The Half Sister Page 37

  He turns the page.

  You have to tell the truth.

  Sign your name at the bottom so everyone knows it’s you.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  ‘Mikey?’ It is late afternoon when Edmund finally leaves his study, the grandfather clock has just struck five. Closing the door firmly behind him, he calls up the stairs again, ‘Mikey?’

  No longer ringmaster in his own circus, Mikey is at a loss. He has given everything away and is now empty-handed. The circus animals are all over the place in his spotless room and they need a new home, but he has not found the energy to build anything for them. He will need a new home as well, he will need to save himself. He has been listening. He thought perhaps Edmund would be so angry that he would go away, but he hasn’t heard the tyres on the gravel. And here he is, calling up the stairs. Mikey cowers on the floor between the chest of drawers and the bed, gorilla in hand.

  ‘Mikey, I know you’re up there. Do you want to come fishing with me? You and me, first time out for the new season?’

  Sensing trouble, the dog has not deserted his post on the landing since Edmund left, but now he is tempted, nosing at the boy, wagging his tail and eager for a walk. He lures Mikey out and the boy appears in his pants and T-shirt, lurking between the banisters and looking down on the head of the man who once offered everything. Edmund sounds stern, so he obeys, pulls on his jeans and a jumper and creeps downstairs. He fetches his waterproof coat and boots and waits. The fishing gear is ready by the back door, along with an old hessian bag and some string.

  Mikey lags behind, and even when they reach the river, he crouches further up the bank, pulling tufts of grass from the bank, watching, waiting. He does not know what he is waiting for, but from deep inside himself to the ends of his fingers, he is charged with a fierce energy.

  With the rods and nets laid to one side, Edmund opens the hessian bag and pulls out the black file. The boy looks away, he knew they weren’t going fishing. It does not belong here, at the riverbank, its hard plastic and metal clips which nick your fingers. Now Edmund knows everything, he must hate him. He will send him away. He sent Diana away, didn’t he? Like other boys with foster parents, he will probably have to be a boarder at his school, even during the rest of the holidays, just until they find him a prison. Diana said they would lock him up; she was right, everything she said, everything she wrote in that file, that he is mad, that he is dangerous, that nobody’s ever loved him, she is right. Even the stuff about being full up with evil seeds growing deep down inside him is right. The days he spent here at Wynhope on his own with her in the attic, they are a muddle, like they never even really happened or were just a film or a game on his computer, but something bad did happen, he knows that, and it was him who did it, although he never meant to. All he did was slam the door and then there was no way back. Maybe Edmund has brought him down to the river to drown him. She was going to do that. That’s probably what the river’s for. Maybe that is what he deserves, but no one stands around waiting to be drowned. His instinct is to run. Behind him the drive leads down to the gates, to the empty lodge, to the main road, to the lorry drivers and the swish-swish-swish of the cars, to Ali, to Africa. He should have run away long ago like when he put the notice on the gates. He should run. Run.

  The dog bounds ceaselessly between the two of them in a figure of eight, as if he can bind them together in an invisible knot.

  ‘Wait, Mikey, wait.’

  It is just enough to stop him, but the hold Edmund’s words have on him are only as strong as a moment that doesn’t last long. The heron has flown the water, the ducks retreat to the shivering pool above the weir, Edmund is begging him to slow down, wait a minute, come back, climbing up the bank towards him, slipping, reaching out to the low-hanging branches to pull himself up. Edmund gets bigger as he gets closer, mud on the knees of his waders, and breathless, catching hold of the bottom of his waterproof coat.

  ‘Wait. Please don’t go. Listen to me.’

  Mikey remains standing, but Edmund kneels down, catching his breath. ‘Thank you for giving me the file. I understand. I do, I understand.’

  This is what Edmund understands. He understands that Mikey locked Diana in the nursery. Constructing a mental flow diagram, he tried to work out what this meant in terms of who was guilty of what, who did what to whom and why and what happened next, but events would not stand in line; they jostled for first place, refused to sit quietly and make sense. For a long time he sat in his study and stared at the wall, wary of the desk where the file lay unopened. He played with the corners of the pages, saw enough to recognise Diana’s writing, the way it was different on different pages: sometimes the writing was recognisably hers, controlled and neat; other pages were more childish; at times the hieroglyphics looked quite mad. He could burn the file, not that there was a fire in the grate any longer.

  Not everything that is written has to be read. Not everything thought has to be spoken. Not everything spoken has to be heard and taken as for ever. Words, like everything else, are seeds and plant themselves in the past where, if you are not careful, they spread their tubers underground and store up guilt to feed the future. They are the product of their times, but times and circumstances change and they do not. No doubt there were dreadful things written in this file and maybe there were also sad or hopeful things, but they were transient, and if he should read them, they would achieve permanence long after the letters faded. The epigraph outlasts the corpse – like the narrative verdict with its present tense, thinking it can sum up the past and close down the future, when all along it was just words. He ran his hands over the pages and could feel no meaning. Just words.

  On the other hand, if he did not read the file, the saga would be incomplete and he would fill that vacuum with fear, constructing a thousand stories in order to bring about an ending.

  There was no decision to be made, not really. Like so much else, it was an inevitable future. Edmund took his familiar place again, pulled his chair up to the desk, and turned on the reading light, because this was indeed work. How else could he bear this story unless he became a reader and the handwritten paper torn from a child’s colouring pad became the pages between the covers of a book, one of a million unpublished real-life stories? As readers have done since there was parchment and ink, he made the story his. In the vitriol which burned through the paper like acid, he found relief because he had to. This bitter anger must spurt from some polluted history of which he knew nothing and it confirmed his suspicion that Diana was not well. If it ever went to court, it would certainly be a case of diminished responsibility. He also found relief in that Mikey was not himself at that time either. Disconcerting that a child could have planned such a meticulous revenge, certainly, but on reflection Edmund can see that Mikey was driven to an extreme childish solution to an impossible situation: he became the prisoner of the prisoner. No one could ever have expected the whole thing to last so long or end as it did. So many secrets. So many lies.

  Like readers do, he focused on some bits more than others, and it was Diana’s letter to her mother which made him mourn the loss of his love with a pain he had not felt for many years. That she told her only now that she loved her. That she asked her only now the questions which could no longer be answered. That only in her letter to the dead did she capture the voice of the child she was before and the woman she might have been. And then that one terrible sentence. ‘I love Edmund so much and he did love me.’ What was it he said to Dominic all those weeks ago, something about being better at tenses in Latin than English? Well, even in her madness, Diana had paid attention to the detail and taken care with the grammar. It was easier for Edmund to move on to the final, long-awaited explanation than to stay wedded to those ten monosyllables.

  To Michael,

  It is dark and probably the middle of the night, but I have a very clear mind, it’s important you know that. There is no point in writing an account of the whole thing – there’s only one bit that needs
explaining. I did want to tell people what happened, but the longer I left it, the harder it was and no one’s ever believed what I say anyway. But this is the whole thing.

  The nights in here alone have dragged me back down to a dark place, I thought I’d never get out, my hands pushing the weight heavy above me suffocating me feet kicking the wall face flat against the damp places. I remember things. I told my aunty what my stepfather did to me and the Chinese whispers passed it on to everyone, my mother, my teachers, the social workers, the police and the story at the end was nothing like my story. So I said to them all ask Valerie, she knows, she’ll tell you the truth, but she never did, did she. Your mother was only half a sister, she had divided loyalties, I can see that now.

  I don’t believe a single word you say

  Liar liar pants on fire.

  And I told a half-truth about her father. What I said wasn’t true but it wasn’t a lie either. He hadn’t done what I said he’d done but he was going to one day. When I was small, it was the way he kissed me goodnight when he thought I was already asleep and his look up my skirt when he did up my laces. When I was old enough to know, I felt him hard against me in the queue for the candyfloss at the zoo. He came between me and mum so she couldn’t even see past him. What was I meant to do? Wait around until it happened and be believed or lie and survive? I spent so long waiting for something dreadful to happen I couldn’t take it any longer. So I left home and now you know.

  This is the whole truth.

  I didn’t mean to kill your mother, I just wanted her to know what it felt like when your last chance of rescue is gone. To scream and for nobody to listen. For nobody to take you seriously, nobody to believe you. It was an opportunity, that’s all, and I took it. One moment. I had the key. I can’t describe it properly it was like I mattered. It was almost worth it but nothing is ever over and done with.

  Diana.

  Sorrow stood behind Edmund soft with the scent of lavender and the whisper of those unspoken words. ‘I love Edmund so much and he did love me.’ Unable to move from his desk, alternately Edmund read and wept and wept and read. There were things left unexplained, he was sure of that. No story is complete; choices are made, things put in, left out, beginnings, middles and endings imposed upon the slippery chronology that is history. What Edmund knew was that these texts that did remain were sufficient, that they changed everything, and that for the first time the pieces were sliding into place and he was beginning to understand.

  Which is what he says now to Mikey, on the riverbank.

  ‘I understand.’

  Chapter Forty-Five

  I understand. Diana’s not good at remembering, although she’s getting better, but she is not mistaken about this. It’s what Edmund whispered when he visited and she asked him to do her that one final favour.

  ‘I understand,’ Diana says out loud.

  Diana is talking. Out of all the expensive professionals at the all-inclusive Angeline, it’s this one lady who she can talk to, the one who bustles in and brings the outside with her, and once she is here, they are intimate. This lady lifts her breasts, one by one, parts her legs, moves across her body with fingers which can read the damage and then sponges her sore skin with warm water and massages her lumpish feet with fine oils until she is smooth again. The expectations of the speech therapist silence her, her muscles contract in the face of the physiotherapist, but Margaret is a care assistant, and it strikes Diana that this is all she’s ever needed and all she ever wanted: care.

  ‘And what was it he understood?’ Margaret is emptying her bag. The biological processes of staying alive dominate Diana’s days and nights, but conversation has at last become possible, even alongside such indignities.

  ‘Long story,’ says Diana, and it is. The plot has brought her here, to this window, in the distance the hint of a calm sea and a blue sky, and there have been worse places. ‘Is it cold outside?’

  ‘Much colder than it looks. The ocean out there, it looks like Antigua but feels like the North Pole.’ Margaret looks up from the end of the bed. ‘You want to go outside today? We could wrap you up warm and go in the garden. Give me half an hour to get some things done and I’ll be back for you.’

  The room is hers again, until the next interruption. Knock knock. They always say ‘just’, they just want to check this, they just want to measure that. Thinking is so hard. Like a child practising cartwheels, she needs space to turn things over in her mind without the risk of smashing things. Along the corridor the chapel service has started, and she can hear the edge of the hymns – ‘There is a green hill far away, without a city wall.’ She has been wondering about attending, but hasn’t made it yet.

  I understand. What was it Edmund understood? Is Michael talking? Has he told Edmund the truth? It seems unlikely. Perhaps someone found the things she wrote in the nursery. So be it, she can’t remember all of it, but she does remember that it was the truth. Edmund won’t help her die, it isn’t his way, even if he does know everything, and she means everything, which is a good thing, because the more she has thought about it recently, since language has made thought more possible, the more Diana has realised that what she asked for is not what she wants. She’s not actually sure death was ever what she wanted, not when she asked Edmund, nor even when, in the nursery, she stepped up to an open window and recognised a familiar way out. There have been times since then when the pain and the loneliness and the ugliness and the clumsiness and the impotence – yes, most of all the impotence – have made her want to throw in the, throw in the, the cushion? These phrases do not come neatly any longer, she needs Edmund for that. Margaret has been building a pile of dirty laundry by the door; it is a dirty business being disabled. Towel. Throw in the towel. But since she has begun talking to Margaret, she is not inclined to be so hard on herself, finds herself in touch with the ordinary things, made it down to the dining room for instance, started reading again, stupid things like the newspaper, even attempting the simple crossword.

  4 across (12) Declaration of I___pe____ce (12)

  Since she has been talking to Margaret, she grips her feeder beaker in her own right hand, like she does now, just the trace of dribble on her chin.

  ‘Take this cup,’ says Margaret. ‘Here, you can do it, drink.’

  Sitting in the little summerhouse, out of the wind, Margaret on the bench, her in her chair with the rug slipping from her knees, Diana wills her fingers to grip the fringe and tug it slowly back up over her dull legs.

  ‘I asked Edmund to help me die.’

  ‘You did, you have told me more than once, and you know my opinion on that.’

  ‘Where do people go from here?’ asks Diana. ‘When they jump?’ Not the right word at all. There was a time when she wondered not whether she’d ever smile again, but if she could. She can, if a little lopsided. She laughs as she searches through the alphabet on her tongue. L. ‘Leave.’

  ‘All sorts.’ Margaret opens her arms wide as if the multitudinous residents of the Angeline might take to the sea in front of them and set sail to the New World. ‘Some stay. Some go home. Some go to different residential accommodation. Some go to supported living.’

  ‘How does that work?’

  As Margaret explains the ins and outs of sheltered housing, specially adapted for the disabled, and living allowances and live-in carers and the expense of it all for the average person, there are words which find purchase in Diana’s precarious thinking. You are free to live life as you choose, that’s what Margaret said. Free. It is cold out here, but it’s very beautiful. There are daffodils lining every path and tight tulips waiting their turn in huge Tuscan pots on the terrace; even the handrails can’t spoil the eyeline to the windswept hawthorn hedge at the bottom of the grounds, the first green leaves iridescent against the winter wood, and beyond that, the clattering shore.

  ‘Gardening,’ says Diana.

  ‘And gardening. What’s to stop you now?’ Margaret ignores her when she indicates the feebleness
of her hands, her inability to kneel or dig or weed or plant or prune. ‘Knee-high beds, that’s what they have at my aunty’s place in Bracknell. Lovely flowers all chosen for their scent because none of the residents can see a thing, God bless them. There are ways, Diana, God always shows us a way if we are looking and willing to listen.’

  The way, the truth and the life. That would be something.

  ‘Did they tell you your husband phoned? Just confirming he’s coming to collect you on Monday. Easter Monday. Now won’t that be lovely? He’s planned a trip to Stourhead. I think that’s a big house with gardens, maybe that’s why he chose it.’

  It’s written all over Margaret’s face that she struggles with the Christian policy of forgiveness when it comes to Sir Edmund; she considers his lack of visits a sin, and maybe it is. Diana wonders if perhaps she forgave him too much too easily in the past.

  Stourhead. Why suddenly all this fuss and attention? Suddenly it occurs to Diana that Edmund would choose a time and a place like that, if he was going to actually do it. A substitute Wynhope, because Wynhope itself was already full.

  ‘Joke?’ queries Margaret.

  What is the colour she is looking for? Blue? Blonde? ‘Black joke, Margaret,’ Diana replies.

  When she conceived the idea, she envisaged it here at the Angeline. He’d probably play bohème and lean over and kiss her goodnight, his face this close to hers, his body heavy on her breasts and sharp against her collarbones as the pillow presses on her and the breath leaves her. It is such a clear image that she wonders if he came one night when she was hostage to her sleeping pills and tried and failed and left. There are solutions on the internet, but when she thinks about it, she’s sure Edmund isn’t the type of man to take this on himself, and money buys distance. Maybe that’s why Dominic is coming on the trip? Or Mrs H? She wouldn’t even need a fee. Mrs H, who made lasagne with yoghurt on the top and stuck notes on the fridge – instructions, were they, or warnings perhaps? Anyway, she did things Diana didn’t like and Diana did things she didn’t like, and, oh, the world is a hedgehog and she is tired of needles.