Читать книгу The Half Sister - Catherine Chanter - Страница 13

Chapter Six

Lunch is in a bankrupt country house where they’d made a business out of dying, plastering fire exit signs on the wood panelling and selling egg-and-cress sandwiches to mourners. It is every bit as ghastly as Diana has predicted; she is so relieved Edmund has not been forced to mingle with the half remembered remnants of her suburban past, it is bad enough for her. The old women cluster around the child as if mere proximity to youth can provide an antidote to the funeral, and of course it is all about Valerie, poor Valerie, hugs and kisses and condolences for Valerie; most of them barely remember that there was another daughter called Diana, or if they do, it’s for all the wrong reasons.

It strikes Valerie that probably both she and Diana are out of place here, for different reasons. If anything, Diana looks more lost, giving orders to the girls in black uniforms serving the tea rather than listening to the old folk with tears behind glasses and memories clasped in handbags. Valerie does try, she says things like, have you caught up with my sister Diana, she’s over there; oh yes, Diana, they say, I’ll see if I can catch her later. When it is all over, waiting for her sister in the empty hall, sprigs of green cress on the parquet floor and coffee spilled in saucers, Valerie realises it isn’t just her family that Diana turned her back on all those years ago, it was her younger self. As Mikey slips his hand in hers, she knows it isn’t such an easy thing to do, to step away from your childhood.

The automatic child locks on Diana’s 4x4 snap shut. Behind her, Mikey is asleep on the back seat. Valerie is also exhausted, she closes her eyes and allows the bland music on the radio and the hypnotic beat of the windscreen wipers to iron out her crumpled grief.

‘Wake up, they’re playing our song.’ Diana is singing along to something. Valerie doesn’t recognise it, but she doesn’t say so. When the song is finished, Diana apologises that Edmund is not going to be at Wynhope when they get there. He has to be in London, apparently.

That is a strange decision, not to go to your mother-in-law’s funeral, even if you didn’t invite her to your wedding, but blearily Valerie concludes it probably wasn’t the right sort of funeral, not his sort of people.

‘He worshipped his mother, but she died of cancer when he was ten and then his father was so depressed afterwards that he shot himself when Edmund was a teenager.’

The Google search Valerie did on her phone the night before brought up images of a country house, a good-looking tanned man with an oversized cheque for charity in his hands and a smile for the camera on his face and several old newspaper articles about a death at Wynhope House which she didn’t bother to read.

Diana explains. ‘He doesn’t really do funerals any longer, and who can blame him?’

Do not judge and you will not be judged, that’s what Solomon would be saying; he’s fond of that verse even though he’s the most unjustly judged of all.

Diana is moving the conversation on: who was at the funeral, faces half remembered, names forgotten. ‘How much had you seen of her?’ Indicating left, Diana pulls off the slip road and keeps her eyes fixed in front of her. ‘Mum, I mean.’

Arrows on road signs propel them through complicated junctions, traffic lights slow them, stop them, send them on their way, time runs away behind them leaving only tyre tracks on damp roads.

‘Not enough. It’s difficult to explain. Paul, he was a very controlling man, he cut me off, from her, and from you, I suppose.’ Crying does not seem acceptable in the Range Rover. ‘To be honest, I don’t think she forgave herself for not spotting what was wrong and coming after me. I wanted to tell her I didn’t blame her, but now of course . . .’

The right turn is badly judged, the oncoming car honks and Diana swears. ‘I don’t remember her coming after me either. Or did I miss her running down the road, pleading with me to come home?’

‘I think she tried, but Dad wouldn’t let her.’

‘Did she ever talk about me?’

The roads are smaller now, the twists and turns wake Mikey up, and Valerie whispers over her shoulder that they are nearly there. She hopes he’s not going to throw up.

‘Well?’

The silence stretches before them the length of the dark lane which is overhung with trees still black from winter and tall hedges rusted brown with last year’s leaves leaning in on them.

‘Thought not,’ says Diana.

She was never as quick off the mark as her sister, couldn’t just come up with the right words at the right time. Once, when she was very young, Diana told her she had to pay her for every word she ever used because Diana was the one who owned a dictionary. This isn’t an easy day for thinking or speaking, but it is too late now because Diana is saying here we are and ahead of them elaborate wrought-iron gates are swinging open to Wynhope House.

Swivelling round, Mikey watches the gates close behind him. He remembers he needs to ask about the coffin and the curtains, but probably not now.

‘Where’s the house, Mum?’ All he can see is grass, trees, sheep, birds, sky and an endless narrow road between painted railings.

‘Here!’ says Diana. ‘We’ve arrived.’

In front of the child, the house is enormous. One, two, three long windows; a dark green front door with a porch on pillars; one, two, three long windows on the other side; upstairs, almost the same; and then another layer of smaller windows on top of that with their own little roofs. Pointing at the top floor, his mum winks and whispers to him that those are the rooms where they lock up the servants; in a louder voice she tells his aunt that the place is amazing, beautiful, she’s never seen anything like it.

There aren’t any words Mikey can really think of to describe it, so he doesn’t say anything. To him, the whole house looks like when you cut things out of paper and unfold it, both sides of the snowflake the same. Except. Except over on one side is a tower, just like a tower in a book with pointy bits and church windows and stone faces. It doesn’t match. It is as if a king thought about building a castle and then got bored and stuck a house on the end, or the other way round, someone built an enormous house and someone else has come along and spoiled it with the tower. He isn’t sure which. He likes the way the tower stands up for itself, as if it knows it doesn’t belong and doesn’t care, but he is also unsettled by the way the tower clings to the main house like an unwanted child, an embarrassment. Someone Paul would call a mistake. He hopes he isn’t going to have to sleep in the mistake.

‘But if I’m honest,’ his mum is saying, ‘that tower is really ugly.’

Diana winks at Mikey, although he has no idea why. ‘Just you wait until you see the inside.’ She opens the front door. ‘Hello?’ she calls.

Who is she expecting to answer? His uncle Edmund’s away and she doesn’t have any children. His mum told him that Diana didn’t want any because she didn’t like them and that Edmund had the snip. What, cut it right off? he’d asked and Valerie laughed, snip-snip-snipping towards his flies with her fingers. He thinks that bit is made up, but having met Diana, he thinks the other bit about her might be true.

‘I’m in the kitchen, Lady Diana! I’ll be right with you.’

The hall where they are standing has a staircase wide enough for six people and here, next to him, is a huge mirror with a gold frame reflecting back the pictures of the old men with beards and black jackets climbing the stairs. They are all dressed for a funeral, as well. In fact, everything is like a funeral, from the vase of flowers which smell like the cemetery to the polished floor which is black and white. He slips off his trainers, placing them precisely by the door, ready to make his getaway.

‘Well, now there’s a well-brought-up young man.’ A woman appears from a door on his left; she strikes Mikey as much more normal than Diana, with her flowery shirt over huge boobies and dangling earrings made to look like daisies.

‘This is Mrs H and she is a darling,’ Diana says, ‘and if it wasn’t for her, I don’t know what we’d do! She is our very own national treasure.’

So, his aunt owns people as well as things.

‘Call me Grace,’ says the lady. ‘If you like, I can take this young man to the kitchen for a little something and get you both a cup of tea?’

Little something, yes, cup of tea, no. Apparently Diana and his mum need a drink. That is something else he could say, if anyone would listen, that it probably isn’t a very good idea to let his mum start drinking, it doesn’t go well with her medicine.

‘That’s the drawing room, where they’ve gone,’ says Grace.

There’s no sign of any art going on in there, but there are other things that interest Mikey: gold curtains, for instance; a piano, he’d like to play now that Solomon has taught him ‘Amazing Grace’ all the way through, hands together; a real fireplace with proper smoke and what Scouts might smell like if he is ever allowed to go.

Grace continues the guided tour. ‘And this we call the morning room,’ she explains.

The whole day has been about mourning. Even the picture above the fireplace shows a man with a pony struggling up a purple mountain bent double by the weight of a dead stag.

‘What a heavy thing to have to carry on your back,’ he says to Grace.

The sitting room is a bit more friendly. It has a huge telly for a start and the kitchen is familiar, at least from adverts, so he’s happy to sit there and eat toast. The smaller telly in there is showing a zoo where all the animals have escaped because of the flood and they’re running wild through a town and it’s something to do with the waves he’d watched only this morning in his own house, but that was then and there and this is here and now. Wynhope. He can’t wait to get back home. Butter? Nod. Jam? Nod. Strawberry or raspberry? Shrug. Expect you’ve had a difficult day. Nod.

‘Monty wants your crusts,’ says Grace.

‘Hello, Monty,’ says Mikey, tentatively feeling the dog’s ears, and he feels sad that he left his penguin at home.

Everything Grace says confirms his initial impression that she knows what she is talking about. He wants the toilet and to get out of his horrible jacket and no sooner does he think that than she says I expect you want to know where the bathroom is, and if I’m not wrong, I expect you want to get out of that jacket.

‘That’s the thing about funerals,’ she says as she takes him down a passage with too many raincoats and giant fish gasping behind glass frames. ‘Everyone’s always so uncomfortable. I expect even Lady Diana’s kicked off those high heels.’

Right again. Back in the drawing room, his mum and his aunt are standing with glasses in their hands and no shoes on their feet, staring into the fire. Mikey brings a china statue of a racehorse and jockey from a little table in the sitting room to show to his mum. He’s been imagining the speed of it, the thrill, crouched low like that on the back of a horse and all dressed in red and green and galloping away, away. Paul used to bet on the horses and sometimes he won but mostly he didn’t.

‘Don’t drop that,’ says his aunt. ‘Your uncle would be very upset.’

‘No, he wouldn’t, don’t you listen to that,’ says Grace.

‘Ah, Mrs H! Did you make supper for seven?’

‘Just like you asked,’ replies the housekeeper.

‘We’d rather eat at eight if that doesn’t put you out.’

His aunt is doing that thing when you can smile and stare at the same time, rubbing your stomach and patting your head. Grace is going round the big room straightening the curtains; it’s a fuck-off sort of tidying up.

‘If that’s what you want,’ she says, with her back to Diana.

‘You are wonderful,’ says his aunt, ‘thank you.’

That is something else teachers do. Put your gum in the bin, Michael, thank you; it’s their way of saying you have no choice.

As Mrs H flounces out of the room, Diana is thinking two things: one is that Mrs H is a bitch and she will get the better of the woman if it kills her; the second is why on earth has she suggested eating later, it will just spin everything out. It isn’t like her to change her mind on impulse, but with the heightened perception that is brought on by wine and funerals, Diana is brimming over with the yearning that is both grief and hope. Outside, the failing light is transforming the gardens into something quite insubstantial, as though she might reach through the dusk and touch something forgotten.

‘I put it all back a bit because we’ve just about got time for a look around,’ explains Diana. ‘It’s such a beautiful evening.’

It is colder than they expected. Valerie borrows Diana’s jacket, and they laugh at the fact that they are both size five when it comes to boots and how daft they look with them in their funeral dresses. Once outside, they stand on the drive and look back at the house. Diana apologises for what she describes as ‘the mess’ to the side of the tower. The terrace looks immaculate to Valerie, who wonders if she is meant to contradict her sister and say no, no, not a mess at all, it looks simply lovely, but you never knew with Diana quite what she understood or what she meant or what she wanted.

‘Obviously we’re going to plant up the whole area, but the builders only finished recently and now there’s some delay about getting the tiles from Italy.’ Her guests are clearly confused. ‘Sorry! I should have explained. It’s the most wonderful project. Edmund knows how much I love swimming, I always loved it, didn’t I, Val? I was quite good at school,’ she tells the boy. ‘Anyway, he said he’d build me a pool, but neither of us wanted to ruin the park with some ghastly shed, and since we were going to restore the tower, we, or rather I, had the brainwave of excavating under the tower and putting one there. Everyone’s doing it in London, why not here?’

‘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 favourite, 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.’