by Imogen Clark
The house was horribly quiet. Theo and Zac were in the lounge and, as far as he could tell, asleep. He would have to sneak in and carry them up to their beds at some point but not right now. Sebastian sank into a chair at the kitchen table. This was where he felt closest to Tessa. Even though their bedroom was where they’d shared more intimate moments, it was here, at the heart of everything that happened to them, that he felt her with him.
‘What do you think, Tess?’ he said out loud. He often spoke to her when he was alone. It felt natural, like she could just be behind him stirring something on the stove or flicking through a travel magazine planning a madly exotic holiday that they’d never take. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? Of course it makes a difference if Clare has a different dad to the rest of us. Part of the connection that holds us all together will be lost. It’s like, I don’t know, like ivy clinging to a wall. It’s still attached if you cut away some of the roots but the connection’s not as strong. Actually, that’s not a great analogy, but you get what I’m saying, don’t you? If she’s only half my sister, then her catastrophic life is only half my problem. I won’t have to keep making allowances for her, will I? Does that make sense?’
Was this what he thought? It had certainly been his gut reaction when he’d heard the news but could he sustain it? Anna and Miriam didn’t share his concerns. He was out on a limb but . . . It was his limb. He was entitled to hang on to it if he wanted.
He heard Tessa’s voice in his head, full as it always was of light and laughter. ‘Once a stryx, always a stryx,’ she said. ‘You’re stuck with her.’ And Sebastian was irritated by her refusal to side with him entirely. Since when did Tessa support the sisters over him? But he knew the answer to this. It was ever since she stopped being his wife and instead became the voice of his conscience, speaking to him in those moments when he wasn’t sure which way to turn.
It was so hard making decisions by himself. There had always been his sisters and then Tessa to make things happen around him. He remembered how she’d planned their wedding, making it feel like it was their dream day when in fact he had had very little say in what happened, not that that mattered. Her ideas had always turned out to be exactly what he wanted in the end.
She had been desperate for a Midsummer Night’s Dream wedding, in a wood not far from home.
‘I want candles in the trees,’ she had said, her dark eyes shining. ‘And I want everyone to sit together in a clearing, like we’re all fairies. We don’t need chairs or anything. We can get a huge tarpaulin or something and I . . . No, wait. We can have little stools, like milking stools.’
‘Where from?’ he had asked. ‘Milking Stools R Us?’ He’d been mocking her but only gently. They had always had to cut through the mad parts of her ideas before they got to the golden core. ‘Chairs would be better. And then you could wrap vines and stuff round the backs.’
She had nodded, visualising how it would be. ‘Yes, that’s good. And we can read beautiful poems. And Miriam’s girls could be flower fairies. Are they too big for that, do you think? How old are they again? We should have got married five years ago when they were tiny.’
‘But you hadn’t said yes then,’ Sebastian had said, laughing fondly at her now. He had proposed endlessly since they had first met at university but Tessa had taken her time in accepting him. She had waved his objection away with a flick of her hand. ‘And I don’t think it’s actually legal to get married in a wood,’ he had added. ‘Doesn’t it have to be in a structure of some sort?’
Tessa had looked crestfallen for a moment but then bounced back. ‘We could build a tree-house. I don’t know how much it would be but I bet it’s cheaper than hiring some posh country-house hotel. And then we could get married in there and then come down the steps afterwards to some wonderful, ethereal music and re-join our guests. And we could be barefoot . . .’
‘In a wood?!’
Not all her ideas had worked out but they had gone ahead with the wood and she had been barefoot, stepping lightly on a green carpet that they laid in lieu of an aisle. And she had found a harpist to play and Rosie and Ellie had been bridesmaids with little wings sewn into the backs of their dresses. At ten and seven, Miriam had said they were too old for that kind of nonsense but when the girls had seen their gauzy golden frocks they hadn’t objected. They’d been ready to do whatever Tessa asked. That was what Tessa had been like. Everyone had wanted a piece of her, for her to turn her attention on to them so that they could bask in the golden light that shone from her.
Everyone except his sisters. Miriam had thought she was silly and frivolous, that she spent Sebastian’s money too freely without ever seeming to make any financial contribution herself. Anna had been stiff and cold with Tess, even when Tess had made an effort to try to win her round. The two of them had been as bad as each other, Sebastian thought, each circling around but refusing to commit to a proper relationship for fear of losing face. The fundamental problem had been that they were too alike but Sebastian would never have told them that. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he’d said to Tessa when yet another meeting had gone awry. ‘I think she’s just angry that you’ve taken me away from her.’
He hadn’t really thought about it when he made the comment but looking back afterwards he wondered whether he had hit the nail on the head. He and Anna had always been a gang and now he had Tess instead. Or as well. That was how he saw it.
And then there was Clare; Clare who disappeared for months on end, Clare who forgot the boys’ birthdays and sometimes even that the boys had been born at all, Clare who had been so far down the neck of a bottle that she had missed Tessa’s funeral. When the hideous accident had stolen his beautiful bride and the mother of his handsome boys, where was his sister? Finding herself in the Shetland Islands, living on a croft and drinking whisky.
‘That’s not a good enough reason, Seb,’ Tessa whispered in his ear. ‘You can’t abandon your sister because you think she abandoned you. If she takes the test and you have different blood she will still be your sister.’
Sebastian put his head in his hands.
‘Do you know what I hate about you, Tessa Bliss?’ he said to the air.
‘That I’m always right?’ replied the Tessa in his head.
CLARE – 2017
I
She knew it was here somewhere. Through all the lovers, the flat-shares and the rough patches spent on strangers’ floors, the box had always stayed with her, like a talisman. Or a dead weight around her neck, depending on how you looked at it. She had lugged it from place to place, never losing connection with it. She had even paid for a left-luggage locker when she set off on that ill-fated trip to India, to make sure that the box and its contents were safe and not exposed to prying eyes.
As far as she knew, no one had ever peeked. She couldn’t guarantee it but she was hopeful that no one would be interested in the random ramblings of a middle-aged woman.
The storage cupboard in the hallway was absolutely fine as long as you didn’t open the door, which, of course, brought with it a number of problems. Gingerly she pulled the handle down and inched the door towards her. She could feel something giving way and falling into the widening gap. She stepped back and let it clatter to the floor. Ironing board. Why did she have an ironing board, for God’s sake? Did she even have an iron?
Once the ironing board was out of the way, it was easier to see the remainder of the cupboard’s contents, which were mainly underused cleaning apparatus, screwed-up plastic bags saved because the Green Gestapo made you feel so bad about throwing anything away these days, and boxes full of stuff she never looked at but couldn’t quite get rid of. It was as if holding on to them made her believe that one day she too could have a life like other people, filled with stuff she didn’t need stored in cupboards she never opened.
The box was on the floor in the middle and not that difficult to access because it wasn’t that long since Clare had last dug it out. As she tried to lift it and wriggle it past everythi
ng else that was in the way, she felt her back twinge threateningly. God, how she hated getting old. Once extracted, she carried the box to the lounge and sat it on the coffee table, which still had the remains of her little tea party with Miriam scattered across it. She ditched mugs on to the floor and lifted the box’s lid.
At the sight of the notebooks inside, she suddenly felt calmer. Here they all were, her babies, guarding the secrets of her life and keeping them safe from harm. There was no regularity to the books; mostly they were whatever she could lay her hands on at the time. The earlier ones were exercise books filched from unlocked stationery cupboards at school. After that there were one or two black Moleskines. She must have had some money then and ideas of grandeur for her words, but that phase hadn’t lasted long. Mostly they were cheap shorthand notebooks, the springs at the top all bent out of shape and the paper so thin that you could only reliably write on one side and still read it. Recently, since she’d had her job at the bakery, she had bought herself a pack of three slightly more substantial books filled with graph paper like the French used. Two were still pristine, waiting for her to fill them with her thoughts.
Clare lifted an exercise book from the box reverentially. On the front, in the box usually reserved for Pupil Name, Teacher’s Name and Class, she had written ‘Clare Bliss. 1980. Private and Confidential. Keep out. That means you Miriam!!!!!’ As a matter of fact, Miriam hadn’t even known about Clare’s books. If she had she would have searched for them endlessly. Recording her life was Clare’s secret.
She opened it at a page about two thirds of the way through the book and began to read.
Saturday 15th March
Well, we did it! The earth didn’t move or anything but what can you expect? Fireworks to start fizzing everywhere?!! It’s a start though and I’m sure that we will improve with practice!! He’s much more gentle than S****. It was like he wanted to make sure that I was enjoying it too, which was a first for me. Usually they are in and out so fast that I hardly notice! Nothing to write home about either for all their big talk. God – boys are full of crap sometimes. But with P*** it was different. He’s bloody boring though. I said we should nick some cider and take it down the river but he came over all goody-two-shoes on me. Might be good in the you-know-what department but I’m not sure we’re going anywhere. I’ll hang on for a bit before I bin him though. I can always get my kicks with M ****** and the others when P*** isn’t around.
Clare smiled with affection at her younger self. It sounded like she was enjoying herself, at least. She had no idea who these coded references were referring to. You’d think the names would be etched on her memory but they were lost. She flicked forward.
Wednesday 14th May
I hate Anna. She never gets in the shit. It doesn’t matter what she does – she always gets away with it. It pisses me off. Tonight she was late back and missed tea. Did Mum even bat an eye? No she just put Anna’s in the oven to keep warm. If that had been me it would have been World bloody War 3 but Anna just floats around taking the piss. It’s not fair. She’s only 14 for God’s sake. [Clare liked how even in her fury she had given ‘God’ a capital G and an apostrophe.] If that had been me when I was 14 then they’d have locked me in my bloody bedroom for a week. But no. Princess Anna gets to do precisely what she bloody well likes.
Clare could tell from the marks that the pen had made across the paper that she must have been pretty angry when she wrote it. Even now she could remember how unjust it had seemed that Anna got such special treatment. At the time she’d been convinced that it was always her singled out for punishment. Had she been right after all? Were they harder on her because she didn’t quite belong?
She picked another book out at random. 1995. The Dicken years. A wry smile fluttered across her lips. God bless Dicken. He’d tried so hard with her. He’d been so kind and forgiving and for a while there Clare had truly believed that she had at least a few redeeming features. In the end, though, she had driven him away like she did with everyone. He’d even been good with River, for God’s sake. He’d been a keeper. She should have seen that at the time.
She flicked the cover but didn’t open the notebook. She usually enjoyed engaging with the Clare of days gone by so she could make believe, if just for a moment or two, that the ensuing years hadn’t been squandered. But reliving all this old stuff would get her nowhere now. All those decades spent chasing round after that elusive something. God knows what it was. She never caught it. She barely even spotted it. It was always just out of sight, a shadow turning a corner a few paces ahead of her. If things had turned out differently . . . well, who knew how her life might have been.
She should have been a journalist like her dad. Like Frank, she meant. (This not-knowing business didn’t half make life complicated.) Frank had loved words. They had dripped from his lips like honey from a spoon. Often he’d spoken as if he were on a stage, his words a performance rather than merely a means of communicating his thoughts. When any of their friends had come to the house, they had always been drawn to him, pulling up front row seats for whatever was coming next. Of course, Frank had liked a drink too. That’s what journalists did back then: sat in smoke-stained rooms drinking whisky and comparing stories, competing as to who had netted the biggest fish. No wonder she liked a diary and a drink, she thought. Like father, like daughter. And then she remembered that maybe Frank wasn’t the father she’d always believed him to be and she felt sick.
Shit. She needed a drink. How was she supposed to deal with this new, fiendish turn of fate sober? Frank. StJohn. What the fuck did she care? Neither of them had turned out to be much use to her. She had careered down the wrong rabbit holes all by herself.
Bloody stupid to dig the box out too. It always made her miserable. The fondness for her younger self soon festered into loathing when she remembered the reality and that invariably sent her in search of a drink. There was nothing in the flat, though. Miriam had seen to that. Clare had pretended not to notice when her sister had discreetly poured what was left of her wine down the sink. She hadn’t objected. The recent relapses had been a response to the shock, nothing more. Now, though, she could barely believe she had been dry for so long. That wasn’t her. Clare Bliss who was incapable of doing or creating anything positive. She wasn’t sure why she’d ever thought she deserved a fresh start here, why it would be different.
When these thoughts settled on her darkening mind, Clare knew how she was supposed to banish them. All those AA meetings had equipped her with the necessary strategies for seeing off her demons. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. She’d got this. She would put the box away before anyone appeared. (Since she’d got the letter, there seemed to have been a plethora of unexpected guests.) Then she would tidy the flat and she could decide what to do after that.
The front door banged. For fuck’s sake. Could they not leave her alone? She’d had more than enough sibling concern. But none of them had a key. That meant that this could only be . . .
‘Hi, Mother,’ said River.
II
Clare took in her son. He looked like he had just stepped off a shoot for Hugo Boss in his sharply creased chinos, a crisp shirt open at the neck and a jacket that looked as if it had cost more than she would earn in a year at the bakery. He was a handsome man, if she did say so herself, and the fine lines that had started to appear after he’d turned thirty last year just added to the overall effect. She had always thought his eyes had that same guarded quality as hers, though, perpetually on the lookout for trouble.
‘You’re not still writing those diaries?’ he asked her. He was smiling but Clare recognised the mocking base notes in his voice. He had no time for reminiscing. ‘You’re moving forwards,’ he always said, ‘so why keep looking behind you?’
Clare started to pack the notebooks back into the box, anxious that what was written inside them should not be open to River’s scrutiny. He had probably helped himself to them over the years. She supposed it was naive to think
that he’d never looked, but there was no point in giving him an open invitation.
‘Any chance of any dinner?’ he asked, looking doubtfully towards the kitchen.
Clare knew that there was nothing to eat barring half a tin of baked beans and some eggs. The shop had been next on her to-do list. If she told River this, though, he would just assume that she had been too badly organised to feed herself. That might have been true in the past – River had had more than his fair share of meals cobbled together from whatever could be scavenged – but no more. This time Clare had run out of food in the way that ordinary people ran out of food – simply because she hadn’t got round to buying any yet. Of course, River wouldn’t believe that.
‘Not unless you’re planning on taking me out,’ she said, meeting his eye defiantly.
She saw his nose turn up as he cast his eye around the flat and she felt her spine stiffen. One of the things about not drinking was that it heightened her awareness of other people’s responses to her and it hurt. Sometimes it was almost enough to send her back to where she’d been, to that delicious oblivion that it created.