The Half Sister Page 25

  ‘Will you be back later?’ asks the nurse.

  No doesn’t seem to be an acceptable answer, he will have to come back, maybe not today, but every other day and every day after that.

  ‘One day at a time, that’s what we say. Come any time, but try to avoid between one and three. It’s important your wife gets some uninterrupted rest.’

  By her bed, he envied her rest as he envied the dead; only now does the possibility occur to him that beneath the flat green horizon of calm, she is in turmoil. One Boxing Day morning when he was too young to ride out, with the hounds parading across the frosted lawns and the huge horses pawing the gravel, he asked the kennel man what they did with the dogs when they were too old to hunt.

  ‘Boy, one day you’ll learn that some questions should never be asked.’

  The doors will not open. It says exit but he cannot get out.

  ‘Here you are, sir.’ A cleaner puts down his mop and the yellow triangle warning of danger ahead and pushes the green button for him. ‘You’ll get used to it all, don’t you worry.’

  Dithering outside the main entrance, Edmund hesitates amongst the smokers, the foot stampers, those on the phone passing on the news. The axis has tilted, but the world looks the same. In the end, he gets a taxi and says the first word that comes to him: ‘Mikey.’

  With a pocket full of Mongolian tughriks, for an awful moment he thinks he is going to have to ask John to pay the taxi like an incompetent teenager coming home at one in the morning. The bell on the front door of the modern, semi-detached house has a singsong electric tone, the sort Diana describes as common because she believes that’s a posh joke. The thought makes him angry; he is very angry with Diana. He should have gone to Wynhope, he is in no fit state to be here, with a mind like a cesspit, but then the frosted-glass door opens and Grace is there, clapping her hands and showering icing sugar onto the sparkling tiles. Behind her, a shadow. Hardly trusting himself, Edmund hangs back in the porch, trying to think strength back into his voice.

  ‘Mikey,’ he whispers, ‘is that you?’

  The boy rushes at him, hits him with such force he almost falls over, clasps small hands around his neck so tightly he can hardly breathe.

  ‘Edmund,’ he says. ‘My Edmund.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  In the front room, Edmund perches sideways on the end of the sofa with Mikey very close to him, leaving an expanse of leather stretching round the corner and on underneath the window which looks out on the street, passers by, men unloading furniture, someone moving house. The boy hasn’t spoken again. Edmund acknowledges how he must have had a horrible time, but it is all over now; it’s not, of course, Mikey is always knife sharp at slicing through stale platitudes. The front door slams. Mikey jumps. Edmund puts his arm around him, kisses his head; he needs a haircut and a good night’s sleep.

  ‘Louisa,’ calls Grace. ‘Come in here a moment, love.’

  A skinny teenager peers round the door, blazer, tie and heavy eye make-up, and takes her headphones out of her ears.

  Grace introduces her granddaughter, Louisa. ‘You remember Sir Edmund,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah,’ says the girl, and Edmund wonders what has been said in this house about the arrogant arseholes who live at Wynhope to provoke a look like that.

  ‘Mikey and I have been doing some cakes for Sir Edmund, they should be ready now. Can you give him a hand decorating and bring them in?’

  Grace’s face is indicating she needs Mikey out of the way.

  ‘You all right then, Mikey?’ says the girl. ‘You should be at school, you should. What’s these cakes you’ve made?’

  The voices fade. He and Diana were mad to offer to look after the boy. They could never give him anything as normal as this; apart from anything else, neither of them ever had anything as normal as this themselves.

  ‘I can’t believe he spoke, he hasn’t said a thing until now. Maybe this is the beginning,’ says Grace.

  She pops out to the hall. ‘You all right in there, Louisa? We won’t be a minute.’ Closing the door firmly behind her, she takes a deep breath and tells him what they found at Wynhope: the strange notices stuck to the gates, the front door wide open, and Mikey curled in his cardboard box, the state of his room, you’ve never seen anything like it.

  ‘And Diana?’

  Dreadful. At the back of the house, by the railings, a nightmare. And Mikey had put a blanket over her and there was a little cup of water, bless him; hours they reckon he must have been there, alone with her. Doesn’t bear thinking about. It was John who realised she was still breathing, what with being in the army, he’s good at that sort of thing. The ambulance men were wonderful, you couldn’t fault them. For the first time, Grace looks him in the eye, flushed with the relief of not only having passed the story on to him, but also having left it with him to finish.

  It is as if he is standing at the back of Wynhope, the bottom of his trousers getting wet in the long grass, the carcasses of the squirrels hung from the railings and the sheep bunched suspiciously against the far hedge. His wife is there, spreadeagled on the ground. He raises his eyes from her body to the windows on the top floor.

  ‘It was the nursery then? I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s a mystery,’ agrees Grace, ‘and of course Mikey can’t say.’

  ‘How she could have fallen. Just fallen.’

  ‘Oh, here you are. And what lovely cakes!’

  Bearing a plate of cupcakes with ludicrous amounts of butter-cream icing and splatterings of gold stars and hundreds and thousands, Mikey enters the room, intense concentration on his face as he offers them round. They all make noises about how wonderful the cakes are, how you can’t possibly eat two, then they are left with just the sound of swallowing. The girl’s phone beeps, she checks it and says she’s off out.

  ‘Who’s that, dear?’

  ‘Liam, isn’t it. I told him about’ – she indicates Edmund with her head and raised eyes – ‘so he won’t want to come home here, will he?’

  ‘Not now, Louisa.’ Grace stares pointedly at her.

  ‘When then?’ snarls the girl. ‘Never?’ The door slams behind her.

  Teenage girls, hormones, feminism, anti-capitalism: there can be a thousand reasons for her apparent hatred of him and all his type represents, most of them possibly legitimate, but none of them seem sufficient. The sound of John’s van pulling into the drive is probably a relief to all of them, not just him.

  ‘Edmund,’ says John, brushing his palms against his work clothes before shaking hands. ‘Dreadful thing to happen.’

  The thing, whatever it is, is clearly dreadful and perhaps all the more dreadful for not knowing what sort of thing it is. Edmund nods his appreciation. Thanking him for all he has done, Edmund says something about having taken up enough of their time and kindness and how he and Mikey better be on their way, he’s ordered a taxi. Grace and John exchange glances. Why doesn’t he go back to Wynhope and get some rest, sort a few things out, come back in the morning? He is obviously not a safe pair of hands, although they don’t say that, not explicitly.

  ‘What do you think, Mikey?’ Edmund asks.

  ‘No.’

  What is anyone meant to do with a boy who never says anything and then says no?

  ‘Goodness. It’s good to hear that voice of yours at last, young man.’ John gets down to eye level with him. ‘But you need to be grown up about this. Edmund’s very tired. He’s going back to Wynhope now and he can come with Monty in the morning and pick you up. All right?’

  Huge tears roll down the boy’s face. He kicks the coffee table violently, the cakes slide onto the floor, their stars face down on the carpet. Sagged on the sofa, the child moans, more the sound of a no, rather than no itself, but it is unbearable to Edmund. Every no an expression of everything he has felt since leaving the wilderness: the harm that existence brings within itself, the intolerable ache of living, the irresistible appeal of no. He too wants to snuggle up on the sofa with
his thumb in his mouth and cry no, no, no, but John and Grace and the consultant and the nurse and his business partners and the estate manager and the taxi driver who is booked to arrive in five minutes’ time, they are all yes people with expectations of yes and he drags himself back to adulthood to meet them as Grace scrapes the buttercream back onto the plate.

  ‘I’ll be here at midday tomorrow and I’ll take you home with me,’ he says. ‘And that’s not a fisherman’s promise.’

  There is a trace of a smile on Mikey’s face as he lets go of the cushion and stretches both hands out wide.

  ‘What’s a fisherman’s promise then?’ asks John.

  Matching Mikey’s gesture, Edmund winks. ‘I promise you, it is this big! Not quite the truth, not quite a lie.’

  The red lights of the taxi disappear down the main road. Edmund specifically asked to be dropped at the bottom of the drive, the man who creeps back to his lover without turning on the light, the better to feel his way into her arms. Wynhope wraps herself around him, and he rests his head on the smooth slope of her shoulders, careful not to disturb her siesta. He is home and home smells of harvest. The late afternoon is perfectly still. Picking up his bags, he mentally times the moment when his footsteps will set the dog barking, smiling when they do. Even now it takes him by surprise, the absence of the tower. He pats his pocket for his keys.

  With the burglar alarm off and Monty fussed over and loved, Wynhope settles itself down. In every single room downstairs, Edmund checks the status of the things which act as his tide timetable and Grace has hit the nail on the head: nothing is wrong, nothing is quite right. The kitchen is not a mess, but the counters are smeared, crumbs on the floor, a splatter of jam congealed in the sink and a white bowl with an encrusted orange rim of baked beans, unwashed. The dining room is a Mary Celeste sort of set, all the ornaments dancing in the dust, but the sitting room is the opposite, overly familiar. Diana, the minimalist, never lived anywhere so fully as this. There is a heap of DVDs on the sofa, Mikey’s coat dumped on the floor, mud on the carpet, a glass with the remnants of whisky congealed at the bottom – but Diana never touches the stuff. The smell is that of an absence of polish.

  Instinctively he takes the pile of post he has collected from the box by the lodge into the morning room; he has no idea why Diana has not bothered to collect any of it for days. At this time, early evening on a dull and breathless day, the room is drab. There is a hymn Edmund remembers from school. The day thou gavest Lord is ended, the darkness falls at thy behest. He remembers also the day the shadow fell on them. He was sitting right here in his armchair reading the paper when Diana came in saying Valerie had called with the news that her mother was dead. It was the first time they had to connect over something big, maybe they just didn’t have the vocabulary. Perhaps if she’d said she needed him to be there for her he might have found the strength, like he did for Mikey with Valerie’s funeral; then he would have been at Wynhope the night of the earthquake and that might have made a difference, although he doesn’t quite know what. That’s another incident shrouded in confusion. He has never been one hundred per cent convinced of the theory that it was Mikey who locked the door to the tower. If he’d ever met Valerie, the infamous half-sister, maybe things would have made sense.

  What might have been. The cartoon in the study hasn’t moved, even if the rest of the place looks a bit of a tip. Edmund picks up the screwed-up bits of paper from the floor and puts them in the bin. Diana probably let Mikey mess around in here for hours; after all, it can’t have been easy being left alone with him twenty-four seven. Upstairs, the light is on in Mikey’s bedroom, revealing quite a different room from the one Edmund remembers before leaving. All the things which usually lived in the sacred nursery – the cardboard box, the castle, the circus animals – have all been brought down to his bedroom, which now resembles a squat. The floor is covered in junk, biscuits, clothes, mud, empty cereal packets, felt-tips without their tops on; even the furniture is out of place. The model animals are jumbled in a haphazard pile beside his bed, a funeral pyre of zebras and tigers and smiling acrobats. How Edmund used to hate this clown when he was a boy, from the moment he opened the box on his seventh birthday, how it laughed at him throughout, how he never had the courage to throw it away, in case, like the tin soldier in the story, flat on its back and poker-faced in the gutter, it refused to die quietly. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Edmund works through the rest of the animals. His hands remember how the elephants can be linked up as a family, trunks looped around the tail in front; the room warms with the song his mother used to sing to him as he played with them, ‘Nellie the elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to the circus.’ He hums it quietly to himself.

  The head of the herd was calling, far far away,

  She left one night, in the silver light,

  On the road to Mandalay.

  The leavings that have been and the leavings which might come suck him deep into himself, into the lightless hollow at the bottom of the wave. He becomes trapped, turned over and over again in a perpetual cycle of fathomless grief. When finally he is exhausted from weeping, he heaves himself up onto the boy’s beach of a bed where he cramps like a child with a tummy ache and falls asleep, clutching a plastic gorilla.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The wall is inches from his face. As if the process of unfurling will open up the memory of the day before and the prospect of the day to come, and survival relies on being able to cling curled to this unformed state, he lies motionless. Only the gorilla digging into his back reminds him where he is and why. The Khoridol Saridag mountains are known for their beauty, Lake Khövsgöl is meant to have the purest water on earth, the nomads there are said to be amongst the most hospitable in the world, and he is here with the stones of his house heavy around his neck; beyond the cities, no one owns property in Mongolia.

  The bath is full, it foams over his tanned arms and neck like snowflakes, but when he finally lets the water out and everything is drained from him, his exposed body is defined only by the dry white edges of the bath and the cold air, legs peculiarly redundant, pale flesh already puckering. If Monty was not whining at the bottom of the stairs, he might stay that way for ever.

  There is no milk, but there is coffee and bread; it looks as though the organic people came, if nobody else. His body clock is all over the place, but breakfast always has been important to him, ever since he was a boy fishing plastic toys out of the cereal box. He should make some calls, but he is so tired and when it comes down to it, he can’t really think who will be genuinely interested. Sally cares, she can spread the news locally; his secretary can tell people in London; it isn’t as if there is family left alive to call on either side. It is a bizarre conundrum, who the undead call to let the dead know they are dying.

  Edmund does visit Diana, but he doesn’t collect Mikey. Nothing has changed at the hospital. He doesn’t know if she is living or dying, and that physical uncertainty disorients him. Time is equally distorted, this present could last for ever. Having bought a KitKat, a pint of milk and some dog biscuits at the garage, he drives home. Smoothing out the silver foil from the chocolate bar into a river, he lies on the phone to Grace, says the doctors have asked him to be back at the hospital later and can she keep Mikey for one more day. Then he falls into a heavy unconscious state and wakes when it is dark. Routine is meant to help both jet lag and trauma, but he hasn’t been given a timetable so he spends most of the night drinking whisky and watching television. The chaos of their own bedroom repels him, the dressing table trashed, the bed unmade. Maybe this is what it would be like to be the man who cleans the theatre, standing on stage at the end of some modern play, broom in hand and not a clue what the whole thing is about. Both he and Monty are drawn to Mikey’s room, but his adult body feels intrusive and out of proportion on the child’s bed; downstairs there is a rare edition of Gulliver’s Travels with a colour picture of the mean and armed little people tying down the ropes and using thei
r spears to prod the body of the visiting giant.

  The anonymity of the spare bedroom is more to his liking, until Diana materialises: the black beads on the faces of the embroidered parrots on the bedspread are her eyes, their crusted claws clutch at him. But this is where he eventually sleeps, throughout the witching hours he is both Gulliver and a Lilliputian. When he wakes at midday, he is aware that he smells stale.

  There are things to do – post to open, private health insurance to check, endless unread emails in his inbox – but he does nothing. There is a sour stench of things rotting in the fridge so he closes the door, vaguely aware that he is hungry. People phone, he doesn’t answer, they leave messages, he doesn’t listen. He isn’t thinking. He just is. Is, he likes the word, feeble and lumpish at the back of the throat refusing to swallow the past or let the future breathe out freely. When he calls yet again to cancel collecting Mikey, he is relieved to get Grace’s voicemail because it makes it easier to lie and he doesn’t answer when they ring back. The third day, he doesn’t even visit Diana. The dog is the only one who can motivate him, so towards the end of the afternoon, he sets off for the river. The water is running fast over the weir, carrying with it golden leaves like candles on the Ganges. Months he spent in Varanasi as a young man; he remembers the meditation, the understanding of things glimpsed between the white smoke at the end of joints and the sweet grey curl of the funeral pyres. Only last week, he found enlightenment of sorts in the shallows of the Tuul. Perhaps his ashes can be scattered here, rivers are good places to wash away the past.