Such work is never finished. There were some little corners that still needed attention. Some larger items – a really nice Welsh dresser, for example – she had not yet been able to afford. And some of what she had done in the beginning itself needed freshening or retouching. But a veritable transformation had undoubtedly been achieved, through imagination and ingenuity and good taste and sheer hard work. She admitted that her house would never be an architectural masterpiece, but at least she now inhabited a place that was more true to its essential nature than when she had acquired it. But in making it something of what it had once been, she had not wanted simply to recreate some historically accurate but sterile original, in the manner of a museum-piece. Although she read books and magazines on house restoration and decor avidly, Catriona was not a purist or a sentimentalist in her refurbishments. There was no question but that her house was one occupied by a woman born towards the end of the twentieth century, who embraced many of that century’s most significant cultural artefacts. Her tastes and her habits, not those of some long-dead Edwardian, animated it. Her identity and personality permeated it. The house had regained its own dignity, but at the same time, in every way, it reflected its owner’s sense of her own self.
Sometimes, of an evening, she would kneel on the hearthrug in front of the beautiful cast-iron fireplace in her sitting room, watching the glow of the coke in the grate, and reflecting on the way she and her house had developed together, the process by which their relationship had grown and deepened over the years. Every square centimetre of its surface was known to her, as intimately as some might know the body of a lover. Every night-time creak of floorboards, every rattle of a sash, every moan of wind in the chimney, every gurgle or vibration of pipework were the familiar marks of the house’s physical presence. It was at these times that her mind seemed in suspension, about to dissolve in some greater whole, and a soft warm blanket of peace seemed to be laid upon her shoulders by some beneficent household deity.
On the day after she had received her sister’s letter and made the desperate journey to Gloucestershire, as she sat in the kitchen of her house, her half-eaten breakfast toast and a mug of cold coffee before her on the pine table, Catriona took no such heady pleasure from her surroundings. The early Sunday morning sun streamed in through the French windows, casting on the polished floorboards the nodding shadows of the Albertina roses that climbed the rear wall and, in the garden beyond, a quartet of chaffinches squabbled cheerfully around the bird feeder. These were sights and sounds that usually elevated her spirits and reminded her of the childlike joy in the commonplace so well imitated by Wordsworth:
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure,
But the least motion which they made,
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
This was normally her favourite time of the day, but for all the brightness of the morning, to her it might have been as adust and dead as a field of newly cooled lava.
Flora’s letter had exploded like a terrorist car-bomb in a city street. The familiar shapes of buildings were reduced to windowless, blasted hulks. And, as the smoke gradually cleared, there was the sound of screaming, a dreadful abandoned wailing that seemed as though it would go on for ever.
Like a member of the emergency services, she had rushed to Owlbury to perform the duty with which Flora had entrusted her: to bury the dead and comfort the living. But now she was herself a confused and bewildered bystander, her ears ringing, her senses numbed, groping in a void. How could she bring aid and comfort, when she did not know the name of the grief? She had gone prepared for a funeral. Should she rather erect a cenotaph? Where, where, where was Flora? Had she taken fright and run away? Would she eventually return? Why had she then not contacted her sister to tell her of her change of heart? Why had she left Catriona to suffer the hell of receiving the letter? Catriona’s head throbbed with the possibilities and the responsibilities heaped upon her.
In the midst of her hurt and distress, like a chronometer unperturbedly continuing to tick as a storm raged around the vessel that carried it, with ceaseless accuracy providing the data that located it on the trackless ocean, the logic centre of her brain continued to function. It had been that highly polished, reliable instrument – the mechanism that had enabled her effortlessly to surmount every scholastic hurdle from school through to university, and to take the glittering academic prizes beyond – which had taken over the previous day, when she stood stunned, staring down at the spotless whiteness of her sister’s bed, in the calm order of Flora’s bedroom.
She had almost fainted. The room had blurred as she pitched forward. Putting out a hand to the bedside table to steady herself, she was dimly aware of the thud as the bedside lamp fell over and onto the floor. Recovering herself, she stared at the room. Flora was not in the bed, the logic machine told her, therefore she must be somewhere else. Somewhere, in this room, in this house, will be a clue as to where that place is. Furthermore, if she had indeed abandoned her attempt at suicide, if she had thought better of it and gone away to reflect, then she would have needed clothes to wear, and the more she had taken, the longer she would have intended to stay away.
Opposite the bed was a range of built-in glazed wardrobes, the cottage panes obscured by pleated chintz drapes within. She yanked open the doors, pair by pair. Flora loved fashion and had so many things. Within, there were rows and rows of garments – skirts, dresses, blouses, tops, slacks – on proper wooden hangers. Flora disdained the wire type, the gift of inferior dry-cleaners, with which her sister was content. There were shelves on which sweaters were neatly folded, racks on which shoes were precisely arranged. The last cupboard was Bill’s: suits and shirts, jeans and trousers in no particular order, shelves crammed with bundled jerseys, and, on the floor, a jumble of shoes, trainers, tennis rackets, cricket bats and golf clubs.
Catriona gazed helplessly at Flora’s open cupboards. There were no obvious gaps in the ranks. She had no idea what might be missing, and hence what her sister might be wearing. Bill would certainly not have a clue. Charlotte might remember some of her mother’s more striking things. But the last thing, surely, that Flora would have gone off in – if she had indeed done such a thing – would have been a glamorous outfit?
One by one, Catriona pulled open the drawers of the tallboy. As she did so, her action released faint traces of Flora’s perfume, which hung like a ghostly presence in the still, warm air of the immaculate bedroom. Arranged as if in descending physical order, there were silk scarves, carefully folded bras, neat piles of pants, tights and socks. There was no sign that a substantial number of items had been removed, but there was, as with the clothing, no certain way of finding what, if anything, had been taken. Would even Flora have known how many pairs of knickers she owned?
On the dressing table, cosmetics and scents were tidily arranged, as were the old fashioned silver-backed brushes and mirror which had been their maternal grandmother’s.
Nowhere was there a note – a hint, even – that anything dreadful might have happened or been contemplated here. The whole room spoke of the order in which Flora habitually lived her life. There were no nighties thrown carelessly over the backs of chairs, no crumpled underwear hanging from half-opened drawers, no magazines and newspapers strewn over the floor, no higgledy-piggledy pile of unread and half-read books teetering on the bedside table. The only note of chaos, the fallen lamp, had been imported by Catriona.
Hearing in her mind her sister’s click of disapproval, Catriona bent to pick it up and set it back in place.
Then suddenly she froze, staring at the empty top shelf of the bedside cabinet. Flora’s existence depended on order, and the fundamental principle of order, as she never ceased to remind her disorganised sister, was that one should know at any given time where one kept one’s important things.
The most important thing for Flora was her bag. Her plain, soft black leather shoulder bag was kept on or by her person at all times. Even in the house she carried it from room to room as if, Catriona sneered, it were the U.S. president’s legendary briefcase containing the codes to launch a nuclear war. In turn, Flora scoffed at her sister’s habit of leaving her own handbag hither and yon, and having – at least twice a day – to engage in a frantic