years old and looking over his shoulder. ‘No, love, no, and it’s never going to be. Where is he?’
‘Australia.’
The day he looks at her when he says it, that will be the time when she knows he really believes it. ‘Paul’s gone and he’s never coming back.’ She pushes his hair out of his eyes. ‘But I have got some news. You know your nanna from Bristol? She’s passed on.’
‘Where to?’
Valerie struggles to control the muscles in her face. ‘I’m sorry, love. What I mean to say is your . . . A doctor from the hospital rang up. Your nanna’s dead. I’ve lost her.’
Mikey has lost a lot of things, like his swimming trunks for instance, and he has managed to get by without telling anyone that all term, but he’s never lost a person he loved, although for a long time it seemed to him his mother was hard to find. But now she’s lost Nanna and won’t ever get her back, he senses the depth of the sinkhole which has opened up in the half-grey half-yellow room and tiptoes as close to the edge as he dares.
‘Sorry about Nanna,’ he says, staring at the television where people are running screaming from the sea, dragging their children behind them, everything wobbling as if the world is built on a boat. He changes the channel to their favourite daytime game show where the jackpot stands at £2,500. This should cheer her up.
‘Don’t cry, Mum.’ He hugs her. ‘You’ve got me.’
‘I’ve got you, all right,’ she says. ‘And Solomon.’
He’ll be out soon, she reminds herself, then they’ll be a family, nights in together with a takeaway and a box set, days out together with a picnic at a beach as golden as this sitting room. They will skim stones across the sea in summer and throw snowballs in winter and who can ask for more?
‘And Jesus,’ says Mikey.
‘And Jesus, of course,’ she says, ‘Sol wouldn’t want us to forget him.’
‘What happens now?’
Valerie doesn’t know. ‘Now’ seems to be an unnatural combination of blank days stretching on and on in which there is nothing to be done because nothing can be done, and a terrible urgency to arrange the things she imagines need to be arranged: clear out the fridge in her mum’s house before things start to smell, feed her budgerigar, caged and peck-peck-pecking at the stripped millet, call the undertaker, order the flowers, but how she’ll pay for it all she has no idea. Money is tight since she walked away, but it has been a small price to pay. There is one person who has money and then some. Her sister. Big sister. Half-sister. Diana.
Valerie blows her nose. ‘You get on with your homework, I’m going to phone your aunty.’
‘The rich bitch?’
‘Don’t you dare use language like that,’ says Valerie. ‘I should never have called her that.’
‘You said you haven’t spoken to her for years and years and years.’
‘I haven’t. I didn’t stay in touch with her or your nanna. Paul didn’t like it, did he? And Diana never called me.’
‘And you said she wasn’t a real aunty. You said she was only half an aunty.’
‘She’s family, Mikey, and family matters at a time like this.’
People often assumed that the final straw with Paul must have been him beating her or something violent like that, but they were wrong. It was the joke notice he bought from a gift shop and nailed to the kitchen wall: ‘Never Forget, As Far as Everyone Else Is Concerned, We Are a Perfectly Normal Family.’ Family, there is no one else left now who understood her childhood except Diana, no one to mourn with except Diana, and not just her mum, but mourn all of it, the graveyard that was their family life back then. She takes a deep breath. No reply. Leave a message. Silence taps its fingers with impatience until she abruptly rings off. Your mum passed away, you can’t do that on voicemail.
‘How did she get to be so rich?’ Mikey asks later. He has brought his duvet and Penguin downstairs and put on Titanic because that might help. He likes the height of the waves and the sinking; she likes the kissing bits and cries at the ending, but, like most stories, this has a boring part at the beginning before it all goes wrong and that’s where they are up to now.
‘She married it, didn’t she?’ Valerie corrects herself. ‘To be fair, that’s not totally true. She walked out the house when she was sixteen and that was the last we saw of her, more or less, but I think she worked her own way up the ladder even before she met Sir Moneybags.’
Later, there is trouble on the deck, the first mate is looking out through his telescope. Valerie calls her sister again. It’s getting late, but she hasn’t got her mobile number. There’s still no reply.
‘Why did she leave?’
Shifting her position on the sofa, Valerie considers the question. ‘Truth is, Mikey, I don’t know. I never really understood.’
They are jumping now, the passengers, choosing to hurl themselves into the churning sea, rather than die behind locked doors.
‘Anyway, maybe me and Diana can make up again.’
‘Doubt it,’ says Mikey. He reaches for his mother’s hand under the duvet, even as fingernails are slipping from the edge of the lifeboats. Nobody comes. Even though they are shouting across the icy sea, help me, help me, nobody comes.
Chapter Two
Positioned by the Aga in the kitchen at Wynhope House, Diana is eating grapes when the landline rings the next morning. She is irritated because they were sold as seedless but she finds that she is having to spit pips into the sink before she can answer.
The conversation with Valerie propels Diana over to the long window where she stands rigidly, looking out at the magnolia flowers, plump and pink against the burned amber of the listed coach house on the far side of the lawns. With the phone to her ear, she knocks on the glass to scare the squirrel from the bird feeder and watches all the long-tailed tits take flight, then she sits awkwardly on the edge of one of the chairs. She says very little. She says, ‘Well, thank you for letting me know anyway’ and ‘Who phoned you?’ And then she says, ‘And I suppose I’ll have to pay for everything.’
The call is over. Diana shakes her head violently from side to side as if to dislodge something disturbing her vision, runs her hands slowly up over her closed eyes and through her hair and clasps them tightly together for a moment before breathing out, a controlled breath through pursed lips, the sort that kindles fire from embers. When she opens her eyes, the subtitles on the morning news are describing several hundred dead in a tsunami and the image shows yet another body being passed from rescue worker to rescue worker, hands above their heads, a crowd-surfing corpse.
My mother is dead.
In the wide wood-panelled hall, she pauses out of habit in front of a gilt-edged mirror. There is nothing wrong with her lipstick, nor with the lie of the jade necklace against her pale neck; it is not those things which made her hesitate, rather it is the bewildering combination of being more alive than she realised before, and yet older, and, yes, at forty-one statistically half way between death and birth. For a moment, time fractures and who is
