A Sleep and A Forgetting

GREGORY HALL

A SLEEP

AND A

FORGETTING

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.