Sister: A Novel (10 page)

I tore open the lining, but there was no letter to me trapped inside.

WPC Vernon sat on the sofa next to me. ‘There’s this, too.’ She took a photograph out of a board-backed envelope, sandwiched between more cardboard. I was touched by her care, as I had been by the way she’d packed your clothes for the reconstruction. ‘It’s a photo of her baby. We found it in her coat pocket.’

I took the Polaroid from her, uncomprehending. ‘But her baby died.’

WPC Vernon nodded - as a mother she had more understanding. ‘Then maybe a photo was even more important to her.’

To start with all I looked at in the photo were your arms as you held the baby, your uncut wrists. The photo didn’t show your face, and I didn’t dare imagine it. I still don’t.

I looked at him. His eyes were closed, as if asleep. His eyebrows were just a pencil line of down, barely formed and impossibly perfect; nothing crude or cruel or ugly in the world had ever been seen by his face. He was beautiful, Tess. Faultless.

I have the photo with me now. I carry it all the time.

WPC Vernon wiped her tears so that they wouldn’t drop onto the photo. She had no edge around her compassion. I wondered if someone as open would be able to stay as a policewoman. I was trying to think of something other than your baby; other than you as you held him.

As soon as I’ve told Mr Wright about the Polaroid I abruptly stand up and say I need to go to the loo. I get to the Ladies’, tears running as soon as the door closes behind me. There’s a woman at the basins, maybe a secretary, or lawyer. Whoever she is, she’s discreet enough not to comment on my tears, but gives a little half-smile as she leaves, a gesture of some kind of solidarity. There’s more for me to tell you, but not Mr Wright, so as I sit in here and have a weep for Xavier, I’ll tell you the next part.

An hour or so after WPC Vernon had gone, Mum and Todd arrived at the flat. He’d driven all the way to Little Hadston to pick her up in my hire car, showing himself to be, as I knew he would, a chivalrous son-in-law. I told Mum and Todd what DS Finborough had said and Mum’s face seemed to crumple into relief. ‘But I think the police are wrong, Mum,’ I said and saw her flinch. I saw her willing me not to carry on, but I did. ‘I don’t think she committed suicide.’

Mum pulled her coat more tightly around her. ‘You’d rather she’d been murdered?’

‘I need to know what really happened. Don’t you—’

She interrupted me. ‘We all know what happened. She wasn’t in her right mind. The Inspector’s told us that.’ She’d promoted DS Finborough to Inspector, reinforcing her side of the argument. I caught the note of desperation in her voice. ‘She probably didn’t even know what she was doing.’

‘Your mother’s right, darling,’ Todd chimed in. ‘The police know what they’re talking about.’

He sat down next to Mum on the sofa and did that man thing of spreading his legs wide; taking up twice as much room as was necessary; being masculine and large. His smile skidded over my closed-in face to Mum’s receptive one. He sounded almost hearty.

‘The good thing is that now the post-mortem is over and done with we can organise her funeral.’

Mum nodded, looking gratefully at him, like a little girl. She clearly bought his big-man thing.

‘Do you know where you’d like her laid to rest?’ he asked.

‘Laid to rest’, like you would be put to bed and in the morning it would all be better. Poor Todd, not his fault that his euphemisms infuriated me. Mum clearly didn’t mind. ‘I’d like her buried in the churchyard in the village. Next to Leo.’ In case you don’t know already, that’s where your body is. In my more vulnerable moments I fantasise about you and Leo being together somewhere, wherever that somewhere is. The thought of the two of you having each other makes me feel a little less desperate. But of course if there is a somewhere, a third person would be with you too.

I want to warn you that what’s coming will be painful. I took the photo out of the cardboard casing and handed it to Mum. ‘It’s a photo of Tess’s baby.’

Mum wouldn’t take the picture from me; she didn’t even look at it. ‘But it was dead.’

I’m sorry.

‘The baby was a boy.’

‘Why have a picture? It’s macabre.’

Todd tried to come to the rescue. ‘I think they let people have photos when their babies die now as part of the grieving process.’ Mum gave Todd one of her looks that she normally only reserves for family. He shrugged as if to distance himself from such an outlandish and distasteful notion.

I carried on, alone. ‘Tess would want her baby buried with her.’

Mum’s voice was suddenly loud in the flat. ‘No. I won’t have it.’

‘It’s what she’d want.’

‘She’d want everyone to know about her illegitimate baby? That’s what she’d want? To have her shame made public?’

‘She would never have found him shameful.’

‘Well she should have done.’

It was Mum on autopilot; forty years of being infected with Middle England’s prejudices.

‘Do you want to stick an “A” on her coffin for good measure?’ I asked.

Todd butted in. ‘Darling, that’s uncalled for.’

I stood up. ‘I’m going out for a walk.’

‘In the snow?’

The words were more critical than concerned. It was Todd who said it, but it could just have easily been Mum. I’d never spent time with both of them together before and was only just realising their similarities. I wondered if that was the real reason I was going to marry him; maybe familiarity, even negative familiarity, breeds feelings of security rather than contempt. I looked at Todd, was he coming?

‘I’ll stay here with your mother then.’

I’d always thought that whatever worst-case scenario happened in my life I’d have Todd to cling to. But now I realised why no one could be my safety rope. I’d been falling since you were found - plummeting - too fast and too far for anyone to break my fall. And what I needed was someone who would risk joining me now seven miles down in the dark.

Mr Wright must see my puffy face as I walk in. ‘Are you all right to carry on?’

‘Absolutely fine.’ My voice sounds brisk. He senses that this is the style that I want and continues, ‘Did you ask DS Finborough for a copy of the post-mortem?’

‘Not then, no. I accepted DS Finborough’s word that nothing else had been found in the post-mortem apart from the cuts to her arms.’

‘And then you went to the park?’

‘Yes. On my own.’

I’m not sure why I added that. My feeling of being let down by Todd must still survive, even now, in all its irrelevancy.

I glance at the clock, almost one.

‘Would it be OK if we break for lunch?’ I ask. I’m meeting Mum at ten past in a restaurant round the corner.

‘Of course.’

I said I’d tell you the story as I found out myself - no jumping forwards - but it’s not fair on you or Mum to keep back what she feels now. And as I set the rules, I’m allowed to curve them a little now and then.

I arrive at the restaurant a few minutes early and through a window see Mum already sitting at a table. She no longer has her hair ‘done’ and without the scaffolding of a perm it hangs straight and limp around her face.

When she sees me her taut face relaxes. She hugs me in the middle of the restaurant, only mildly concerned that she is holding up a waiter en route to the kitchen. She strokes my hair (now longer) away from my face. I know, not Mum at all. But grief has pressed out of her all that we thought of as Mum-ish, leaving exposed someone who felt deeply familiar, connected to the rustle of a dressing gown in the dark and a feeling of warm arms before I could talk.

I order a half-bottle of Rioja and Mum looks at me with concern. ‘Are you sure you should be drinking?’

‘It’s only half a bottle, Mum. Between two of us.’

‘But even a little alcohol can be a depressive. I read about it somewhere.’

There’s a moment of silence and then we both laugh, almost a real laugh, because being depressed would be so welcome compared with the pain of bereavement.

‘It must be hard going through everything, having to remember it all,’ she says.

‘It’s not so bad actually. The CPS solicitor, Mr Wright, is very kind.’

‘Where have you got to?’

‘The park. Just after the post-mortem result.’

She moves her hand to cover mine, so that we hold hands as lovers do, openly on the tablecloth. ‘I should have stopped you going. It was freezing.’ Her warm hand over mine makes tears start behind my eyes. Fortunately, Mum and I travel everywhere now with at least two packets of Handy-Andy tissues in pockets and handbags, and little polythene bags to put the sodden ones into. I also carry Vaseline and lipsalve and the futile-hopeful Rescue Remedy for when tears overwhelm me somewhere inappropriate like the motorway or the supermarket. There’s a whole range of handbag accessories that go with grief.

‘Todd should have gone with you,’ she says and her criticism of Todd is somehow an affirmation of me.

I wipe my nose with a handkerchief she gave me last week, a little-girl cotton one with embroidered flowers. She says cotton stings less than a tissue, besides it’s a little more eco and I know you’d appreciate that.

She squeezes my hand. ‘You deserve to be loved. Properly loved.’

From anyone other than Mum it would be a cliché, but as Mum has never said any of this stuff before it feels newly minted.

‘You too,’ I reply.

‘I’m not all that sure that I’m worth having.’

You must find this conversation strange in its directness. I have got used to it but you won’t have done yet. There were always spectres at our family feasts, taboo subjects that no one dared acknowledge, that our conversations tiptoed around, going into cul-de-sacs of not talking to each other at all. Well, now we strip these unwanted guests bare, Mum and I: Betrayal; Loneliness; Loss; Rage. We talk them into invisibility so that they’re no longer sitting between us.

There’s a question I’ve never asked her, partly because I’m pretty sure I know the answer and because, deliberately I think, we’d never created the opportunity.

‘Why did you call me by my second name not my first?’ I ask. I presume that she and Dad, especially Dad, thought Arabella, a beautiful romantic name, inapplicable to me from the very beginning, so they opted instead for starchy Beatrice. But I’d like the detail.

‘A few weeks before you were born we’d been to the National Theatre to see
Much Ado about Nothing
,’ Mum replies. She must see my surprise because she adds, ‘Your father and I used to do things like that, before children came along, we’d go to London for the evening and get the last train home. Beatrice is the heroine. She’s so plucky. And outspoken. Her own person. Even as a baby, it suited you. Your father said Arabella was too wishy-washy for you.’

Mum’s answer is so unexpected, and I am a little stunned actually. I wonder if I’d known the reason for my name as a child whether I’d have tried to live up to it, instead of being a failed Arabella I might have become a plucky Beatrice. But, although I’d like to, I can’t linger on this. I only asked the question as a lead up to the real one.

You’re upset that she could believe you committed suicide - after Leo - and knowing the suffering it would cause. I tried to tell you, as I reported it, that she was grabbing at a safety rail, that it was a self-protection reflex, but you need to hear it from her.