A Sleep and A Forgetting

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.