The Half Sister Read online

  Default. On the bed. Curl small. Hug head. Avoid eye contact. ‘I’m sorry. I won’t be like that again, I promise. Leave the light on, Di.’ Valerie reaches out. ‘I’ve been scared for such a long time. Even when I was small I used to kneel by my bed and pray you’d come back for me.’

  ‘Well, surprise, surprise, no one was listening. I didn’t come back, did I, and that was the best decision I ever made.’ Diana is unpeeling Valerie’s limpet fingers from her dress. ‘He’s dead, Mum’s dead, and that just leaves little old you.’

  Step by step across the room and away she goes, going, going, pausing, in the doorway, the light of the staircase behind her. One last chance, that’s all they have, before it’s too late and everything comes crashing down around them. This is her sister, not Paul; to apologise would be a strength, not a weakness. ‘I’m sorry, I want you to know I’m sorry, sorry for both of us, sorry that it all turned out like it did. And about this evening and everything else.’

  ‘Too late. You said the only words I’ll ever remember and never forgive.’ Diana mimics her sister. ‘I don’t believe a word you say.’

  ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘As long as you don’t spoil the sheets, you can choke on your own vomit, for all I care.’

  Now Diana is gone and all lights are out. It is an awful thing that has happened this evening, terrible things said by both of them, cats mewling and howling in a back alley, that’s what they’re like, cowering behind overfilled dustbins and scratching each other from walls topped with broken glass, and looking down from a window which will never open again, their mother, tapping and shaking her head. Valerie needs to use the bathroom, but at the top of the spiral stairs, she realises that she can’t find the switch, the stone steps fall away beneath her, probably all the way down into her sister’s top-of-the-range dungeon. Paul used to do that, take the light bulbs out, but he hasn’t been able to keep them in darkness in the end, has he? Diana is still down there somewhere. Valerie can hear the echo as the door from the passage to the landing is closed. Feeling her way to the window, she pulls open the corner of the curtain and looks down on the silhouette of the bronze boy. The moonlight shines on the child’s song hung on the wall. Diana tries to own everything with her posh words – not a ditch, a ha ha, not a picture, a sampler.

  ‘By the rivers of Babylon,’ hums Valerie, ‘where we sat down.’ She loves a bit of reggae and red, red wine. Reggae’s always been one of her favourites (second only to Elvis, who is definitely not dead), just the memory of the beat takes her back to the festival where she met Solomon for the first time and knowing he was something else straight away, dancing in the street as if there was no tomorrow.

  ‘Lift up your hearts, with the meditation lift them up.’ Without undressing, Valerie falls onto the four-poster bed. The visit has been like a grave robber; it has got out its spade and dug questions out of the ground where they have been quietly decomposing for years, and now the bones demand answers. Why did Diana do it? Why did she make it all up? Did she make it all up? She must have known the future would be impossible for her once she said what she did. To think of Solomon is to reconnect with his sort of wisdom. What’s happened must be forgiven. Tomorrow is another day. All we have is grace and hope. Tomorrow. Maybe there’ll be answers then.

  ‘Lift up your hearts, with the meditation lift them up,’ she sings drunkenly to herself as the room turns circles around her. Night night, Sol, love you. The thought of him in his cell is terrible, but it’s only three months and then they’ll be a proper family and the sky’s the limit. She can wait. Suddenly, she sits up. She never goes a night without checking on Mikey, she hasn’t kissed him goodnight, and him in a strange room in this strange house, but it’s too late now and she hopes Diana’s left the landing light on for him and the door open, like she promised. Night night, Mum, you sleep now, nothing left to fight about now. Night night, Mikey, God bless, she whispers as she slips under the silk bedspread.

  Her tears flow onto the huge goosedown pillows, and the song and her love for her son curl like a kind current around her head until she sleeps as she hums and she hums as she sleeps. ‘Let the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart, be acceptable in your sight, here tonight.’

  Her light is out.

  Leaning heavily on the closed door to the tower, Diana understands the turn of the key in her hand, hears the click of the catch, experiences its security like a zookeeper closing up for the night, turning his back on the restless beasts and stale cages and stepping out safe into the fresh air. She opens the landing window. The tower which has been like a child for her, coaxed and dressed and spoiled to death, is now polluted by her past in a way that Wynhope has never been in the three short years it has been her home. She was so full of hope. More fool her. Far from settling her slurried mind, the bitter air and the strange sounds of the night unnerve her: the barking fox, the relentless, repetitive bleating of a lost lamb and the breathing out of ghosts. In the centuries to come, there will be some other woman at this window and she will have become the ghost, nothing more than a footnote in Wynhope’s history, and her mother buried, even this same day. Her mother is never coming after her, Valerie and the boy will be gone tomorrow as well, taking with them their wheelie suitcase and sniggers and her last chance of ever being validated. So be it. She shivers. Somewhere beyond the stables, maybe in the Cedar of Lebanon, a tawny owl is shrieking.

  ‘Goodnight,’ whispers Diana as she creeps past Michael’s bedroom door. ‘Sleep tight.’ She can sympathise with a child who wants nothing more than uninterrupted sleep.

  In her bedroom, Diana undresses, holding tight to the bedstead and her routine, slips her silk dressing gown over her white cotton nightdress, takes up her place in front of the dressing table. Wiping from her face the thick layer of pale foundation applied for the funeral, she notices her mascara has run, and with cotton wool she disposes of the evidence that Valerie is able to make her cry. Downstairs, Valerie has stamped their mess into the very fabric of the carpet; however hard she scrubs, everything is stained.

  It is stupid to get in such a state. Tomorrow, today it must be now, Edmund will be home. She pulls the curtains across his parkland, his shadow sheep, his whole estate at night, as if by doing so she can bring him back in here with her; for someone who has made their own way in the world for over twenty years, it is extraordinary how she now feels incomplete if anything takes him away from her. She lies with one hand clutched tightly around the key to the tower in her dressing-gown pocket, like a child with a special object, the other hand pulling the empty pillow closer. She is thinking of the things she should tell him when he is back, he will believe her, because tonight of all nights, she realises, you never know when it might be too late, you never know when one drunken sleep might last a lifetime.

  Mikey is only small and not used to staying away from home. He didn’t want to sleep lost in this strange room in this half empty house in the middle of nowhere with nothing but fields and sheep and sky and trees and birds and poo. Mikey’s had three jobs so far in his life: the first is to make everything better for his mum and he’s the only one who can do that; the second is to do very well at school; the third is to stay awake, to be the lookout, and to make sure everyone goes to bed in one piece and stays that way until morning.

  Here, even the house doesn’t know how to go to bed quietly. It creeps around, it stands on the step which creaks, even its stomach rumbles. He is good at only being half asleep, at identifying stumbling on the stairs as the sound of grown-ups going to bed, and it triggered him to slip out from under the duvet and creep to his bedroom door, just to make sure. Which is why he was hiding behind his bedroom door like a spy, watching her, feeling the strange thin air of the countryside from the open window against his hot cheeks. He witnessed her turn the key, he saw her put it in her pocket, even though she promised she’d leave the door open, he heard the rattle of the handle as she checked it was locked, and then a quiet breathing out of
something he thought was half way between laughter and cross.

  It didn’t make sense to Mikey. He was trying to unpick the magic trick with which Diana vanished his mother, along with the fantasy film of false candles and a four-poster bed and a spiral staircase which went all the way up to nowhere and all the way down to a hole in the ground. All gone, just like that, with one turn of the key. The house was fidgeting, it knew he was hiding there in his crumpled school shirt and trousers, it was going to give him away. What he wanted to say was give me the key, I’ll look after her, but even when he found the words, he was just not brave enough, never had been brave enough when it mattered, and then his aunt was turning towards him, surely she’d see him, hear his heart beating, but she walked on past and disappeared down the dark landing, like a ghost.

  Now he’s sure she’s gone, he turns on the little bedside lamp and slips out and finds the door which leads to the tower. He wants to say sorry to his mum about the rude words and to tell her he loves her before he goes to sleep. Because he does love her, more than anything. She’s better than anyone else’s mum and more beautiful, and the two of them together, nothing’s going to stop them now, that’s what she sings sometimes. He pushes the door as strongly as he dares, he even whispers through the keyhole, ‘Mum, it’s me’, but he knows it’s a long, long way to the bedroom at the top of the tower and she’ll never hear him even though everything sounds ten times louder in the dark. He was right. This door is locked. There is no key. No light. No mum. Nothing except a hollowing stomach and a racing pulse and the words he hasn’t said for cold company as he creeps back to his room and, a little like a dog, turns in circles before he lies down and makes a bed of his duvet on the floor. The lamp throws shadows, transforms his new for-the-funeral jacket into a body and his new for-the-funeral tie into a rope. It’s worse than darkness, so he shuts his eyes tight and turns out the light. Why would she lock the door, why would she do that?

  Chapter Nine

  Wynhope settles down for the night. In the lodge at the bottom of the drive, the housekeeper secures the guard across the fire; outside her husband double-checks the hen house. The fox is barking in the wood. It is a cold night even for April. Wynhope gathers the park around itself, careful not to disturb the rooks who have finally settled in the conifers or the lambs huddled with their mothers under the shelter of the spreading oaks. A badger snouts his way across the front lawn and triggers the security lights. There he is, black and white on the luminous grass and behind him Wynhope; all three floors of the magnificent Queen Anne house are illuminated for the delight of the night-sliding slugs and the sly and musky polecat. Even the damp gravel drive shines. The curious tower wriggles its toes into the clay for a foothold, clings on to the end of the west wing with its bitten fingernails. It is the bastard offspring and knows it, its gargoyles hide behind stone hands and giggle and spit at visitors when it rains.

  The badger shuffles off into the wings. There is no one to applaud save the tawny owl biding his time in the Cedar of Lebanon. The plough is low in the Lent sky, the moon has risen above the fir trees, the international space station is passing over Wynhope, unnoticed; it sees sunrise every ninety-two minutes and now is beaming back footage which shows a planet at peace with itself, just the slow roll of the blue globe whispered in white. Soon it will be on the dark side and all there will be is black. A smudge on the lens of the satellite turns out to be smoke over China. Those minute variations in the colour of the sea, azure, cobalt, indigo, Persian? Sunlight on a tsunami. Beneath its crusted skin, the planet’s joints are old and stiff, the ice sheets melted from this English bed many thousands of years ago and yet still sleep does not come easy. Maybe the dog dozing in the kitchen opens one eye, or the deer trespassing in the spring wheat freeze, tremble, listen and return to graze, but the people rarely pay attention, perhaps only once in a decade questioning the unfamiliar tremor beneath their feet, or once in a century holding tight to the duplicitous banisters, or once in every five hundred years running from their homes in terror that the earth under their feet has turned against them and the cathedral spire has fallen. That time is now.

  Chapter Ten

  And it is Wynhope who is the first to sense trouble. There are intruders in the cellar, they are rattling the wine racks, their booted feet are pounding up the stone steps, breaking into the hall and giving the grandfather clock a good kicking until it peals for help. The house is shaken awake.

  A helicopter, that’s what Diana thinks, but it’s too low, it’s going to crash. Half awake, she cries out for Edmund, but he’s in London and she’s at Wynhope. Hot, sweating, drink, menopause, fear, whatever, she is disoriented and breathless from panic. On her dressing table, face creams and foundation, the necklace she wore to the funeral, silver trinket boxes, they are all dancing to a discordant orchestra made up of expensive bottles of scent. Kefalonia, three years ago, honeymoon with Edmund, running from a restaurant, plates of moussaka sliding and bottles of retsina smashing onto the terrace, cries of seismos, seismos, as the locals fled screaming into the streets. Seismos. Earthquake. Out. Hide. Doorframe. But this is here, now, Wynhope, England. Stumbling down the landing, Diana trips on something, a body, a bag of bones, a boy.

  Get out. Get out.

  The boy is bumping along the floor, in his half-dream sleep he is lying across the back seat of Solomon’s car and Solomon is rescuing him, driving him away from somewhere he does not want to be and his mum’s in the front seat singing, but when he reaches out, there is no door and no handle, and he does not know where he is or why the car has become a ghost train, the rails rumbling in the dark, the rough carpet against his face. This is his aunt’s house, he remembers, and he does not know where to go so he crawls until his face finds a foot and he curls in on himself like a hedgehog.

  The boy. In her panic, Diana has forgotten the boy. Grabbing at his hair, pulling at his legs, he resists, she screams. Somewhere, maybe in the hall, a smash of glass and that energises the child. Together they hurtle down the stairs to the front door, but she can’t slide the bolt across and she can’t get out, she can’t get out. Then. Stop. It’s over. The door swings open and they fall out into the blank, unmoving dawn, triggering the security lights, herself and the boy bewildered players in an unscheduled performance. He slips free of her grasp. The wind whips Diana’s dressing gown around her, the stones on the drive are mean and she retreats to the lawn to feel the sweet firmness of the damp grass between her toes. Were it not for the relentless wail of the alarm and the dog howling in the kitchen, she would have thought that she dreamed the whole thing. There is no way she can go back in there and rescue Monty, she can’t trust the house to keep its word, but imagine carrying the dog’s body from the ruins, Edmund would never forgive her. But she and the boy, they’re out. She did not think it happened like this, when you’re alone; on the news from other countries there are always neighbours running into the streets, hugging each other, counting each other, reaching for their phones and banging on doors. But here, it is just the two of them, mute, as if all words have been shaken out of them. It is so quiet she can hear the hum of the tilted, turning world.

  ‘That was an earthquake,’ Diana says, more because she needs to hear herself speak than anything else. ‘I know it was. Probably not a real earthquake, just a tremor. We do get them in England, not very often, but we do. And it’s over now. Everything will be all right.’

  Finding no words of his own, Mikey processes those coming from this woman. He wants so much to hold on to something which is not moving, but he cannot bring himself to touch her. He has something important to say. It is an earthquake, he repeats inside his head, and his brain scans his memory: it finds a children’s book with a picture of a volcano all mixed up with doing a sponsored skip at his last primary school which had blackberries in the bushes round the edge of the playground which they weren’t allowed to eat. It did all that in a millionth of a second, but then the brain realises the uselessness of this information
in the current situation and it returns to the one overriding word pounding inside him, so insistent that he holds his head between his hands for fear it might split him apart.

  ‘Mum.’

  Inside the tower, Valerie is consumed by this sudden stillness. It is unreliable, as is the silence which has replaced the inexplicable muffled roar that rumbled up the spiral staircase and blundered into the room. When it woke her, she thought it was a bomb; that is the only thing she has ever seen on telly which might be like this, coming out of nothing and shaking everything without warning. By the light shining in from outside, she can see splinters of glass on the floor and she remembers the sampler, it must have shattered, and then she pieces together where she is and why. At Wynhope. With her sister. Not a bomb then, the only thing she can think of is a hurricane or an earthquake or something from the weather channel but whatever it is, it seems to be over. She’s survived. And Mikey?

  ‘Mikey,’ she screams.

  Her son fills her up, there is no room in her left for anything else other than him, the Michaelness of him, his smell, his voice, his being is all that matters to her, his being safe. Without warning, the light outside is switched off, the bedside lamp isn’t working, she is inching blind through the unfamiliar room with her arms outstretched. The steps on the spiral staircase turn their backs on her and twist away beneath her feet. She slips and falls and it hurts, but not so much that she cannot carry on, one hand on either side pressing against the cold walls, reading her way out. At last, a gap. Valerie reconstructs yesterday’s guided tour and knows this must be where the passage connects the tower to the house to the landing to the spare room to Mikey. Wood. Door. Handle. Latch. Open, for Christ’s sake, open will you.