Sister

14

Monday

This morning I have woken up ludicrously early. Pudding is a furry, purring cushion on my legs (I never used to understand why you took in a stray). Mr. Wright told me that today we are going to cover your funeral and at five-thirty I give up on the idea of sleep and go out into your garden. I ought to go through it in my mind first, make sure I can remember what’s important, but my thoughts flinch when I try to look backward with any focus. Instead I look at the leaves and buds now flourishing along the lengths of the once-presumed-dead twigs. But there has been one fatality, I’m afraid. The Constance Spry rose was killed by a fox urinating, so in her place I’ve planted a Cardinal Richelieu. No fox would dare to wee on him.

I feel a coat draped around my shoulders and then see Kasia sleepily stumbling back to bed. Your dressing gown doesn’t meet over her bump anymore. There are only three days to go now till her due date. She’s asked me to be her birthing partner, her “doula” (it sounds too posh for my rudimentary knowledge of what to do). You never told me about doulas when you asked me to be with you when you had Xavier; you just asked me to be there. Perhaps you thought I’d find it all a little off-putting. (You’d have been right.) Or with you I didn’t need a special name. I’m your sister. And Xavier’s aunt. That’s enough.

You might think Kasia is giving me a second chance after I failed you. But although that would be easy, it’s not true. Nor is she a walking, talking Prozac course. But she has forced me to look into the future. Remember Todd telling me “Life has to go on”? But as my life couldn’t rewind to a time you were still alive, I’d wanted to pause it; moving forward was selfish. But Kasia’s growing baby (a girl, she found out) is a visual reminder that life does go on, the opposite of a memento mori. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a memento vitae.

Amias was right: the morning chorus is really noisy out here. The birds have been singing fit to burst for an hour already. I try to remember the order he told me about and think it must be the larks’ turn now. As I listen to what I think is a wood-lark playing notes similar to Bach’s preludes, a little amazed and strangely comforted, I remember your funeral.

The night before, I stayed in Little Hadston in my old bedroom. I hadn’t slept in a single bed for years and I found the narrowness of it and the tightly tucked in sheets and the heavy eiderdown securely comforting. I got up at 5:30 but when I went downstairs, Mum was already in the kitchen. There were two mugs of coffee on the table. She gave me one. “I would have brought your coffee up to your room for you, but I didn’t want to wake you.” I knew before I took a sip that it would be cold. Outside it was dark with the sound of rain hammering down. Mum distractedly drew back the curtains as if you could see something outside, but it was still dark and all she could see was her own reflection.

“When someone dies, they can be any age you remember, can’t they?” she asked. As I tried to think of a reply she continued, “You probably think about the grown-up Tess, because you were still close to her. But when I woke up, I thought of her when she was three, wearing a fairy skirt I’d got her in Woolworth’s and a policeman’s helmet. Her wand was a wooden spoon. On the bus yesterday I imagined holding her when she was two days old. I felt the warmth of her. I remembered all her fingers clasped around my finger, so tiny they didn’t even meet. I remembered the shape of her head, and stroking the nape of her neck till she slept. I remembered her smell. She smelled of innocence. Other times, she’s thirteen and so pretty that I worry for her every time I see a man look at her. All of those Tesses are my daughter.”

At 10:55 a.m. we walked to the church, the wind blowing the driving cold rain against our faces and our legs, making Mum’s black skirt stick coldly to her damp tights; my black boots were splattered with mud. But I was glad it was raining and windy—“blow winds and crack your cheeks”—yes, I know, this was hardly a blasted heath but Little Hadston on a Thursday morning with cars parked two deep along the road to the church.

There were more than a hundred people standing outside the church in the slicing rain, some under umbrellas, some with just their hoods up. For a moment I thought that the church wasn’t open yet, before realizing that the church was too full for them to get inside. Among the crowd I glimpsed DS Finborough next to PC Vernon, but most people were a blur through rain and emotion.

As I looked at the crowd outside the church and thought of the others packed inside, I imagined each person carrying their own memories of you—your voice, your face, your laugh, what you did and what you said—and if all these fragments of you could be put together, then somehow we could make a complete picture of you; together we could hold all of you.

Father Peter met us at the gate to the graveyard leading up to the church, holding an umbrella to shelter us. He told us that he’d put people into the choir stalls and got extra chairs, but there wasn’t even standing room left now. He escorted us through the graveyard toward the door of the church.

As I walked with Father Peter, I saw the back view of a man on his own in the graveyard. His head was bare and his clothes soaked through. He was hunched over by the gaping hole in the ground that was waiting for your coffin. I saw that it was Dad. After all those years of our waiting for him, when he never came, he was waiting for you.

The church bell began tolling. There is no more ghastly a sound. It has no beat of life, no human rhythm, only the mechanical striking of loss. We had to go into the church now. I found it as impossible and terrifying as stepping out of a window at the top of a skyscraper. I think Mum felt the same. That single footstep would inexorably end with your body in the sodden earth. I felt an arm around me and saw Dad. His other hand was holding on to Mum. He escorted us into the church. I felt Mum’s judder through his body as she saw your coffin. Dad kept his arms around us as we walked up the seemingly endless aisle toward our places at the front. Then he sat between us holding our hands. I have never been so grateful for human touch before.

At one moment I turned, briefly, and looked at the packed church and people spilling out beyond in the rain and wondered if the murderer was there, among us all.

Mum had asked for the full monty funeral Mass and I was glad because it meant there was longer till we had to bury you. You’ve never liked sermons, but I think you’d have been touched by Father Peter’s. It had been Valentine’s Day the day before and maybe for that reason he talked about unrequited love. I think I can remember his words, or just about:

“When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn’t return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels…”

After the Mass in the church we went outside to bury you.

The unrelenting rain had turned the snow-covered white earth of the churchyard to dirty mud.

Father Peter started the burial rite: “We have entrusted our sister Tess and baby Xavier to God’s mercy, and we now commit their bodies to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust: in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.”

I remembered back to Leo’s burial and holding your hand. I was eleven and you were six, your hand soft and small in mine. As the vicar said “in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life,” you turned to me, “I don’t want sure and certain hope, I want sure and certain, Bee.”

At your funeral I wanted sure and certain too. But even the church can only hope, not promise, that the end of human life is happy ever after.

Your coffin was lowered into the deep gash that had been dug in the earth. I saw it brush past the exposed roots of grass, sliced through. Then farther down. And I would have done anything to hold your hand again, anything at all, just once, just for a few seconds. Anything.

The rain hammered down onto your coffin, pitter-patter. “Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, I hear raindrops”; I was five and singing it to you, just born.

Your coffin reached the bottom of the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you.

Then Mum stepped forward and took a wooden spoon from her coat pocket. She loosened her fingers and it fell on top of your coffin. Your magic wand.

And I threw the e-mails I had signed “lol.” And the title of older sister. And the nickname Bee. Not grand or important to anyone else, I thought, this bond that we had. Small things. Tiny things. You knew that I didn’t make words out of my alphabet spaghetti, but I gave you my vowels so you could make more words out of yours. I knew that your favorite color used to be purple but then it became yellow (“Ocher’s the arty word, Bee”), and you knew mine was orange, until I discovered that taupe was more sophisticated and you teased me for that. You knew that my first whimsy china animal was a cat (you lent me fifty pence of your pocket money to buy it) and that I once took all my clothes out of my school trunk and hurled them around the room and that that was the only time I had something close to a tantrum. I knew that when you were five you climbed into bed with me every night for a year. I threw everything we had together—the strong roots and stems and leaves and beautiful soft blossoms of sisterhood—into the earth with you. And I was left standing on the edge, so diminished by the loss that I thought I could no longer be there.

All I was allowed to keep for myself was missing you. Which is what? The tears that pricked the inside of my face, the emotion catching at the top of my throat, the cavity in my chest that was larger than I am. Was that all I had now? Nothing else from twenty-one years of loving you? Was the feeling that all is right with the world, my world, because you were its foundations, formed in childhood and with me grown into adulthood—was that to be replaced by nothing? The ghastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody’s sister now.

I saw that Dad had been given a handful of earth. But as he held out his hand above your coffin, he couldn’t unprise his fingers. Instead, he put his hand into his pocket, letting the earth fall there and not onto you. He watched as Father Peter threw the first clod of earth instead, and then he broke apart, splintering with the pain of it. I went to him and took his earth-stained hand in mine, the earth gritty between our soft palms. He looked at me with love. A selfish person can still love someone else, can’t they? Even when they’ve hurt them and let them down. I, of all people, should understand that.

Mum was silent as they put earth over your coffin.

An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

Mum’s silent screaming is in my head as I reach the CPS offices. It’s Monday and crowded with people. When I get in the packed lift I start fretting, as I always do, that it will get stuck and my mobile won’t get a signal, so Kasia will be unable to contact me if she goes into labor. As soon as I arrive at the third floor, I check for messages: none. I also check my pager. Only Kasia has that number. Overkill, yes, but like a recent convert to Catholicism, my conversion to being thoughtful is going to be done absolutely properly, with rosary beads and incense sticks, a pager and a special ring tone on my phone reserved for her. I don’t have the security of being born a considerate person. I’ve learned that, at least. I can’t treat it casually as part of my intrinsic makeup. And yes, maybe my anxiety about Kasia is a way of rerouting my thoughts for a while onto someone who is alive. I need the memento vitae.

I go into Mr. Wright’s office. He doesn’t smile at me this morning, maybe because he knows that today we have to start with your funeral; or maybe the flicker of a romance I thought I felt at the weekend has been doused by what I am telling him. My witness statement, with its central topic of murder, is hardly a love sonnet. I bet Amias’s birds don’t sing to one another of such things.

He’s closed the venetian blinds against the bright spring sunshine and the somber lighting seems appropriate for talking about your funeral. Today I will try not to mention my physical infirmities; as I said, I have no right to complain, not when your body is broken, beyond repair, buried in the ground.

I tell Mr. Wright about your funeral, sticking to facts, not feelings.

“Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, her funeral gave me two important new leads,” I say, omitting the soul-suffocating torture of watching your coffin being covered with earth. “The first was that I understood why Emilio Codi, if he had murdered Tess, would have waited until after Xavier was born.”

Mr. Wright doesn’t have a clue where I’m going with this, but I think you do.

“I’d always known Emilio had a motive,” I continue. “His affair with Tess jeopardized his marriage and his job. True, his wife hadn’t left him when she found out, but he couldn’t have known that. But if it was him, and he killed to protect his marriage and career, why not do it when Tess refused to have an abortion?”

Mr. Wright nods, and I think he’s intrigued.

“I’d also remembered that it was Emilio Codi who had phoned the police after the reconstruction and told them that Tess had already had her baby. It meant, I thought, that he must have either seen her or spoken to her afterward. Emilio had already made a formal complaint about me to the police, so I had to be careful, make sure he couldn’t tell them I was pestering him. I phoned him and asked if he still wanted his paintings of Tess. He was clearly angry with me, but wanted them all the same.”

Emilio seemed too large for your flat, his masculinity and rage swamping it. He had unwrapped each of the nude paintings—to check I hadn’t damaged them? Applied fig leaves? Or simply to look at your body again? His voice was ugly with anger.

“There was no need for my wife to know about Tess, the cystic fibrosis, any of it. Now she’s getting herself tested as a carrier of CF and so am I.”

“That’s sensible of her. But you are clearly a carrier; otherwise Xavier couldn’t have had it. Both parents need to be carriers for a baby to have it.”

“I know that. The genetic counselors rammed it into us. But I may not be the father.”

I was stunned by him. He shrugged. “She wasn’t hung up about sex. She could easily have had other lovers.”

“She would have told you. And me. She wasn’t a liar.”

He was silent because he knew it was true.

“It was you who phoned the police to say she’d had Xavier, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“I thought it was the right thing to do.”

I wanted to challenge him. He had never done “the right thing.” But that wasn’t why I was questioning him. “So she must have told you that Xavier had died?”

He was silent.

“Was it a phone call or face-to-face?”

He picked up his paintings of you and turned to leave. But I stood in front of the doorway.

“She wanted you to own up to Xavier, didn’t she?”

“You need to get this straight. When she told me she was pregnant, I made it crystal clear where I stood about the baby. I told her that I wouldn’t help her or the baby in any way. I wasn’t going to be a father to it. And she didn’t make a fuss about that. She even said that the baby would be better off without me.”

“Yes. But what about when Xavier died?”

He put down the paintings. I thought for a moment he was going to push me out of the way so he could leave. But he made an absurdly theatrical gesture of surrender, ugly in its childishness.

“You’re right. Hands up. She threatened to expose me.”

“You mean she wanted you to say that you were Xavier’s father?”

“Same thing.”

“Her baby had died. She just wanted his father not to be ashamed of him.”

His hands were still held up, he tensed his fists, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. Then he let them drop to his side.

“It’s that boy you should be questioning, always following her around with that bloody camera of his. He was obsessed with her. And jealous as hell.”

“I knew that Tess wouldn’t have asked anything from Emilio if Xavier had lived,” I say. “But when Xavier died, it would have been intolerable to her for Emilio to deny him then.”

When I had watched Dad at your graveside, he had redeemed himself. When it mattered—when your dead body was going into the muddy, cold earth—he had stepped up as the man who is your father. You cannot disown a dead child.

Mr. Wright waits a moment before asking his next question. “Did you believe him about Simon?”

“I was suspicious of both him and Simon, but I had nothing tangible against either of them; nothing that would challenge the police’s certainty that she committed suicide.”

I have told Mr. Wright about my encounter with Emilio as if I were a detective, but the heart of it for me was as your sister. And I must tell him that too, in case it is relevant. It’s embarrassingly exposing, but I can no longer be modest and shy. I must risk what he thinks of me. So I continue.

Emilio was standing at the open front door, anger sweating out of the pores in his face, holding the nude paintings of you.

“You just don’t get it, do you? It was sex between me and Tess, great sex, but just sex. Tess knew that.”

“You don’t think that someone as young as Tess may have been looking to you as a father figure?” It’s what I thought, however many times you denied it.

“No. I do not think that.”

“You don’t think that because her own father had left and you were her tutor, she was looking to you for something more than ‘just sex’?”

“No. I don’t.”

“I hope not. She’d have been so let down.”

I was glad I had finally said it to his face.

“Or maybe she got a kick out of breaking the rules,” he said. “I was out of bounds and maybe she liked that.” His tone was almost flirtatious. “Forbidden fruit is always more erotic, isn’t it?”

I was silent and he moved a little closer. Too close.

“But you don’t like sex, do you?”

I was silent and he watched me for a reaction, waiting. “Tess said you only have sex to pay for the security of a relationship.”

I felt his eyes on mine, spying into me.

“She said you chose a job that was dull but secure and the same went for your fiancé.” He was trying to rip away the insulating layers of our sisterhood and still he continued, “She said you’d rather be safe than happy.” He saw that he’d hit his mark and continued to hit it. “That you were afraid of life.”

You were right. As you know. Other people may sail through lives of blue seas, with only the occasional squall, but for me life has always been a mountain—sheer faced and perilous. And, as I think I told you, I had clung on with the footholds and crampons and safety ropes of a safe job and flat and secure relationship.

Emilio was still staring at my face, expecting me to feel betrayed by you and hurt. But instead I was deeply moved.

And I felt closer to you. Because you knew me so much better than I’d realized—and still loved me. You were kind enough not to tell me that you knew about my fearfulness, allowing me to keep my Big Sister self-respect. I wish now that I’d told you. And that I knew if I dared look away from my treacherous mountainside, I’d have seen you flying in the sky untrammeled by insecurities and anxieties, no safety ropes tethering you.

And no ropes keeping you safe.

I hope you think I have found a little courage.