, humiliating security process which divides her from Solomon. Through one door. Locked behind you. Feet astride on yellow footprints on the floor, like someone has stood in a great big pot of her Spring Sunshine. Arms outstretched. Sniffer dogs. Another door. Locked behind you. The only time Mikey came with her he said it was a bit like his computer game Lockdown, all about getting to the next level; she should never have brought him, even on a family day. It makes her angry that he should even have to think about prison at his age, that Paul should be free as a bird and Solomon locked up. Anyone who knows what a peaceful man he is would realise that he’d never assault a police officer on a protest march unless the police officer assaulted him first, but who was going to listen to his side of the story? And what about people like Diana’s husband, sitting around sucking his silver spoon and never worshipping anything other than money, never campaigning for anything other than himself? Bet he’s not squeaky clean, but they wouldn’t send him down, would they? She wonders what he is really like, this Edmund. If she says yes to the invitation, she will know soon enough.

  When Solomon hears the news about her mum, he cries, even though he’s only met her the once, and Valerie ends up comforting him across the gap between the bolted-down chairs. It is seven years since he’s seen his own mother.

  ‘My long-lost sister Diana’s invited us to stay the night after the funeral,’ says Valerie. ‘I just got a text.’

  ‘In her stately home? Well, that’s a yes from me. I’ll apply for a pass right away.’

  ‘Oh, stop it, Sol.’ Valerie manages to laugh. ‘Why’s she done it, do you think?’

  ‘After everything you’ve told me about your family, sounds like an olive branch.’

  ‘I don’t know. Even if it is, she’ll want to be raking over the past.’

  Around him, row upon row of visitors and prisoners bend towards each other at the blue plastic tables like chess players. The past and poorly thought-out moves are what have got most of them here in the first place, one way or another.

  ‘What is the worst that can happen?’ he asks.

  They pull their hands apart, clasp them together again under the table. She can feel him turning the ring on her finger. He should be out in three months, the church is keeping his job open for him, the flat will be finished. This is what hope feels like, she thinks, and tells him what she’d seen on television, how it reminded her of Mikey sitting on his shoulders in the park last summer.

  ‘You know I’d do anything for him,’ says Solomon. ‘If anything ever happened to you, I’d be there for him.’

  That evening, hands behind his head, lying on his bed in his cell after lockdown, Solomon’s thoughts are a flickering screen obscuring the prayerfulness he sought. He wants her now, not just for the sex, although he wants that too, but he wants her so he can be someone for someone again, a gentleman for Val, a proper father for Mikey. In the photo he keeps, Mikey is running after a football, the little boy’s face screwed up with determination. He scored, but it was as if the kid didn’t know how to celebrate. Out in the fresh air, he didn’t look as geeky as usual, just frizzy hair and stumpy legs and nine years’ worth of wariness.

  Turning to his Text for the Day, Solomon tries to focus: ‘They that visited us required of us mirth, saying Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’

  So Solomon begins to sing quietly to himself. ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’

  No, comes the reply from the bottom bunk.

  ‘Were you there when the stone was rolled away?’ Solomon laughs, but he has the good grace to sing silently, only to himself.

  On the bus going home, Valerie texts back: ‘Thx Di, Mikey and I would love to stay the night. X Val.’

  Chapter Five

  On the morning of the funeral Mikey wakes up with the day lying awkward beside him. He hates the
idea that school will go on without him, the lining up, the working out, and, even worse, he already hates two days’ time when everyone will look at him and wonder where he’s been, or everyone won’t look at him, like it hasn’t mattered that he hasn’t been there. His mother says staying at his aunty’s is an opportunity to put things right. What things, he doesn’t know. What he does know is that stuff doesn’t often get put right, not overnight.

  Downstairs, the cat is waiting to go out. Having found a packet of crisps in the cupboard and the remote down the back of the sofa, he flicks through the channels: a quiz show, a chat show, a stupid cartoon for little kids, a cooking show, a shopping show. Finally, he finds a nature show all filmed underwater where the fish bulge at the camera, silenced thousands of feet below the surface of the sea. Even the voice of the man explaining the fish sounds as though it belongs in a different world, and Mikey finds himself on the side of the fish. The cat comes back, he finds three more jigsaw pieces of Elvis’s boots, eats another packet of crisps and hides the empty packets, and then it is the nine o’clock news. He watches long enough to see more pictures of buildings being swallowed up by the sea because that is interesting, how an earthquake can make waves which grow bigger and bigger, and he wonders how far things can tip without actually spilling over and whether if the world tilts as it goes round and round and Australia is upside down, why don’t they all fall off the edge? He leaves it all behind and goes upstairs.

  ‘Mum? We’re going to be late for the funeral.’

  ‘Put the kettle on, Mikey,’ she calls from the shower.

  He brings her mug of tea to the bedroom and sees her straightening her hair which isn’t that colour really and getting a brand-new black dress out of the cupboard and snaking it down over her bra and pants like it is a second skin. So that’s what you wear to funerals, he thinks, sort of the same as what you wear to go clubbing only a bit longer. She has got him a new jacket with a free footballing tie. He doesn’t even like football.