The Half Sister Read online

  ‘I thought you said you belonged to a health club,’ says Valerie.

  ‘I do, and it’s fine, very cliquey, but fine. Anyway, it’s so much nicer swimming alone.’

  She’s lonely, thinks Valerie, Diana never did find it easy to keep friends.

  ‘A swimming pool?’ Mikey is asking. ‘Under there?’

  He doesn’t know why Diana is laughing at him and her reply doesn’t make sense either.

  ‘We couldn’t go under the main house because that’s Grade Two listed, so we extended it out from the tower under the garden.’ She performs a little tap dance on the brand-new flagstones. ‘It’s here, invisible, but right under my feet.’

  Staring at the ground, Mikey tries to imagine a whole blue swimming pool deep beneath them, dark and unbroken. The pools he has been to smell of cleaners and echo with shouts and screams and the sharp whistle of the lifeguard, but this buried pool must be a very quiet place.

  ‘Can we go swimming?’ he asks his mum.

  Valerie shrugs. ‘Don’t ask me, this is way out of my league.’

  Diana beckons him over. ‘It’s not ready, there’s no water. Look, you can see.’

  Squatting down, Mikey presses his face against a glass panel which is a sort of skylight into the earth.

  ‘When it’s finished, then you must come and swim, won’t that be fun?’

  Although his mum is agreeing, Mikey thinks it would be scary, lying on your back in the water with the weight of the whole heavy world inches from your face and nothing to hold it up and, besides, he’d have to own up that he’s lost his trunks. His mum is walking away, making some comment about how much it must all have cost and Diana is saying an arm and a leg. He can tell by the way his mum is changing the subject that she doesn’t think it’s worth that.

  ‘Come on, Mikey,’ she’s calling. ‘Take a picture of us. Use my phone.’

  Lining them up in front of the round lily pond, Mikey clicks, checks the screen and shows his mother.

  ‘You’d never know we were sisters, just looking at us,’ says Valerie.

  ‘Half-sisters,’ Diana reminds her. ‘You’ve got your father’s eyes.’

  Giggling, Michael points at the screen. ‘It looks like the statue behind is about to hit Diana on the head,’ he says.

  Leaning over the boy’s shoulder as she looks, Diana realises his smile reminds her of Valerie when she was young. Maybe it would be nice to have a relationship with her nephew, now that her mother is dead and she herself has no children. There are no moorings on either side of the river and she is adrift in the present. A little awkwardly, she squeezes his thin shoulders. ‘I hope he isn’t going to clout me.’ She laughs. ‘That bronze boy will grow up to be Hercules, the strongest man in the world.’

  ‘I know about him from school,’ starts Mikey, but his aunt isn’t listening, she’s telling her own story. She probably thinks he’s stupid, but she’s wrong, he knows lots of things, he just doesn’t always say them.

  Perhaps she can buy the boy a child’s book of Greek myths for his birthday? Tea at Wynhope, cake with candles on the kitchen table, Edmund singing, Michael unwrapping the gift.

  ‘Zeus’s wife was so angry at the news of the birth of Hercules, she sent snakes to the baby’s cradle to kill him,’ Diana explains, ‘but the baby Hercules was so strong he rose up and killed them. That’s the snakes you can see in the boy’s hands.’

  ‘Bit like how you felt when I was born, I expect,’ jokes Valerie, then immediately regrets it.

  ‘All gone,’ says Mikey, swirling his hands in the still water of the ornamental pool.

  Their reflections are erased by the ripples shimmering in the last of the light, but the awkwardness is not.

  The quiet moment offers an opportunity which Diana takes. ‘I’m sorry I got all prickly in the car, it’s not easy thinking back. Obviously there was just Mum and me for a while, after Dad died, and we were happy. Do you know, I don’t remember Dad dying? I think I remember the police knocking, telling Mum someone had run into him on the hard shoulder while he was attending a breakdown, but it’s a false memory. I only know it because I was told it. I wasn’t allowed at the funeral. All I really remember feeling was that I was happy, there was Mum and me and I was happy. Then it was like your father and then you gatecrashed my party and trashed the house, at least that’s how it felt.’

  Then she’s off, striding slightly too fast, leading them past the tennis court, telling Michael that his uncle hasn’t really enjoyed tennis for a long time, but she’s sure he’d love to bowl a few overs with him, and he’ll be back the next day in time for lunch. She turns to Valerie and asks if she likes the white narcissi.

  ‘We’d love a garden, wouldn’t we, Mikey?’ says Valerie.

  ‘As I said, you must come and stay, especially when the weather’s lovely. Edmund would love someone to play with and I could do with some company.’

  Hope comes and goes in their conversation like a song or a siren heard from a distance, in the wind. Arm in arm, they walk on in the company of questions unasked, rounding the corner into the arboretum, expressing delight at the things that are easy to love like spring flowers and pink sunsets. Mikey sticks close. These trees are nothing like the park, no kids playing their music on the ramp, no benches, no bins where you can shovel the dog shit. He pulls on the catkins hanging from the hazel branches and the two women watch him.

  ‘Why didn’t you want kids, Di?’

  ‘Usual thing to start with, I was more interested in my career than baby puke. I had nothing, remember that, I was sixteen, starting from ground zero. It took one hundred per cent of me, making it, moving up, photocopying girl, receptionist, letting agent, estate agent, property portfolio manager – that’s when Edmund employed me. That’s when we met. And I did make it, Valerie, all this didn’t just fall in my lap, you know.’ Diana pauses as she takes in the extent of her very own country house. Other people might think she married it, but in her own way she knows she earned it. Suddenly she remembers who she is with and why. ‘What were we talking about?’

  ‘Kids,’ says Valerie.

  ‘Oh yes, kids.’ Diana pulls her coat closer around her. ‘So I didn’t have time for relationships. There were men, typical men, just not worth it. Certainly, I never met anyone I wanted to have children with. Then there’s our childhood. I thought if I can’t even remember being happy as a child, then how can I ever imagine having happy children?’

  ‘Mikey looks okay, doesn’t he?’ says Valerie. ‘Things don’t have to repeat themselves, Di.’ After years of feeling more ignorant than her sister, Valerie now believes it is possible that she understands more than her; not Greek myths or Latin words for clumps of trees, but things that matter like love at all costs and never giving up.

  ‘Then when I met Edmund and things got serious, we obviously talked about it – vasectomy reversal, sperm donation, adoption – but do you know what?’

  ‘No, tell me.’

  ‘We realised we didn’t want children – as a positive choice, I mean. There’s only ever been one moment when I felt a sort of flutter of what might have been, but other than that, we’re happy as we are. Edmund’s everything to me.’ Realising the truth of what she says, Diana grins. ‘Call me greedy, but I’d hate to share him with anyone other than the dog, that’s hard enough, isn’t it, Monty?’ She claps her hands and shoos the dog off into the shrubbery. ‘Go on, hunt somewhere else, you jealous old thing, you.’

  Sisterly talk, thinks Valerie, sitting as sisters should sit, and Mikey running in from the wood to join them, beautiful, standing in the centre of the orchard spinning time on a broken sundial. On the old wrought-iron bench, Valerie turns ripe words over in her hands. One thing she has learned in life is that there are things better said than left unsaid and this moment will not come again.

  ‘Look, I don’t know what you want to happen today, what you want to talk about. All I can say is I know it must have been hard for you, your dad dead, me the favour
ite, and yes, my dad was a bastard at times, I recognise it now of course, the way he put Mum down, the way he bullied you, but . . .’

  ‘Bullied?’

  ‘Well, yes, bullied.’

  ‘Is that the word you’d use for it, is it? Bullied?’

  Pulling a branch down from the apple tree above them, Diana examines the buds, little lips, tightly sealed. Dull word, bullied, like sullied. Not the right word at all.

  This bench is wide enough for three and there is space in between them. Their eyes fix on the rows of skeleton trees joining hands in the dim light. The boy hits the sundial with his stick over and over again. As she gets up abruptly, Diana tramples the garish daffodils at their feet. Suffocating the last of the daylight, the thick evening is blurring the edges of things, the blue tits and the wren are mute, surrendering the space to the rooks and damp disappointment.

  Leaving, Diana calls out to her sister huddled in a borrowed coat like a tart on a park bench at the end of the night. ‘Just forget it. I’ll go and check on supper. You take your time. Come on, Monty, home.’

  They stay together: Mikey watching the robin on the wall watching him, Valerie hearing the word ‘bullied’ hit her like a ball on a wall, thud, thud, thud. Why just walk off like a teenager? Go on, then, shut yourself in your room and turn the music up. She was Mikey’s age when Diana walked out; what did her sister expect her to understand about family life at that age? What does she want from her now? And, yes, ‘bullied’ is the word she would use, whatever vocabulary Diana decides to impose on their childhood story.

  As her anger subsides, Valerie concludes that, despite appearances, she has it all compared to Diana; she would not swap all the listed country houses and underground swimming pools and grass tennis courts and banks of daffodils in the world for what she has: her son, her Solomon, the past put to bed and a second chance. As she and Mikey find their way back, they pause in front of the tower, chinks of light shining through the windows on the top floor like eyes through a helmet. It looks like an army man, thinks Mikey, but he wonders what’s keeping it standing to attention, now that they’ve dug up its boots. Valerie tells Mikey that, if she had to, she would climb to the top and stand on the battlements to fight for him, and he says he’d get a sword and a horse and he’d defend the tower with his life for her.

  ‘Seriously, Mikey,’ she says, ‘nothing beats telling the truth. Nothing worse than secrets and lies. That should be our motto. No more secrets, no more lies.’

  Marching round the pond, stomping his feet on the flagstones as he salutes first the tower and then the bronze boy, Mikey finds a sergeant-major voice, chanting for the benefit of the swarming starlings, ‘No more secrets, no more lies,’ he sings, punching the air, ‘no more secrets, no more lies.’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘That’s downstairs,’ says Diana, leading the way a little unsteadily. ‘Now let’s see where you’re sleeping.’

  The large glass of Merlot downed on her return to the house was probably a mistake, but at least now, dealing with bricks and mortar, she feels a renewed resilience. She is still pleased she invited Valerie, she has just rushed into the past too quickly, knocking things over as she went. It’s difficult with Michael around, she doesn’t know how much he knows.

  ‘When we have house parties, we use the coach house,’ Diana explains as they climb the stairs. ‘Edmund’s elderly aunt was in there when I arrived. She’s the one who looked after him when he was a teenager, after both his parents were dead. I said to Edmund, she needs to go, it’s not as if you can’t afford a decent nursing home. You weren’t going to catch me mashing her banana and wiping her bum.’

  ‘That’s what I get paid to do at the care home,’ says Valerie.

  Valerie has a job? Diana thought she lived on benefits. Propped up against the banisters, Diana laughs rather hysterically. ‘Not my thing at all. If I ever reach that stage, put me down. Seriously, pop a little something in the wine and wave goodbye.’ She opens a bedroom door and turns on the light. ‘Now, this is one of the spare rooms, but we don’t want to give you that. Did you ever watch that? Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’

  Valerie can imagine the programme appealing to Diana. Quite apart from the money (and she’s certainly come into the money), her father used to call Diana a know-all, then Diana would say she’d be the one with the last laugh and here she is, laughing.

  ‘This room’s lovely, Di!’ says Valerie. ‘I’d be fine in here.’

  The pale shade of olive green turned out better than Diana hoped when she redecorated. Stroking the fine silk bedspread she traces the embroidered feathers of the red parrots, down the climbing stalks of the emerald blue flowers, the smooth and knotless surface of wealth. She is good with colour and fabrics; the rental clients always came back to the properties she used to manage for Edmund’s property company and they commented on how the flats were furnished in impeccable taste. They, like her, were nearly always outsiders, and she knew how to construct English class for the foreigner: how to have the sense of a Labrador waiting for a walk in the grounds, without the hair on the furniture; how to have the touch of history, without the handcuffs. She misses work, she acknowledges privately, as she straightens the bed. Valerie and the boy are standing behind her as if there is a red cabled rope across the landing so she resumes the role of tour guide.

  ‘Michael, you’re in this room at the top of the stairs. There’s a brand new duvet with footballers on it, just like your tie!’

  The words ‘but I don’t like football’ are just a swallow away, but she’s still talking.

  ‘And in case you like reading, Uncle Edmund dug out a couple of old books he had when he was a boy.’

  Robinson Crusoe. Mikey doesn’t open it because but he doesn’t want his mum to be sad that they don’t have many books any longer. The social worker only had room in her car for the things that really mattered, and when he puts it down Diana reaches her own conclusions about the literacy skills of state-educated children. Perhaps she can help him, when she gets to know him better, pay for a private tutor, take him to libraries.

  ‘What’s up there?’ Valerie peers up a much narrower staircase.

  ‘What Edmund calls the nursery, although, as you say, not much use for that. Don’t worry, no mad women in the attic, but we do have our very own gothic tower.’ Imitating a trumpet, Diana strides in front of them. ‘In Victorian times, Edmund’s relations made a lot of money and didn’t know what to do with it. So what’s new!’ She shrugs. ‘They built the tower as a sort of joke. You can get in through the door you can see from the drive, and eventually that will be the way down to the pool, but if you follow me’ – she speaks in what she hopes is a conspiratorial whisper which might appeal to a child – ‘there’s a secret entrance!’

  At the end of the landing, at what looks like a wood-panelled wall, Diana slides one section to the side and behind it there is another door with an ornate key. A light reveals a short stone passageway and, beyond that, a spiral staircase.

  ‘Jesus, Di!’ says Valerie. ‘I’ve had enough of visiting prisons.’

  ‘Trust me,’ says Diana.

  ‘Can Monty come?’ Mikey asks his mother.

  ‘Monty stays here, on guard,’ says Diana. ‘Sit, Monty, stay.’

  The boy whispers in the dog’s ear, ‘Bye bye, Monty.’

  The sound of chattering fades as the grown-ups disappear from view. He is small for nine years old, the steps are steep, and he struggles to keep up. The staircase goes round and round, like a helter skelter, except he is trying to go up it, not down, and his socks keep slipping on the stone. He can touch both sides of the staircase at the same time. Every now and again there are little candles on ledges, but almost no windows, and he only passes one door which turns out to be a bathroom, so he has to go on up. Above his head, the underneath of the steps look like they might go on for ever and take him somewhere he has never been before. It isn’t like Lockdown, though, he won’t be able to cheat to get
out. He half expects to climb until he reaches the sky and be rescued by an army helicopter, but, no, here he is at the top with a door to a bedroom with a massive four-poster bed on one side of him and on the other, a wall. Just a wall. It seems wrong that the spiral ever has to end.

  ‘Now, Val, I simply insist.’ Diana is moving round the hexagonal room, putting on the lamps and drawing their attention to one fabulous feature after another: the rich red velvet curtains with gold cords matching the swags which drape the bed; a great tapestry hanging from the ceiling – can you see the hunters on their horses, Michael, and the hounds at their heels, and there’s the deer ahead, they’re going to catch him, don’t you think?

  ‘And here,’ says Diana, pointing to a framed piece of embroidery hanging on the opposite wall, ‘they call this a sampler. A little girl in Victorian times did it. Look closely, at the bottom it says “Edith Carlton, eighteen twenty-four, aged ten”.’

  All three of them study the picture, a river flowing through an idyllic parkland with a house much like Wynhope in the background, harps hung in the weeping willow trees in each corner and lines in green thread beneath.

  ‘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,’ Diana reads out loud.

  To Valerie, there is something indescribably moving about the sampler; there has been so much weeping recently, she can feel the water running like tears and the little girl, only the same age as Mikey, seated on her own in a dim light, stitching sadness into the cloth.

  ‘It goes on a bit,’ Diana is saying. ‘It used to hang in the drawing room. Can you imagine something so gloomy when I’m trying to brighten the place up? Edmund likes it, though, something to do with the ancestors and Antigua. He calls it the Wynhope Psalm, so this is our compromise, to hang it in the tower.’

  ‘Was she a little slave girl, this Edith? Or was she the child of one of the plantation owners?’