GREGORY HALL

A SLEEP

AND A

FORGETTING

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

June’s

ONE

That Saturday, just as Catriona Turville had been about to leave the house for her usual morning run, the postman delivered her sister Flora’s suicide note.

As she sat on the bottom tread of the staircase in her navy-blue tracksuit, the bright early Spring sunlight shining through the stained-glass panel of the front door and splashing the encaustic tiles of the hall floor with bars and blotches of red and blue, she wondered, while tying the laces of her new, alarmingly white trainers, how long their pristine cleanliness would survive the dog shit which lay in whorls like enormous worm-casts half-hidden by the long grass of the park, and speculated whether the overweight middle-aged man who had been sweating and panting over the exact same route at the exact same time rather too coincidentally for the previous three days, and who had appeared to gaze longingly after her as she effortlessly outpaced him, would get around either to speaking to her or assaulting her, when there was the clatter of heavy-shod feet on the tiled front path, a shadow behind the glass, and the white envelope fluttered through the letter box on to the coir mat.

She had had no premonition of disaster. She unhurriedly picked up the envelope. Recognising the sender from the small, precise handwriting of the address, she felt nothing other than mild curiosity. Her sister rarely if ever wrote letters. But there could be nothing bad, as otherwise Flora would surely have phoned. The telephone was her preferred method of communication. She phoned Catriona at least twice a week, usually for quite long conversations.

Catriona sat down at the kitchen table to read the letter, intrigued as to what news it could be that needed to be communicated in this manner, and quite glad of a genuine excuse to delay her departure and thereby upset the timetable of her fat fellow jogger.

Minutes later, the trivial concerns and inconveniences of London living brutally thrust back to the far distant periphery of her mental universe by the cataclysmic impact of the news, her body numb, she sat staring at the sheets of writing-paper in her hands, the warm, comfortable room at that moment become as cold and alien as one of the moons of Saturn.

She read the letter yet again, its words already imprinted on her memory.

The Old Mill

Ewescombe Lane,

Owlbury

Glos.

Friday morning

My dearest Cat,

There is no gentle way to tell you what I have decided to do directly I return from posting this letter. It will hurt you as it will hurt everyone I love and who loves me. By the time you receive this letter, the sister you know and love will be dead.

I’ve often thought of killing myself but I’ve never had the courage. But now I have found the drug to put an end to my suffering and to give me peace. Now I am afraid only of the loss of the dear faces which have been the only things that have kept me sane all these years.

I love you, you must know that. And I know you love me. But somehow, that love has never been enough to exorcise the ghosts of the past. Terrible things have happened to us, the memories of which are with us every waking moment and in our dreams, though no nightmare could ever be as bad as the reality.

We have never before spoken of such things, have we? They have spread their darkness over us so thickly that no light that we could generate would pierce it. Perhaps if we had talked, really talked about what happened all those years ago, things might have been different. But we never did and now we never shall.

I’m not blaming you, dearest Cat. Your remedy is to endure the unendurable in solitude, and by your power of mind to endeavour to forget the unforgettable. But I have never had your strength. I’ve decided I can’t go on any longer waking every day to the dreadful things inside my head.

What I am about to do may seem weak to you, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. I’m about to do the strongest thing I’ve done, to seize the remedy for my agony.

Please come directly you receive this. You must be here to help my darling Charlotte. I need you to use your strength for her.

I hope it’s going to be like one of those hospital anaesthetics where everything suddenly blanks out like a TV screen, except that this time there won’t be any nurse to say, ‘Welcome back, sweetheart’, a micro-second later.

I’ve chosen this weekend because it’s half-term. Bill is away in the States at a conference and won’t be back before Wednesday. Charlotte has gone to a study centre in Devon with her school for the entire week.

Now, you must destroy this letter and never tell anyone you received it. Charlotte must never know the secret of our past. It has destroyed our lives. It must not destroy hers.

Goodbye, my dear. As your old Wordsworth says, ‘We must grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.’

Love, hugs and kisses, my beloved, from your very dearest little sister Flora.

The words of Flora’s letter hammered inside her skull as if they were physical blows. For a hideous moment, like a storm-tossed lake of black polluted water spilling over the edge of a crumbling dam, those terrible memories to which Flora referred threatened to sweep away the wall which confined them and flood Catriona’s conscious mind. She stood rigid, her eyes closed, forcing her mind to counter this image, as she had countered many others, as if they were spells cast by a magician, battling to keep that filthy tide from engulfing her. Then she was breathing easily. The water in the lake was aquamarine, the sun was shining through the clouds and the massive curve of white concrete, springing majestically from side to side of the rocky valley, was unbreached.

Flora was right. That was how she tried to bear the unbearable. By the constant effort of forgetting. By struggling with her memories in solitude and in silence. And in that silence, she had always assumed that for Flora, the demons had been less tormenting. Now it was clear that she had been wrong. Dreadfully, unforgivably wrong. And now it was too late.

But was it? Wasn’t the threat of suicide sometimes a way of forcing hidden matters into the light? Had Flora indeed travelled to the undiscovered country? Would she, could she have done that? What if she had lost her nerve at the last moment? Or what if she hadn’t, by accident or by subconscious design, taken enough pills? Maybe she was even now waking up, groggy and sick? Please, let it be so! Let it not be too late to act!

Catriona grabbed the kitchen phone off its hook and jabbed out her sister’s number. It rang, and for a few glorious seconds, she imagined a drowsy arm reaching out at the other end, and then a fuddled voice saying, ‘Who’s that?’ and Catriona replying, ‘It’s me, silly. What do you think you’re playing at?’

The ringing tone went on and on. There were several extensions in Flora’s house and they would be chirping in unison like an avian chorus in the morning silence. After five minutes she gave up. She had done it. That was the only logical conclusion to draw from the silence. Flora alive would not have allowed that dreadful letter to arrive without warning to unleash its appalling message. She would surely have called, or she would have come to London. At the very least she would have answered the phone.

Almost a day had elapsed since she would have taken the pills. More than enough time to ensure that they would do their job. That was why she had used a letter. To avoid any possibility that Catriona would arrive too soon. Flora would have done her homework on how many she would need to take, and then added a few more just to make sure. From the tone of the final paragraphs of that terrible letter, business-like, organised, efficient, there had been no doubt she had been in her usual state of mind. In that mood, if Flora had determined to do something, she would do it.

The letter had not, though, merely been a farewell. It had been a warning and an injunction. No one must know their secret. More than that, no one must ever know or suspect that there was a secret. The young life of Flora’s child must not be blighted further than it must inevitably be by loss and grief. The reason for Flora’s death must remain a mystery. But not only for Charlotte’s sake. For Catriona’s too.

Catriona laid the letter’s three white sheets in the empty grate and struck a match. The thin paper blazed briefly. The loops and curls of Flora’s handwriting were still dark against the grey flakes of ash when she crushed them to fragments.

It was time to answer her sister’s summons. She collected her car key from the hook by the bulletin board alongside the phone, and, pausing only to engage in a hurried search for her shoulder bag, which had unaccountably found its way into the bathroom, and to grab a charcoal grey shower-proof jacket from the bentwood coat-stand in the hall, went out into the agonising brightness of the morning.

At the time she received her sister’s letter, Catriona Turville was thirty-eight years old. For the previous five years, she had been the Bloomsbury Professor of English Literature at London University’s Warbeck College.

She had commenced her climb to this lofty academic peak at the Camden High School for Girls, where she had been by a long way the most brilliant pupil of her year. Her achievements at the school were, however, not merely intellectual. She had played sports and games with skill and a fierce determination to win, although this did not always make her popular, since her need to perform as an individual frequently took precedence over that of the team. At two sports in particular, she was outstanding: in judo, she had been the most skilful and aggressive student the school had ever had; on the running track she had had no equal. On numerous occasions, there had been attempts to persuade her to compete at a higher level, but she had disdained the blandishments. ‘The only person I’m running for is myself,’ she replied. Some more perceptive observers might have said that it was from herself that this austere, serious girl was running, but no one had had the courage or the honesty to point this out. Besides, she knew it already.

She had crowned her career by winning a scholarship to St Hilda’s College, Oxford. But it was there that the shadow side of this formidable young woman became evident. Although there were many at Oxford, themselves wealthy or well-connected or merely brilliant, who were fascinated and awed by her, who would gladly have befriended her, or borne her like a trophy to ball or country-house party, or bedded her, she made no close friends even amongst her own sex, and had no lovers, male or female. At some point in a burgeoning relationship, she would shy away, like a wild animal that is suddenly aware it has been tempted to venture too far out of its known territory. Then she could turn a hurtfully cold and indifferent face to someone with whom only the previous day she had seemed to be verging on intimacy.

Intellectually, however, she had no peer. She had continued to dazzle her tutors both with the awesome concision and maturity of her written papers, and with the calm assurance of her bearing. She gained a starred first, the most brilliant of her year. Three more years at Oxford saw her gain her doctorate – on Coleridge and the German Metaphysicians – then, despite the flood of offers to remain, she left the dreaming spires.

Wholly uninterested in doing what others of her generation called travelling – or, as she saw it, the pointless infliction of themselves on the parts of the globe that had already been thoroughly ravaged by colonialism and by its successor, foreign aid – she did nevertheless wish to see something of some other world than that bounded by the High and the Banbury Road. She enrolled as a post-doctoral student at McGill University, taught seminars, which she enjoyed, following which she was offered an assistant professorship. She had liked Canada and the Canadians, but after three years it had seemed increasingly artificial to be teaching English nineteenth-century literature in the context of a country whose language, landscape and traditions were so different.

Offered a number of appointments on her return, she had accepted a readership in the English department at Warbeck, and when one of the two Chairs fell vacant some years later, she had been the natural successor. In addition to an unusually heavy teaching commitment, which she had insisted on maintaining in addition to her departmental duties, she had produced several well-received books, as well as a regular stream of articles and reviews in learned journals. The pinnacle of her professional career to date had been the commission she had received to produce the first complete edition of Wordsworth’s poems to have the benefit of the most modern biographical and textual discoveries. The Grasmere Edition, which many lesser minds would have regarded as a lifetime’s work, was proceeding with quite extraordinary speed for such a vast undertaking.

Her colleagues in the senior common room were not a little jealous of her combination of intellect and energy. Workaholism is not particularly common in the Arts faculties of institutions of higher learning, where a high rate of production is often regarded as shallow self-advancement. But no one who knew Catriona Turville’s work could accuse her of being unscholarly, quite the reverse, and she was also unfailingly generous in the time she would spend assisting a colleague.

Personally, she was regarded as an enigma. In the prime of life, tall, slim and extremely fit, with a mass of jet-black hair surrounding a pale, classically featured face, attractive, even beautiful, she had never been known to have a sexual relationship, or even an intimate friendship with anyone of either sex. She never spoke of her private life, never referred to any personal tastes or preferences for anything other than authors and works in her chosen field of expertise, never invited anyone to her house – never, in fact, disclosed her address or even her telephone number to anyone who had not official authority to demand it.

Rumours abounded, of course – some of the most fanciful and fantastic kind – which she did nothing to confirm or deny, maintaining her habitual composure and calm indifference. Such a woman could not fail to be a target for those members of the university who prided themselves on their irresistibility in sexual matters. Over the years, many attempts at the conquest of this formidable woman had been made, but all, like the Knights in Browning’s poem who had ridden to the Dark Tower, had failed ignominiously in their quest.

Owlbury is a village in the Cotswolds, between the endemic shabbiness of Stroud and the despoiled elegance of Cheltenham. Those who like that kind of thing, and there are plenty who do, call it picturesque. The narrow, winding A46 climbs a hill, and becomes an even narrower High Street of gabled, stone houses, their plain facades given austere dignity by the precise fit of the yellow-grey ashlar and the skilful carving of lintels, dripstones, and mullions, their characteristic steeply pitched stone-tiled roofs enlivened as by an Impressionist with splashes of green, yellow, white and orange lichen.

In the centre of this touristic gem is, as might be expected, a parish church, large and imposing, for Owlbury once waxed fat trading the wool of the hugely fleeced sheep known as Cotswold lions that grazed the sloping pastures of the surrounding valleys. St Michael and All Angels has a tall tower, which bears at its summit a gilded weathercock, and on its western front a handsome clock face, below which two quaint figures in the gaudy costume of seventeenth-century men-at-arms strike the hours and the quarters on a bell that hangs between them. It is surrounded by an extensive churchyard, sprinkled with ancient, meticulously clipped yew-trees, in which the rude forefathers of the village, unlike the other inhabitants of the High Street, blessedly enjoy their sleep untroubled by the traffic that grinds its way along on the other side of the lychgate by which they were admitted.

Opposite the church stands The Tiger Inn. Its eighteenth-century exterior cloaks a foundation several centuries older. In front there is a cobbled yard, from where on certain days of the calendar the unspeakably posh Beaufort Hunt, in its unique dark blue livery, departs in full pursuit of the uneatable. The rest of the year, the impracticably uneven, heritage-listed surface – ladies in high heels beware! reads a helpful notice – is occupied by wooden benches and tables, which on sunny days are crowded with drinkers and diners.

At this relatively early hour, the pub had not yet opened its doors, and the Saturday influx of tourists had not yet arrived. The few inhabitants who were up and about, and who saw the passage of the white, battered, rust-streaked old-model Ford Fiesta as it roared and rattled along the High Street, might have noted that it was being driven at considerably more than the legal speed limit, but that was hardly unusual in these lawless days. Only those who combined curiosity with acute vision would have observed that the driver was a woman, and that her pale face was wet with tears.

Narrowly avoiding scraping a bumper on the stone gatepost as she made the awkward turning through the open five-barred gate, Catriona screeched the car to halt in a spray of shingle, then, reluctant to move, sat staring at the solid stone building that Flora and Bill had turned from a derelict shell used to store farm machinery into what most people would regard as a highly desirable residence.

Eventually, she roused herself, shouldering the car door, which eventually opened with its usual screeching. She swung her long legs over the sill and stood upright, gazing around her. The sun, blocked until now by the rise of the wooded hillside opposite, was just beginning to shed a few feeble shafts of light onto the stone tiles of the dormer-windowed roof, and the air was damp and cold. From the darkness of the trees to one side of the house came the plashing sound of the brook, which replenished the silver mirror of the millpond, in which fronds of green weed floated, like the long hair of a drowned maiden.

The spare key was in its usual place: under the plant pot on the right-hand side of the oak front door. As she touched the chilly phosphor-bronze, she felt a shudder like a mild electric shock: the metal might be the last point of contact with her sister’s living fingers.

Her feet clattered on the uncarpeted hardwood treads of the open-work staircase. On the beige cord carpeting of the landing, she hesitated, staring at the veneered door panel of what Bill had referred to, half-ironically, mimicking the jargon of the estate agents, as the master bedroom suite. Flora had riposted tartly, ‘Such a pity you have no mistress to share it with.’ Flora always had a nose for the pretentious, and was merciless in mocking it.

Had. Was. How easily she had slipped into the past tense.

She stood at the door listening, holding her own breath, hoping to hear thereby the softer murmur of a breath from within. But not the faintest whisper leaked from the gaps by the jambs. The silence coated the whole interior, as if it had been applied like paint. Finally, she exhaled, and the sound, which might have been a sigh, broke the spell. She pushed open the door, closing her eyes as tightly as she had as a small child, shutting out the imaginary horrors of the dark. But this was broad day, and the horrors were real.

She blinked in the sunshine which was now streaming unobstructed through the open curtains of the dormer window. The bed was in front of her, the bedclothes as brilliantly white as those in a detergent commercial.

At first she thought she had been dazzled, or that her brain had simply refused to acknowledge the message from her eyes. But as she drew nearer, and out of the direct line of the blinding rays, it was evident that she had not been deceived: no blonde head lay in a hollow of the bleached cotton fabric of the pillows. They were freshly plumped up, quite undented. The duvet lay flat and smooth, with no tell-tale hump to indicate a body lay beneath. She nevertheless snatched it aside. The tightly stretched sheet betrayed not a wrinkle of any recent occupancy. The bed was, undeniably, completely empty.

TWO

The house whose location Catriona rarely and reluctantly disclosed was, in fact, situated in a quiet street on the southern slope of Muswell Hill. She had bought it with a mortgage ten years before, when she had returned to England to take up her first job at Warbeck.

After years of student residences and communal living, she had been determined to have a place of her own. She was fed up of having to dodge damp underwear hanging from the shower-rails in shared bathrooms, and tired of rows over the responsibility for chores, damage, and the apportioning of household bills. Most of all, she was utterly sick of the constant presence of other personalities, other egos, and their intrusive interference with her own. God, how pleasant it was to come down in the morning into her own kitchen and not find in it some bleary-eyed fellow, a boyfriend, no doubt – how she hated that juvenile, mealy-mouthed word boyfriend! – slumped at the table over a mug of coffee, the stereo blaring the rock music she hated. How good it was to be able to read a book or a journal without being interrupted or distracted by a flatmate’s inane whining about being in love or not being in love. She was finished with all that.

From the start, she had loved her house, and for several years she had spent every spare moment doing it up. The weekend she had moved in, she had discovered in the hallway the original geometric and encaustic tile floor, quite intact under multiple layers of filthy linoleum. With a thorough cleaning and a lick of polish, the golds, azures, terracottas, blacks and reds had glowed as brightly as they must have done a century before. It had seemed, as she sat back on her heels to admire her handiwork, an omen. Underneath the tacky accretions of hardboard, chipboard, vinyl and laminate was the living form of the original Edwardian house. Its identity was occluded but not destroyed. It was her role to coax it once again into the light.

In the following weeks, she had exultantly hurled into a skip the cheap kitchen cupboards, the tacky DIY-store fitted wardrobes, the nylon shagpile carpets, and the other hideous sixties and seventies rubbish with which the place had been smothered. In the months and years afterwards, she had combed junk shops and reclamation yards in search of replacements for the features that had been destroyed. Every weekend had been spent in overalls and headscarf with almost manic effort: scrubbing, filling, sanding, painting, papering, tiling. She had reinstated fireplaces, matched and repaired plaster cornices, architraves and dado rails. She had hung doors. She had laid York stone paving in place of the cracked concrete that had covered the rear terrace. She had spent hours of frustration supervising slow-moving and sometimes recalcitrant workmen in those things such as plumbing and electrical wiring which she had not the skill or knowledge to tackle herself.

Such work is never finished. There were some little corners that still needed attention. Some larger items – a really nice Welsh dresser, for example – she had not yet been able to afford. And some of what she had done in the beginning itself needed freshening or retouching. But a veritable transformation had undoubtedly been achieved, through imagination and ingenuity and good taste and sheer hard work. She admitted that her house would never be an architectural masterpiece, but at least she now inhabited a place that was more true to its essential nature than when she had acquired it. But in making it something of what it had once been, she had not wanted simply to recreate some historically accurate but sterile original, in the manner of a museum-piece. Although she read books and magazines on house restoration and decor avidly, Catriona was not a purist or a sentimentalist in her refurbishments. There was no question but that her house was one occupied by a woman born towards the end of the twentieth century, who embraced many of that century’s most significant cultural artefacts. Her tastes and her habits, not those of some long-dead Edwardian, animated it. Her identity and personality permeated it. The house had regained its own dignity, but at the same time, in every way, it reflected its owner’s sense of her own self.

Sometimes, of an evening, she would kneel on the hearthrug in front of the beautiful cast-iron fireplace in her sitting room, watching the glow of the coke in the grate, and reflecting on the way she and her house had developed together, the process by which their relationship had grown and deepened over the years. Every square centimetre of its surface was known to her, as intimately as some might know the body of a lover. Every night-time creak of floorboards, every rattle of a sash, every moan of wind in the chimney, every gurgle or vibration of pipework were the familiar marks of the house’s physical presence. It was at these times that her mind seemed in suspension, about to dissolve in some greater whole, and a soft warm blanket of peace seemed to be laid upon her shoulders by some beneficent household deity.

On the day after she had received her sister’s letter and made the desperate journey to Gloucestershire, as she sat in the kitchen of her house, her half-eaten breakfast toast and a mug of cold coffee before her on the pine table, Catriona took no such heady pleasure from her surroundings. The early Sunday morning sun streamed in through the French windows, casting on the polished floorboards the nodding shadows of the Albertina roses that climbed the rear wall and, in the garden beyond, a quartet of chaffinches squabbled cheerfully around the bird feeder. These were sights and sounds that usually elevated her spirits and reminded her of the childlike joy in the commonplace so well imitated by Wordsworth:

The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure,

But the least motion which they made,

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

This was normally her favourite time of the day, but for all the brightness of the morning, to her it might have been as adust and dead as a field of newly cooled lava.

Flora’s letter had exploded like a terrorist car-bomb in a city street. The familiar shapes of buildings were reduced to windowless, blasted hulks. And, as the smoke gradually cleared, there was the sound of screaming, a dreadful abandoned wailing that seemed as though it would go on for ever.

Like a member of the emergency services, she had rushed to Owlbury to perform the duty with which Flora had entrusted her: to bury the dead and comfort the living. But now she was herself a confused and bewildered bystander, her ears ringing, her senses numbed, groping in a void. How could she bring aid and comfort, when she did not know the name of the grief? She had gone prepared for a funeral. Should she rather erect a cenotaph? Where, where, where was Flora? Had she taken fright and run away? Would she eventually return? Why had she then not contacted her sister to tell her of her change of heart? Why had she left Catriona to suffer the hell of receiving the letter? Catriona’s head throbbed with the possibilities and the responsibilities heaped upon her.

In the midst of her hurt and distress, like a chronometer unperturbedly continuing to tick as a storm raged around the vessel that carried it, with ceaseless accuracy providing the data that located it on the trackless ocean, the logic centre of her brain continued to function. It had been that highly polished, reliable instrument – the mechanism that had enabled her effortlessly to surmount every scholastic hurdle from school through to university, and to take the glittering academic prizes beyond – which had taken over the previous day, when she stood stunned, staring down at the spotless whiteness of her sister’s bed, in the calm order of Flora’s bedroom.

She had almost fainted. The room had blurred as she pitched forward. Putting out a hand to the bedside table to steady herself, she was dimly aware of the thud as the bedside lamp fell over and onto the floor. Recovering herself, she stared at the room. Flora was not in the bed, the logic machine told her, therefore she must be somewhere else. Somewhere, in this room, in this house, will be a clue as to where that place is. Furthermore, if she had indeed abandoned her attempt at suicide, if she had thought better of it and gone away to reflect, then she would have needed clothes to wear, and the more she had taken, the longer she would have intended to stay away.

Opposite the bed was a range of built-in glazed wardrobes, the cottage panes obscured by pleated chintz drapes within. She yanked open the doors, pair by pair. Flora loved fashion and had so many things. Within, there were rows and rows of garments – skirts, dresses, blouses, tops, slacks – on proper wooden hangers. Flora disdained the wire type, the gift of inferior dry-cleaners, with which her sister was content. There were shelves on which sweaters were neatly folded, racks on which shoes were precisely arranged. The last cupboard was Bill’s: suits and shirts, jeans and trousers in no particular order, shelves crammed with bundled jerseys, and, on the floor, a jumble of shoes, trainers, tennis rackets, cricket bats and golf clubs.

Catriona gazed helplessly at Flora’s open cupboards. There were no obvious gaps in the ranks. She had no idea what might be missing, and hence what her sister might be wearing. Bill would certainly not have a clue. Charlotte might remember some of her mother’s more striking things. But the last thing, surely, that Flora would have gone off in – if she had indeed done such a thing – would have been a glamorous outfit?

One by one, Catriona pulled open the drawers of the tallboy. As she did so, her action released faint traces of Flora’s perfume, which hung like a ghostly presence in the still, warm air of the immaculate bedroom. Arranged as if in descending physical order, there were silk scarves, carefully folded bras, neat piles of pants, tights and socks. There was no sign that a substantial number of items had been removed, but there was, as with the clothing, no certain way of finding what, if anything, had been taken. Would even Flora have known how many pairs of knickers she owned?

On the dressing table, cosmetics and scents were tidily arranged, as were the old fashioned silver-backed brushes and mirror which had been their maternal grandmother’s.

Nowhere was there a note – a hint, even – that anything dreadful might have happened or been contemplated here. The whole room spoke of the order in which Flora habitually lived her life. There were no nighties thrown carelessly over the backs of chairs, no crumpled underwear hanging from half-opened drawers, no magazines and newspapers strewn over the floor, no higgledy-piggledy pile of unread and half-read books teetering on the bedside table. The only note of chaos, the fallen lamp, had been imported by Catriona.

Hearing in her mind her sister’s click of disapproval, Catriona bent to pick it up and set it back in place.

Then suddenly she froze, staring at the empty top shelf of the bedside cabinet. Flora’s existence depended on order, and the fundamental principle of order, as she never ceased to remind her disorganised sister, was that one should know at any given time where one kept one’s important things.

The most important thing for Flora was her bag. Her plain, soft black leather shoulder bag was kept on or by her person at all times. Even in the house she carried it from room to room as if, Catriona sneered, it were the U.S. president’s legendary briefcase containing the codes to launch a nuclear war. In turn, Flora scoffed at her sister’s habit of leaving her own handbag hither and yon, and having – at least twice a day – to engage in a frantic search for it or the items it contained. Its location, along with the location of umbrellas, handkerchiefs, pens and keys were among the few things which Catriona could never remember.

When Flora was in bed, the bag, repository of her information and memory systems, remained in its allotted place on the top shelf of her bedside cabinet, so that when she woke up she had only to stretch out a hand immediately to access her bulging Filofax; change purse; wallet containing never less than one hundred pounds in twenties, tens and fives; credit cards; cheque book; paying-in book; building society pass book; house keys; car keys … Car keys!

She ran down the stairs, yanked open the front door, and, without stopping to close it, charged across the shingle to the detached stone double garage. The up-and-over door was locked. Cursing she ran back into the house, to the board in the kitchen where the spare keys lived. She grabbed the bunch neatly labelled ‘Garage’ and hurtled back to the pale green metal door. She inserted the small chromed key and twisted it in the lock. There was a squealing sound mixed with a metallic rumble as the steel panel began its ascent.

The smell that drifted out as the door opened was of damp concrete mixed with faint traces of oil and petrol. There was none of the scent she had feared, the acrid reek of exhaust gas. Within, to one side, stood a red VW Golf, two years old, and as shining clean as you would expect Flora’s car to be.

She dashed over to it and wrenched at the driver’s door. It was locked. Her head thrust close to the spotless glass of the side window. She could see, with overwhelming relief, that the interior was completely empty.

Other than the car, the garage contained a ride-on motor mower, three bicycles leaning against the rear wall, and a slotted metal shelf unit containing tins of paint, a plastic container of motor oil and a small metal tool box. Bill was not the type for hobbies, and even here Flora had been a dedicated enemy of clutter. Catriona thought of the garage which gave on to the lane at the back of her own house. An ancient rickety affair of timber and corrugated iron, it was stuffed from floor to ceiling with junk. Her car lived on the street.

She had returned to the house relieved but still confused. Wherever Flora had gone, she had not taken her car, and could not therefore be traced by reference to it. The cavernous spaces of the Old Mill’s principal rooms were as equally, blandly uninformative as to the fate of its chatelaine.

In the kitchen, sparkling granite work-surfaces, gleaming high-tech laminate cupboards up to the ceiling and shiny stainless steel appliances reflected only Catriona’s own pale, puzzled, anxious features. There were no unwashed pots. No jars or packets left out. The dishwasher was empty. The rubbish bin contained only a clean plastic liner. In anyone else, Catriona for instance, this absence of clutter and detritus might have seemed abnormal, but for Flora, this hospital-like functionalism was quite usual. Catriona had often joked with her sister that the Old Mill was the only place where one might literally eat one’s dinner off the floor.

Even beside the huge American fridge-freezer, at the table that Flora used as a sort of housekeeper’s desk, where there was a cordless telephone and a pin-board on the wall, there was no sign of anything other than routine domesticity. The message pad was blank. The cards stuck on the board were of tradesmen and local services. There were typed lists of numbers of friends and acquaintances. A copy of Charlotte’s lesson and homework timetable. A school bus schedule. Exactly what one could find in any bourgeois household anywhere in the country.

The other downstairs rooms – the vast, double-height, galleried sitting room; the dining room with its antique mahogany table at which Flora and Bill had given their elaborate dinner parties; Bill’s study with its bookshelves containing weighty scientific tomes, series of periodicals and digests, its shut-down computer and the satellite receiver and television on which Bill could watch sport from round the world, round the clock – they were also all clean, tidy, and orderly.

Only in Charlotte’s dormer-windowed bedroom on the top floor had there been anything approaching disorder. But even there, amidst the spilled stacks of CDs and the books scattered on the floor, the daughter was enough like her mother for it to show far more than in most girls her age. The single bed was neatly made. Her soft toys stared down in an orderly row from the top of the tallboy. The books on the shelves were in alphabetical order by author. On her desk, pens and crayons were gathered together in a jar. Her computer had been shut down. Underneath the combined TV and VCR stood a labelled row of videotapes.

It had been only as she stood in the doorway of this room – full of the expensive tools of modern materialist culture, yet redolent of that vulnerable innocence which even the most outwardly mature and sophisticated child carries at their heart – that Catriona’s tears began to flow. How, if the worst had happened, could she break it to Charlotte? Would she ever recover from such a blow? Desperately she had hoped that Flora would return, that this was only a passing episode.

In that hope there was some justification. The only clue as to Flora’s intentions that had emerged from Catriona’s search of the Old Mill was that Flora appeared to have taken her handbag. The dead need no luggage. If Flora had walked out of her house, in whatever clothes she stood up in, intending to go through with her suicide, but wishing to end her life in the countryside she loved, perhaps even with the fatal drug at that moment coursing through her veins, then surely even she would have regarded herself as free from the need to burden herself with earthly possessions. She could have gone without even a handful of coins to pay the ferryman across the infernal river. She would not have needed her handbag.

As she stood in the hall, ready to leave, Catriona stared up into the shadows where the staircase climbed. Aloud, she begged: ‘Please, Flora. Wherever you are. Please come home.’ But the silent empty house had absorbed her words, returning not the faintest echo.

For four days, she went about her normal life. The iron discipline ineluctably imposed by her rational nature caused her to function with her usual efficiency, and in fact she took a kind of pleasure in her ability to subdue the turbulence of her feelings beneath a mask of confidence. Morning, afternoon and evening, on every one of those days, she had telephoned the Gloucestershire number in case Flora should have returned. Every morning she had waited, in excruciating suspense, for the arrival of the post. Every evening, the first thing she rushed to do when she got back home was to check her answering machine.

For four days of grief and bitterness, she had considered what to do. Should she get in touch with Bill at his conference? If so, what should she tell him? The truth?

And what was that? Flora had threatened suicide, no, had stated in so many words how and when she was going to kill herself. That much her letter made plain. But then he would inevitably want to know about the contents of the letter, about Flora’s reasons for taking this extreme step, reasons about which hitherto he knew nothing. She could not, would not explain those to him. Whether to do that had been Flora’s choice, and she had chosen not to share her past – and thus her sister’s past – with the man with whom she shared her life, sparing him the anguish and the burden of that knowledge. Catriona, who shared her life with no one, had never been faced with that decision, had determined never to be faced with it. She could certainly never contemplate breaching a twenty-four-year wall of silence to Bill of all people, a man to whom she was not in the least close, whom she neither liked, nor trusted.

But the truth was also that there was as yet no body. And without a body there could have been no suicide. And without a suicide, there could only be an absence. But what was the nature of that absence? Had Flora thought better of what she had intended and simply gone away in distress? Would she return in a manner that made it clear that the idea of suicide was merely an episode, a fugue that had passed? In that event, the content of the letter was in the nature of a trust which it was incumbent on Catriona not to break, certainly not to a man who might react with anger and bitterness, a man who might reject her if he knew.

There was another explanation: that Flora’s departure was intended to be permanent. That she had deliberately abandoned Bill, Charlotte and Catriona. That somewhere she was adopting a new identity. That in that new life, she would no longer be Flora Jesmond, née Turville, but someone else entirely. Catriona shuddered at this thought.

Would she, could she have done that? Catriona then really would be entirely alone in the world. Alone with the dreadful memories, which from time to time, as if from the depths of a still lake, attempted to rise like the kraken.

What most tore and worried at her as she contemplated the situation was that what had happened, what appeared to have happened, was not the act of the sister she had thought she had known. Like an eruption, the events of Saturday had overlain with alien matter all her familiar features. But, on reflection, that was not the right image. The ash and rock of a volcanic explosion buried and obscured. Saturday’s cataclysm had revealed. It had shown Catriona a different Flora, a Flora who was more like Catriona herself.

She was stunned by this epiphany. Her image of her sister, from earliest childhood, had been founded on the concept that they were polar opposites – in appearance, in everything.

Little Flora was the blondest of blondes, and wore her hair either in long and luxuriant straight tresses, or wound and plaited into complex braids and chignons, from out of which her bright complexion shone like a sun. Young Catriona’s abundant black hair had a naturally stiff and awkward curl, and it surrounded and hung in tangles over her face, obscuring her pale features, like streaks of dark cloud across the moon. Flora was a neat, clean and tidy girl. Catriona was constantly rebuked for her personal habits; she cared not a fig for clothes or cleanliness and her room was always a mess. Flora was animated, effervescent, social, loving parties and company. Catriona was quiet, dour, shunned society, and hated social gatherings. Flora had had boyfriends and admirers by the dozen. Catriona was aloof and cold, and scorned any boy who came near her.

As they grew up, Catriona even as she loved and cherished Flora, was inclined to patronise, even to have some measure of contempt for her younger sibling’s character, regarding it as less interestingly complicated than her own. Flora, she decided, lacked intellectual or emotional depth. She did not read the kind of books that Catriona read; she did not think about the kinds of issues which her sister constantly pondered; she did not respond to the power of literature or the arts generally, with one exception: she did like some music. This taste, though, was another area of difference between them.

Flora loved folk songs, genuinely traditional or in the style of Bob Dylan and his followers. The better to enjoy these, she taught herself to play, or rather, in her modest words, strum the guitar and sing along to it. On several occasions, the endless repetitions of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ or ‘Blowing in the Wind’ provoked Catriona to fury, the only occasions when they had had real rows. Catriona’s prejudice – and perhaps her jealousy, as she could not herself play a note – blinded her to the fact that Flora actually had some real talent, which she later exploited to her advantage.

This ability was the only one that had given Catriona the least pause, however. In everything to do with school, the elder had been far and away the champion. She had been the keenest and most driven of scholars, top in every subject, whilst Flora, with no sense of shame, had bumped along at the bottom of her class, a cheerful, unaffected presence who regarded the classroom activities as a distracting irrelevance compared to the important things in life: personal grooming and appearance, physical health and fitness, make-up, and fashion.

Not that she had been a troublesome pupil, far from it. She had always been polite, helpful, and, ultimately, uninterested. The only thing the school offered in which she could have excelled was drama, where she proved, like her sister, to have a natural talent as an actor. Typically, though, although she loved costumes and dressing up and being a presence on the stage, she found plays boring, the learning of words tedious; yet another aspect of education which held no interest. As soon as she was able to leave school, she left, with only a few paper qualifications.

Her first job was as a junior dogsbody in a travel agency in the West End. In no time at all she had revealed a flair for the work. Her people skills were good, she was told. She was being groomed for management. But Flora had had her own ideas. She had saved her money assiduously, and one fine morning, just after her eighteenth birthday, she resigned from the agency, but not before she had bought a clutch of budget air tickets. For the next year, she travelled the world, seeing the exotic destinations that she had spent her days selling to customers. She took her guitar, and worked bars and clubs and cafes en route, or busked in the streets.

On her return, her travel bug had not left her. She had applied to British Airways and been accepted for training as a flight attendant. Catriona remembered, guiltily, the scorn with which she had greeted Flora’s proud announcement. She knew now what she hadn’t known then: that it was actually incredibly difficult to get onto the training course, still less to pass it with such élan as Flora had managed.

By that time, Catriona had her starred First and was beginning her doctoral research. The fact that her sister was an air hostess was not something she wished to broadcast amongst the sage and serious feminist community of St Hilda’s College.

Flora had flown for several years. Then she had met Bill Jesmond and married him.

That was the first thing her sister had done which Catriona had found did not accord with her view of Flora’s character. However, this going against type did not raise her opinion of Flora, rather the reverse. Bill was the last man in the world Catriona could have imagined any lively, attractive young woman wishing to marry. He was a tall, rather gangling and awkward man. Though he was only thirty-five and his chestnut curly hair bore no hint of grey, he talked and behaved as if he were at least ten years older. He was undoubtedly brilliant, possessing a string of chemistry degrees from the Cambridges in both England and the United States, but, despite this intellectual achievement, he was, as a personality, unspeakably dull.

As Flora was always at pains to point out, their relationship did not begin as a plane-board romance, but in New York’s Central Park, by the skating rink. Flora was with another girl who had come in on the same flight, and Bill, a researcher for a multinational pharmaceuticals corporation in Cincinnati alone during a business trip to the city, hearing their clear English voices with a pang of nostalgia, had overcome his natural reserve to engage them in halting and diffident conversation.

They had lived in the States for three more years, where Charlotte had been born. Then Avalon Corporation, Bill’s employer, had taken over an English company, and he had been the obvious choice to return to head its research department, based at Wychwood Court, a country house, formerly a girls’ boarding school, near Cheltenham.

At Catriona’s first meeting with her brother-in-law, Bill made no secret of his male chauvinism. A woman’s brain, in his view, was not suitable for academic work, and besides, he regarded literature, the focus of her interests, as unworthy of sustained intellectual attention by anyone, male or female. Poetry, novels, plays, he thought of as lightweight entertainment for an idle hour or two. Art and sculpture were merely forms of decoration. His main pleasure outside his work was playing and watching a variety of sports.

Bill had straightaway picked up the habit of addressing Catriona through Flora, referring to her as ‘your sister’. ‘Would your sister like another cup of coffee?’ ‘Is your sister coming with us this afternoon?’ He avoided situations in which they would be forced to converse together by themselves. If they were left together in a room, he would immediately mumble an excuse and find something to do in another part of the house.

Her visits en famille were consequently infrequent and rather a strain. She preferred to keep in touch with Flora by twice or thrice weekly phone conversations. If Bill took the call, he did no more than grunt a greeting, then she would hear him yell out to Flora, ‘Your sister’s on the line!’

In fact, the few weekends Catriona did spend in Gloucestershire were only tolerable because Bill was out for much of the time, either jogging around the countryside to keep fit, or playing cricket, tennis, squash or golf. Even at weekends, he would go over to the laboratory for hours at a time, pleading that an experiment needed attention or that results needed to be run through the computer in time for the return of the technical staff on the Monday.

Flora seemed to accept this workaholism. He was hardly ever around to share bedtimes or to read stories or simply to have fun with his daughter. Flora, in contrast, was devoted to Charlotte. She seemed to enjoy the demanding but dull routines of motherhood. Physically strong, she used to joke that, after having four hundred adult babies to cope with on an international flight, only one real baby was a piece of cake. She would spend hours playing with her, or taking her to the local playgroup.

To Catriona, this signified that her sister’s individuality had been further compromised. Flora had ceased to be an independent person. She had dwindled into a wife and was now further diminished into a mother. When Charlotte had gone to school, Flora had taken a part-time job, but it was not a real job, not a job like the Bloomsbury Chair of English Literature at Warbeck College in the University of London, which Catriona herself occupied with such distinction.

For years, Catriona had persisted in her belief that she and Flora, attached to each other though they were, and willing on occasions to share their differences – Flora would read a book that Catriona recommended, Catriona would allow herself to buy an outfit or some underwear of her sister’s choice – remained the opposites she had always regarded them as being.

For years. Until Saturday. The day that had changed everything.

On Wednesday evening, the phone was answered. But it was a male voice. Bill’s.

‘Catriona?’ He had never called her Cat.

‘Hi, there Bill! Good trip? Sorry to disturb the joyous reunion, but I’d just like a word with the lady of the house!’ As she spoke, watching her knuckles whiten as she grasped the plastic handset, she was conscious that the false, nervous joviality was so uncharacteristic that even the insensitive biochemist might suspect something was wrong.

But when he replied, his voice had in it only the habitual note of irritation, emanating, she believed, from his conviction that no tiresome mortal had the right to interrupt the deep thought processes on which the future of the human race might depend. ‘Actually, she’s not here, although she knew quite well I was coming back today.’

She was trembling now. Breathing deeply, she waited before replying, so long that Bill demanded impatiently, as if the connection had been lost, ‘Are you still there, Catriona?’

‘I haven’t heard from Flora since last week. I’ve phoned several times and got only the machine. I’ve left messages. It isn’t like her not to return calls or to be out so often. I had the impression she might have gone away.’

‘Now you mention it, there’s no sign of her having been here at all, not for some time. It isn’t that the house is tidy. It’s always that. But even Flora leaves things out occasionally, and there’s nothing of that sort. And I looked in the fridge just now and I noticed there’s none of the salad stuff she normally eats. As if she hasn’t been shopping recently. Which reinforces the idea that she’s away. So do you have any idea where she might have gone?’

‘No, none whatever.’

‘She never mentioned anything like that to you, even as a remote possibility?’

‘No.’

‘You’re quite sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure!’

‘Why did you happen to ring up just now?’

‘I wanted to speak to her, of course!’

‘Look, Catriona, if I find out that you and your sister have cooked this up to put the wind up me, then I shall be very annoyed indeed. Now I’m going to make some calls. To friends locally. Her boss. See if they know anything.’

Seething with fury she slammed down the phone. The bastard had accused her of conspiring with Flora in some petty act of spite. Had the two of them had a row? Or was this the normal state of their marital relations? Had Flora simply walked out on him? In Catriona’s view she would have had ample justification. But why the terrible letter? Why drag her sister into their private quarrel?

Later that evening the phone rang again and she snatched it up.

This time Bill’s voice had a more conciliatory tone; from that unusual state, she judged with a sinking heart that he, the great unflappable, was worried.

‘I’ve exhausted all the possibilities I can think of and there’s no trace of her. Nor did she say anything to anyone about going away. I’m letting you know that I consider that I have no alternative but to report her absence to the police.’

‘The police? You think you need to do that?’

‘I really think I do. Now I’ve had the chance to look around the house, there are some other puzzling features. Her car’s still in the garage, for example. I’ve never known Flora take the bus or use a cab ever since we’ve lived here. Why would she start now? Her handbag has gone, but there’s no sign of anything in the way of clothing being missing, though she had so much that it’s hard to tell. The overnight bag and make-up bag she always used are still here. I’ve looked in the loft and none of the suitcases are missing.’

‘If Flora’s simply gone off on her own for a few days, won’t she be annoyed to find herself the subject of a missing persons inquiry?’

At this, his usual truculent tone returned. ‘Frankly, Catriona, if my wife and your sister has been so damned insensitive as to walk out on her family without a word of explanation to anyone, without having the consideration to leave so much as a note as to her whereabouts, then she needs to be made aware of the effects of her behaviour. I don’t care if she’s annoyed. We’ll find her first, and worry then about whether she’s embarrassed. Besides,’ and here there was almost, to her amazement, the trace of a sob in his voice, ‘we have to face up to the possibility that something, something serious may have happened to her. She can’t have had just an accident. I’ve called the hospitals round here that have emergency departments: Gloucester, Bristol, and Cheltenham. There were no unidentified casualty patients or victims of accidents.’

‘Something serious? What do you mean?’

‘Isn’t it rather obvious? It’s desperately upsetting but we can’t yet rule out the possibility that she might have been attacked or abducted. I don’t want to think these things, but it seems to me they have to be considered.’

‘But is there any indication of something like that having happened?’

‘Here? None whatever. But it could have happened while she was out. You know how much she likes rambling around the countryside. But we could speculate endlessly and quite pointlessly. That’s why I’m going to the police. They have the resources and the knowledge to do what’s necessary.’

‘What about Charlotte?’

‘She’s not home until Friday. Besides, if Flora does turn up, there may in the end be nothing to tell her.’

Catriona sat unmoving staring at the phone for long after he had rung off.

In the light of what Bill knew, the action he proposed was entirely logical. He was, after all, a scientist. A disappearing spouse was no different from one of Newton’s billiard balls. If she had moved, some force must have acted upon her. All appropriate means should therefore be taken to identify that force.

Was she right to deny him the data concerning the nature of the force that might have acted? Was she concealing vital information for her own selfish reasons? If Flora did not return in the next few days, would she then be bound to reveal all she knew? Her gorge rose at the very thought of that idea, of broaching that taboo with such a man.

Did he in fact even care what had happened to his wife? Had the marriage been a mere shell with no kernel of love or affection? There had seemed at some points to be in him more anger than concern, as if he felt that Flora had been playing some kind of game with him. But the contemplation of her abduction, injury or even death had shown a little more of his vulnerability, and a little was a great deal in a man of his generally dispassionate nature.

And Flora, this new Flora whom she hardly knew, was she really playing some sort of attention-seeking game? At that, Catriona found that she too could feel anger and resentment, mixed with her anxiety and grief. And wasn’t suicide itself the ultimate piece of attention-seeking, the easy, the coward’s way out? Wasn’t that why she herself had shunned it? How could Flora have vanished in this fashion, leaving such emotional wreckage in her wake? Was it desperation that caused it, or cruelty – a desire to wound and to punish? Each thought was like a further stone added to the cairn of desolation in her heart. How could she have been abandoned like this, full of a grief that could neither be assuaged with knowledge or purged by death?

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