The Half Sister Read online

  The photos on his phone are nearly all of Mikey: Mikey fishing, the river so low and slow it barely laps his boots and the flowering irises on the islands midstream higher than his head; Mikey captured flying higher and higher on the swing hung by a blue rope from the boughs of the Cedar of Lebanon in what is, of course, a silent movie. Is this sharp yearning what fatherhood feels like? Mikey draws him into an extraordinary world which everyone else seems to inhabit quite casually, but the child has quite the opposite effect on Diana. Looking at it with the benefit of hindsight and distance, it is obvious Diana was becoming more than a little mad and he should probably have said something to someone, should probably not have left them alone. This unequilateral triangle cannot maintain its shape. If he wants to stay with Diana, Mikey will have to go; if he wants to keep Mikey, he will lose Diana. The first scenario seems less and less appealing, the second, quite impossible; they probably wouldn’t let a man like him have Mikey anyway, whoever ‘they’ are, so all three of them will go their separate ways and be lonely and that will be that. God knows where Mikey will go. Out of sight out of mind. To distance yourself from difficulty is almost a genetic trait in his family. He supposes if it wasn’t for the earthquake, he would never have met him. As Diana says, it was a watershed of sorts. The coroner’s verdict might have brought things to a close, but the story runs on.

  The hopelessness of what awaits him on the other side of customs at Heathrow in a few days’ time is unbearable. The leaning lines of people in the arrivals hall waving their expectations over the barriers; he isn’t expecting a welcome home banner, Diana barely leaves the house with the boy any more. Pushing aside the blinds, Edmund opens the window as far as it will go, which is not far enough. Beneath him the city looks and sounds like hell: shouts and horns and sirens and commerce and pollution and motherless boys picking pockets on Peace Avenue and fatherless girls for sale in bars. He will go home and sort things out once and for all, but he will not stay. Wynhope has been mothballed before. In his mind’s eye he imagines himself retreating to somewhere quiet, a clean, uncluttered space, a whitewashed cell in a monastery on a mountain, one window looking west over a snow plateau. Desert Island Discs gives you the Bible and Shakespeare and that would be fine for him; he would be a very British hermit.

  Pen and paper in his suitcase, wash bag with two packets of paracetamol and a bottle of sleeping pills in the bathroom. He isn’t man enough for that, although there is something fitting about a mediocre mid-lifer such as himself taking his curtain call in an anonymous box in a hotel chain. He could never have carried off the tower. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, no time like the present; his father had an inexhaustible supply of proverbs. Well, he’d lived and died true to those. The cartoon in his study at Wynhope gave Edmund his own motto, it was a sort of pointed present from WNT, a man gagged and bound by the blight of what might have been. Mikey is what might have been.

  The screen on his phone lights up against the yellow ochre bedspread. Message from Diana. The only email he’s had from her sounded peculiarly positive and cheery – something about a trip to a wildlife park with Mikey, which seemed very unlikely. Anyway, that won’t have lasted and he can’t face talking to her; she’ll want to Skype if she knows he’s got a signal and there’ll be some long catalogue of Mikey’s deficiencies as if he was a child psychologist and could suggest a solution. This time last year he missed her when he was away, missed the unconditional way in which she loved him physically with no expectation or disappointment. It was something he thought he’d never know again when things went downhill in that department; he missed the quiet evenings together in the drawing room when neither of them felt the need to talk. He had thought that was a measure of love between people, the quality of the silence between them. He missed what fun she was, always game to have a go at things that were new for her: racing, opera, getting to grips with the estate and its little ways. She became more like his mother every day as if, despite all the differences in their backgrounds, she was born to belong to Wynhope. And even stranger, although he always revelled in having time to himself without her fussing over him, he did miss fussing over her; for all her executive competence, he cherished the infinitesimal part of her that craved a bit of TLC.

  But now? The hotel window is still open, he is on the eleventh floor. It might not be a big enough gap for a man, but it is wide enough for a phone with an unread message.

  ‘Help me.’

  The room tilts around him. Help me. Diana? Help is not a word in her vocabulary, unless of course that is all she can manage. Possible scenarios: attacked at Wynhope during a burglary, his study turned over, paintings ripped from the wall, spaces where valuable things had been, he couldn’t quite think what; a car crash; some sort of breakdown, her, not the car; and as his thinking slows, that seems to him most likely, a descent into unfamiliar vocabulary and incoherence. If she needs help, why doesn’t she just try calling and speak to him? He has not heard from her as often as in previous years when there were dozens of messages waiting for him when he returned to the city, and he wonders what has really been going on back home in his absence. He shouldn’t have left her there with Mikey, she was already too close to the edge.

  Mikey. If Mikey needed help, he would have to text. What if it’s Mikey? That, at the very moment when he is thinking about leaving him, the boy reaches out to him for help? As if a gun has cracked and a race has started, his heart rate speeds up and his stomach tightens; he has the physical experience of not being able to run fast enough to save the thing that matters most.

  ‘Who is this?’

  While he waits for a reply, the radio alarm switches from 21:07 to 21:08. The television follows a warplane flying low over a burning city, he does not know if it is fact or fiction. Keeping the phone in one hand, he opens the fridge with the other, takes out the mini vodka, pours it, tops it up with Coke, shuts the fridge with his foot, throws the can in the bin. 21:09. Surely online messaging should be instantaneous despite the 5,000 miles between them. It must be afternoon in England, light, raining maybe, only the stubble left on the hills and the sweet smell of wheat straw blowing in on an easterly wind. Everyone lives almost simultaneously these days, almost, but not quite.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Mikey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Despite the drink, Edmund’s mouth is dry. Something is wrong at Wynhope, but he is so far away he does not know what it is or what he can do about it and, although blood is pumping through his muscles, there is nowhere to fly to and nothing to fight. Another earthquake? Everyone said it was just a question of time, Valerie’s skirt crumpled up above her thigh and her white leg sticking out of the rubble. The boy could be trapped. How come he’s got the phone?

  ‘Hi Mikey,’ he types, ‘everything OK?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Diana is typing, it says at the top of the screen, but it’s lying.

  ‘Diana.’

  Diana is what’s wrong. A shaky sort of hysterical laugh breaks the silence; this is probably yet another fallout between the two of them and he is being expected to mediate from the other side of the world. It’s not funny, but at least it isn’t a catastrophe. He downs the vodka and Coke in one and leans back against the pillows, chuckling to himself.

  ‘Oh dear. What’s happened now?’

  Mikey is probably scrunched up in the nursery, his circus animals guarding his stolen mobile phone, he can virtually hear Diana screaming up the stairs.

  ‘She had an accident.’

  Not awful, not laughable, something in between.

  ‘Are you on your own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Edmund swings round to the edge of the bed.

  ‘Well done for texting me. Can you ring 999?’

  ‘No.’

  No? He can’t even call 999? Why the hell not? Edmund and Mikey’s relationship is based on silence: apart from maybe two or three words on that terrible mo
rning, he has never heard the boy talk and not only has he become comfortable with his mutism, he realises he has been more than a little in love with their secret ways of understanding each other. But now at this greater distance in terms of both time and space, Edmund experiences the stubborn dumbness as if for the first time – why won’t he just bloody well speak?

  ‘It is very easy. Press 999. Say three words. Ambulance. Wynhope House. You can do it.’

  Two ticks. Message received. No reply.

  ‘Are you still there? Press 999. You don’t have to speak to them. They will trace the phone. Mikey? Let me know you’re okay. I’m worried.’

  The phone rings until it goes to Diana’s voicemail, composed and efficient. He leaves a message anyway, Mikey is always listening even if he doesn’t talk. Impotence and anxiety, his twin torturers, are back, cornering him. Nothing he can do, no one he can turn to. Contacts. The names mean nothing, spiralling past, the police are a last resort. You never know with Mikey, and Edmund is reluctant to further professionalise his family’s crimes if it is not necessary. It is shocking to him that out of all the people captured in his list, so few, if any, can be called upon in an emergency like this; the whole village would have turned out for his parents. There is one he can select. Despite the fact that John and Grace were his lifeline in so many ways for so many years, he has been too embarrassed to contact them since ‘letting them go’ and surprisingly Grace hasn’t even kept in touch about Mikey, but he is certain they will do whatever needs to be done, for Wynhope, if not for Diana – there’s no love lost there. Grace answers. It takes no more than two minutes. He imagines her untying her apron, rattling through her bag for her car keys. Neither of them knows what she will find.

  Chapter Thirty

  Ulaanbaatar to Seoul. Seoul to Heathrow. The arrival is delayed by fog. Carried downstairs by the escalators, sucked by the moving walkway into the baggage reclaim hall, Edmund has the sensation of having been prematurely recalled from paradise and transported against his will back to a world he had decided to quit. On the coach from the airport, squashed against a suntan lotion and aftershave man, waiting at the bus station with a busker playing Elgar and a pop-up selling Lebanese which smells of mornings in Damascus, and a homeless man with a cardboard box he’s given to his dog, he feels everything too clearly. Like a neap tide, it is all creeping back to him, saltwater seeping up the estuary in the mist and him realising, too late, that the banks are too steep for a fisherman who is in too deep. In the taxi queue, a woman in fishnet tights and leather shorts asks him where he wants to get to, sometimes, you know, it’s cheaper to share. It was in a bar in the Caribbean that he lost his virginity to a woman like this, another escape at another time and he was as high as the waves then, as full, as strong, nothing like the limpet, low-tide man he has become. Everyone in the queue waits for his answer; he hears himself saying something about needing to get to the hospital urgently, wife, accident. Now they are all on his side, no point in a taxi, less than five minutes’ walk, he’ll be stuck in a cab for hours in the one-way system. It’s a wonderful hospital, they hope everything works out all right, God bless, smiles the girl in the fishnet tights.

  Descending into the subway, he is relieved to lose the psychedelic album cover of a world beyond the tunnel, to reduce the traffic to nothing more than a rhythmic throb far above him. England knows him too well. In their own peculiar tight-lipped way the people are too kind. Down here it is easier to be himself, a tired man dragging himself and his awkward luggage back towards his dying wife, an unspoken acknowledgement that her death would be the simplest of solutions slung over one shoulder, his prayer that he will not lose her so heavy it makes his lungs ache. Having climbed and counted the steps to the hospital, he places his feet on the painted line that leads to Intensive Care where a sign directs him to disinfect his hands with the alcohol gel in a dispenser. How many people like him pause at that entrance wishing they could wash their hands of the whole thing?

  The consultant is well known to Edmund, not personally, but from dinner parties and other people’s daughters’ weddings and charity auctions where people bid highly for things they already own. Both pull their trousers up slightly as they sit on easy chairs designed for difficult conversations, both lean forwards a little, hands clasped. They understand not only each other’s body language, but the requirement for minimalist, polite responses to devastating information.

  Diana has sustained significant injuries to her spine, multiple fractures and severe head injuries. The apparent delay between the trauma and medical attention was not helpful, but they operated successfully to reduce swelling to the brain and she is now in an induced coma and will be kept that way for the time being. At the moment they have no way of knowing what level of consciousness might be regained or when. It is too early to talk about a long-term prognosis.

  Following the neurosurgeon, Edmund is the car-sick child in the backseat: how much further now? The genre changes from drama to science fiction. The neuro ward is a future factory, it is hard to tell where the power lies between the machines and the people or what extraordinary experiment is being conducted that can necessitate such extravagant technology. As the workers cluster, part, regroup, Edmund glimpses beds and heads and the bent backs of visitors, then the charge nurse says here we are and here he is and here she is, apparently, and he becomes the bent back of a visitor. Once, on holiday in Siena, he stepped out of the heat into the cathedral, found himself in front of the mummified head of Saint Catherine, two and a half yellow teeth in a dumb mouth, a nose nibbled and moon craters for eyes. It was imprisoned behind an iron grille, and according to the information sheet it took three separate sets of keys to open it; a lot of trouble to go to, to unlock the dead. The saint’s thumb was preserved in a separate shrine of its own. Carefully positioned on the white sheet, Diana’s right hand is also a thing apart. Edmund turns his attention back to the nurse.

  ‘I’ll explain a couple of things.’

  There is a ventilator because she cannot breathe on her own. He thinks instead of the grey plastic pipe in the laundry room which the rats gnawed through last winter and how the smell lingered a long time.

  There are lines in and lines out from a stack of machines which resemble the sort of sound systems they had as students. His was a Sony. The trustees released the money for it on his seventeenth birthday.

  There are monitors recording her pulse, heart rate, oxygen levels, pressure on the brain, but there is no indicator of self, of how much of Diana is there.

  The nurse offers him a chair and a few well-worn phrases.

  ‘Just sit with her,’ he says. ‘I know it’s hard, but don’t be afraid. Talk to her, you can’t do any harm at this stage. I’ll be right here if you need me.’

  This is an unknown country, although Edmund has seen documentaries about it while flicking channels, heard its soundtrack, the steady whoosh of the ventilator, the insistent beep of a monitor and beyond that the airless silence. There was a boy at school who hid in an old freezer while playing hide and seek; his bed in the dormitory was taken by some boarder from Japan who didn’t understand its provenance. It must have been something like this, thought Edmund, hearing the voices counting down from ten, the never being found. Or like being trapped under an avalanche, that’s how his friend’s uncle died in the Alps, with the weight of the snow crushing your chest and no hope of rescue. So many white deaths coming to mind now, in this half-life place. That is what it feels like to him; what it feels like to Diana, he has no way of knowing. Like pheasants beaten out of the covers for the shoot, his thoughts fly randomly in all directions. He forces himself to focus. With her head bandaged and her nose and mouth encased in plastic, it is only her eyes which are recognisably Diana, and even so, he rarely sees her without make-up. At night she takes it off sitting at her dressing table by the green Chinoise lamp, leaning into the mirror, while he sits up in bed and finishes the City Digest on his tablet. If it seems likely they might try, sh
e keeps her make-up on and he turns off the lamp, then afterwards she slips into her bathroom and he is aware of the light shining under the door, of her taking just a little too long if all she is doing is removing her lipstick – and who can blame her? In the mornings, he is always up first and out and about, so for their hours spent together she is eyebrow-trimmed, eyelash-perfect, her foundation smooth and flawless, but here she is with eyelids as grey and flaccid as the gills of a dead fish. It may be the light, but her flesh is tinged purple. Reaching for her free hand, he repetitively smoothes her thumb with his thumb. Even her nail varnish is chipped. No bracelet but a plastic identity band, the skin nourished by years of expensive hand cream now blemished with marks of injections and surgical tape. How she would hate this ignominious ugliness. It is passive and heavy, this wrist in his, but it has a pulse.

  As time passes, a confluence of rivers swirl in unnatural eddies around unspeakable thoughts. As he should be, he is incapacitated by the awfulness of what has happened, by the warm woman who he has loved, by the stone senselessness of what she has become. But here is a colder current from a foreign glacier, bringing with it a chill wish: less than forty-eight hours ago he admitted to himself there was no life left for him and Diana, and now there is no life left, or almost no life left, just enough life left to lock the door on any other ways of living. Less than forty-eight hours ago he had not loved her enough to want to live with her. Only then does it occur to him that Diana’s fall from a great height might have been intentional. He should not have left her alone at Wynhope, he knew that at the time; that knowledge will now be forever linked with the smell of the back seat of taxis. There was a glimpse of something across her face as they said goodbye. Not tears. Hatred is the word that comes to mind. Living together was not an option, but dying together? Here he can crawl into her bed, lie himself out under the sheets, disconnect them both and they will be together as equals in intent and outcome, removed from choice, remembered in marble in the chapel in the park, an Arundel couple.