A Sister’s Gift (16 page)

‘No.’ She looks at me in disbelief. ‘So this place is really nothing more than an albatross around our necks? How could you have known this all this time and never said anything to me?’

‘I don’t believe it’s ever been an albatross, Lettie, and it’s never
been a potential pot of gold for us either. It’s our
home
. Mine and Richard’s…’ I look at her remorsefully. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you out with the money thing…’

‘You’re not sorry,’ she fumes. ‘Legally, we could sell it, right? We’re talking about a deathbed promise, not a binding caveat to the will, I take it?’

‘A promise, yes, but one that I intend to keep. I won’t betray Flo’s trust, Scarlett. I just won’t.’

‘She’s dead, though. Whatever promise you made to her – it doesn’t matter any more. There are other things that matter more. You must see that.’

‘Lettie…’

‘All this…all this heritage stuff,’ she indicates the whole of our sitting room now with a dismissive sweep of her hand. ‘It’s all just bricks and mortar and ancient history. But people matter more.
Living people
, Hollie! You of all people should understand that. You want a child, don’t you? That matters to you more than this mouldy old cottage, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Yes.’ I can scarcely draw a breath.

‘Well – that’s good then,’ Scarlett tells me. ‘Because you know what matters most then. For me, my tribespeople matter more than this cottage. The rest is simple, wouldn’t you say?’

‘We don’t even know if you’re pregnant yet,’ I remind her faintly.

‘We’ll know soon enough. And after that?’ My sister scrutinises me carefully for a few moments before she turns away, but I don’t answer her.

As for what happens after, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Inside Number Five the Esplanade, I head straight up to my office, unwinding my scarf from about my neck as I go. I stand at the top of the wide stairs thoughtfully and blow my nose. It’s very quiet up here today. The pale light coming through the stained-glass windows at the bend of the stairwell is yellowed and closed in. It makes me feel like turning on every light in every room and I can already tell from the silence there won’t be anybody in any of them. The way I’m feeling today, that’s probably just as well.

I go and sit down at my desk, letting my head sink into my hands. Since we got back after Christmas, my desk has grown ever more crowded with papers and files. It’s depressing. I don’t want to even
look
at any of them. When I get up and go to the high arched windows the stone surround feels cool under my fingertips while the radiator underneath it belts out a huge amount of heat, warming up my legs. Medieval buildings weren’t designed to be economically centrally heated, I remember Ben Spenlow telling me the first day I arrived here – ten years ago now, when I took over Auntie Flo’s job here at the Trust after she passed away. It’s mainly administrative, what I do – sorting our charity applications, taking minutes, greeting our visitors – not what I ever imagined I’d end up doing for a job though I have been happy here. When Flo died I should have been finishing off my final year at Canterbury University but I had to give that up -we needed the money.

I took over Flo’s job of looking after my sister at the same time, I muse. Scarlett was only thirteen and Flo had been the only mum she’d ever known. After Flo died she’d gone through a really difficult teenage stage. That was really hard for me. I wasn’t all that old myself, only twenty-one. We got through that though, didn’t we? We’ll get through this.

‘Aha! Just the person I was hoping to see…’ Beatrice Highland’s plummy tones cut through my reverie; she’s caught me staring out of the window when I should be tackling my paper mountain. I stifle a cough.

‘Oh! Beatrice – sorry, I didn’t realise anyone was in this morning. I’d have offered to make you a drink.’ I make a quick show of sorting out some paperwork that has somehow found its way onto the window ledge. ‘Such a lot to catch up on…’ I mutter.

‘Indeed, things have been moving apace here since Christmas.’ Beatrice joins me at the window and I shuffle up a bit. With her long tweed skirt and her archaic way of speaking it’s easy to imagine Beatrice travels here from next door every morning in a time tunnel from the fifties.

‘Any sign of our new bridge picture being framed?’

‘Soon.’ I look away guiltily. Chrissie hadn’t even
begun
framing it last time I asked her. My mother-in-law’s had her hands so full with Rich’s dad being unwell. I should have just taken it locally but I wanted to give her the work. ‘I hear they’re hanging it up by the front entrance, is that right?’

‘That’s correct.’ Working with someone who’s also my neighbour can have its disadvantages: she knows me too well, for one. ‘You don’t approve of our choice of location for it? I thought it would look marvellous there. That way everyone will see it.’

‘Oh no, the location’s fine. It’s me. It’s just me. I find the picture a little bit…scary, that’s all.’

‘My dear, it is a work of art.’

‘I know,’ I tell her miserably, because what do I know about
art? ‘Anyway, I’m…I’m really sorry about all this mess, Bea. I know that with the bridge being shut there’s been even more paperwork to get through than usual. I’ll get it sorted soon though, I promise.’

‘Everything is all right, dear, isn’t it?’ She takes me in a little more closely. ‘You don’t seem quite yourself, that’s all.’

‘I’m fine, honestly. I just…’I look at my desk intently as if I’m really interested in the huge report from the bridge engineers that’s appeared on my desk over the weekend. Oh, what the heck. Bea’s known the family for decades. She’s going to learn about the surrogacy soon enough.

‘I’ll let you in on something, Bea. Scarlett’s offered to be my surrogate for me. She’s going to have a baby for Rich and me.’

‘Good grief.’ Beatrice Highland looks shocked. ‘That’s…marvellous, my dear. What a hugely charitable offer. I can’t think of anything greater a woman could give her sister…’

‘Yep.’ I’m not going to mention the small fact that Scarlett has just asked me to give up my home in return. Beatrice would be scandalised.

‘And – if you pardon my making the observation – I wouldn’t have put Scarlett down as a natural candidate for such an offer.’ My boss picks up a discarded tea mug and holds it delicately by its handle. ‘She’s a lovely girl, your sister, so full of life and
joie de vivre
, but…I’ve never had her down as patient and persevering and just generally the self-sacrificing type, you know?’

‘No, I know what you mean,’ I give a small laugh. Beatrice has known Scarlett since she was a child so there’s no point trying to pull the wool over her eyes. ‘She’s…she’s always been a bit of a wild child.’

‘A free spirit,’ she rejoins. ‘A butterfly…’

‘Yes,’ I concur. ‘All those things. Not a natural earth mother sort, I agree. But she says she’s changed.’

Scarlett’s got an agenda of her own to fulfil too, I remember now, frowning. She’s got her second family on her mind as much
as anyone else. Scarlett’s words come back to me now: ‘It’s a large part of the reason why I agreed to help you’.

I find another tea mug underneath a loose-leaf file and collect my boss’ mug from her hands. I need to escape and go and get these washed.

‘She says being in the Amazon has made her more aware of others and less selfish and she wanted to do this for us so…Well, we’ll see.’

‘If she really has grown up that much it’ll be a marvel,’ Bea mutters, almost to herself. ‘Anyhow, with a bit of luck she’ll conceive easily, and given that she does like her freedom, I don’t suppose handing the child over will be too much of a wrench either. Goodness, that does sound dreadful, I didn’t mean it like that…’

‘No, that’s perfectly all right…’ I rush in. Nobody can say that Beatrice doesn’t have the measure of my sister at any rate. ‘To be honest,’ I confide, ‘the waiting around to find out if she’s pregnant or not has been a bit of a strain on all of us. But never mind that, I’m here now and I need filling in on what’s happened while I’ve been away…’

‘Lots of engineering tests, mainly.’ She rubs her hands together briskly. ‘The mountain of paperwork stacking up on your desk is testimony to the fact that we have not been idle.’ She gets up and goes to peer out of the window again where I join her. You can’t see the bridge from here because my office is too far round the corner but you can see the river. We gaze out, silent for a bit, watching the eddies and the swirls in the river flow.

‘It’s going to take a little while to sort it all, isn’t it?’

‘Indeed. Sometimes, my dear, we know what the problem is but we don’t always know straightaway what’s going to be the best solution.’ She gets up as the phone in her own office begins to trill. ‘Sometimes, the first thing that springs to mind – the thing we want to go for – brings along a whole rack of problems of its own, do you see?’

She leaves me and I go to put on the kettle. When I return my own phone is going and I almost don’t pick it up. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I don’t want to pretend I’m my usual efficient, helpful self. I leave it to ring seven times before I realise that they aren’t going to go away.

‘Hello?’ I answer more sharply than I intend to, so it’s a relief when it’s just Scarlett at the other end.

‘Hi. It’s me.’ Pause.

What,
what?
Is she going to apologise to me now? Is she going to say that she didn’t really mean all those things she said to me before? My heart is thudding so loudly in my chest I put my hand over it. I need to hear her say that she didn’t mean any of it. That she really did do this for me and Rich and not just to get her hands on that money. I pause, waiting for the words to come.

‘Hollie, I’m not pregnant, OK?’ She spills it all out in a rush like it will hurt less that way.

‘OK.’ I blink back a tear.

‘Are you all right?’ Her voice is anxious. ‘I thought you’d want to know as soon as I did.’

‘I’m fine.’ Why, why couldn’t it just have worked for once? Why couldn’t it just be easy?

‘I thought I was pregnant. I could have sworn that I was, I did one of those early tests, you know, you can find out just a few days after conception now, you don’t have to wait…’

‘You did?’ I ask faintly.

‘Yes. And the first one I did, it was positive, I’m sure I read it right. I knew you wanted to wait till things were more certain so I didn’t say till now but then today…’ she trails away, flat and disappointed. ‘I tested it again after we spoke. I’m not pregnant. I don’t understand.’

‘These things happen, Scarlett.’ I’m back into pretend mode. I’m so good at covering up my feelings, at telling everyone ‘Oh, I wasn’t really expecting anything’, that I could almost fool myself.

‘Yeah,’ she says. She sounds almost disappointed

‘So…’ I hold my breath. ‘Are you willing to stay and try once again?’

Can I really go through with this all over again,
another month?

‘Scarlett?’

‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ she says. ‘Learning I wasn’t in the will came on top of a whole lot of other bad news, that’s all. I didn’t mean to snap at you.’ She stops and I don’t know what to say because if I open my mouth she will hear that I’m crying.

There’s a pause. While we both get it back together I randomly pick up the folder that Beatrice has just balanced on top of the pile on my desk: ‘Suggested solutions for bridge repair. Long- and short-term strategies.’ It looks like a lengthy document. Every potential solution seems to have a whole list of ‘considerations’ attached to it. No wonder they can’t decide. The worst thing is, I feel so disconnected from it all at the moment. I really don’t feel as if I even care. And I
should
care. I never wanted this desire to have a baby to turn into an obsession. I never thought that it could become so big it would crowd out each and every other thing in my life that holds some meaning for me but somehow it has, it is. The silence stretches out for so long I begin to think Scarlett must have got cut off or gone away and answered the door or something.

‘Hello?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she says.

‘Are you willing to stay?’

‘I guess I have to really, don’t I?’

‘No, you don’t have to.’

‘I don’t want to let Rich down, Hollie. Or you. I promised you I’ll do it and I will, only…’

‘Only what?’ I tense.

‘I really, really need to get together those funds we spoke about for PlanetLove,’ she cajoles. ‘If I’m going to carry on putting my
energies into getting pregnant for you it makes it kind of difficult for me to spread myself so thinly.’

‘Oh.’

‘It would really help me to know – if I don’t manage to pull together the funds any other way – I’ll have your support?’

My sigh of relief is laced with trepidation. Who am I kidding? Having this child matters to me more than anything.

‘If it comes to that, Scarlett…’I tell her at last.

OK, so she’ll stay. I don’t have the luxury of a load of potential solutions like the bridge engineers do. Scarlett
is
the solution to the problem which I’ve been facing for so long, and I don’t want to let my last chance slip away.

I can’t.

‘She’s there, isn’t she?’

Who wants my sister now? I feel myself bristle slightly at the caller’s tone. Ten days to go before we find out if Scarlett’s pregnant at her second attempt or not and who could this be, ringing up and demanding so abruptly to speak to her?

‘I want to speak to your sister please, Hollie.’ Then I recognise his voice.

Oh no, not
him
again! Why did I even pick up the phone?

I was already dreading this morning enough. I had no idea it was about to get much worse.

I’m not going to let this guy faze me. I pick up the towel which I have no intention of using and roll it into a cylinder to pack into my bag, along with the swimming cossie Scarlett’s insisted on buying me. My sister’s decided that my sessions with Mr Huang are taking too long and what I need to do is go down to the local pool ‘even if you don’t go in because it’ll help you get used to the idea’.