The Half Sister Read online

  Dominic pays. Maybe he thinks his financial problems are so bad he can’t even put a card on the table for dinner, or feels sorry for him, or maybe he looks incapable of doing something as simple as getting out his wallet or remembering his PIN. Edmund does feel disabled. It is not unexpected, what Dominic says, just so unwieldy he cannot carry it home.

  Outside the restaurant, they rub their hands and pull their collars up, make jokes about weak bladders and make promises to meet up again at the College Gaudy. The taxi pulls up, Edmund says he can do with the walk, and Dominic confirms his address with the driver, but before he climbs in, he turns back to Edmund.

  ‘One word of advice,’ he says. ‘Don’t go taking things into your own hands. It very rarely works out well.’

  The taxi nudges out into the stop-start traffic, the world and his wife heading home. Dominic has some new woman on the go. He hasn’t said much about her, but Edmund guesses that she’s the source of the messages during dinner, imagines him unbuttoning his shirt, kicking off his shoes and getting into bed. Poor bugger, he’ll say to his woman as he slips on top of her, what a fucking awful position to be in.

  From pool to pool of light, Edmund creeps unsteadily along the Embankment. The pavements are slippery with ice and everybody is either overtaking him or coming the other way. Nobody is walking beside him. His father tried to teach him bridge once; he had this phrase, ‘There’s many a man walking the Embankment because he didn’t lead trumps.’ He is no good at bridge either, never seems to have the right hand. A thin layer of snow has already settled on the benches, so he leans on the wall and studies the abstracted reflections on the mudflats on the other side of the black low-tide river, no reason to it other than the swallowing current. Sounds tune in and out around him: a girl screaming incoherently into a mobile phone; reggae booming from a passing car; sirens; a group of young men all dressed as Elvis – a stag night, maybe – drunk, but definitely not dead. Dominic read his mind. They put away a lot of booze tonight. The wine of life is drunk and only the dregs are left. He’s been thinking a lot about Macbeth recently. And Lady Macbeth. He struggles to remember another quote, something to do with plucked babies and brains.

  Taking poorly judged decisions on speed and distance, Edmund crosses the road carelessly and is drawn to the entrance to the underground where he swipes his card and accepts the invitation of the tunnel even though he has no business there, nowhere to go. This is his sort of place tonight, littered and angry; these are his sort of sounds, mechanical and deafening, leaving no space for anything else, no air to breathe when the train blasts into the station and then pulls away, sucking the people and the life out of the place. He lets one, two, three trains pass; they all have different destinations but he isn’t sure where he is going. He can’t face the flat. He really thought Dominic might have had answers, or a set of instructions at least, though with hindsight that was unrealistic. The electronic board gives him a three-minute warning: train terminating at Angel. It is strange, staring down at the tracks, appreciating their offer, realising there would have been times, not so long ago, when he might have accepted their invitation, but he has Mikey now. If he is contemplating anyone’s death, it is not his own.

  Angel train: one minute.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ A man in a fluorescent jacket is reaching out his hand. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you. I was just wondering if you’re feeling unwell.’

  Stepping back from the yellow line, Edmund apologises. ‘Just a little queasy,’ he mumbles. ‘Too much to drink, I expect.’

  Train approaching. Staying close to him, the maintenance worker is obviously only partially convinced. The doors open.

  ‘Is this your train, sir?’

  Doors closing.

  ‘No, I think I’d be better off walking, don’t you? Fresh air.’

  The roar of the departing train muffles in the tunnel. Just the two of them are left on the empty platform.

  Embarrassed, Edmund takes a few steps towards the exit, then turns. ‘Would you have stopped me? I mean, if I had been going to jump, which I wasn’t, would you have stopped me?’

  ‘I would’ve tried,’ says the man.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a beautiful night out there. Other people grumble, but I love the snow, it makes everything look so clean. My grandfather tells a story about when he came first from Pakistan and saw the snow. He thought the world had ended, but then he realised it had only just begun.’ He smiles. ‘No matter how bad things are, show me a man who doesn’t laugh if he’s throwing snowballs with the children.’

  Edmund has to acknowledge the truth of that.

  ‘They say it’s the little things in life, don’t they?’

  ‘They do,’ says Edmund, ‘and they’re probably right.’

  ‘We all do what we can with what we have been given,’ says the man.

  ‘We do, we do indeed.’

  Edmund holds out his hand and the maintenance man shakes it.

  ‘As-sālamu ‘alaykum.’ ‘Wa’alaykuma, as-salam.’

  At the top of the stairs, Edmund stops in front of the transport map for southeast England, remembering Mikey’s retracing his past the night of the hideous pantomime. You are here. With his finger, Edmund tracks the overground network due south, on over the Thames and through the suburbs, across the South Downs until he can almost smell the sea. The line arrives at a station whose name is familiar from a leaflet in the family room at the hospital. Easthamon-Sea. Less than two hours’ drive from central London. That makes it well over three and a half from Wynhope. The Angeline. Pictures of caring staff and the grateful smiling sick. You are here and she is there. Long-term care. A home away from home.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  ‘Are you going to bring her back to Wynhope?’ Sally has popped round for one of her moral support visits and a glass or two after Edmund has attended the patient planning meeting at the hospital where there was welcome news, with certain qualifications. Diana is making such good progress: she sits up (with the help of an adapted chair); she smiles (although like a baby, sometimes it’s hard to tell); she makes noises (of sorts). It is time to think about next steps.

  Sally makes helpful suggestions. ‘You could put her in the coach house, couldn’t you? Plenty of room for live-in staff and it’s all on one floor for the wheelchair. There’s the downstairs bathroom for all the ghastly paraphernalia – bags and what have you. Ideal really.’

  Lots of people have put ‘idyll’ and ‘Wynhope’ together, but not in this context. ‘To be honest, Sally, I don’t think I can manage it, not quite yet.’

  ‘Quite right, darling. Far too much on your hands with Mikey. Isn’t he doing well? God knows you’ve got enough cash in the attic to splash out on some luxury rehab place. Property’s on the up again, isn’t it? Earthquake dead and buried. You could flog a cottage or a field to pay for it. And my ex always used to say the FTSE 100 had a very short attention span. Look, don’t beat yourself up about it. All she wants is for you to be happy.’

  ‘She says that?’

  ‘In an eyes right sort of way, not in so many words. But I know. It’s all she’s wanted ever since she met you.’

  ‘It’s what she did,’ says Edmund, responding to Sally’s suggestion and reaching for the crutch of historical precedence to support him. ‘She had poor old Aunt Judy shipped out before you could say Jack Robinson.’

  It’s what one does when the going gets tough. The tough don’t get going, they stiffen the lip and stand their ground and send their problems packing instead, usually to highly expensive residential establishments where someone else can sort them out. His estate manager has looked into the price he can get by selling a couple of outlying fields for development; they can’t be seen from the house so it won’t spoil the view and the income should finance Diana’s care for a very long time. Nobody would be able to say he hadn’t done everything he could. Some people might ask if it wouldn’t be better to choose somewher
e closer to home, but there isn’t anywhere local even half as good as the Angeline. He’ll claim to have researched every opportunity. Dominic’s throwaway comment about not taking things into his own hands was irrelevant; he could never do that, but if he sends Diana to the Angeline he will achieve an absence almost as permanent and a distance almost as great, without the cost or consequences. If the land is going to be lost, it should be for affordable housing – he knows the village needs it – but he’s opting to maximise the profit and save the here and now instead and roll the dice on the endgame. On the phone, the manager at the Angeline expresses surprise that Sir Edmund doesn’t want to visit first, it’s such an important decision and Lady Diana’s so very young. In reply, Sir Edmund makes it clear that he has every confidence the Angeline can discuss his wife’s needs with her specialist medical team and every faith that the care she will receive at their hands will be first class. The deposit has already been transferred. When he puts the phone down, it occurs to Edmund that online banking is helpful like that, you can pay for all sorts of things at arm’s length.

  Outside, the overnight snow has topped the yew hedges and the low morning sun casts sharp, geometric shadows on the white lawn. The bronze boy stands stoically above the frozen pond and Edmund’s are the only footprints crossing the yard to the coach house where he checks the locked door. Because of Edmund’s early start, Mikey has stayed the night with Grace so the scene before him is one of great calm: all the red mud ridges and erupting molehills in the park are buried under the even hand of snow; each tree revels in its very own sky, each bud wrapped safe against the frost. Edmund loves the lakes like this, snow on ice on water, and he feels the quietness as a pause between movements, only the intermittent drip of icicles measuring the slow thaw. It is Wynhope as it was always meant to be: a white world apart.

  The winter conditions have brought chaos to the motorway. It takes him for ever and Diana is already in situ when he arrives at the Angeline with his shop-bought flowers and exclamations of what a nice room it is, even if she can’t quite see the sea, and how homely it is, even if it isn’t quite the same as Wynhope. Maybe they upped her meds to help her cope with the transfer in the private ambulance, or is it seeing her out of the ward and somewhere just a little bit more normal which makes her appear more incapacitated than ever, pushed in, put down, propped up, then arranged like a doll with stiff limbs, staring out from the middle of the bed when everyone rushes off to play with more interesting toys. Even the eyes right thing doesn’t seem to work here.

  No, it’s kind of them to offer, but he won’t stay for lunch.

  ‘I’ll come again very soon, Di. You sleep now, it will all seem better later.’

  With the restrictive neck brace off, she has more movement, and it looks like a shake of the head, rather than a nod, but it could just be another involuntary spasm.

  While with her, in her room, he can hardly even imagine leaving her there, leaving at all. But he does. Leave. Along the carpeted corridor, past the reproductions of Monet’s lily ponds which line the walls, he walks as quickly as he can without actually running, hearing her voice pleading with him to come back, her paralysed legs pounding down the stairs after him, her mechanical fingers gripping the bottom of his coat as he slips out through the front entrance. Please don’t go. Come back. That is how he used to be, a little boy in shorts on the first day of term outside the boarding house, looking the length of the long avenue of chestnut trees also still dressed for summer, despite the long winter term ahead. And did his father recover as quickly as he does now, because by ten, certainly no more than twenty miles along the motorway, Edmund has convinced himself that it is the right decision for everyone. She will be safe and well looked after and should make good progress and he can almost imagine her happily waving goodbye from her first-floor window overlooking the garden. By four o’clock he is back at Wynhope and school is over. In the park, Mikey and Monty and Edmund throw snowballs.

  How time flies and how often he has to be at the office or at a meeting for Mikey or at the Riverside site. Edmund only makes it down to Eastham twice before the first care review: the first time he couldn’t stay long and the second time she was being whisked away for a scan, silly of him to have forgotten when it was in his diary all along. This time, with forty minutes to kill, Edmund parks in the centre of the small town and wastes time on the main street with its predictable chain stores, the mass of people spending and getting and losing, the drab-coloured coat of the capitalism which keeps him warm.

  The coffee shop looks out over the estuary. It isn’t the sort of thing he does usually, but upstairs he finds a table free in the window and experiences the same degree of pleasure he used to get as a child claiming the front seat on the top of a London bus. From here, the tops of the masts are visible, the boats grounded and tilted at low tide, and safe behind glass he can study the monstrous seagulls, sentry soldiers of the sea wall. It is hot inside, mothers are unwrapping their toddlers and a man bustles in with the wind and a boy about Mikey’s age who’s been to the doctor and will soon be as right as rain, and Edmund is loath to leave this café and its humid hum of the living.

  At the Angeline, the manager, the charge nurse, the liaison nurse from the hospital, the physiotherapist, the speech therapist, Uncle Tom Cobley and all – shall I find some more chairs? – introduce themselves and call him Edmund and suggest having a few words before Diana is wheeled in to join them. How easy it is to hand over your problems to a team and for those problems to become polished and professionalised, how good they look on the shelf. He chooses a custard cream, changes his mind and takes a Bourbon, noticing the hair on the back of his hands and the size of his shoes as he crosses his legs. He is the only man in the room and he makes a conscious effort to talk about Mikey as if being a good father might give legitimacy to a husband who never visits his wife. They sit on chintz sofas and armchairs, balance their coffee on sturdy side tables. The small lounge where they are meeting is designed to look like a room in a grand house, with its Country Life magazines and a piano and expensive shades of paint, but he recognises the ways in which it is unnaturally clean and subtly adapted for those who will no longer be riding horses or passing the port and there is no sheet music on the stand. The team are so pleased with Diana’s progress: her strength is returning, she has much better control of the neck muscles and even some slight movement in the fingers of the left hand. The last medical review – such a shame he couldn’t be there – reiterated the difficulty in ascertaining the cause of some of the upper body paralysis, the right arm for instance. Scans had confirmed that there is no physiological or neurological reason for it to remain paralysed, and the charge nurse thumbs through Diana’s file and reads sections out loud, as if to emphasise her role as messenger rather than message: ‘at some point in the future, it may be helpful to give consideration to possible psychogenic disorder’.

  ‘You mean she’s making it up?’

  Of course not. Psychosomatic illness is a complex field, pain is genuinely felt by the patient, but our minds and bodies are inextricably linked, especially if there has been trauma. And there has been trauma, Edmund acknowledges silently, there has been a lot of trauma, and curiously he notes that it has been a long time since his IBS has flared up. He tunes back into the meeting. They are saying how this links to their other concerns: how isolated Diana is, how she resists any form of communal activity, how she still chooses to eat all her meals in her room, that she can’t really be said to have made herself at home at the Angeline.

  ‘The same with interaction skills,’ adds another professional, a language and communication something or other. ‘She’s still reluctant to engage in speech therapy and refuses the enhanced laptop which could make life so much richer for her.’

  ‘Oh, she can talk a little and she does sing.’ This comment comes from an older woman, the only one who has had to fetch her own upright chair from the dining room next door. She sits on the edge of this circle of prof
essionals.

  ‘Sorry, Margaret? Do tell us.’ The manager turns to Edmund and explains that Margaret is a care assistant, a gem, she probably knows more about Diana’s day-to-day presentation than anyone, but it’s said with a patronising smile that implies Margaret’s understanding of emptying bags and wiping bottoms is nothing compared to their professional competencies.

  ‘She sort of sings, when she thinks no one’s listening.’

  Edmund is not the only one surprised. What does she sing?

  ‘She sings the Psalms.’

  ‘The Psalms?’

  ‘Maybe not quite. The Psalms reggae style if you like.’ With a big smile, the care assistant hums the popular reggae song for the benefit of the meeting. ‘By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down.’

  When Edmund suggests she could add ‘Red Red Wine’ to her repertoire, they laugh politely, probably on account of his title, probably because he’s the one who settles the account, either way he realises his sarcasm has not got down well.

  As if neither Margaret’s insights nor the singing count for much, the speech therapist brings them back to the agenda. ‘There are some memory issues. Are you familiar with PTA?’ She turns to Edmund and doesn’t wait for a reply. ‘Post-traumatic amnesia. Complicated, but all about what the client’s capacity is, not just to remember, but to form new memories.’

  Edmund is aware that he is thinking of Mikey, how together they are knotting and knitting new memories, and that almost trumps the resentment he feels for Diana’s pick’n’mix recollection policy.

  ‘We could do some very useful work around memory if she would talk.’

  That’s the professional opinion. That, and the summary conclusion that Diana presents as very withdrawn and depressed.

  ‘Depressed,’ says Edmund. ‘Yes. She is a woman used to being in control. I imagine as the extent of her problems have become clear to her she must be very depressed. I thought about her mood last time I was here, I worried about it all the way home,’ he lies.