Sister

20

I’d always sent flowers to Mum on Leo’s birthday and phoned her, thoughtfulness at a distance. And I’d always made sure there would be an end to the phone call—a meeting I had to get to, a conference call that had to be taken—creating a barrier against any potential emotional outpouring. But there had never been any outpouring, just a little awkwardness as emotions were bitten back and passed off as the judder of a transatlantic phone call.

I’d already bought Leo a card, but at Liverpool Street Station I bought a bunch of cornflowers for you, wild and vividly blue. As the florist wrapped them, I remembered Kasia telling me that I should lay flowers at the toilets building for you, which she’d done weeks before. She was uncharacteristically insistent and thought that Mum would find it “healing” too. But I knew Mum found this modern expression of grief—all those floral shrines by pedestrian crossings and up lampposts and on roadsides—unsettling and bizarre. Flowers should be laid where you were buried, not where you died. Besides, I would do my damnedest to make sure Mum never saw the toilets building. Me too, for that matter. I never wanted to go near that building again. So I’d told Kasia that I’d rather plant something beautiful in your garden, look after it, watch it as it grew and flourished. And, like Mum, lay flowers on your grave.

I walked the half mile from Little Hadston station to the church, and saw Mum in the graveyard. I told you about my lunch with her just a few days ago, jumping ahead in the chronology of the story so I could reassure you and be fair to her. So you already know how she changed after you died, how she became again the mum of babyhood in the rustling dressing gown, smelling of face cream and reassurance in the dark. Warm and loving, she’s also become worryingly vulnerable. It was at your funeral that she changed. It wasn’t a gradual process but horrifyingly fast, her silent scream as you were lowered into the wet mud shattering all of her character artifices, leaving the core of her exposed. And in that shattering moment, her fiction around your death disintegrated. She knew, as I did, that you would never have killed yourself. And that violent knowledge leached the strength from her spine and stripped the color from her hair.

But every time I saw her, so old and gray now, it was newly shocking.

“Mum?”

She turned and I saw tears on her face. She hugged me tightly and pressed her face against my shoulder. I felt her tears through my shirt. She pulled away, trying to laugh. “Shouldn’t use you as a hanky, should I?”

“That’s fine, anytime.”

She stroked my hair. “All that hair. It needs a cut.”

“I know.”

I put my arm around her.

Dad had gone back to France, with no promises of phone calls or visits, honest enough now not to make promises he couldn’t keep. I know that I am loved by him but that he won’t be present in my everyday life. So, practically, Mum and I have only each other now. It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people’s too—yours, Leo’s, Dad’s. We have to expand at the moment we feel the most shrunk.

I put my cornflowers on your grave, which I hadn’t seen since the day of your burial. And as I looked at the earth heaped above you and Xavier, I thought that this is what it all meant—the visits to the police, the hospital, the Internet searches, the questioning and querying and suspicions and accusations—this is what it came down to: you covered with suffocating mud away from light, air, life, love.

I turned to Leo’s grave, and put down my card, an Action Man one, that I think an eight-year-old would like. I’ve never added years to him. Mum had already put on a wrapped-up present, which she’d told me was a remote-control helicopter.

“How did you know he had cystic fibrosis?” I asked.

She told me once that she knew he had it before he showed any signs of illness, but neither she nor Dad knew they were carriers, so how did she know to get him tested? My mind had become accustomed to asking questions, even at Leo’s graveside, even on what should have been his birthday.

“He was still a baby and he was crying,” said Mum. “I kissed his face and his tears tasted salty. I told the GP, just a by-the-by comment, not thinking anything of it. Salty tears are a symptom of cystic fibrosis.”

Remember how even when we were children, she hardly ever kissed us when we cried? But I remember a time when she did, before she tasted the salt in Leo’s tears.

We were silent for a few moments and my eyes went from Leo’s established grave back to your raw one, and I saw how the contrast visualized my state of mourning for each of you.

“I’ve decided on a headstone,” Mum said. “I want an angel, one of those big stone ones with the enveloping wings.”

“I think she’d like an angel.”

“She’d find it ludicrously funny.”

We both half smile, imagining your reaction to a stone angel.

“But I think Xavier would like it,” Mum said. “I mean for a baby an angel’s lovely, isn’t it? Not too sentimental.”

“Not at all.”

She’d got sentimental, though, bringing a teddy each week, and replacing it when it got wet and dirty. She was a little apologetic about it, but not very. The old Mum would have been horrified by the poor taste.

I remembered again our conversation when I told you that you must tell Mum you were pregnant, including the ending that I had forgotten, deliberately, I think.

“Do you still have knickers with days of the week embroidered on them?” you asked.

“You’re changing the subject. And I was given those when I was nine.”

“Did you really wear them on the right day?”

“She’s going to be so hurt, if you don’t tell her.”

Your voice became uncharacteristically serious. “She’ll say things she’ll regret. And she’ll never be able to unsay them.”

You were being kind. You were putting love before truth. But I hadn’t seen that before, thinking you were just making up an excuse—“Avoiding the issue.”

“I’ll tell her when he’s born, Bee. When she’ll love him.”

You always knew she would.

Mum started to plant a Madame Carriere rose in a ceramic pot next to your grave. “It’s just temporary, till the angel arrives. It looks too bare without anything.” I filled a watering can so we could water it in and remembered you as a small child trundling after Mum with your mini gardening tools, your fingers clutched around seeds you’d collected from other plants—aquilegias, I think, but I never really took much notice.

“She used to love gardening, didn’t she?” I asked.

“From the time she was tiny,” said Mum. “It wasn’t till I was in my thirties that I started liking it.”

“So what started you off?”

I was just making conversation, a safe conversation, that I hoped Mum would find soothing. She’s always liked talking about plants.

“When I planted something, it became more and more beautiful, which at thirty-six was the opposite of what was happening to me,” Mum said, testing the soil around the rose with her bare fingers. I saw that her nails were filled with earth. “I shouldn’t have minded losing my looks,” she continued. “But I did then, before Leo died. I think I missed being treated with kindness, with leeway, because I was a pretty girl. The man who came to do our rewiring, a taxi driver once, were unnecessarily unpleasant; men who would normally have done a little extra job for free were aggressive, as if they could tell I had once been pretty, beautiful even, and they didn’t want to know that prettiness fades and ages. It was as if they blamed me for it.”

I was a little taken aback by her, but only a little. Shooting from the hip as a style of conversation was getting almost familiar now. Mum wiped her face with her grimy fingers, leaving a streak of dirt across her cheek. “And then there was Tess growing up, so pretty, and unaware of how generous people were to her because of it.”

“She never played on it though.”

“She didn’t need to. The world held its door open for her and she walked through smiling, thinking it would always be that way.”

“Were you jealous?”

Mum hesitated a moment, then shook her head. “It wasn’t jealousy, but looking at her made me see what I had become.” She breaks off. “I’m a little drunk. I allow myself to get a little plastered, actually, on Leo’s birthday. The anniversary of his death too. And now there’ll be Tess’s and Xavier’s anniversaries, won’t there? I’ll become a drunkard if I don’t watch out.”

I held her hand tightly in mine.

“Tess always came down to be with me on his birthday,” she said.

When we said good-bye at the station, I suggested an outing together on the following Sunday, to the nursery at Petersham Meadows, which you used to love but couldn’t afford. We agreed we’d choose a new plant that you’d like for your garden.

I got the train back to London. You’d never told me that you visited Mum on Leo’s birthday. Presumably, to spare me the guilt. I wondered how many other times you visited her until the bump started to show. I already knew from the phone bill that I’d been cruelly neglectful of you, and I realized it applied to Mum too. It was you who was the caring daughter, not me, as I’d always self-righteously assumed.

I ran away, didn’t I? My job in New York wasn’t a “career opportunity”; it was an opportunity to leave Mum and responsibility behind as I pursued an uncluttered life on another continent. No different from Dad. But you didn’t leave. You may have needed me to remind you when birthdays were coming up, but you didn’t run away.

I wondered why Dr. Wong hadn’t shown me my flaws. Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray–style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are. But that’s unfair to her. I didn’t ask the right questions about myself; I didn’t question myself at all.

My ringing phone jolted me out of the self-analysis. It was Christina. She made small talk for a while, which I suspected was because she was putting off the reason for her phone call, and then came to the point.

“I don’t think Xavier’s death and this other baby’s death can be linked, Hemms.”

“But they must be. Both Tess and Hattie were in the same trial at the same hospital—”

“Yes, but medically there isn’t a connection. You can’t get something that causes a heart condition serious enough to kill one baby, and kidney problems—most likely total renal failure—which kill another baby.”

I interrupted, feeling panicky. “In genetics, one gene can code for completely different things, can’t it? So maybe—”

Again she interrupted, or maybe it was the bad connection in the train. “I checked with my professor, just in case I was missing something. I didn’t tell him what this was about, just gave him a hypothetical scenario. And he said there’s no way two such disparate and fatal conditions could have the same cause.”

I knew that she was dumbing down the scientific language so that I would understand it. And I knew in its more complex version, it would be exactly the same. The trial at St. Anne’s couldn’t be responsible for both babies’ deaths.

“But it’s strange, isn’t it, that two babies have died at St. Anne’s?” I asked.

“There’s a perinatal mortality rate in every hospital and St. Anne’s delivers five thousand babies a year, so it’s sad but, unfortunately, a blip that wouldn’t be seen as remarkable.”

I tried to question her further, find some flaw, but she was silent. I felt jolted by the train, my physical discomfort mirroring my emotional state, and the discomfort also made me worry about Kasia. I’d been planning a trip for her, but that might be irresponsible, so I checked with Christina. Clearly glad to be able to help, she gave me an unnecessarily detailed reply.

I finish telling Mr. Wright about my phone call with Christina. “I thought that someone must have lied to the women about what their babies really died from. Neither baby had had a postmortem.”

“You never thought you might be wrong?”

“No.”

He looks at me with admiration, I think, but I should be truthful.

“I didn’t have the energy to think I might be wrong,” I continue. “I just couldn’t face going back to the beginning and starting again.”

“So what did you do?” he asks, and I feel tired as he asks the question, tired and daunted as I did then.

“I went back to see Hattie. I didn’t think she’d have anything to say that would help, but I had to try something.”

I was grasping at straws, and I knew that, but I had to keep grasping. The only thing that might help was the identity of the father of Hattie’s baby, but I didn’t hold out much hope.

When I rang Hattie’s doorbell, a pretty woman in her thirties, whom I guessed to be Georgina, answered the door, holding a child’s book in one hand, lipstick in the other.

“You must be Beatrice, come in. I’m a little behind; I promised Hattie I’d be out of here by eight at the latest.”

Hattie came into the hallway behind her. Georgina turned to her. “Would you mind reading the children the cow story? I’ll get Beatrice a drink.”

Hattie left us to go upstairs. I sensed that this had been engineered by Georgina, though she seemed genuinely friendly. “Percy and the Cow is the shortest, start to finish in six minutes, including engine noises and animal sounds, so she should be down soon.” She opened a bottle of wine and handed me a glass. “Don’t upset her, will you? She’s been through so much. Has hardly eaten since it happened. Try to… be kind to her.”

I nodded, liking her for her concern. A car hooted outside and Georgina called up the stairs before she left. “There’s an open pinot grigio, Hatts, so dig in.” Hattie called down her thanks. They seemed more like flatmates than a boss and a nanny both in their thirties.

Hattie came down from settling the children and we went into the sitting room. She sat on the sofa, tucking her legs under her, glass of wine in her hand, treating the place as home, rather than as a live-in domestic helper.

“Georgina seems very nice…?” I asked.

“Yes, she is. When I told her about the baby, she offered to pay my airfare home and to give me two months’ wages on top. They can’t afford that; they both work full-time and they can only just about manage my wages as it is.”

So Georgina wasn’t the stereotypical Filipina-nanny employer, just as Hattie didn’t live in the broom cupboard. I ran through my, by now, standard questions. Did she know if you were afraid of anyone? Did she know anyone who may have given you drugs? Any reason why you may have been killed (bracing myself for the look that I usually got at this point)? Hattie could give me no answers. Like your other friends, she hadn’t seen you after you’d had Xavier. I was now scraping the bottom of my barrel of questions, not really thinking that I’d get very far.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone the name of your baby’s father?”

She hesitated and I thought she looked ashamed.

“Who is he, Hattie?”

“My husband.”

She was silent, letting me have a stab at working it out. “You took the job pregnant?”

“I thought no one would employ me if they knew. When it became clear, I pretended that the baby was due later than he was. I’d rather Georgina thought I had loose sexual morals than that I lied to her.” I must have looked bemused. “She trusted me to be her friend.”

For a moment I felt excluded from the threads of friendships that bind women together and which I’ve never felt I needed because I’d always had you.

“Did you tell Tess about your baby?” I asked.

“Yes. Hers wasn’t due for another few weeks. She cried when I told her, on my behalf, and I was angry with her. She gave me emotions I didn’t have.”

Did you realize that she was angry with you? She was the only person I’d spoken to who’d had any criticism of you; who you had misunderstood.

“The truth is, I was relieved,” she said. Her tone was one of challenge, daring me to be shocked.

“I understand that,” I replied. “You have other children at home that you need to look after. A baby would mean losing your job, however understanding your employers are, and you wouldn’t be able to send money home to them.” I looked at her and saw I was still offtrack. “Or couldn’t you bear to leave another child behind while you came to the UK to work?” She met my eye, a tacit confirmation.

Why could I understand Hattie when you could not? Because I understand shame, and you’ve never experienced it. Hattie stood up. “Is there anything else you’d like to know?” She wanted me gone.

“Yes, do you know who gave you the injection? The one with the gene?”

“No.”

“What about the doctor who delivered your baby?”

“It was a caesarean.”

“But surely you still saw him or her?”

“No. He wore a mask. When I had the injection. When I had the operation. All the time in a mask. In the Philippines there’s nothing like that. No one’s bothered that much about hygiene, but over here…”

As she spoke, I saw those four nightmarish canvases you painted, the woman screaming and the masked figure over her. They weren’t a record of a drug-induced hallucination but what actually happened to you.

“Do you have your hospital notes, Hattie?”

“No.”

“They got lost?”

She seemed surprised that I would know.

I drain my cup of coffee and don’t know if it’s the caffeine hit or the memory of those paintings that makes a shudder run through me, spilling some of the coffee on the table. Mr. Wright looks at me, with concern. “Shall we end it there?” he asks.

“Yes, if that’s okay.”

We go out into reception together. Mr. Wright sees the bunch of daffodils on his secretary’s desk and stops. I see her tensing. He turns to me, eyes reddening.

“I really like what Tess told you about the gene for yellow in a daffodil saving children’s sight.”

“Me too.”

Detective Sergeant Finborough is waiting for me in Carluccio’s, near the CPS building. He phoned me yesterday and asked if we could meet. I’m not sure whether it’s allowed, but I agreed. I know he won’t be here for his own sake, no pleas to buff up the truth of what happened so he reflects better in it.

I go up to him and we hesitate a moment, as if we may kiss on the cheek as friends rather than as—what? What are we to each other? He was the person who told me it was you they’d found, you in the toilets building. He was the man who’d taken my hand and looked me in the eye and destroyed who I was up until that moment. Our relationship isn’t cocktail-style pecking on the cheek, nor is it simply that of policeman to relative of a victim. I take his hand and hold it as he once held mine; this time it’s my hand that’s the warmer.

“I wanted to say sorry, Beatrice.”

I am about to reply when a waitress pushes between us, tray held aloft, a pencil stuck businesslike into her ponytail. I think that we should be somewhere like a church—a quiet, serious place—where the big things are talked about in whispers, not shouted above the clatter of crockery and chitchat.

We sit down at a table and I think we both find it awkwardly intimate. I break the silence. “How is PC Vernon?”

“She’s been promoted,” he replies. “She’s working for the domestic violence unit now.”

“Good for her.”

He smiles at me, and ice broken now, he takes the plunge into a deeper conversation. “You were right all along. I should have listened to you and believed you.”

I used to fantasize about hearing exactly that kind of a sentence and wish I could whisper to my earlier self that one day a policeman would be telling me that.

“At least you had a query,” I say. “And acted on it.”

“Much too late. You should never have been put in jeopardy like that.”

The sounds of the restaurant suddenly mute, the lights are dimming into darkness. I can just hear DS Finborough talking to me, reassuring me that I’m okay, but then his voice is silenced and everything is dark and I want to scream but my mouth can’t make any sound.

When I come round, I’m in the café’s clean and warm ladies’ room. DS Finborough is with me. He tells me I was out for about five minutes. Not so long then. But it’s the first time I’ve lost sound too. The staff at Carluccio’s have been solicitous and call me a taxi to get home. I ask DS Finborough if he’ll accompany me and he willingly agrees.

I’m now in a black cab with a policeman sitting next to me, but I still feel afraid. I know that he’s following me; I can feel his malevolent presence, murderous, getting closer. I want to tell DS Finborough. But like Mr. Wright, he’d tell me that he’s locked up on remand in prison, that he can’t hurt me again, that there’s nothing to fear. But I wouldn’t be able to believe him.

DS Finborough waits till I’m safely inside the flat, and then takes the taxi on to wherever he is going. As I close the door, Pudding bends her warm furry body around my legs, purring. I call out Kasia’s name. No reply. I dampen down flaring sparks of anxiety, then see a note on the table saying she’s at her antenatal group. She should be home any minute.

I go to the window to check, pulling back the curtains. Two hands pummel the glass from the other side, trying to smash it. I scream. He vanishes into the darkness.