Читать книгу The Half Sister - Catherine Chanter - Страница 19

Chapter Twelve

A rumbling in the distance disturbs the dull night – not again, surely not another aftershock, Diana can’t stand much more – but this is just a car coming up the drive over the cattle grid, its headlights illuminating the pale trunks of the silver birch trees standing watch in front of the coach house. Edmund? No, he’s in London, probably doesn’t even know what’s happened. It is Mrs H and her husband John. Feeling an unfamiliar relief that everything can be given to someone else to sort out, she runs to meet them as they pull up behind the garages, but the thought of the housekeeper seeing her like this, bedraggled like a bag lady, and John seeing her in the clothes she wears to bed, slows her down. They have coats done up over their pyjamas and a torch. The spotlight exposes everything about her; they would like to do that, she knows, expose everything about her.

‘We’ve got a crack in the back wall at the lodge,’ says John, ‘so we came up to make sure everything was all right at the house.’

‘Mikey, come here, my love, you’re freezing. Look at you still in your shirt and your best trousers.’

Gratefully, Diana relinquishes responsibility for the boy to the housekeeper, who wraps her arms around the child and presses her cheek against his face. Mikey allows himself to be folded up in her. He holds on tight to Grace’s coat, and when he is sure she is not going anywhere he lets go, just a little, and struggles to think how he can tell her what’s happened, what he saw and what he heard and how his aunt has got the key in her pocket and how nobody knows what’s important and how nobody’s doing anything, but it’s hard to make sense of it all and in the end it’s something much simpler he needs to say. He takes her arm and drags her to the drive.

‘Please can you help my mum?’ he asks her and he points.

‘Of course, my love, where is she? Valerie?’

‘Oh my God,’ says John as he turns the corner and instinctively covers his mouth against the dust. ‘What the hell?’ He systematically swings the torchlight from the house to what is left of the tower, then on around the garden where the last of the snowdrops blink white beneath the twisted rose bushes, and on past the impenetrable wall of yew hedges, all vaguely shrouded in a layer of unnatural cloud. For John, the image in front of him takes on the characteristics of Belfast in the 1980s: sirens, the smell of sweat on uniforms and urine on the kiddies’ pyjama bottoms, counting the men in his platoon and finding the numbers short. He rounds on Diana.

‘This can’t just have been the tremor, it wasn’t that strong.’ Suddenly he laughs loudly, incongruously. ‘It was the pool, wasn’t it? Bloody ridiculous, that pool. Destabilised the whole lot. I said so. That’s what’s done it. So where’s your sister?’

‘She was going to sleep in the tower, John,’ says Grace. ‘Oh my, you don’t think . . .’

‘In there?’ John directs the beam to the wreckage then starts to run. ‘She might still be okay.’ He shouts, ‘Hello? Valerie, isn’t it? Can you hear me? Valerie! Valerie!’

‘Valerie!’ Hand in hand, Grace and the boy catch up with him. ‘Valerie, my love, can you hear us?’

The only other sounds are the dog howling from the house and the relentless pulse of guilt inside her head. Valerie is dead, Diana knows it. The key is in her pocket. She hasn’t done anything wrong, she was put in a terrible situation, and, yes, she failed in some ways, but it was not her fault. Everyone will blame her, no one will believe her. The familiar phrases beat their logic into the rails like an oncoming train, whining their threat down the track, the time to save herself is now. They all have their backs to her. In one swift and violent movement, she flings the key to the tower into the border behind her. It must have fallen in the shrubs, a shining lie, bright amongst the dark leaves and red berries, or perhaps it fell beneath the camellias. Edmund taught her that yews protect against evil and camellias hate the morning sun; they both have reason enough now.

She joins in with a more confident voice. ‘Valerie, can you hear me?’

Everything is failing: the security lights do not come on again, the alarm is reduced to an intermittent whine, Monty howls and stops, howls and stops, and Mrs H is possessed with pointless questions. Whatever happened? Did anyone hear her calling? Why couldn’t she get out? Instinctively Diana glances back at the flowerbed behind her, smelling of secrets and drizzle. John is the gardener; she imagines him, fingers probing the warming earth.

‘What is it? What’s in there? What have you seen?’ cries Grace. ‘Is it her?’

‘It’s nothing,’ says Diana, turning away, ‘there’s nothing to be frightened of there.’

‘Is the house safe?’ asked John.

‘The boy will catch his death out here,’ says Grace.

‘What about Monty?’ pleads Diana. ‘Sir Edmund will never forgive us.’

‘I thought you said you could help my mum.’

After one last check, John makes the decision. ‘We can’t risk it on our own. It’s too unstable. We’ll need to wait for help. The coach house is a better bet.’

Scooping Mikey up in his tattooed arms, John carries the boy. He is passive and unresisting in the strong man’s hold, head lolling down and neck crooked at an unnatural angle. Diana and Grace follow him in a line, like night travellers.

As they blunder into the barn conversion, Diana is reminded yet again that the flat was someone else’s refuge once, until she evicted her, and now she expects these walls to protect her? Aunt Julia was dispatched to a home fairly promptly after they got married and died soon after that. Edmund was right when he said moving from Wynhope would kill her; he sent extravagant flowers to the funeral, apparently it cost less than sending himself. The coach house was left smelling of care staff and bed sores, and Diana redecorated swiftly and pragmatically, painting over the suffering in New World White, which she thought would be nice for entertaining, although this was not the party she had in mind, the pathetic group of them bundling in from the cold night with their chaos for luggage and one person missing.

This is what Diana used to do for a living: walk into unlived-in, high-end flats, check them out for marks on the cream carpets, open and close the drawers in the designer kitchens and count there was still twelve of everything. She was known for her eye for detail, her rigorous control of contracts, it was what helped her work her way up, that and her ability to bring a veneer of class to the most shabby of rental properties, the damp on the wall and the faulty wiring all concealed behind a makeover; now she doesn’t know what her job is, except perhaps looking after the boy, and God knows she hasn’t got a qualification in that. Mrs H and John have hurried back to the lodge to call the emergency services. She is alone in the shadows with Michael. He is not much more than a silhouette against the window opposite her, pressing the remote control repeatedly, but before she can explain again that the electricity is off, he is turning the light switch on and off, on and off, on and off.

‘You’ll fuse the house. Then what will we do?’

Then what will we do.

On and off, on and off clicks the switch.

‘You’ll only make things worse.’

She has nothing to offer him, no bribe big enough, no threat now that will count.

Finally, he gives up, and she can just make out his shape curled like an unlucky black cat in the other armchair. He is very small.

‘Do you want something?’ she asks.

He doesn’t reply.

There must be something. Her hands are so cold as she fumbles around the kitchen, feels the contents of the cupboards one by one: bleach, a mousetrap, a packet of something, maybe ant killer, it’s too dark to read the small print. No buzz of the fridge. No radio on in the bathroom. The boy kicks his foot against the edge of the armchair. Sucks his thumb. He passes close to her as he makes for the door and even the air around her changes.

‘You must wait here. There’s nothing to do but wait.’ Her right hand reaches out towards him to hold him, but falls back to her side, paralysed by its history.

The door opens and a hint of daylight and the sour smell of smouldering rubble filters into the room. John and Grace bring with them a refugee survival kit: coat and boots for Diana; for Mikey, a terrible old anorak one of the grandchildren left at the lodge; blankets, an emergency camping light, some biscuits and a flask of tea; and the dog, unharmed. Monty brings not only some sense of hope and energy into the unlit, sterile flat, but the instinctive ability to sense distress. He goes straight to the boy, places his paw on his knee and waits patiently for a response.

The couple are full of updates. They’re not sure how long the emergency services will be, it took a while to get through, there were three missed calls from Sir Edmund but they had to leave a message when they rang back, oh, and they had a quick listen to the local radio in the car, there’s minor damage in Twycombe, a few casualties taken to the Royal Infirmary, but nothing too awful. Except here. Suddenly, Grace bursts into tears and John is saying not to worry, he’s sure the family are all right and it’s just the shock making her get everything out of proportion. The camping light flares and their faces leer out of the half-light like skulls in the paintings Edmund took Diana to see in Amsterdam. She is familiar with the trials and tribulations of the housekeeper’s family, the daughter Naomi, the grandchildren, Liam and Louisa; she used to be treated to a regular update like a soap opera and shown endless pictures of them on family holidays, usually somewhere very hot. She doesn’t have any photos like that, never will. She doesn’t need a photo of Liam in his skimpy trunks; she knows him well enough.

A mobile beeps a message alert.

‘They’re safe,’ says Grace. ‘Oh no, they’re still waiting to hear from Liam. He was out clubbing and hasn’t come home. What if something’s happened to him?’

What if, Diana wonders, that would be something. Her hand goes to play with her necklace, but she’s forgotten that she might as well be naked, so she twists her wedding ring instead and asks to borrow John’s phone to try Edmund again.

‘All his numbers are in there in case of emergencies at Wynhope,’ says John, ‘and I think you can call this an emergency.’ He waits. ‘No luck? He’s probably driving.’

Diana hands the phone back to her housekeeper.

Grace’s fingers are fumbling as she replies to her daughter’s texts. ‘It makes you realise,’ she says, ‘in the end family’s all there is.’