Sister

6

As I drove back to your flat along precariously icy roads, Todd phoned to say he was getting a flight to Heathrow, landing in the morning, and the thought of him made the road feel a little more secure somehow.

The next morning, standing at the arrivals barrier, I didn’t recognize him when he walked through, my eyes still scanning for someone else—an idealized Todd? You? When I did see him, he seemed slighter than I remembered him, a little smaller. The first thing I asked was whether a letter from you had arrived, but there was nothing.

He had brought a case of clothes for me with everything he thought I’d need, including an appropriate outfit for your funeral and a prescription of sleeping pills from my U.S. doctor. That first morning, and from then on, he made sure I ate properly. The description of him, of us, feels a little disconnected, I know, but that’s how it felt.

He was my safety rope. But he wasn’t—yet—breaking my fall.

I have left out Todd’s arrival but have told Mr. Wright about my confrontation on Emilio’s doorstep and my time in the garden with his wife.

“I knew Emilio had a motive for killing Tess—losing his job and possibly his marriage. Now I also knew that he was capable of living with a lie. And of twisting the truth into the shape he wanted. Even in front of me, her sister, he had claimed Xavier was no more than the fantasy of an obsessed student.”

“And Mrs. Codi, did you believe her alibi for him?”

“At the time, I did. I liked her. But later, I thought she might have chosen to lie for him to protect her little girl and unborn baby. I thought that her children came first with her, and for their sake she wouldn’t want him in prison; and that her little girl was the reason she hadn’t left Emilio when she’d discovered he’d been unfaithful.”

Mr. Wright looks down at a file in front of him. “You didn’t tell the police about this encounter?”

The file must be the police log of my calls.

“No. Two days later, DS Finborough told me that Emilio Codi had made a formal complaint about me to his boss, Detective Inspector Haines.”

“What did you think his reason was?” asks Mr. Wright.

“I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t think about it at the time because in that same phone call DS Finborough said that they’d got the postmortem results back. I was surprised they’d done it so quickly but he told me that they always try to, so that the family can have a funeral.”

I’m sorry that your body had to be cut again. The coroner requested it and we had no say in it. But I don’t think you mind. You’ve always been a pragmatist about death, having no sentiment for the body left behind. When Leo died, Mum and I hugged his dead body to us, cheating ourselves with the illusion that we were still hugging Leo. At just six years old you walked away. I pitied you for your courage.

I, on the other hand, have always been reverential. When we found Thumbelina dead in her hutch, you prodded her with slender five-year-old fingers to discover what death felt like, even as you wept, while I wrapped her in a silk scarf, believing with all the solemnity of a ten-year-old that a dead body is precious. I can hear you laughing at me for talking about a rabbit—the point is I’ve always thought a body is more than a vessel for the soul.

But the night you were found, I had a powerful sense of you leaving your body and vortexlike sucking up all that you are with you. You were trailing clouds of glory in the opposite direction. Maybe the image was prompted by your Chagall print in the kitchen, those ethereal people rising heavenward, but whatever caused it, I knew that your body no longer held any part of you.

Mr. Wright is looking at me and I wonder how long I have been silent.

“What was your reaction to the postmortem?” he asks.

“Strangely, I didn’t mind about what happened to her body,” I say, deciding to keep Chagall and trailing clouds of glory in reverse to myself. But I will confide in him a little. “A child’s body is so much a part of who they are, maybe because we can hold a little boy in our arms. We can hold the whole of him. But when we grow too large to be held, our body no longer defines us.”

“When I asked you what your reaction was to the postmortem, I meant whether you believed its findings.”

I am hotly embarrassed but thankful that I at least kept Chagall to myself. His face softens as he looks at me. “I’m glad I wasn’t clear.”

I still feel heatedly ridiculous but smile back at him, a tentative first step to laughing at myself. And I think I knew, really, that he wanted me to talk about its findings. But just as I’d chosen to ask DS Finborough why the postmortem had been done so quickly, with Mr. Wright I was again putting off its results. Now I must address it.

“Later that day DS Finborough came round to the flat with the postmortem report, to give me the results.”

He’d said he’d rather do it in person and I thought it kind of him.

From your sitting-room window I watched DS Finborough coming down the steep basement steps, and I wondered if he was walking slowly because they were slippery with ice or because he was reluctant to have this meeting. Behind him was PC Vernon, her sensible shoes giving her a good grip, her gloved hand holding the railing just in case—a sensible woman who had children at home to look after that evening.

DS Finborough came into your sitting room but didn’t sit down or take off his coat. I’d tried to bleed your radiators but your flat was still uncomfortably cold.

“I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know that Tess’s body showed no evidence of any sexual assault.”

That you had been raped had been an unarticulated anxiety, corrosively hideous at the edge of my imagining. I felt relief as a physical force.

DS Finborough continued, “We know for definite now that she died on Thursday, the twenty-third of January.”

It confirmed what I already knew, that you had never made it out of the park after seeing Simon.

“The postmortem shows that Tess died because of bleeding from the lacerations to her arms,” continued DS Finborough.

“There are no signs of any struggle. There’s no reason to believe that anyone else is involved.”

It took a moment for the meaning of his words to make sense, as if I were translating a foreign language into my own.

“The coroner has returned a verdict of suicide,” he said.

“No. Tess wouldn’t kill herself.”

DS Finborough’s face was kind. “Under normal circumstances I’m sure you’d be right, but these weren’t normal circumstances, were they? Tess was suffering not only grief but also postpartum—”

I interrupted him, angry that he dared tell me about you when he didn’t know you. “Have you ever watched someone die from cystic fibrosis?” I asked. He shook his head, and was going to say something, but I headed him off. “We watched our brother struggling to breathe and we couldn’t help him. He tried so hard to live, but he drowned in his own fluid and there was nothing we could do. When you’ve watched someone you love fight for life, that hard, you value it too highly to ever throw it away.”

“As I said, in normal circumstances, I’m sure—”

“In any circumstances.”

My emotional assault had not dented his certainty. I would have to convince him with logic: muscular, masculine argument. “Surely there must be a connection to the threatening phone calls she was getting?”

“Her psychiatrist told us that they were most likely all in her head.”

I was astonished. “What?”

“He’s told us that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.”

“The phone calls were delusional and my sister was mad? Is that it now?”

“Beatrice—”

“You told me before that she was suffering from postpartum depression. Why has that suddenly changed to psychosis?”

Against my hectoring anger, his tone was so measured. “From the evidence, that seems now to be the most probable.”

“But Amias said the phone calls were real, when he reported her missing, didn’t he?”

“But he was never actually there when she got one of the phone calls.”

I thought about telling him that your phone was unplugged when I arrived. But that didn’t prove anything. The calls could still have been delusional.

“Tess’s psychiatrist has told us that symptoms of postpartum psychosis include delusions and paranoia,” DS Finborough continued. “Sadly, many of the women suffering also have thoughts of harming themselves, and tragically some actually do.”

“But Tess didn’t.”

“A knife was found next to her body, Beatrice.”

“You think she carried a knife now?”

“It was a kitchen one. And it had her fingerprints on it.”

“What kind of kitchen knife?”

I’m not sure why I asked, maybe some dimly remembered seminar on the questioner taking authority. There was a moment of hesitation before he replied, “A Sabatier five-inch boning knife.”

But I only heard the word Sabatier, maybe because it distracted me from the ugly violence of the rest of the description. Or maybe the word Sabatier struck me because it was so absurd to think you would own one.

“Tess couldn’t possibly have afforded a Sabatier knife.”

Was this conversation degenerating into farce? Bathos?

“Maybe she got it from a friend,” suggested DS Finborough. “Or it was a gift from someone.”

“She would have told me.”

Sympathy tempered his look of disbelief. I wanted to make him understand that we shared the details of our lives, because they were the threads that braided us so closely together. And you would have been certain to tell me about a Sabatier knife, because it would have had the rare value of being a detail in your life that tied directly into mine—our lives sharing top-end kitchenware.

“We told each other the little things. That’s what made us so close, I think, all the small things, and she’d have known I’d want to hear about a Sabatier knife.”

No, I know, it didn’t sound convincing.

DS Finborough’s voice was sympathetic but firm, and I briefly wondered if, like parents, the police believed in setting parameters. “I understand how hard this must be for you to accept. And I understand why you need to blame someone for her death, but—”

I interrupted with my certainty about you. “I’ve known her since she was born. I know her better than anyone else possibly could. And she would never have killed herself.”

He looked at me with compassion; he didn’t like doing this. “You didn’t know when her baby died, did you?”

I couldn’t answer him, winded by his punch to a part of me already bruised and fragile. He’d told me once before, indirectly, that we weren’t close, but then it came with the upside that you had run off somewhere without telling me. Not being close had meant you were still alive. But this time there was no huge payoff.

“She bought airmail stamps, just before she died, didn’t she? From the post office on Exhibition Road. So she must have written to me.”

“Has a letter from her arrived?”

I’d asked a neighbor to go in and check the apartment daily. I’d phoned our local post office in New York and demanded they search. But there was nothing, and it would surely have arrived by now.

“Maybe she meant to write to me but was prevented.”

I heard how weak it sounded. DS Finborough was looking at me with sympathy.

“I think Tess was going through hell after her baby died,” he said. “And it isn’t a place anyone could join her. Even you.”

I went through to the kitchen, “stropping off,” as Mum used to call it, but it wasn’t a strop, more of an absolute physical denial of what he was saying. A few minutes later I heard the front door shut. They didn’t know that words could seep through your badly fitting windows.

PC Vernon’s voice was quiet. “Wasn’t that a little…?” She trailed off, or maybe I just couldn’t hear.

Then DS Finborough’s voice, sounding sad, I thought. “The sooner she accepts the truth, the sooner she’ll realize she’s not to blame.”

But I knew the truth, as I know it now: we love each other; we are close; you would never have ended your own life.

A minute or so later, PC Vernon came back down the steps, carrying your knapsack.

“I’m sorry, Beatrice. I meant to give you this.”

I opened the knapsack. Inside was just your wallet with your library card, your travel card and your student ID card—membership badges of a society with libraries and public transport and colleges for studying art, not a society in which a twenty-one-year-old can be murdered in a derelict toilets building and left for five days before being dismissed as a suicide case.

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

PC 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.”

PC 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.

PC 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’ room, 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 PC 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 rented 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 that the postmortem is over and done with we can organize 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, as if 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 fantasize 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 now let people have photos when their babies die as part of the grieving process.” Mum gave Todd one of her looks that she normally reserves only 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.”

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 as easily have been Mum. I’d never spent time with both of them together before and was only just realizing 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 realized 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 postmortem?”

“Not then, no. I accepted DS Finborough’s word that nothing else had been found in the postmortem 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 okay 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 forward—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 Mumish, 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 postmortem 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 from 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 tissues in pockets and handbags, and little plastic bags to put the sodden ones into. I also carry Vaseline and lip salve 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 that 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 yet. There were always specters 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 one another 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 and 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 whether, had I known the reason for my name as a child, I’d have tried to live up to it. Instead of being a failed Arabella, I might have become a Shakespearean plucky Beatrice. But although I’d like to, I can’t linger on this. I asked the question only 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.

“Why did you think Tess had committed suicide?” I ask.

If she’s surprised by the question, she doesn’t show it, not hesitating for a moment in her reply. “Because I’d rather feel guilty for the rest of my life than for her to have felt a second’s fear.”

Her tears fall onto the white damask tablecloth, but she doesn’t mind the waiter’s stare, not caring anymore about “form” and socially correct behavior. She’s the mother in the rustling dressing gown sitting at the end of our beds smelling of face cream in the dark. The glimpse I had as she first shed her old Mumness is now fully exposed.

I never knew so much love could exist for someone until I saw Mum grieving for you. With Leo, I was away at boarding school and didn’t witness it. I find her grief both shocking and beautiful. And it makes me afraid of being a mother, of risking what she feels now—what you must have felt for Xavier.

There’s a short silence, a hangover from a previous time of silences, but then Mum talks into it. “You know I don’t mind much about the trial. Not at all if I’m being totally honest.” She looks at me, checking for a reaction, but I say nothing. I’ve heard her say this before in myriad ways. She doesn’t care about justice or revenge, just you.

“She’s been in the headlines for days,” Mum announces with pride. (I think I already told you that she’s proud of all the media attention?) She thinks you deserve to be on everybody’s front page and topping the bill on the news, not because of your story but because everyone should know all about you. They should be told about your kindness, your warmth, your talent, your beauty. For Mum it’s not “Stop the clocks” but “Run the presses!” “Turn on the TV,” “Look at my wonderful daughter!”

“Beatrice?”

My vision is blurring. I can just hear Mum’s voice. “Are you all right…? Poppet…?”

The anxiety in her voice jolts me back into full consciousness. I see the worry on her face and hate to be the cause of it, but the waiter is still clearing the next table, so it can’t have been for long.

“I’m fine. Shouldn’t have had wine, that’s all; it makes me woozy at lunchtime.”

Outside the restaurant I promise to come and see her at the weekend and reassure her that I’ll phone her this evening, as I do every evening. In the bright spring sunshine we hug good-bye and I watch her walk away. Among the shining hair and brisk walk of office workers returning from lunch breaks, Mum’s nonreflective gray hair stands out for its dullness, her walk uncertain. She seems weighted down by her grief, physically stooping as if not strong enough to bear it. As I watch her among the crowd, she reminds me of a tiny dinghy in an enormous sea, impossibly still afloat.

There’s a limit to how much I can ask her in one wallop. But you want to know if Xavier is buried with you. Of course he is, Tess. Of course he is. In your arms.