The Half Sister Read online

  The cemetery building looks like a church, a library and a swimming pool all rolled into one. Mikey feels nervous; in the gents’ there is a large man in black at the other end of the urinals, crying and pissing at the same time. They’re early, but there are already so many cars the parking is full and there is a sign directing people to an overflow.

  ‘Have they all come for Nanna?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, they’re for the one before, every twenty-five minutes,’ she explains. ‘There’s thousands buried here.’

  Thousands? Thousands dead in the tsunami, that’s what it says on the news, but that’s in another country, not here. Under every one of those stones, a body? When the rabbit Paul got him died, Paul said if he was a normal boy he would cry, but it was an ugly rabbit and he’d never wanted it anyway. Stiff with its eyes open and its head at a funny angle, and how in the nightmares he never tells anyone about, the rabbit turns into his mum. Other dead things, not including the enemy on Lockdown who don’t count: a mouse in a trap; a black-and-white cat, perfect by the side of the road except for a thin line of bright red blood running from its whiskers to the dull leaves in the gutter; and something else, a bird in their old house thudding against the French windows, falling onto the carpet, still alive when he stretched out its wings, still twitching when he pulled its legs. He doesn’t know why he did that, doesn’t want to think about it now.

  ‘There’s Diana’

  Between the pink cherry trees, between the cars parked like toys on either side of the road, a black hearse is rolling towards him. It stops, the coffin is sliding out on a tray and propped up beside it like a doll is a tall woman, also in black, with dark glasses which make her look like a spy.

  The sound is turned down, the murmuring around him of the little gangs of grown-ups when they don’t want you to hear, the sudden and unexpected fluttering of a flock of fat pigeons, traffic droning beyond the cemetery walls, and their spiky heels grating on the gravel as they scratch towards each other.

  ‘Valerie, you haven’t changed a bit.’

  ‘Nor have you, Di.’

  It’s her then. That makes sense. She doesn’t look like she’s part of their family, but she does look rich. Stupid kissing, kiss, kiss. Not him, no way.

  ‘Lovely flowers, Di!’ says his mum.

  The white lilies sprout from the coffin like a tropical jungle.

  ‘I’d love them to have been Wynhope lilies,’ says his aunt, ‘but I’m afraid Edmund insists on keeping them for our private chapel, so I had to place a special order in London.’

  She sounds rich too.

  ‘And you must be Michael.’

  ‘Say hello to your aunty, Mikey.’

  Paul used to say his mum sounded common, but Mikey thinks she sounds just fine. He kicks the stones and studies the grit and the dirt that lies beneath the pale pebbles.

  ‘Mikey!’

  The boy and his aunt face each other. Behind them there is movement, the silent movie of the undertakers manoeuvring into position, the bare branches of the beech trees shifting in the wind and tissues falling like snow, soundlessly from sleeves onto soft grass, but the boy and the aunt are frozen.

  ‘Well, go on then, Mikey.’

  But having not said hello, now he can’t find hello. Hello has gone and left nothing in its place. He takes a very deep breath as if to find hello, but his new for-the-funeral jacket is very tight and the new for-the-funeral tie is pressing on his throat and they won’t let hello back up again from wherever it’s hiding.

  ‘Hello, Michael!’ says Diana.

  So, she had the word all the time.

  Inside, there is space and light and whiteness and windows, and at the same time it is all mixed up with blackness and rumbling music and the coffin on a stand with the lid nailed shut. No one would hear you, even if you screamed. It strikes him as odd that although a lot of people die in Lockdown, you never see them buried. He can put that right if he becomes a person who makes computer games and he is wondering about that when suddenly, without warning, the coffin disappears. It is extraordinary, like magic, black magic, because there is a lot of black. His mum is right, all the people come in the front door and leave out the side except the dead person, who slides through the curtains and that’s that.

  Chapter Six

  Lunch is in a bankrupt country house where they’d made a business out of dying, plastering fire exit signs on the wood panelling and selling egg-and-cress sandwiches to mourners. It is every bit as ghastly as Diana has predicted; she is so relieved Edmund has not been forced to mingle with the half remembered remnants of her suburban past, it is bad enough for her. The old women cluster around the child as if mere proximity to youth can provide an antidote to the funeral, and of course it is all about Valerie, poor Valerie, hugs and kisses and condolences for Valerie; most of them barely remember that there was another daughter called Diana, or if they do, it’s for all the wrong reasons.

  It strikes Valerie that probably both she and Diana are out of place here, for different reasons. If anything, Diana looks more lost, giving orders to the girls in black uniforms serving the tea rather than listening to the old folk with tears behind glasses and memories clasped in handbags. Valerie does try, she says things like, have you caught up with my sister Diana, she’s over there; oh yes, Diana, they say, I’ll see if I can catch her later. When it is all over, waiting for her sister in the empty hall, sprigs of green cress on the parquet floor and coffee spilled in saucers, Valerie realises it isn’t just her family that Diana turned her back on all those years ago, it was her younger self. As Mikey slips his hand in hers, she knows it isn’t such an easy thing to do, to step away from your childhood.

  The automatic child locks on Diana’s 4x4 snap shut. Behind her, Mikey is asleep on the back seat. Valerie is also exhausted, she closes her eyes and allows the bland music on the radio and the hypnotic beat of the windscreen wipers to iron out her crumpled grief.

  ‘Wake up, they’re playing our song.’ Diana is singing along to something. Valerie doesn’t recognise it, but she doesn’t say so. When the song is finished, Diana apologises that Edmund is not going to be at Wynhope when they get there. He has to be in London, apparently.

  That is a strange decision, not to go to your mother-in-law’s funeral, even if you didn’t invite her to your wedding, but blearily Valerie concludes it probably wasn’t the right sort of funeral, not his sort of people.

  ‘He worshipped his mother, but she died of cancer when he was ten and then his father was so depressed afterwards that he shot himself when Edmund was a teenager.’

  The Google search Valerie did on her phone the night before brought up images of a country house, a good-looking tanned man with an oversized cheque for charity in his hands and a smile for the camera on his face and several old newspaper articles about a death at Wynhope House which she didn’t bother to read.

  Diana explains. ‘He doesn’t really do funerals any longer, and who can blame him?’

  Do not judge and you will not be judged, that’s what Solomon would be saying; he’s fond of that verse even though he’s the most unjustly judged of all.

  Diana is moving the conversation on: who was at the funeral, faces half remembered, names forgotten. ‘How much had you seen of her?’ Indicating left, Diana pulls off the slip road and keeps her eyes fixed in front of her. ‘Mum, I mean.’

  Arrows on road signs propel them through complicated junctions, traffic lights slow them, stop them, send them on their way, time runs away behind them leaving only tyre tracks on damp roads.

  ‘Not enough. It’s difficult to explain. Paul, he was a very controlling man, he cut me off, from her, and from you, I suppose.’ Crying does not seem acceptable in the Range Rover. ‘To be honest, I don’t think she forgave herself for not spotting what was wrong and coming after me. I wanted to tell her I didn’t blame her, but now of course . . .’

  The right turn is badly judged, the oncoming car honks and Diana swears. ‘I don’t re
member her coming after me either. Or did I miss her running down the road, pleading with me to come home?’

  ‘I think she tried, but Dad wouldn’t let her.’

  ‘Did she ever talk about me?’

  The roads are smaller now, the twists and turns wake Mikey up, and Valerie whispers over her shoulder that they are nearly there. She hopes he’s not going to throw up.

  ‘Well?’

  The silence stretches before them the length of the dark lane which is overhung with trees still black from winter and tall hedges rusted brown with last year’s leaves leaning in on them.

  ‘Thought not,’ says Diana.

  She was never as quick off the mark as her sister, couldn’t just come up with the right words at the right time. Once, when she was very young, Diana told her she had to pay her for every word she ever used because Diana was the one who owned a dictionary. This isn’t an easy day for thinking or speaking, but it is too late now because Diana is saying here we are and ahead of them elaborate wrought-iron gates are swinging open to Wynhope House.

  Swivelling round, Mikey watches the gates close behind him. He remembers he needs to ask about the coffin and the curtains, but probably not now.

  ‘Where’s the house, Mum?’ All he can see is grass, trees, sheep, birds, sky and an endless narrow road between painted railings.

  ‘Here!’ says Diana. ‘We’ve arrived.’

  In front of the child, the house is enormous. One, two, three long windows; a dark green front door with a porch on pillars; one, two, three long windows on the other side; upstairs, almost the same; and then another layer of smaller windows on top of that with their own little roofs. Pointing at the top floor, his mum winks and whispers to him that those are the rooms where they lock up the servants; in a louder voice she tells his aunt that the place is amazing, beautiful, she’s never seen anything like it.

  There aren’t any words Mikey can really think of to describe it, so he doesn’t say anything. To him, the whole house looks like when you cut things out of paper and unfold it, both sides of the snowflake the same. Except. Except over on one side is a tower, just like a tower in a book with pointy bits and church windows and stone faces. It doesn’t match. It is as if a king thought about building a castle and then got bored and stuck a house on the end, or the other way round, someone built an enormous house and someone else has come along and spoiled it with the tower. He isn’t sure which. He likes the way the tower stands up for itself, as if it knows it doesn’t belong and doesn’t care, but he is also unsettled by the way the tower clings to the main house like an unwanted child, an embarrassment. Someone Paul would call a mistake. He hopes he isn’t going to have to sleep in the mistake.

  ‘But if I’m honest,’ his mum is saying, ‘that tower is really ugly.’

  Diana winks at Mikey, although he has no idea why. ‘Just you wait until you see the inside.’ She opens the front door. ‘Hello?’ she calls.

  Who is she expecting to answer? His uncle Edmund’s away and she doesn’t have any children. His mum told him that Diana didn’t want any because she didn’t like them and that Edmund had the snip. What, cut it right off? he’d asked and Valerie laughed, snip-snip-snipping towards his flies with her fingers. He thinks that bit is made up, but having met Diana, he thinks the other bit about her might be true.

  ‘I’m in the kitchen, Lady Diana! I’ll be right with you.’

  The hall where they are standing has a staircase wide enough for six people and here, next to him, is a huge mirror with a gold frame reflecting back the pictures of the old men with beards and black jackets climbing the stairs. They are all dressed for a funeral, as well. In fact, everything is like a funeral, from the vase of flowers which smell like the cemetery to the polished floor which is black and white. He slips off his trainers, placing them precisely by the door, ready to make his getaway.

  ‘Well, now there’s a well-brought-up young man.’ A woman appears from a door on his left; she strikes Mikey as much more normal than Diana, with her flowery shirt over huge boobies and dangling earrings made to look like daisies.

  ‘This is Mrs H and she is a darling,’ Diana says, ‘and if it wasn’t for her, I don’t know what we’d do! She is our very own national treasure.’

  So, his aunt owns people as well as things.

  ‘Call me Grace,’ says the lady. ‘If you like, I can take this young man to the kitchen for a little something and get you both a cup of tea?’

  Little something, yes, cup of tea, no. Apparently Diana and his mum need a drink. That is something else he could say, if anyone would listen, that it probably isn’t a very good idea to let his mum start drinking, it doesn’t go well with her medicine.

  ‘That’s the drawing room, where they’ve gone,’ says Grace.

  There’s no sign of any art going on in there, but there are other things that interest Mikey: gold curtains, for instance; a piano, he’d like to play now that Solomon has taught him ‘Amazing Grace’ all the way through, hands together; a real fireplace with proper smoke and what Scouts might smell like if he is ever allowed to go.

  Grace continues the guided tour. ‘And this we call the morning room,’ she explains.

  The whole day has been about mourning. Even the picture above the fireplace shows a man with a pony struggling up a purple mountain bent double by the weight of a dead stag.

  ‘What a heavy thing to have to carry on your back,’ he says to Grace.

  The sitting room is a bit more friendly. It has a huge telly for a start and the kitchen is familiar, at least from adverts, so he’s happy to sit there and eat toast. The smaller telly in there is showing a zoo where all the animals have escaped because of the flood and they’re running wild through a town and it’s something to do with the waves he’d watched only this morning in his own house, but that was then and there and this is here and now. Wynhope. He can’t wait to get back home. Butter? Nod. Jam? Nod. Strawberry or raspberry? Shrug. Expect you’ve had a difficult day. Nod.

  ‘Monty wants your crusts,’ says Grace.

  ‘Hello, Monty,’ says Mikey, tentatively feeling the dog’s ears, and he feels sad that he left his penguin at home.

  Everything Grace says confirms his initial impression that she knows what she is talking about. He wants the toilet and to get out of his horrible jacket and no sooner does he think that than she says I expect you want to know where the bathroom is, and if I’m not wrong, I expect you want to get out of that jacket.

  ‘That’s the thing about funerals,’ she says as she takes him down a passage with too many raincoats and giant fish gasping behind glass frames. ‘Everyone’s always so uncomfortable. I expect even Lady Diana’s kicked off those high heels.’

  Right again. Back in the drawing room, his mum and his aunt are standing with glasses in their hands and no shoes on their feet, staring into the fire. Mikey brings a china statue of a racehorse and jockey from a little table in the sitting room to show to his mum. He’s been imagining the speed of it, the thrill, crouched low like that on the back of a horse and all dressed in red and green and galloping away, away. Paul used to bet on the horses and sometimes he won but mostly he didn’t.

  ‘Don’t drop that,’ says his aunt. ‘Your uncle would be very upset.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t, don’t you listen to that,’ says Grace.

  ‘Ah, Mrs H! Did you make supper for seven?’

  ‘Just like you asked,’ replies the housekeeper.

  ‘We’d rather eat at eight if that doesn’t put you out.’

  His aunt is doing that thing when you can smile and stare at the same time, rubbing your stomach and patting your head. Grace is going round the big room straightening the curtains; it’s a fuck-off sort of tidying up.

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ she says, with her back to Diana.

  ‘You are wonderful,’ says his aunt, ‘thank you.’

  That is something else teachers do. Put your gum in the bin, Michael, thank you; it’s their way of sayi
ng you have no choice.

  As Mrs H flounces out of the room, Diana is thinking two things: one is that Mrs H is a bitch and she will get the better of the woman if it kills her; the second is why on earth has she suggested eating later, it will just spin everything out. It isn’t like her to change her mind on impulse, but with the heightened perception that is brought on by wine and funerals, Diana is brimming over with the yearning that is both grief and hope. Outside, the failing light is transforming the gardens into something quite insubstantial, as though she might reach through the dusk and touch something forgotten.

  ‘I put it all back a bit because we’ve just about got time for a look around,’ explains Diana. ‘It’s such a beautiful evening.’

  It is colder than they expected. Valerie borrows Diana’s jacket, and they laugh at the fact that they are both size five when it comes to boots and how daft they look with them in their funeral dresses. Once outside, they stand on the drive and look back at the house. Diana apologises for what she describes as ‘the mess’ to the side of the tower. The terrace looks immaculate to Valerie, who wonders if she is meant to contradict her sister and say no, no, not a mess at all, it looks simply lovely, but you never knew with Diana quite what she understood or what she meant or what she wanted.

  ‘Obviously we’re going to plant up the whole area, but the builders only finished recently and now there’s some delay about getting the tiles from Italy.’ Her guests are clearly confused. ‘Sorry! I should have explained. It’s the most wonderful project. Edmund knows how much I love swimming, I always loved it, didn’t I, Val? I was quite good at school,’ she tells the boy. ‘Anyway, he said he’d build me a pool, but neither of us wanted to ruin the park with some ghastly shed, and since we were going to restore the tower, we, or rather I, had the brainwave of excavating under the tower and putting one there. Everyone’s doing it in London, why not here?’