‘And Jesus, of course,’ she says, ‘Sol wouldn’t want us to forget him.’
‘What happens now?’
Valerie doesn’t know. ‘Now’ seems to be an unnatural combination of blank days stretching on and on in which there is nothing to be done because nothing can be done, and a terrible urgency to arrange the things she imagines need to be arranged: clear out the fridge in her mum’s house before things start to smell, feed her budgerigar, caged and peck-peck-pecking at the stripped millet, call the undertaker, order the flowers, but how she’ll pay for it all she has no idea. Money is tight since she walked away, but it has been a small price to pay. There is one person who has money and then some. Her sister. Big sister. Half-sister. Diana.
Valerie blows her nose. ‘You get on with your homework, I’m going to phone your aunty.’
‘The rich bitch?’
‘Don’t you dare use language like that,’ says Valerie. ‘I should never have called her that.’
‘You said you haven’t spoken to her for years and years and years.’
‘I haven’t. I didn’t stay in touch with her or your nanna. Paul didn’t like it, did he? And Diana never called me.’
‘And you said she wasn’t a real aunty. You said she was only half an aunty.’
‘She’s family, Mikey, and family matters at a time like this.’
People often assumed that the final straw with Paul must have been him beating her or something violent like that, but they were wrong. It was the joke notice he bought from a gift shop and nailed to the kitchen wall: ‘Never Forget, As Far as Everyone Else Is Concerned, We Are a Perfectly Normal Family.’ Family, there is no one else left now who understood her childhood except Diana, no one to mourn with except Diana, and not just her mum, but mourn all of it, the graveyard that was their family life back then. She takes a deep breath. No reply. Leave a message. Silence taps its fingers with impatience until she abruptly rings off. Your mum passed away, you can’t do that on voicemail.
‘How did she get to be so rich?’ Mikey asks later. He has brought his duvet and Penguin downstairs and put on Titanic because that might help. He likes the height of the waves and the sinking; she likes the kissing bits and cries at the ending, but, like most stories, this has a boring part at the beginning before it all goes wrong and that’s where they are up to now.
‘She married it, didn’t she?’ Valerie corrects herself. ‘To be fair, that’s not totally true. She walked out the house when she was sixteen and that was the last we saw of her, more or less, but I think she worked her own way up the ladder even before she met Sir Moneybags.’
Later, there is trouble on the deck, the first mate is looking out through his telescope. Valerie calls her sister again. It’s getting late, but she hasn’t got her mobile number. There’s still no reply.
‘Why did she leave?’
Shifting her position on the sofa, Valerie considers the question. ‘Truth is, Mikey, I don’t know. I never really understood.’
They are jumping now, the passengers, choosing to hurl themselves into the churning sea, rather than die behind locked doors.
‘Anyway, maybe me and Diana can make up again.’
‘Doubt it,’ says Mikey. He reaches for his mother’s hand under the duvet, even as fingernails are slipping from the edge of the lifeboats. Nobody comes. Even though they are shouting across the icy sea, help me, help me, nobody comes.
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?’