Sister Read online

  “Thousands of children used to go blind because of a lack of vitamin A in their diet. But now with the new rice they’re going to be fine.”

  For a moment I stopped thinking about the logo.

  “Children are going to see because of the yellow in a daffodil.”

  I think it was the fact that a color could save sight that you found so miraculously appropriate. I smiled back at Amias and I think in that moment we both remembered you in exactly the same way: your enthusiasm for life, for its myriad possibilities, for its daily miracles.

  My vision is returning to normal again, the darkness transmuting into light. I am glad for the faulty electric light that can’t be turned off and the spring sunshine pouring in through the overly large window. I see Mr. Wright looking at me with concern.

  “You’re very pale.”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “We’re going to have to stop there. I have a meeting to get to.”

  Maybe he does, but it’s more likely he’s being considerate.

  Mr. Wright knows that I am ill, and I think it must be on his orders that his secretary makes sure I always have mineral water, and why he is drawing our session to an early close today. He is sensitive enough to understand that I don’t want to talk about my physical problems, not yet, not till I have to.

  You’d already picked up that I’m unwell, hadn’t you? And you wondered why I didn’t tell you more. You must have thought it ludicrous yesterday when I said a glass of wine at lunchtime could make me black out. I wasn’t trying to trick you. I just didn’t want to admit, to myself, my body’s frailties. Because I need to be strong to get through this statement. And I must get through it.

  You want to know what’s made me ill, I know, and I will tell you when we get to that point in the story, the point when your story becomes mine too. Until then I will try not to think about the cause, because my thoughts, cowards that they are, turn tail and flee from it.

  Music blaring interrupts our one-way conversation. I am near our flat and through the uncurtained window I see Kasia dancing to her Golden Hits of the 70s CD. She spots me and appears moments later at the front door. She takes hold of my arm and doesn’t even let me take my coat off before trying to make me dance too. She always does this, actually, “Dancing very good for body.” But today, incapable of dancing, I make up an excuse, then sit on the sofa and watch. As she dances, face beaming and sweating, laughing that the baby loves it, she seems so blithely unaware of the problems that she will face being an unemployed, Polish, single mother.

  Upstairs, Amias is banging his foot on our ceiling in time to the music. The first time he did it I thought he was asking us to keep the noise down. But he enjoys it. He says it was so quiet before Kasia came to stay. I finally persuade a breathless Kasia to stop dancing and eat something with me.

  While Kasia watches TV, I give Pudding a bowl of cat food, then take a watering can into your back garden, leaving the door slightly ajar so I can see. It’s starting to get dark and cold, the spring sunshine not strong enough to heat the air for long into evening. Over the fence, I see that next door your neighbors use the same outside area to house three trash cans. As I water the dead plants and bare earth, I wonder as usual why I’m doing this. Your trash-can neighbors must think I’m absurd. I think I’m absurd. Suddenly, like a magician’s sleight of hand, I see tiny green shoots in the dead twigs. I feel a surge of excitement and astonishment. I open the kitchen door wide, lighting the tiny garden. All the plants that were dead have the same tiny, bright-green shoots growing out of them. Farther away, in the gray soil, is a cluster of dark-red leaves, a peony that will flower in all its exuberant beauty again this summer.

  I finally understand yours and Mum’s passion for gardening. It is seasonally miraculous. All that health and growth and new life and renewal. No wonder politicians and religions hijack green shoots and imagery of spring for themselves. This evening I, too, exploit the image for my own ends and allow myself to hope that death may not be final after all, that somewhere, as in Leo’s beloved Narnia books, there is a heaven where the white witch is dead and the statues have life breathed back into them. Tonight it doesn’t seem quite so inconceivable.

  9

  Friday

  Although late, I am walking slowly to the CPS offices. There are three things that I find particularly hard in the telling of this story. I’ve done the first, finding your body, and what’s coming up is next. It sounds trivial, a bill, that’s all, but its effect was devastating. As I dawdle, I hear Mum’s voice telling me that it’s already ten to nine, we’re going to be late, Come on, Beatrice. Then you whiz past on your bike, book bag looped over a handlebar, eyes exhilarated, with pedestrians smiling at you as you whirred past them, literally creating a breath of fresh air. We haven’t got all day, Beatrice. But you knew that we had and were seizing it moment by moment.

  I reach Mr. Wright’s office, and not commenting on my late arrival, he hands me a Styrofoam cup of coffee, which he must have bought from the dispenser by the lift. I am grateful for his thoughtfulness, and know that a tiny part of my reluctance to tell him the next episode in the story is because I don’t want him to think badly of me.

  Todd and I sat at your Formica table, a pile of your post in front of us. I found the task of sorting out your paperwork oddly soothing. I’ve always made lists, and your pile of post represented an easily achievable line of ticks. We started with the red urgent reminders, then worked our way down to the less urgent bills. Like me, Todd is adept at the bureaucracy of life, and as we worked companionably together, I felt connected to him for the first time since he’d arrived in London. I remembered why we were together and how the small everyday things formed a bridge between us. It was a quotidian relationship based on practical details rather than passion, but I still valued its small-scale connections. Todd went to talk to Amias about the “tenancy agreement” despite my saying that I doubted there was such a thing. He pointed out, sensibly I thought, that we wouldn’t know unless we asked him.

  The door closed behind him and I opened the next bill. I was feeling the most relaxed since you’d died. I could almost imagine making a cup of coffee as I worked, switching on Radio 4. I had a flicker of normality and in that brief moment could envisage a time without bereavement.

  “I got out my credit card to pay her phone bill. Since she’d lost her mobile, I’d paid the landline one every month. It was my birthday present to her and she said it was too generous, but it was for my benefit too.”

  I told you I wanted to make sure that you could phone me, and talk to me as long as you wanted to without worrying about the bill. What I didn’t tell you is that I needed to make sure that if I wanted to ring you, your phone wouldn’t have been disconnected.

  “This bill was larger than in previous months. It was itemized so I decided to check it.” My words are slower, dawdling. “I saw that she’d phoned my mobile on the twenty-first of January. The call was at one p.m. her time, eight a.m. New York time, so I would have been in the subway getting to work. I don’t know why there were even a few seconds of connection.” I must do this all in one go, no pausing, or I won’t be able to start again. “It was the day she had Xavier. She must have phoned me when she went into labor.”

  I break off for just a moment, not looking at Mr. Wright’s face, then continue, “Her next call to me was at nine p.m. her time, four p.m. New York time.”

  “Eight hours later. Why do you think there was such a long gap?”

  “She didn’t have a mobile, so once she left her flat to go to the hospital, it would have been hard for her to ring me. Besides, it wouldn’t have been urgent. I mean, I wouldn’t have had time to get to her and be with her for the birth.”

  My voice becomes so quiet that Mr. Wright has to bend toward me to hear.

  “The second call must have been when she got home from the hospital. She was ringing me to tell me about Xavier. The call lasted twelve minutes and twenty seconds.”

>   “What did she say?” he asks.

  My mouth is suddenly dry. I don’t have the saliva needed to talk. I take a sip of cold coffee, but my mouth still feels parched.

  “I didn’t talk to her.”

  “You were probably out of the office, darling. Or stuck in a meeting,” said Todd. He’d come back from Amias’s, full of incredulity about your paying your rent in paintings, to find me sobbing.

  “No, I was there.”

  I’d got back to my office from a longer-than-expected briefing to the design department. I vaguely remembered Trish saying that you were holding for me and my boss wanted to see me. I asked her to tell you I’d call you back. I think I made a note on a Post-it and stuck it on my computer as I left. Maybe that’s why I forgot, because I’d written it down and didn’t need to hold it my head. But there are no excuses. None at all.

  “I didn’t take her call and I forgot to phone her back.” My voice sounded small with shame.

  “The baby was three weeks early; you couldn’t possibly have foreseen that.”

  But I should have foreseen that.

  “And the twenty-first of January, that was the day you were given your promotion,” Todd continued. “So of course you had your mind on other things.” He sounded almost jocular. He had single-handedly found me an excuse.

  “How could I have forgotten?”

  “She didn’t say it was important. She didn’t even leave you a message.”

  Exonerating me meant putting the responsibility onto you.

  “She shouldn’t have had to say it was important. And what message could she have left with a secretary? That her baby was dead?”

  I’d snapped at him, trying to shift a little guilt his way. But of course the guilt is mine alone, not for sharing.

  “Then you went to Maine?” asks Mr. Wright.

  “Yes, a last-minute thing, just for a few days. And her baby wasn’t due for three weeks.” I despise myself for this pathetic attempt to save face. “Her bill showed that the day before she died and the morning of her death she phoned my office and apartment fifteen times.”

  I saw the column of numbers, all mine, and each was an abandonment of you, indicting me again and again and again.

  “Her calls to my apartment lasted for a few seconds.”

  Just until your call was put through to voice mail. 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 assumed 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.

  “God 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’d 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 glass 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 assumed 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 realize that you weren’t able to phone me and tell me? Why did I focus on your not turning to me rather than realizing it was I 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’d 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 glass 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 glass of water and he switches on the cassette 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 flashlight. 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 platitudes 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 humor 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 a.m. I picked up the phone and dialed 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 entitled to a copy of the postmortem report. There was a whole load of paperwork that PC Vernon gave me, and there was a leaflet about it.” I had been too passive, too accepting of information I had been given.

  “Darling, you’ll just be wasting everyone’s time.”