Sister: A Novel Part 14

Just until your call was put through to voicemail. I should have put on a message saying we were away, but we hadn't, not because we'd been carried away in the spontaneous moment, but because we'd decided it was a security risk. 'Let's not broadcast the fact we're away.' I can't remember if it was Todd or I who'd said it.

I thought that you must have a.s.sumed I'd be back soon, and that's why you didn't leave a message. Or maybe you simply couldn't bear to tell me your ghastly news without hearing my voice first.

'G.o.d knows how many times she tried to phone my mobile. I'd switched it off because there wasn't any reception where we were staying.'

'But you did try ringing her?'

I think he's asking this question out of kindness.

'Yes. But the cabin didn't have a landline and my mobile had no reception, so I could only phone her when we went out to a restaurant. I did try, a few times, but her phone was always engaged. I thought she was chatting to her friends, or had unplugged it so she could concentrate on painting.'

But there is no justification. I should have taken your call. And when I didn't do that I should have immediately rung you back, and then kept on ringing you until I got hold of you. And if I couldn't get hold of you, I should have alerted someone to go and check on you and then got on the next flight to London.

My mouth has become too dry to talk.

Mr Wright gets up. 'I'll get you a gla.s.s of water.'

As the door closes behind him I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it tracks me as I walk, an ugly shadow made by myself.

Before this, I'd confidently a.s.sumed myself to be a considerate, thoughtful person, vigilant about other people. I scrupulously remembered birthdays (my birthday book being annually transcribed onto the calendar); I sent thank you cards promptly (ready-bought and waiting in the bottom drawer of my desk). But with my numbers on your phone bill I saw that I wasn't considerate at all. I was conscientious about the minutiae of life but in the important things I was selfishly and cruelly neglectful.

I can hear your question, demanding an answer: Why, when DS Finborough told me that you'd had your baby, didn't I realise that you weren't able to phone me and tell me? Why did I focus on you not turning to me rather than realising it was me who'd made that impossible? It's because I thought you were still alive then. I didn't know you'd been murdered before I ever reached London. Later, when your body was found, I wasn't capable of logic, of putting dates together.

I can't imagine what you must think of me. (Can't or daren't?) You must be surprised that I didn't start off this whole letter to you with an apology, and then an explanation so that you could understand my negligence. The truth is that, lacking courage, I was putting it off as long as I could, knowing that there are no explanations to be offered.

I'd do anything to have a second chance, Tess. But unlike our storybooks there's no flying back past the second star to the right and through the open window to find you alive in your bed. I can't sail back through the weeks and in and out of the days returning to my bedroom where my supper is warm and waiting for me and I'm forgiven. There is no new beginning. No second chance.

You turned to me and I wasn't there.

You are dead. If I had taken your call you would be alive.

It's as blunt as that.

I'm sorry.

10.

Mr Wright comes back into the room with a gla.s.s of water for me. I remember that his wife died in a car crash. Maybe it was his fault, perhaps he was driving after drinking or momentarily distracted - my guilt shadow would feel better with some company. But I cannot ask him. Instead I drink the gla.s.s of water and he switches on the ca.s.sette recorder again.

'So you knew Tess had turned to you?'

'Yes.'

'And that you had been right all along?'

'Yes.'

There was a flipside to the guilt. You had looked to me for help, we were close, I did know you and therefore I could be absolutely confident in my conviction that you didn't kill yourself. Had my confidence ever wavered? A little. When I thought you hadn't told me about your baby; when I thought you hadn't turned to me for help when you were frightened. Then I questioned our closeness and wondered if I really knew you after all. Then quietly, privately, I also wondered, Did you really value life too highly to end it? Your phone calls meant that the answer, however painfully obtained, was an unequivocal yes.

The next morning I woke up so early it was still night. I thought about taking one of the sleeping pills, to escape from guilt now as much as grief, but I couldn't be that cowardly. Careful not to wake Todd, I got out of bed and went outside hoping for escape from my own thoughts or at least some kind of distraction from them.

When I opened the front door, I saw Amias putting carrier bags on your pots, using a torch. He must have seen me illuminated in the doorway.

'Some of them blew off in the night,' he said. 'So I need to get them put back again before too much damage is done.'

I thought about him recently planting daffodil bulbs in the freezing earth. From the beginning the bulbs never stood a chance. Not wanting to upset him, but not wanting to give him false plat.i.tudes about the efficacy of his carrier bag greenhouses, I changed the subject.

'It's so quiet at this time in the morning, isn't it?'

'You wait till spring, then it's a racket out here.'

I must have looked confused because he explained, 'The dawn chorus. Not sure why the birds like this street particularly, but for some reason best known to themselves they do.'

'I've never really understood what the dawn chorus was about actually.' Keeping the conversation going to humour him or to avoid my thoughts?

'Their songs are to attract a mate and define territories,' replied Amias. 'A shame that humans can't take the musical approach to that, isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'Do you know that they have an order?' he asked. 'First blackbirds, then robins, wrens, chaffinches, warblers, song thrushes. There used to be a nightingale too.'

As he told me about the dawn chorus I knew that I would find the person who had murdered you.

'Did you know that a single nightingale can sing up to three hundred love songs?'

That was my single-minded, focused destination; there was no more time for the detour of a guilt trip.

'A musician slowed down the skylark's song and found it's close to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.'

I owed it to you, even more than before, to win you some kind of justice.

As Amias continued telling me about the musical miracles within the dawn chorus, I wondered if he knew how comforting I found it, and thought that he probably did. He was letting me think, but not on my own, and was giving me a soothing score to bleak emotion. In the darkness I tried to hear a bird singing, but there was nothing. And in the silence and the dark it was hard to imagine a bright spring dawn filled with birdsong.

As soon as it was 9.00 a.m. I picked up the phone and dialled the police station.

'DS Finborough please. It's Beatrice Hemming.'

Todd, still half-asleep, looked at me bemused and irritated. 'What are you doing, darling?'

'I'm ent.i.tled to a copy of the post-mortem report. There was a whole load of b.u.mf that WPC Vernon gave me which had a leaflet about it.'

I had been too pa.s.sive; too accepting of information I had been given.

'Darling, you'll just be wasting everyone's time.'

I noted that Todd didn't say 'it's a waste of time', but that I was wasting somebody else's time; somebody he didn't even know. Like me, Todd is always conscious of when he's being a nuisance. I used to be, too.

'The day before she died, she called me every hour, and G.o.d knows how many more times on my mobile. That same day she asked Amias to look after her spare key because she was too afraid to leave it under the pot.'

'Maybe she'd just started bothering about basic security.'

'No, he told me it was after she'd got one of those calls. The day she was murdered, she phoned me at ten o'clock, which must be when she got home from her psychiatrist. And then every half an hour until one thirty when she must have left to go to the post office and to meet Simon in Hyde Park.'

'Darling-'

'She told her psychiatrist she was afraid. And Simon said she wanted round-the-clock protection; that she was "terrified witless" and that she saw someone following her into the park.'

'So she said, but she was suffering from puerperal-'

DS Finborough came on the line, interrupting us. I told him about your many calls to my office and apartment.

'That must make you feel pretty terrible. Responsible even.'

I was surprised by the kindness in his voice, though I don't know why. He'd always been kind to me. 'I'm sure this isn't much consolation,' he continued, 'but from what her psychiatrist has told us, I think that she would have gone ahead anyway, even if you had been able to talk to her on the phone.'

'Gone ahead?'

'I think that the phone calls were most likely cries for help. But that doesn't mean anyone could have helped her, even her close family.'

'She needed help because she was being threatened.'

'She felt like that, certainly. But in the light of all the other facts, the phone calls don't change our opinion that she committed suicide.'

'I would like to see a copy of the post-mortem report.'

'Are you sure you want to put yourself through that? I have given you the basic findings and-'

'I have every right to read the report.'

'Of course. But I'm worried you're going to find it very distressing.'

'That should be my decision, don't you think?'

Besides, I had seen your body being taken out of a derelict toilets building in a body bag and after that experience I thought I would find 'distressing' a relatively easy adjective to live with. Reluctantly, DS Finborough said he'd ask the coroner's office to send me a copy.

As I put down the phone I saw Todd looking at me. 'What exactly are you hoping to achieve here?' And in the words 'exactly' and 'here' I heard the pettiness of our relations.h.i.+p. We had been united by superficial tendrils of the small and the mundane, but the enormous fact of your death was ripping each fragile connection. I said I had to go to St Anne's, relieved to have an excuse to leave the flat and an argument I wasn't yet ready to have.

Mr Wright turns to a box file in front of him, one of many bulky files, all numbered with some code I have yet to crack, but marked in large scruffy handwriting 'Beatrice Hemming'. I like the personal touch of the scruffy writing alongside the numbers; it makes me think of all the people behind the scenes in the production of justice. Someone wrote my name on the files; maybe it's the same person who will type up the tape that is whirring in the background somewhere like a ma.s.sive mosquito.

'What did you think of DS Finborough at this point?' asks Mr Wright.

'That he was intelligent and kind. And my frustration was that I could understand why Tess's phone calls to me could be interpreted as "cries for help".'

'You said you then went to St Anne's Hospital?'

'Yes. I wanted to organise her baby to be buried with her.'

I didn't just owe you justice but also the funeral that you would want.

I'd phoned the hospital at 6.30 a.m. that morning and a sympathetic woman doctor had taken my call, unperturbed by how early it was. She suggested that I came in when they 'opened for business' later that morning.

As I drove to the hospital I put my phone onto hands-free and called Father Peter, Mum's new parish priest, who would be conducting your funeral. I had vague memories from first communion cla.s.ses of suicide being a sin ('Do not pa.s.s Go! Do not collect 200! Go straight to h.e.l.l!). I started off defensively aggressive. 'Everyone thinks that Tess committed suicide. I don't. But even if she had she shouldn't be judged for that.' I didn't give Father Peter s.p.a.ce for a comeback. 'And her baby should be buried with her. There shouldn't be any judgements made about her.'

'We don't bury them at crossroads any more, I promise you,' replied Father Peter. 'And of course her baby should be with her.' Despite the gentleness in his voice I remained suspicious.

'Did Mum tell you that she wasn't married?' I asked.

'Nor was Mary.'

I was totally thrown, unsure if it was it a joke. 'True,' I replied. 'But she was, well, a virgin. And the mother of G.o.d.'

I heard him laughing. It was the first time someone had laughed at me since you'd died.

'My job isn't to go around judging people. Priests are meant to teach love and forgiveness. That to me is the essence of being a Christian. And trying to find that love and forgiveness in ourselves and others every day should be a challenge that we want to achieve.'

Before you died I'd have found his speech in poor taste; the Big Things are embarra.s.sing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturist style of conversation. Let's strip it all down to what matters. Let's have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.

'Do you want to talk through the service?' he asked.

'No. I'm leaving that up to Mum. She said she'd like to.'

Had she? Or had I just wanted to hear that when she said she'd do it?

'Anything you'd like to add?' he asked.

'The truth is I don't really want her buried at all. Tess was a free spirit. I know that's a cliche but I can't think of another way of explaining her to you. I don't mean that she was untrammelled by convention, although that's true, it's that when I think of her now she's up in the sky, soaring. Her element is air not earth. And I can't bear the idea of putting her under the ground.'

It was the first time I'd talked about you like this with someone else. The words came from a strata of thought many layers down from the surface ones that are usually sc.r.a.ped off and spoken. I suppose that's what priests are privy to all the time, accessing the deep thoughts where faith, if it exists, can be found. Father Peter was silent but I knew he was listening, and driving past a Tesco local supermarket I continued our incongruous conversation, 'I hadn't understood funeral pyres before, but now I do. It's ghastly to burn someone you love but watching the smoke going into the sky, I think that's rather beautiful now. And I wish Tess could be up in the sky. Somewhere with colour and light and air.'

'I understand. We can't offer you a pyre I'm afraid. But maybe you and your mother should think about a cremation?' There was lightness in his tone that I liked. I supposed that death and burial were an everyday part of his job and, although not disrespectful, he wasn't going to allow them to edit his conversational flow.

'I thought you weren't allowed a cremation if you're Catholic? Mum said the church thought it was pagan.'

'They did. Once upon a time. But not any more. As long as you still believe in the resurrection of the body.'

'I wish.' I said, hoping to sound light too, but instead I sounded desperate.

'Why don't you think about it further? Ring me when you've decided, or even if you haven't and just want to talk about it.'

'Yes. Thank you.'

As I parked the hire car in the hospital's underground car park I thought about taking your ashes to Scotland, to a mountain with purple heather and yellow gorse, climbing up into the grey skies above the first level of cloud and in the cold clean air scattering you to the winds. But I knew Mum would never allow a cremation.