Читать книгу The Half Sister - Catherine Chanter - Страница 9

Chapter Two

Positioned by the Aga in the kitchen at Wynhope House, Diana is eating grapes when the landline rings the next morning. She is irritated because they were sold as seedless but she finds that she is having to spit pips into the sink before she can answer.

The conversation with Valerie propels Diana over to the long window where she stands rigidly, looking out at the magnolia flowers, plump and pink against the burned amber of the listed coach house on the far side of the lawns. With the phone to her ear, she knocks on the glass to scare the squirrel from the bird feeder and watches all the long-tailed tits take flight, then she sits awkwardly on the edge of one of the chairs. She says very little. She says, ‘Well, thank you for letting me know anyway’ and ‘Who phoned you?’ And then she says, ‘And I suppose I’ll have to pay for everything.’

The call is over. Diana shakes her head violently from side to side as if to dislodge something disturbing her vision, runs her hands slowly up over her closed eyes and through her hair and clasps them tightly together for a moment before breathing out, a controlled breath through pursed lips, the sort that kindles fire from embers. When she opens her eyes, the subtitles on the morning news are describing several hundred dead in a tsunami and the image shows yet another body being passed from rescue worker to rescue worker, hands above their heads, a crowd-surfing corpse.

My mother is dead.

In the wide wood-panelled hall, she pauses out of habit in front of a gilt-edged mirror. There is nothing wrong with her lipstick, nor with the lie of the jade necklace against her pale neck; it is not those things which made her hesitate, rather it is the bewildering combination of being more alive than she realised before, and yet older, and, yes, at forty-one statistically half way between death and birth. For a moment, time fractures and who is who in the mirror and when unsteadies her world and she almost starts to cry. In the doorway to the morning room, she hesitates. Despite its name, it is only in spring that the early sun streams through the large window as it does now, it is an alchemist, everything it touches turns to gold, the logs in the basket, the antique globe on the desk, even Edmund, his tanned arms, his auburn hair. The back of her husband’s head is all she can see from here.

She clears her throat. ‘That was Valerie!’ she announces.

In the leather armchair, he is sprawled with one leg cocked over the arm like a gorgeous boy, but he is scrutinising the financial pages with the casual interest of an older man who can afford to lose a little. He barely raises his eyes. ‘Oh God! Valerie! Your sister? What does she want? A blank cheque?’

As if to catch her as she passes his chair, he reaches out his arm, but she slips away and stands with her back to him at the round mahogany table in the bay window, rearranging the yellow tulips.

‘My half-sister called to let me know that my mother has died.’ Diana sidesteps his awkward hug. ‘And for Christ’s sake, Edmund, don’t treat me like the grief-stricken daughter. When did I last see her? Years ago. It’s a bit of shock, that’s all, Valerie ringing up out of the blue like that.’

The flowers are thirsty. She picks up the vase, but then has to sit down quite suddenly on the sofa and the tulips tip to the floor, a dribble of stale water trickling along the embroidered pathways of the Turkish rug. As Edmund replaces the tulips they feel curiously false, as if it would be hard to tell plastic from the real thing. ‘You sit there,’ he says. ‘Monty will look after you, won’t you, old boy? I’ll fetch us a drink.’

A black Labrador gets to his feet and rests his heavy head on Diana’s knees. Her hand reaches out to stroke him, offering him soft repeated condolences which she cannot accept herself. She can hear her husband collecting a bottle from the sideboard in the dining room.

‘Damson gin. Best medicine!’

The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up to the elbow and usually she likes him like this, the holiday tan against the city white cotton, but today it all feels faintly absurd, the pseudo workmanlike uniform, and when the hairs on his arms brush across her, she thinks she is noticing too much. Diana drinks urgently; Edmund sips. They do not speak. She holds out her glass, he takes it from her, leaves it empty on the tray, and speaks before she can ask.

‘She wasn’t ill, was she? If we’d known . . .’

‘If we’d known, what?’ She cuts him off. ‘We would have driven down to Highbridge every weekend to take Lucozade and hoover the stairs? Anyway, it was a heart attack.’

He doesn’t touch her, his fingers close in on themselves and he occupies them, playing with the empty glass. ‘How is Valerie?’

‘Sobbing and hysterical. Probably pissed.’

‘Perhaps she’s sad.’

Getting to her feet, Diana collects the glasses, uses a tissue to dab at a spot of spilt gin. ‘Of course, I’ll have to pay for the funeral since we’re so stinking rich and she’s still, what did she say, getting things together after leaving that man who beat her up. What was his name? Peter, Paul?’ She replays the conversation. ‘To be fair, she didn’t actually say stinking.’

Following her example, Edmund sets things in order in the morning room, checks the date before folding the paper.

‘Ash Wednesday,’ he notes, poking the log back into the grate, regretting the fact that they hadn’t had pancakes; his mother could toss pancakes so high they stuck to the ceiling.

‘What’s that?’ Diana has already left the room.

‘Nothing.’ He follows her into the kitchen. ‘When do you think the funeral will be?’

‘Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to come. Now don’t just stand there fiddling with your car keys, you go on to London. I’m fine.’ She waves her fingers at him. ‘Off you go and play with your money.’

It always rankles when she says that, but he never retaliates. After all, she’s probably right. His investments are well looked after by the grown-ups he has employed to manage his businesses, his appearances at the office not much better than a child wanting to help wash the car, and probably equally as unhelpful. Nevertheless, after kissing the dog goodbye, Edmund leaves the house and says good morning to the bronze statue of the boy in the middle of the lily pond as he does most mornings, then he crosses the lawn and heads towards the garages. The builders have finished work on the tower, and the ridiculous underground swimming pool is dug if not watered. He is pleased that the quiet morning is finally all his, undisturbed by the clatter and clang of the scaffolding and the army of strong men singing along to the radio. Usually in March, daffodils and white blackthorn against winter trees would connect him to the present, but today is all about the past. Death follows each footprint left in the wet grass. Forty-one years ago in October, he was ten. Rain and a headmaster’s study and the mute video of the Firsts playing rugby in the mud and the slanting rain beyond the window, and there was a great-aunt he barely knew confirming his mother was dead. Then five years after that, playing tennis with himself against this very stable wall and counting each hit, seventy-four, seventy-five, seventy-six, he might have even got to a hundred had it not been for the crack of a shot, that second literally split. Like the atom, he thinks, a decision was taken and then the one irreversible moment when destruction was loosed upon the world and nothing could ever be the same again. Everyone had been just a little embarrassed at the service, as if, rather than committing suicide, his father had dropped a bit of a clanger. He has never attended a funeral since.

When he reaches the stone bridge towards the end of the half-mile drive which leads from Wynhope House to the road, Edmund stops the car and, disregarding the red mud on his city shoes, slides down to the river. It has rained heavily overnight and the stream is sullen. Cupping his hands in the coloured water, he baptises himself all over again, allowing the cold flood of mourning to pour over him; it still does this, bursts the banks even after all these years.

In the time between leaving his estate behind him and arriving at his office in London, the first-class carriage transports him through a no man’s land of suburbs and sprawling new housing, neither countryside nor city, neither the weight and warmth of his encompassing history nor the ice-shining gleam of his future returns. Something grey and in the middle where everyone else lives, but he doesn’t seem to belong. In the office, he stares out over the Legoland structures around him and thinks that nothing is for ever; he watches a barge moving slowing down the Thames beneath him and thinks perhaps some things are. Mounted on the wall, the small television is permanently tuned to News 24, not so much for the disasters tumbling and flooding and exploding and terrorising the world in the background, but for the market summary which streams along the bottom of the screen and for the red and green graphs in the corner like a life-support machine, showing which way the world is heading.

Twenty-four hours gone, and Mikey writes about his dead granny in his English book as part of a ‘telling stories in the first person’ exercise. His teacher asks him if it is a true story, then says she is sorry, he must be very sad, which he isn’t but doesn’t like to say so. Valerie posts it online and watches the sympathy scroll in, a black tide arriving in waves over the screen. Over lunch, Edmund tells his accountant; he hasn’t planned to, but the news has filled him up with thoughts of dying and they spill over the edge and soak into the conversation about profit and loss. And Diana stands alone at the front door at Wynhope. She is not wearing quite enough given how cold it is for March and the bronze boy is a poor substitute for a listening ear.