Sister

18

The morning of the art show your friend Benjamin came round looking businesslike, his Rasta hair tied back, with a young man I didn’t recognize and a beaten-up white van to take your paintings to the college. He said it wasn’t the end-of-year one, which was a big formal affair, but it was important. Potential buyers could come and everyone had family attending. They were solicitous toward me, as if I were fragile and could be broken by loud noise or laughter.

As they left your flat with the pictures, I saw that both of them were near tears. Something had prompted it, but it was a part of your life I didn’t know; maybe they were simply remembering the last time they were at the flat and the contrast—me here and not you—was painful.

I had packed up your paintings myself, but when I walked into the exhibition, I think I literally gasped. I hadn’t seen them on a wall before, just stacked on the floor, and put together they were an explosion of living color, their painted vibrancy arresting. Friends of yours whom I’d met at the café came to talk to me, one after another, as if they had a rota of looking after me.

I couldn’t see any sign of Simon, but through the crowded room, I saw Emilio on the far side of the exhibition hall. Near to him was the Pretty Witch and by her expression I knew something was wrong. As I went toward him, I saw he had the nude paintings of you on display.

I went up to him, livid, but I kept my voice quiet, not wanting anyone to hear, not wanting him to have an audience.

“Does your affair with her carry no penalties for you now she’s dead?” I asked.

He gestured to the nudes, looking as if he was enjoying this spat with me. “They don’t mean we had an affair.”

I must have looked incredulous.

“You think artists always sleep with their models, Beatrice?”

Actually, yes, that’s what I did think. And using my first name was inappropriately intimate, just as displaying the nudes of you was inappropriately intimate.

“You don’t have to be a woman’s lover to paint a nude of her.”

“But you were her lover. And you’d like everyone to know about it now, wouldn’t you? After all, it reflects pretty well on you that a beautiful girl twenty years your junior was prepared to have sex with you. The fact that you were her tutor and you’re married probably doesn’t count for much against your macho posturing.”

I saw the Pretty Witch nod at me, approving and a little surprised, I think. Emilio glared at her and she shrugged and moved away.

“So you think my paintings are ‘macho posturing’?”

“Using Tess’s body. Yes.”

I started walking back toward the display of your paintings, but he followed me.

“Beatrice…”

I didn’t turn.

“There’s a piece of news you may find interesting. We’ve had the results of the cystic fibrosis tests back. My wife isn’t a carrier of the CF gene.”

“I’m glad.”

But Emilio hadn’t finished. “I’m not a carrier of the cystic fibrosis gene either.”

But he had to be. It didn’t make sense. Xavier had cystic fibrosis so his father had to be a carrier.

I grabbed at an explanation. “You can’t always tell by a simple test. There are thousands of mutations of the cystic fibrosis gene and—”

He interrupted. “We’ve had all the tests there are, the whole works—you name it, we’ve had it and we have been told, categorically, that neither of us are carriers of cystic fibrosis.”

“Sometimes a baby can spontaneously have CF even when one of the parents isn’t a carrier.”

“And what are the chances of that? A million to one? Xavier was nothing to do with me.”

It was the first time I’d heard him say Xavier’s name—in the same expelled breath to say the words to disown him.

The obvious explanation was that Emilio wasn’t Xavier’s father. But you’d told me he was and you don’t lie.

I sense an increase in Mr. Wright’s concentration as he listens closely to what I am saying.

“I knew that Xavier had never had cystic fibrosis.”

“Because both parents need to be carriers of the cystic fibrosis gene?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Exactly.”

“So what did you think was going on?”

I pause a moment, remembering the emotion that accompanied the realization. “I thought Chrom-Med had used gene therapy on a perfectly healthy baby.”

“What did you think their reason was?”

“I thought it must be fraud.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“It was hardly surprising Chrom-Med’s ‘cure’ for cystic fibrosis was so successful if the babies had never had it in the first place. And it was because of Chrom-Med’s supposed miraculous cure that their value had skyrocketed. They were weeks away from floating on the stock market.”

“What about the regulatory bodies who’d monitored the trial?”

“I couldn’t understand how they’d been so misled. But I thought somehow they must have been. And I knew that the patients, like Tess, would never have questioned the diagnosis. If you’ve had someone in the family with cystic fibrosis, you always know that you might be a carrier.”

“Did you think Professor Rosen was involved?”

“I thought he had to be. Even if it hadn’t been his idea, he must have sanctioned it. And he was a director of Chrom-Med, which meant he stood to make a fortune when the company floated.”

When I’d met Professor Rosen at Chrom-Med, I’d thought he was a zealous scientist who craved admiration by his peers. I found it hard to replace that image with a money-grabbing fraudster, that instead of being driven by that age-old motive of glory, he was driven by the even older one of avarice. It was difficult to believe he was that good an actor, that his speech about eradicating disease and being a watershed in history was no more than hot wind designed to throw me, and everyone else, off course. But if it really was the case, he’d been disturbingly convincing.

“Did you contact him at this stage?”

“I tried to. He was in the States giving a lecture tour and wouldn’t be back until the sixteenth of March, twelve days away. I left a message on his phone but he didn’t reply.”

“Did you tell DS Finborough?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Yes. I phoned and said I needed to meet him. He set up an appointment early that afternoon.”

Mr. Wright glances down at his notes. “And at your meeting with DS Finborough, Detective Inspector Haines was there too?”

“Very much so.”

A man who infringed the subtle boundaries of personal space, as if it were his right to invade.

“Before we move on, I just want to get one thing clear,” says Mr. Wright. “How did you think the fraud was linked to Tess’s death?”

“I thought she must have found out.”

DI Haines’s jowly face loomed across the table at me, his physique matching his overbearing voice. Next to him was DS Finborough.

“Which do you think more likely, Miss Hemming,” DI Haines boomed, “an established company with an international reputation, complying with myriad regulations, tests out a gene therapy on perfectly well babies or a student is mistaken about the father of her baby?”

“Tess wouldn’t have lied about the father.”

“When I last spoke to you on the phone, I asked you, courteously, to stop indiscriminately apportioning blame.”

“Yes, but—”

“On your phone message just a week ago, you put Mr. Codi and Simon Greenly at the top of your list of suspects.”

I cursed the message I’d left on DS Finborough’s phone. It showed me as emotional and unreliable, damaging any credibility I might have had.

“But now you’ve changed your mind?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“But we haven’t, Miss Hemming. There is nothing new that brings into question the coroner’s verdict of suicide. I’ll state the bald facts for you. You may not want to hear them but that does not mean they don’t exist.”

Not just a double but a triple negative. His oratory wasn’t as impressive as he believed it to be.

“An unmarried young woman,” he continued, enjoying his emphasized words, “who is an art student in London, has an illegitimate baby with cystic fibrosis. The baby is successfully treated by a new genetic therapy in utero” (I thought how proud he was of this little bit of knowledge, this smidgen of Latin thrown into his monologue), “but unfortunately it dies when it is born of an unrelated condition.” (Yes, I know—“it.”) “One of her friends, of whom she apparently had many, leaves her a tactless message on her answering machine, which drives her further down her path toward suicide.” I tried to say something but he continued, barely pausing for the breath needed to patronize me. “Suffering hallucinations from the illegal drugs she was taking, she takes a kitchen knife with her into the park.”

I noticed a look between DS Finborough and DI Haines.

“Maybe she bought the knife specially for the purpose,” snapped Haines. “Maybe she wanted it to be expensive and special. Or just sharp. I am not a psychiatrist; I cannot read a suicidal young woman’s mind.”

DS Finborough seemed to flinch away from DI Haines, his distaste for him clear.

“She went into a deserted toilets building,” continued Haines. “Either so she wouldn’t be found or because she wanted to be out of the snow; again I cannot accurately tell you her reason. Either outside in the park or in the toilets building, she took an overdose of sedatives.” (I was surprised he managed to hold back “a belt and suspenders suicide” because that was the kind of thing he was itching to say.) “She then cuts the arteries in her arms with her kitchen knife. Afterward it transpires that the father of her illegitimate baby isn’t her tutor as she’d thought but someone else, who must carry the cystic fibrosis gene.”

I did try to argue with him, but I might as well have been playing the triangle on the edge of the M4. I know, one of your sayings, but remembering it comforted me a little as he shouted me down. And as he patronized me, not listening to me, I saw how scruffy my clothes were and that my hair needed cutting and I was no longer polite, or respectful of his authority, and it was no wonder he didn’t pay attention to me. I didn’t used to pay attention to people like me either.

As DS Finborough escorted me out of the police station, I turned to him. “He didn’t listen to a word I said.”

DS Finborough was clearly embarrassed. “It’s the accusation you made about Emilio Codi. And Simon Greenly.”

“So it’s because I’ve cried wolf too often?”

He smiled. “And with such conviction. It doesn’t help that Emilio Codi made a formal complaint against you and that Simon Greenly is the son of a cabinet minister.”

“But surely he must be able to see that something’s wrong?”

“Once he has arrived at a conclusion, backed up by facts and logic, it’s hard to dissuade him. Unless there are heavier counterbalancing facts.”

I thought DS Finborough was too decent and professional to publicly criticize his boss.

“And you?”

He paused a moment, as if unsure whether to tell me. “We’ve had the forensic results back on the Sabatier knife. It was brand-new. And it had never been used before.”

“She couldn’t have afforded Sabatier.”

“I agree—it doesn’t fit when she didn’t even own a kettle or a toaster.”

So the last time he’d been in the flat, when he’d come to talk about the postmortem results, he’d noticed. It hadn’t just been, as I’d thought at the time, a compassionate visit. I was grateful to him for being first a policeman. I worked up the courage to ask my question.

“So do you now believe that she was murdered?”

There was a moment while my question was static in the silence between us.

“I think there’s a query.”

“Are you going to answer your ‘query’?”

“I’ll try. That’s the best I can offer.”

Mr. Wright is concentrating intently on what I am telling him, his body bent toward mine, his eyes responding—not a passive but an active participant in the tale and I realize how seldom people are fully listened to.

“When I left the police station, I went straight to Kasia’s flat. I needed her and Mitch to be tested for the CF gene. If either of them tested negative, then the police would have to act.”

Kasia’s dingy sitting room had become damper since my last visit. A one-bar electric fire didn’t stand a chance against the coldly seeping concrete walls. The thin fabric of the Indian throw at the closed window flapped in the draft around the window frame. Three weeks had passed since I’d last seen her, and she was nearly eight months pregnant now. She looked bewildered.

“But I don’t understand, Beatrice.”

Again I wished someone wouldn’t use the intimacy of my name, this time because, coward that I was, I didn’t want to be close to her as I distressed her. I put on my corporate distancing voice as I spelled it out, “Both parents have to carry the cystic fibrosis gene for the baby to be born with cystic fibrosis.”

“Yes. They tell me in clinic.”

“Xavier’s father doesn’t carry the gene. So Xavier couldn’t have had cystic fibrosis.”

“Xavier not ill?”

“No.”

Mitch came in from the bathroom. He must have been eavesdropping. “For fuck’s sake, she just lied about who she had sex with.”

Without the plaster dust his face was handsome, but the contrast between his finely sculpted face and muscular tattooed body was oddly menacing.

“She had no embarrassment about having sex,” I said. “If she’d been having sex with someone else as well, she would have told me. There was no reason for her to lie. I really think you should get tested, Mitch.”

Using his name was a mistake. Instead of sounding friendly, I sounded like a primary schoolteacher. Kasia was still looking bemused. “I have cystic fibrosis gene. I test plus for that.”

“Yes. But maybe Mitch is negative, maybe he isn’t a carrier and—”

“Yeah right,” he interrupted, sarcasm biting. “The doctors are wrong and you know best?” He looked at me as if he hated me; perhaps he did. “Your sister lied about who the father was,” he said. “And who’d blame her? With you looking down your nose at her. Patronizing bitch.”

I hoped he was being verbally aggressive for Kasia’s sake, that he was trying to prove that your baby did have cystic fibrosis, as their baby had had cystic fibrosis, that the treatment wasn’t a con. And the only way for that to be true was for you to be a liar and me an uptight, patronizing bitch. But he was enjoying his verbal attack too much for it to be for a kinder reason.

“Truth is, she probably fucked so many men she had no idea who the father was.”

Kasia’s voice was quiet but clear. “No. Tess not like that.”

I remembered how she’d said you were her friend, the simplicity of her loyalty. The glance he gave her was spiked with anger but she continued, “Beatrice is right.” As she spoke, she stood up and I knew as I watched that reflexive movement that he had hit her in the past, that she’d instinctively stood up to avoid him.

The silence in the room met the damp coldness in the walls, and as it continued I wanted the heat of a row, for words to be fighting, rather than the fear that it would be fought later with physical brutality. Kasia motioned me to the door and I went with her.

We walked down the stained sharp-edged concrete steps. Neither of us said anything. As she turned to go back, I took hold of her arm. “Come and stay with me.”

Her hand moved to her bump, and she didn’t meet my eye. “I can’t.”

“Please, Kasia.”

I startled myself. The most I’d ever given of myself before was my signature on a check to a worthy cause, but now I was asking her to stay and really hoping that she would. It was the hope that startled me. She turned away from me and walked back up the stained concrete steps toward the cold, damp flat and whatever waited for her there.

As I walked home, I wondered if she’d told you why she once loved Mitch. I was sure that she must have, that she wasn’t the kind of person who had sex without love. I thought how William’s wedding ring was a sign that he was taken, spoken for, but that the small gold crucifix Kasia wore around her neck wasn’t about ownership or promises; it was a no-trespassing sign unless you have love and kindness for the wearer. And I was furious that Mitch was ignoring it. Because he did ignore it, violently.

At just after midnight, the doorbell rang and I hurried to answer it, hoping that it would be Kasia. When I saw her standing on the doorstep, I didn’t see her tarty clothes and cheap hair color, only the bruises on her face and the welts on her arms.

That first night we shared the bed. She snored like a steam train and I remembered you telling me that pregnancy could make you snore. I liked the sound. I had spent night after night awake, listening to my grief, my sobbing the only sound in the room, my heart screaming as it rhythmically thumped into the mattress, and her snoring was an everyday sound, innocent and annoyingly soothing. That night I slept deeply for the first time since you’d died.

Mr. Wright has had to go off to a meeting, so I am coming home early today. It’s pouring rain when I leave the tube station and I get drenched as I walk home. I see Kasia looking for me out of the window. Seconds later she greets me, smiling, at the front door. “Beata!” (It’s Polish for Beatrice.) As I think I told you, she has the bed to herself now and I have a futon in the sitting room and it feels absurdly cramped; my feet touch the wardrobe and my head, the door.

As I change into dry clothes, I think that today has been a good day. I’ve managed to keep my morning resolutions of not being afraid and intimidated. And when I felt faint and shivery and sick, I tried to ignore it and not let my body dominate my mind, and I think I succeeded pretty well. I didn’t get as far as finding something beautiful in the everyday, but maybe that’s just a step too far.

Now changed, I give Kasia her English lesson, which I do every day. I have a textbook for teaching Polish people English. The book groups words together and she learns a group before our lesson.

“Piękny,” I say, following the pronunciation instructions.

“Beautiful, lovely, gorgeous,” she replies.

“Brilliant.”

“Thank you, Beata,” she says, mock solemn. I try to hide how much I like her using her Polish name for me. “Ukochanie?” I continue.

“Love, adore, fond of, passionate.”

“Well done. Nienawisść?”

She’s silent. I am on the other side of the page now and the antonyms. I gave her the Polish word for hate. She shrugs. I try another, the Polish for unhappy, but she looks at me blankly.

At the beginning I got frustrated at the holes in her vocabulary, thinking it was childish that she refused to learn the negative words, a linguistic head-in-the-sand policy. But on the positive ones she’s forging ahead, even learning colloquialisms.

“How are you, Kasia?”

“Tip-top, Beata.” (She likes 1950s musicals.)

I’ve asked her to stay on with me after her baby’s born. Both Kasia and Amias are delighted. He’s offered us the flat rent free, till we “get on our feet again,” and somehow I’ll just have to look after her and her baby. Because I will get through this. It will all be okay.

After our lesson, I glance out of the window and only now notice the pots down the steps to your flat. They are all in flower, a host (a smallish host but a host nonetheless) of golden daffodils.

I ring Amias’s bell. He looks genuinely delighted to see me. I kiss him on the cheek. “The daffodils you planted—they’re flowering.”

Eight weeks before, I’d watched him planting the bulbs in snow-covered earth, and even with my lack of gardening knowledge, I knew they couldn’t survive. Amias smiles at me, enjoying my confusion. “You don’t need to sound quite so surprised.”

Like you, I see Amias regularly, sometimes for supper, sometimes just for a whiskey. I used to think you went out of charity.

“Did you pop some in, ready-potted, when I wasn’t looking?” I ask.

He roars with laughter; he’s got a very loud laugh for an old person, hasn’t he? Robust and strong.

“I poured some hot water in first, mixed it with the earth, then planted the bulbs. Things always grow better if you warm their soil up.”

I find the image comforting.