The Half Sister. Catherine Chanter

the train and going to his office and renewing his fishing licence. They’ll all still line up along the hours, very close to the edge. And there is a motherless boy on the sofa and he promised him he’d be back in a jiffy, but he can’t face it, not quite yet. He is physically shaking.

      Soaked to the skin, Edmund stays outside and throws the ball for the dog into the long grass and the dog brings it back to his feet and waits. He throws the ball again and the dog retrieves it and waits. Remember the dead, pay attention to the living, that’s what the school chaplain told him. Least said, soonest mended. That was what was called counselling in those days. Sometimes terrible flashbacks return, as they do now even after so many years – the firemen and the police shouldering their padded bodies and helmeted heads against the wood, he can hear it, the counting down, the battering, the splintering of the door. He has no memory of their pulling his father’s body from the tower. He does not know if that is because he did not see it or does not want to remember it. There is the smell of Jeyes Fluid, the disinfectant usually kept for the stables, but later thrown over the doorstep to the tower, bucket after bucket of water splashing over the stones like the tide, and the rain runs over his head and down his face, trickling under his shirt, and he wants so much to cry and never stop crying. It will pass. Edmund hurls the ball high into the air, like he used to when he was hoping for a place in the First Eleven; for a moment, it is lost in storm light, but then he spots it again. He keeps his eye on the ball as it falls from the sky and he catches it safely. Again he throws the ball and again he catches it. Just playing cricket in the rain. Once more, he is about to send the ball back up when the boy appears tear-stained and dishevelled in the porch. Embarrassed, Edmund wonders what the child thinks, to see a grown man playing catch with himself in front of the place where his mother has died. As no words come to him to explain himself, he simply holds the ball up in his right hand.

      ‘For you?’ he says.

      The child nods. Edmund throws it very gently towards him in a long slow curve. It falls towards the two cupped palms and the boy catches it and there develops a song of sorts, a rhythm and harmony on this, the ugliest of days: the silence of the throw, the thud of the catch, a safe pair of hands.

      It is a long time since Wynhope has dared to welcome a child.

      Chapter Fifteen

      That night was difficult. Clutching duvets, candles, food, bottles of water, they struggled back to the coach house, asylum seekers of sorts, and as if to ensure they were not mistaken for the dead they both slept fitfully although the boy seemed virtually unconscious; Edmund said he used to sleep for hours and hours, never wanting to wake up.

      In the morning, the spring storm has passed but left in its wake a thin drizzle, greyness creeping soft-sandalled into the main house. The gash in the landing wall has allowed rain to splatter over the carpet and Edmund feels the splintered edges of the oak panelling and its violated passage and tests his weight on the floorboards, then he leans out over the edge, the rubble like rocks on a beach beneath him, strewn with the coloured clutter of day trippers who have swum out to sea and never returned. The remains of the spiral staircase are crazy – Escher architecture going nowhere – and somewhere within him is a dizzying desire to follow their lack of logic and plunge. Stepping back sharply, he catches hold of the banisters behind him. He phones John, hears his own voice sounding unreliable when Valerie is mentioned, and feels on safer ground asking for help with boarding up the gap.

      ‘I would wait,’ Edmund says, ‘but it’s too dangerous with Mikey here. Anything could happen. Oh, and Liam?’ He kicks himself for his thoughtlessness. ‘Is everything all right?’ Liam is fine. John will be over later to make things safe, on a temporary basis, at least.

      The council is meant to be sending an engineer to assess the house and the lodge. They are close to the top of a short list because it turns out that for nearly everyone else the impact of the earthquake was little more than slates off the roof and cracks in the brickwork of 1950s extensions and shattered glass in poorly constructed conservatories. Wynhope is a high priority case; there was, after all, a fatality. Edmund is of the view that apart from the tower, Wynhope, structurally at least, looks as resilient as ever; Diana is not sure that the house has ever really put its faith in her, but she is relieved to reclaim it all the same and now she wants the place all to herself.

      ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she snaps at Edmund, ‘take the boy away from here. Anywhere. He needs some fresh air.’

      From the back door Diana watches the two figures, the tall man holding hands with the child, growing smaller as they walk away from her towards the meadows. That is what it would have looked like if they had children. He would have taught his son to shoot, spent even more time tying flies on his river, frittered away summer evenings in the garden bowling overs, and she would have been the mother who didn’t quite get it, not having had hearty brothers who went to prep school or jolly fathers who drove the horse box to pony club. Well, they were right to have agreed no children; it would have changed everything, and, besides, an aversion to family life is something they have in common: one with parents who loved too much, the other with parents who loved not enough or not at all, or at least not when it mattered.