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
