The Half Sister Page 39
Everything else is preparing for night. It is a violet dusk, too pale to allow the thin moon to shine, too hesitant to convince the rooks to roost in the pines. They settle, rise and swoop and scatter and re-form in unison to some unknown music. Lying on the bank, Edmund feels the roots of the overhanging sycamores digging into his back. He shifts his weight. The sunset has faded, colouring in the sky through the jigsaw pattern of the bare branches over his head, the only stars the fragile white wood anemones under their feet. The difficult, ordinary here and now, this is where they have to live. Grand gestures of the past, like that of his father, are not what is called for. It is how to live honourably with the people and the places God has given to you – that is the challenge. How to live with them, not how to live without them. How to sleep easily, spooned with your history, your family, your story. How to live easily with your self, your God.
If he sits up, Edmund can just see the roof of the chapel and he hears that cry, that prayer, a second time: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? They are not forsaken, they have all been given a second chance, and for that Edmund is grateful. He will restore the chapel, chase out the crow, request that it be reconsecrated. The house is also visible in the distance, two lights on upstairs; he imagines a third lamp shining in the months to come, maybe even this summer. He has pushed Diana up the long drive after a picnic at the river, walking and talking about this and that, she has finished the glass of wine he brought her as she rested under the catalpa tree, her rug is slipping so he pulls it up over her cold legs, and the shade is as soft as silk falling on her shoulders. The piano music is Mikey, the front door to Wynhope is open, she is ready for bed and he carries her upstairs and the smell of meadow hay sweetens their bedroom. His mind wanders on into a future: he will employ a couple to live in the coach house, Grace won’t want to look after Diana, even if she ever agrees to come back at all, everything might be explicable, but that is not to say everything will be forgiven. It turns out Grace is a complicated lady after all. The drawing room has been converted and it has become Diana’s dayroom, opening out on the front lawn where they have built raised beds and he helps her tend them. He does the hard work, he digs in the compost in the winter and plants new roses in the spring, she picks the tulips and yellow daffodils with her left hand. Wynhope has been restructured to accommodate the sick before, in a different time, for the casualties of a different type of war. It is all very idealised, he acknowledges, but if it is to work at all, there has to be hope.
Monday he will go to Stourhead with Dominic as planned. His friend will never know what the original purpose of the day out was, nor will Diana. He’ll unlock the walnut box with the silver key and destroy its contents, put the little key with the yellow-and-red twisted cotton tag back in its rightful place, and it will be as if none of it ever happened. Monday, there will be a sort of second proposal to Diana, to come and live with him at Wynhope, and she will say yes, yes, please, and he will do something of value with his life at last, pay his long overdue debt to the dead – he will rescue her. He will change the tenses: Diana loves him and he loves her. What if she turns him down? The evening has become cold, Edmund is stiff from this blind groping with the future unreal conditional, and he sits up, pulling his coat around him. Does she still love him? How could she still love him? He cannot force her to do anything; he fears he has been something of a bully over the past year.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ says Mikey.
Edmund shares his dream.
‘She might say no,’ says Mikey, the world expert in no. ‘She probably doesn’t like me or Wynhope any longer. Or she might not want people fussing.’
An element of wishful thinking, to put it mildly, thinks Edmund. ‘Well, we will have to listen to what she wants.’
‘And I’ve been thinking too,’ interrupts Mikey, taken up in a hurry of thoughts. ‘We still need to go to the seaside in the summer holidays like you promised and her wheelchair won’t work in the sand so she’ll have to stay here and someone will have to look after her.’ He pauses. ‘Sally is her best friend. She can come. I think Grace might not want to. She’ll be too busy.’
‘We’ll work something out.’
‘Diana could come in September instead when I’m in Year Six and Solomon will be here as well. He can come and stay, not just for tea. He’s good at helping. He helped Mummy and Mummy helped him. And there’s John, he’s strong enough to carry people.’
‘Come here, you. Snuggle up to me.’
Edmund hugs Mikey to warm him up and hold him still and keep him close and in one piece. He does not fool himself that this is going to be easy, but despite everything that he has read about the future prognosis for boys like this, Mikey does not frighten him. He never has, he has only ever stirred up feelings of great love; if Diana has finally met her childhood self, then perhaps, in a roundabout way, the same is true for him. He feels Mikey’s hands rummaging in his pocket.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Gloves. I’m cold. What’s this? Your hanky?’
How extraordinary, thinks Edmund, in my pocket tonight of all nights. ‘I’ll show you.’
Having turned on the torch on his phone, Edmund hands it to Mikey. It is a very white light, Edmund’s face is all lit up and luminous. Mikey flashes the beam down the river, listens to everything running away into the night with a rush and a rustle, then he shines it on the ground between them where the Wynhope Psalm is laid out on the damp moss, weighed down with pebbles from the river.
‘You look surprised,’ says Edmund. ‘Do you know it?’
‘Yes and no.’ Edmund helps him with the difficult words like Zion, captive and mirth, and Mikey reads it out loud.
‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive, required of us a song;
And they that visited us required of us mirth, saying.’
Edmund joins in the last line.
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’
So they don’t rush off, they don’t fish, they just sit. They don’t talk, they listen to the songs the river sings. The trout rise to the fly, flashes of silver twisting high over the black water before swimming away free, deep beneath the weeded ledges, until a kind darkness comes with the coolness of a cloth held soft against the forehead and the still earth reminds them both that this feverish day is done and that Wynhope is waiting.
Acknowledgements
With thanks: to everyone at Canongate, in particular to my editor Francis Bickmore; to The Arvon Foundation for the one week every year where I can disappear from view and write; and finally, to all those in the NHS, in social care, in education and in charities who believe in the potential of every vulnerable child and who work tirelessly to help them achieve it.
Also by Catherine Chanter
The Well