to restore the tower, we, or rather I, had the brainwave of excavating under the tower and putting one there. Everyone’s doing it in London, why not here?’
‘I thought you said you belonged to a health club,’ says Valerie.
‘I do, and it’s fine, very cliquey, but fine. Anyway, it’s so much nicer swimming alone.’
She’s lonely, thinks Valerie, Diana never did find it easy to keep friends.
‘A swimming pool?’ Mikey is asking. ‘Under there?’
He doesn’t know why Diana is laughing at him and her reply doesn’t make sense either.
‘We couldn’t go under the main house because that’s Grade Two listed, so we extended it out from the tower under the garden.’ She performs a little tap dance on the brand-new flagstones. ‘It’s here, invisible, but right under my feet.’
Staring at the ground, Mikey tries to imagine a whole blue swimming pool deep beneath them, dark and unbroken. The pools he has been to smell of cleaners and echo with shouts and screams and the sharp whistle of the lifeguard, but this buried pool must be a very quiet place.
‘Can we go swimming?’ he asks his mum.
Valerie shrugs. ‘Don’t ask me, this is way out of my league.’
Diana beckons him over. ‘It’s not ready, there’s no water. Look, you can see.’
Squatting down, Mikey presses his face against a glass panel which is a sort of skylight into the earth.
‘When it’s finished, then you must come and swim, won’t that be fun?’
Although his mum is agreeing, Mikey thinks it would be scary, lying on your back in the water with the weight of the whole heavy world inches from your face and nothing to hold it up and, besides, he’d have to own up that he’s lost his trunks. His mum is walking away, making some comment about how much it must all have cost and Diana is saying an arm and a leg. He can tell by the way his mum is changing the subject that she doesn’t think it’s worth that.
‘Come on, Mikey,’ she’s calling. ‘Take a picture of us. Use my phone.’
Lining them up in front of the round lily pond, Mikey clicks, checks the screen and shows his mother.
‘You’d never know we were sisters, just looking at us,’ says Valerie.
‘Half-sisters,’ Diana reminds her. ‘You’ve got your father’s eyes.’
Giggling, Michael points at the screen. ‘It looks like the statue behind is about to hit Diana on the head,’ he says.
Leaning over the boy’s shoulder as she looks, Diana realises his smile reminds her of Valerie when she was young. Maybe it would be nice to have a relationship with her nephew, now that her mother is dead and she herself has no children. There are no moorings on either side of the river and she is adrift in the present. A little awkwardly, she squeezes his thin shoulders. ‘I hope he isn’t going to clout me.’ She laughs. ‘That bronze boy will grow up to be Hercules, the strongest man in the world.’
‘I know about him from school,’ starts Mikey, but his aunt isn’t listening, she’s telling her own story. She probably thinks he’s stupid, but she’s wrong, he knows lots of things, he just doesn’t always say them.
Perhaps she can buy the boy a child’s book of Greek myths for his birthday? Tea at Wynhope, cake with candles on the kitchen table, Edmund singing, Michael unwrapping the gift.
‘Zeus’s wife was so angry at the news of the birth of Hercules, she sent snakes to the baby’s cradle to kill him,’ Diana explains, ‘but the baby Hercules was so strong he rose up and killed them. That’s the snakes you can see in the boy’s hands.’
‘Bit like how you felt when I was born, I expect,’ jokes Valerie, then immediately regrets it.
‘All gone,’ says Mikey, swirling his hands in the still water of the ornamental pool.
Their reflections are erased by the ripples shimmering in the last of the light, but the awkwardness is not.
The quiet moment offers an opportunity which Diana takes. ‘I’m sorry I got all prickly in the car, it’s not easy thinking back. Obviously there was just Mum and me for a while, after Dad died, and we were happy. Do you know, I don’t remember Dad dying? I think I remember the police knocking, telling Mum someone had run into him on the hard shoulder while he was attending a breakdown, but it’s a false memory. I only know it because I was told it. I wasn’t allowed at the funeral. All I really remember feeling was that I was happy, there was Mum and me and I was happy. Then it was like your father and then you gatecrashed my party and trashed the house, at least that’s how it felt.’
Then she’s off, striding slightly too fast, leading them past the tennis court, telling Michael that his uncle hasn’t really enjoyed tennis for a long time, but she’s sure he’d love to bowl a few overs with him, and he’ll be back the next day in time for lunch. She turns to Valerie and asks if she likes the white narcissi.
‘We’d love a garden, wouldn’t we, Mikey?’ says Valerie.
‘As I said, you must come and stay, especially when the weather’s lovely. Edmund would love someone to play with and I could do with some company.’
Hope comes and goes in their conversation like a song or a siren heard from a distance, in the wind. Arm in arm, they walk on in the company of questions unasked, rounding the corner into the arboretum, expressing delight at the things that are easy to love like spring flowers and pink sunsets. Mikey sticks close. These trees are nothing like the park, no kids playing their music on the ramp, no benches, no bins where you can shovel the dog shit. He pulls on the catkins hanging from the hazel branches and the two women watch him.
‘Why didn’t you want kids, Di?’
‘Usual thing to start with, I was more interested in my career than baby puke. I had nothing, remember that, I was sixteen, starting from ground zero. It took one hundred per cent of me, making it, moving up, photocopying girl, receptionist, letting agent, estate agent, property portfolio manager – that’s when Edmund employed me. That’s when we met. And I did make it, Valerie, all this didn’t just fall in my lap, you know.’ Diana pauses as she takes in the extent of her very own country house. Other people might think she married it, but in her own way she knows she earned it. Suddenly she remembers who she is with and why. ‘What were we talking about?’
‘Kids,’ says Valerie.
‘Oh yes, kids.’ Diana pulls her coat closer around her. ‘So I didn’t have time for relationships. There were men, typical men, just not worth it. Certainly, I never met anyone I wanted to have children with. Then there’s our childhood. I thought if I can’t even remember being happy as a child, then how can I ever imagine having happy children?’
‘Mikey looks okay, doesn’t he?’ says Valerie. ‘Things don’t have to repeat themselves, Di.’ After years of feeling more ignorant than her sister, Valerie now believes it is possible that she understands more than her; not Greek myths or Latin words for clumps of trees, but things that matter like love at all costs and never giving up.
‘Then when I met Edmund and things got serious, we obviously
