‘No, he wouldn’t, don’t you listen to that,’ says Grace.
‘Ah, Mrs H! Did you make supper for seven?’
‘Just like you asked,’ replies the housekeeper.
‘We’d rather eat at eight if that doesn’t put you out.’
His aunt is doing that thing when you can smile and stare at the same time, rubbing your stomach and patting your head. Grace is going round the big room straightening the curtains; it’s a fuck-off sort of tidying up.
‘If that’s what you want,’ she says, with her back to Diana.
‘You are wonderful,’ says his aunt, ‘thank you.’
That is something else teachers do. Put your gum in the bin, Michael, thank you; it’s their way of saying you have no choice.
As Mrs H flounces out of the room, Diana is thinking two things: one is that Mrs H is a bitch and she will get the better of the woman if it kills her; the second is why on earth has she suggested eating later, it will just spin everything out. It isn’t like her to change her mind on impulse, but with the heightened perception that is brought on by wine and funerals, Diana is brimming over with the yearning that is both grief and hope. Outside, the failing light is transforming the gardens into something quite insubstantial, as though she might reach through the dusk and touch something forgotten.
‘I put it all back a bit because we’ve just about got time for a look around,’ explains Diana. ‘It’s such a beautiful evening.’
It is colder than they expected. Valerie borrows Diana’s jacket, and they laugh at the fact that they are both size five when it comes to boots and how daft they look with them in their funeral dresses. Once outside, they stand on the drive and look back at the house. Diana apologises for what she describes as ‘the mess’ to the side of the tower. The terrace looks immaculate to Valerie, who wonders if she is meant to contradict her sister and say no, no, not a mess at all, it looks simply lovely, but you never knew with Diana quite what she understood or what she meant or what she wanted.
‘Obviously we’re going to plant up the whole area, but the builders only finished recently and now there’s some delay about getting the tiles from Italy.’ Her guests are clearly confused. ‘Sorry! I should have explained. It’s the most wonderful project. Edmund knows how much I love swimming, I always loved it, didn’t I, Val? I was quite good at school,’ she tells the boy. ‘Anyway, he said he’d build me a pool, but neither of us wanted to ruin the park with some ghastly shed, and since we were going to restore the tower, we, or rather I, had the brainwave of excavating under the tower and putting one there. Everyone’s doing it in London, why not here?’
‘I thought you said you belonged to a health club,’ says Valerie.
‘I do, and it’s fine, very cliquey, but fine. Anyway, it’s so much nicer swimming alone.’
She’s lonely, thinks Valerie, Diana never did find it easy to keep friends.
‘A swimming pool?’ Mikey is asking. ‘Under there?’
He doesn’t know why Diana is laughing at him and her reply doesn’t make sense either.
‘We couldn’t go under the main house because that’s Grade Two listed, so we extended it out from the tower under the garden.’ She performs a little tap dance on the brand-new flagstones. ‘It’s here, invisible, but right under my feet.’
Staring at the ground, Mikey tries to imagine a whole blue swimming pool deep beneath them, dark and unbroken. The pools he has been to smell of cleaners and echo with shouts and screams and the sharp whistle of the lifeguard, but this buried pool must be a very quiet place.
‘Can we go swimming?’ he asks his mum.
Valerie shrugs. ‘Don’t ask me, this is way out of my league.’
Diana beckons him over. ‘It’s not ready, there’s no water. Look, you can see.’
Squatting down, Mikey presses his face against a glass panel which is a sort of skylight into the earth.
‘When it’s finished, then you must come and swim, won’t that be fun?’
Although his mum is agreeing, Mikey thinks it would be scary, lying on your back in the water with the weight of the whole heavy world inches from your face and nothing to hold it up and, besides, he’d have to own up that he’s lost his trunks. His mum is walking away, making some comment about how much it must all have cost and Diana is saying an arm and a leg. He can tell by the way his mum is changing the subject that she doesn’t think it’s worth that.
‘Come on, Mikey,’ she’s calling. ‘Take a picture of us. Use my phone.’
Lining them up in front of the round lily pond, Mikey clicks, checks the screen and shows his mother.
‘You’d never know we were sisters, just looking at us,’ says Valerie.
‘Half-sisters,’ Diana reminds her. ‘You’ve got your father’s eyes.’
Giggling, Michael points at the screen. ‘It looks like the statue behind is about to hit Diana on the head,’ he says.
Leaning over the boy’s shoulder as she looks, Diana realises his smile reminds her of Valerie when she was young. Maybe it would be nice to have a relationship with her nephew, now that her mother is dead and she herself has no children. There are no moorings on either side of the river and she is adrift in the present. A little awkwardly, she squeezes his thin shoulders. ‘I hope he isn’t going to clout me.’ She laughs. ‘That bronze boy will grow up to be Hercules, the strongest man in the world.’
‘I know about him from school,’ starts Mikey, but his aunt isn’t listening, she’s telling her own story. She probably thinks he’s stupid, but she’s wrong, he knows lots of things, he just doesn’t always say them.
Perhaps she can buy the boy a child’s book of Greek myths for his birthday? Tea at Wynhope, cake with candles on the kitchen table, Edmund singing, Michael unwrapping the gift.
‘Zeus’s wife was so angry at the news of the birth of Hercules, she sent snakes to the baby’s cradle to kill him,’ Diana explains, ‘but the baby Hercules was so strong he rose up and killed them. That’s the snakes you can see in the boy’s hands.’
‘Bit like how you felt when I was born, I expect,’ jokes Valerie, then immediately regrets it.
‘All gone,’ says Mikey, swirling his hands in the still water of the ornamental pool.
Their reflections are erased by the ripples shimmering in the last of the light, but the awkwardness is not.
The quiet moment offers an opportunity which Diana takes. ‘I’m sorry I got all prickly in the car, it’s not easy thinking back. Obviously there was just Mum and me for a while, after Dad died, and we were happy. Do you know, I don’t remember Dad dying? I think I remember the police knocking, telling Mum someone had run into him on the hard shoulder while he was attending a breakdown, but it’s a false memory. I only know it because I was told it. I wasn’t allowed at the funeral. All I really remember feeling was that I was happy, there was Mum and me and I was happy. Then it was like your father and then you gatecrashed my party and trashed the house, at least that’s how it felt.’
Then she’s off, striding slightly too fast, leading them past the tennis court, telling Michael that his uncle hasn’t really enjoyed tennis for a long time, but she’s sure he’d love to bowl a few overs with him, and he’ll be back the next day in time for lunch. She turns to Valerie and asks if she likes the white narcissi.
‘We’d love a garden, wouldn’t we, Mikey?’ says Valerie.
‘As I said, you must come and stay, especially when the weather’s lovely. Edmund would love someone to play with and I could do with some company.’