‘Nina! What are you doing?’
I turn and see Susan sitting up in bed. Her eyes peer at me, shrunken with sleep. ‘What’s the matter? Was he crying?’
‘No, he’s fine. I just came in to have a look at him.’
‘Oh.’ She’s ill at ease, suspicious, dragged out of sleep and wondering if I’ve come up to check on her.
‘I’m sorry, Susan, I didn’t mean to wake you up. I wanted to make sure he was all right. He’s all I’ve got left of her.’
It works, as I knew it would. ‘Oh, Nina, I’m so sorry. It must be terrible for you. Everyone thinks about Richard, but she was your sister. You’d known each other all your lives. Do you want to pick him up? I don’t suppose he’d wake.’
‘No.’
I stroke the side of the baby’s face with my finger. Now he’s rolled on his back I can see for the first time that he’s not going to look so very like Colin after all. There’s a lot of Richard in him too. I slide my finger across his open palm and he grasps it tightly, as if he knows me.
‘It’s all right, Ant, I’ll look after you,’ I tell him in a whisper, but he’s asleep and anyway he knows it already. The whole world’s here to look after him. He’ll be a big, heavy man, like his father, a good man who believes the best of the world until it shows him otherwise. He’s not going to grow up with words haunting the corner of his room. He’s going to grow up with Isabel’s shadow gentle on him. I’ll say nothing. Nothing.
Chapter Thirty-one
I take down Isabel’s key from the lintel again, open the door, put on the light. Edward didn’t draw the curtains so there’s an edgy sense of being watched by the black, reflecting square of the window. But there’s no one out there, so I fight the urge to pull the curtains across. Let the night look in if it wants to. The night where Isabel’s gone. On her bed there’s the mark where a body has lain. Edward. The covers were pulled tight earlier, the way she’d left them. The drift of papers, books, clothes and sewing that usually covers Isabel’s bed has disappeared. Edward’s long, light body has made a deep dent. He’s been lying there with his face in Isabel’s pillow, silent, the door locked against us. For him it’s all over. He’ll be down at the sea now, straining into the dark as we did until black and white dots spark at him and his eyes itch with tears. He’ll keep believing he’s seen something. But there’s so much sea, and so little land.
Edward won’t sleep. He stayed awake before, when Isabel needed him, when I heard their voices murmuring under her door, hour after hour. I thought they were picking over the bones of Edward and Alex, Alex and Edward, but now I’m not so sure. If only I could hear their voices now, and listen to what Isabel was telling him. What did Isabel tell him? He was always closer than I thought. Closer to what nobody else should have known.
Edward will stay awake for Isabel while Richard sleeps, breathing loudly through his mouth because of the brandy. Edward won’t see anything and he won’t hear anything, only the restless noise of the water. The sea sounds so much louder at night. It sucks and drags at the stones, and if you listen it’ll suck the heart out of you too.
I’m not going to think of Edward or what Edward sees. It’s too late for that now. I’ve got my point of view and he’s got his and we’ve got nothing to say to each other. And he’s lucky, because he’s got nothing left to do, and nothing he should have done. He did what he could. Let him stand there, let the wind blow tears into his hair. He can mourn for Isabel and I can’t.
One by one I open the drawers by Isabel’s bed. The bottom drawer is full of letters, stuffed in anyhow. I’ll come back to those. I’m sure they won’t give anything away, or Isabel wouldn’t have kept them. There’s half a packet of dried apricots in the second drawer. I slide the drawer in, and then pull it out again. The drawers are dark oak and they stick a bit, so you have to lift them a little as you slide them in. Finding food tucked away in the oak drawer reminds me of something.
We had a sideboard in this wood, an oak sideboard that should have been polished but never was. It was sticky with fingerprints. And there was a deep drawer in it. I touch the packet of apricots. They should be plump and moist but the packet’s been open too long, and they are dry. I push them to the back of the drawer and my wrist scrapes on the inside wood. Yes. There was food kept in the deep drawer at home. There was an opened tin of Colin’s milk, which no one knew about but me. My mother must have forgotten that she’d put it in there. There was dull blue paper on the side of the tin which I dug at with a fingernail while I scooped milk from inside with the little yellow scoop that was left on top of the heap of powder. The powder had a crust over it. I broke through it and ate the milk powder quickly, scoop after scoop, cramming it into my mouth. It was thick and sweet and disappointing. I knew it would taste better if I could make it up into a bottle the way I’d seen my mother do. Those bottles Colin grunted and flailed for. When he got them he sucked till sweat came out on his head and his baby smell was so rank it sickened me. I didn’t dare take the tin out of the drawer. Isabel would have seen. The milk powder stuck on the roof of my mouth and in between my teeth so that long after I tiptoed away I could still suck on the taste.
There was torn paper over the top of the tin, like a circus hoop after a dog had jumped through it. I put the top back on the tin and hid it in the deep drawer. I went back to it again and again, not every day but when I could get away from Isabel, until the bottom of the tin shone through the last grains of the milk. After that I didn’t go back.
I go through the contents of Isabel’s drawers. An empty pill bottle, a red plastic file with details of antenatal care and maternity benefits. A catalogue from a rose nursery. An address book and her diary. We were always looking for each other’s hidden diaries in our teens, but even when I found Isabel’s there was never anything worth reading. This one is just the same. I flick through doctor’s appointments, train times, neat notes: E arriving. R in Hong-Kong, N b/day. There’s tomorrow’s date, ringed in red, with ‘Baby due today’ written in the space underneath, and then crossed out. When she was first pregnant the hospital got the date wrong.
If that first date had been right, Isabel would be alive. She’d still be pregnant, alive, slow-moving, sitting on the edge of her bed and pencilling in more dates, more ‘things to do’. But there’s a quick, clean line through the date.
Her nightdress isn’t hanging over the chair any more. I glance round but it’s nowhere to be seen. Unless Edward’s tidied it away, he’s taken it. It’s the old lace nightdress Isabel found in a second-hand shop and dyed. Isabel finds bargains everywhere, and she hardly ever needs to buy anything new. The lace at the neck was torn but she didn’t bother to mend it. ‘It looks OK as it is.’ It did. It looked perfect. The soft, clear brown swell of her breasts against the torn coffee-coloured lace. But the trouble with being so beautiful is that people don’t think you need anything.
The drawers are still open. I’ve looked at everything and there’s nothing left to find. But my hand slides in again, grazing on the wood, crackling against the thick layers of newspaper with which she’s lined them. My hand moves of itself. Like a burrowing animal it feels deeper, lifting the newspaper, scratching the unstained wood beneath it. The wood is rough. My hand pushes back and back, deep into the drawer. I run my tongue over my palate, as if the clogging taste of milk is still there.
And I find Isabel’s hiding-place. I draw it out, the piece of thin card that slips under my hand, glossed on one side. The photograph. It’s face down, creased as if it’s been crumpled up, and then spread flat again, for keeping. I turn it over.
It’s a black-and-white photograph. A good photograph, sharp, clear and alive. It could have been taken yesterday. There is a woman, my mother, with the soft heap of a child in her arms. Its shawl trails down her dress, and one baby fist clutches a fold of wool. My mother is looking out at the photographer, lifting the baby up a little so that his face is clear of the shawl. She sits erect but easy, as my mother always sat.
Her eyes look straight at me, proud, tender, triumphant. Look what I’ve done. Look what I’ve made. She offers me the baby so I can see how beautiful he is.
I draw in a long, shaky breath. It’s my mother, but I don’t know her. My mother, mine and Isabel’s, never looked like that.
Isabel must have taken the photo, stolen it away. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to destroy it. She’d crushed it up, and then smoothed it out again and hidden it where she didn’t have to look at it.
But I think she did look at it. When she was pregnant, when she was writing down her birth plan in the maternity file that no one’s taken away yet. When Ant was born and she brought him home. She looked at the photograph again and again and she began to understand it. It was very simple, after all, when you came to look at it. Love, and hope. She saw them and she was afraid. I look round and for a second the empty room swarms with Isabel’s terror, as my mother smiles in my hand.
It’s easy to tear the photo. I tear it along the creases, then again, into pieces no one could ever recognize. I think of swallowing the pieces. I’m too tired, not thinking straight. Instead I put them in my pocket like confetti, and then I shut all the drawers. There’s no point going through Isabel’s letters. She won’t have written anything down. All she’s left is the photograph, but that’s enough. She knew I would look in her drawers and find it.
But I don’t know why she bothered to lock this room. There’s nothing here for anyone else to find. When Colin died the smell of baby went out of the house at once. The next morning I clattered down the bare wooden treads of our stairs, and no one hissed at me to be quiet. There was no baby to be woken. I was the youngest person in the house again. Whatever Isabel has thought and felt here, it can’t be found. I don’t like words like soul and spirit, I never have. I walk around the room touching things: her hairbrush, her cool collection of marbles in its tall sweet jar, her books. The marbles have coils of colour in them which only come alive when they are spun across the floor. Some of them are chipped from fights. There are Richard’s things too but I don’t touch these. There’s this to do first, before I can start to think of him. I pick up her comb and then put it down. It’s grubby, with long brown hairs twisted in the teeth. She’d have combed her hair before she went out.
I loved this room when it was empty, just after Isabel took on the lease of the house. It seemed an enormous thing to do. I came down for a week to help her paint the bare rooms. We slept in here, on two mattresses with sleeping bags, side by side. The whole house stank of paint and we kept the windows open all night though it was cold. The rooms looked huge at first, and then as we painted them they gradually grew smaller. We mixed colours ourselves: I can still see dark stripes under the paint by the light switch where we tried out blends that didn’t quite work. Beyond the windows there was the jungle of garden, all bindweed and feral cats. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ Isabel kept saying as we walked from one room to another, making echoes, deciding on colours, washing down walls and ceilings with sugar soap. She wore a pair of jeans which had been expensive once, a pair I’d always envied, but they were old now and she let them get covered in paint. One day it was sunny and we spent half the morning washing filth off the windows until we could see out of them. There was no hot water and no heating except for a couple of ancient electric fires that spat showers of sparks. It seemed like the most beautiful place in the world that weekend. I couldn’t believe I’d ever want to be anywhere else, or with anyone else. But I went back to London, and Isabel met Richard.
I look around the room again, and now I know why Isabel locked the door. It was not to keep us out. It was to draw a line under the new life which had begun for her in that room, alone: she’d had the empty house around her with new paint on the walls like sunshine, and the lease in her own name, and she was miles from where we were born. For a long time she didn’t bother to put up curtains at the windows. Everything was beginning.
I turn off the light and go to the window. There’s a faint grey and I look up for the moon, but it’s gone. The grey is dawn and it’s not the day of Isabel’s death any more. The more I look, the more I can see. Trees, lawn, Isabel’s twisting paths, the garden wall. They jump into position like cats.
I always forget how much noise birds make in the country, how much they want each day to begin. The garden is soaked, but there’s green spreading through the grey. There are low, dirty clouds over the water-meadows. No heat any more, no more blaze of summer. We’re not cut off now and anybody can come here. Policemen and health visitors and neighbours with greedy eyes. Everyone will want to see the baby to make sure he’s all right. I’ve been awake so long it feels as if I will fall to pieces unless I hold on to what I’m seeing for myself through my open, burning eyes.
Isabel’s garden. From up here the shapes are clear. The paths run as she wanted them to run, secretly. You can lose yourself in this garden. There are the walls, dripping fruit, the flowers, smashed down by the storm. They are grey now, but in a few minutes colour will stain them. It’s getting lighter all the time.
I remember the wilderness of weeds that was here when Isabel came to the house. She hacked and chopped and burnt until there was nothing left, and then she made her garden. But you never really get rid of nettle and ivy and ground elder and bindweed. As soon as you turn your back they spring up. The lines of Isabel’s paths look like writing from up here, but it’s writing that doesn’t mean anything. She won’t come again with her quick hands, digging and planting, ramming sticks into softened earth to support the smashed flowers, making sense of everything.
It’s first light, and the search will be resuming. Even as I watch, the sodden grass turns greener. I’ve never seen a police search but I know what they look like from years of TV. I’m stuffed with TV truths like everyone else. Lines of black, solid, tramping figures advance in a way that makes you want to run. They poke every foot of the earth with sticks, and mark it with tape. A search at sea is not so easy. A body won’t lie where it’s fallen. The sea plays with it, picking it up in its soft mouth, dropping it again. At the Gap the water’s thick and green and you can’t see to the bottom of it. I don’t know what happens to people when they drown at the Gap. When they the and go down. But the searchers will know where’s the best place for a body to be found. In broad daylight, with the storm over, the police will be able to look everywhere. Maybe she’ll come up miles away and frighten children who are lying asleep in bed now. This is Isabel I’m talking about. My sister Isabel. Her skin is puffed and sodden, as it used to be when we stayed too long in the bath.
‘Isabel,’ I say, but the room doesn’t answer and the garden keeps on growing, choking the paths with weeds, forcing through the brickwork. I think of how hard you have to work to make anything, and I feel tired.
Behind me there’s a small cry, then another. The baby’s waking up. But I stay, looking out of the window. Over the wall there are the water-meadows, flat and wet in morning light, and the hidden river that goes down to the sea. The baby is crying strongly now. The rising cry breaks on a second of silence, and I think it’ll never come again. My palms prickle and I hold the window-sill as the house hangs still, suspended. But then the silence tears in a roar of outrage. He was only getting his breath.
I remember. I’m climbing up a long staircase cut into the rock, with my sister just in front of me. She’s holding my hand, pulling me up until I’m safe beside her. I am four, and she is seven. I know she won’t let go of me, though my face is sore with tears because she said if I didn’t start climbing she was going to leave me behind. Sobs burst out of my chest like hiccups. Isabel looks back and down.
‘There’s only a few more steps. Don’t cry, Neen.’
But I’ve got too much crying in me. ‘You said you were going to leave me.’
She bends down and her cold fresh face almost touches mine. ‘I’d never do that, Neen. You know I wouldn’t. I’d do anything for you.’
Isabel’s voice is stronger
than the hungry sea under us. Would you? Would you really?’ I stare up at Isabel, who could change the world for me. My mouth fills with the taste of milk. It clings to my tongue and sticks there. I smell milk, too, and the smell of baby, rank and sickening, blotting out the smell of the sea, blotting out everything. The baby is everywhere. It fills my ears and my mouth until I can’t think of anything else. My lips move and Isabel bends to hear me.
‘Will you really do what I want?’
‘You know I will,’ she answers.
Her eyes are so close to me I can see nothing else. I swim in their clear, wide blue. A huge, wonderful idea is unfolding in me like a clean handkerchief to wipe away all my tears.
‘Isabel,’ I say, ‘when we get to the top, can I ask you something?’
She nods, her cheek brushing my lips. We go on up the endless staircase, hand in hand.
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Talking to the Dead
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Talking to the Dead Page 20