A Sister’s Gift (35 page)

His eyes widen momentarily and then close in shock. I hear him draw in a heavy breath and he removes one hand from mine, puts it across his heart.

‘She confessed to you that she was in love with you, didn’t she, Rich?’ I battle to keep my voice low, not to sob, but several heads turn to look in our direction nonetheless.

‘Christ, what has she said to you?’

‘She…she told me tonight but you’ve known it for weeks. You never said. You kept it from me, Rich!’

‘I swear I didn’t know she was already pregnant. That’s – unbelievable! And what was I meant to do, when she suddenly turned around and professed her love for me?’ He leans in suddenly, the intensity on his face almost frightening. ‘I never had the first
idea she felt that way. And you’d asked me to sleep with her for Christ’s sake…you’d already made it clear where your priorities lay. You wanted the baby. You were prepared to risk the emotional fallout you said.
What else did you want me to do?’

We both fall silent for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye I can see the waiter approaching with intent but then, thinking the better of it no doubt, he turns away to give us our space.

‘I was really angry with you,’ he adds quietly after a bit. ‘I was angry that you were prepared to put me through all that. But I didn’t want to repeat her words to you. I knew how much they’d hurt. I couldn’t come home with
her
still there. And she couldn’t leave while she was so sick with the pregnancy – I haven’t known what to do for the best. And now she’s told you…’

‘You were
angry?
At me?’

‘In fact, Hol, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve had moments over the past few weeks when I’ve wondered if I could really come back to you at all.’

I look at him in horror. ‘What did
I
do?’ I whisper. ‘What did I ever do, other than try and make us a family?

‘What
did
you do, Hol?’ he asks remorsefully.

‘I never knew she felt like that, Richard! You can’t imagine for one moment I ever had the first idea…’ I judder to a halt, because maybe I should have known, I think now. Maybe the only reason I had no idea how my sister really felt was because I didn’t want to see it.

Of course he must have been angry! If I’m honest I saw it that frozen day along the Esplanade when I first broached the subject. I just didn’t want to let it stop me. I’ve been ruthless, I realise now.

‘I
was
angry, Hol. That’s why I’ve stayed away. But I’ve realised that I love you more. I didn’t want us to be apart any more so I’ve come home to sort it out with you if we can. And I’m partly to blame too. I could always have refused your request.’

I swallow nervously. ‘I have to ask you this, Rich, forgive me, but I have to. Did you feel anything for her? Anything at all?’

He looks up sharply. ‘Good God, Hollie!’

‘Just – tell me, OK? I’d rather you did. I’d rather know.’ Even though the truth is, I don’t. The razor-sharp silence hangs like an axe-blade in the air between us, then:

‘No.’

One word. Stark. The waiter swoops in, sensing his moment, lands our drinks deftly on the table and is quickly off again.

‘No,’ Rich repeats when I don’t answer him. ‘OK?’

I swallow down some of my wine. More than half the glass, in fact, without realising it. I look at my husband through pained eyes.

‘The trouble is…’ Richard leans in a little closer, his eyes boring into mine ‘…you will never be sure now, will you? No matter what I say. No matter what I do. You’ll never be sure whether or not you can really trust me because I’ve slept with another woman – your sister! God, if only you knew!’ He lets out a half-laugh but there is not the slightest trace of humour in it.

‘If only I knew what…?’I whisper.

‘If only you knew how much time I have had to regret going along with your plans, Hollie. Time enough all these past few weeks when I’ve been away, to reconsider a lot of things. And I’ve
hated
being apart from you. I missed you.’

‘You have?’

He nods. ‘More than you know. But I’ve also realised that I was wrong to work so hard to try and please you. I needed to trust my own judgement on this one. I didn’t. I let my desire to please you rule my thinking, and that was clearly a mistake.’ There’s a pause as we both reflect for a bit. ‘But dear God,’ his voice catches suddenly as another thought occurs to him, ‘if your sister was
already
expecting then why in God’s name did she go through with it?’

‘I think we both now know the answer to that.’ I drain the rest of my wine glass with unaccustomed ease and he takes the bottle from its chiller bucket and refills it for me.

‘So you’ve told her you don’t want to see her again?’ He looks at me sharply now. ‘And the baby?’

Ah, the baby. I have been feeling all sorts of conflicting emotions rising to the surface but suddenly I’m back to numbness again.

‘Have you thought about that?’ he persists.

‘I haven’t…I didn’t think about anything earlier on beyond getting that girl out of my sight.’

‘Don’t you think,’ he adds softly after a while, ‘that you’d better go after her now?’

I look at him uncomprehendingly. What does he mean? I make to raise my wine glass to my lips again but he stays my hand.

‘Hollie, you need to go after her,’ he repeats. ‘Before it’s too late.’

Oh fuckety, fuckety, fucking hell, what have I just done?

I didn’t want to say all those things to her. So many horrid words. I wanted to tell her how I felt but I didn’t mean it to come out like that with such spitefulness, so many little nasty thorns of truth like arrows aimed with hatred right at her heart. I hurt her more than I ever imagined I could. Get out of my life forever, she said, and she meant it.

Thank God there is no one in the bathroom right now because I need to throw up. Shit. I’m not going to make it in time. No time to bolt the door, no time to tie my hair back. I barely make it to the loo before I begin to heave. It isn’t the baby making me throw up this time either, it’s just me.

I thought I’d feel better if I told her. It’s been niggling away at me for so long I couldn’t stand it any more. All the pretence, it was killing me. All her unending gratitude towards me when I’ve been such a bitch and she’s been so…so…good but also so stupidly and obstinately blind to everything I’ve really been feeling. Couldn’t she see I loved him? Wouldn’t a blind person have seen it? I couldn’t help loving him. I felt bad and I wanted her to know. Surely – surely she needed to know?

But not like this.

I clutch at my lower abdomen with all the pain of retching when there is nothing in your stomach to bring up. What have
I just done? I can still see her face turning grey when I said those poisonous things.

What is this disgusting feeling? I feel so uncomfortable and…bad, deep in my stomach. Is this what Auntie Flo always meant when she’d say to me: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself’? Is this it…shame? I always laughed at Flo when she told me that because I never did feel what she’d thought I should. An elemental, she called me, a law unto myself. But I do feel it now, so maybe she was wrong and I had it in me after all, this capacity to feel so totally out of place, so unsure. So in the wrong.

I try and lift my eyes to the bathroom mirror to look at my face but I can hardly look at myself. Who is that girl in the mirror? I hate her. She’s not me. When I look at her I see someone so much younger and more vulnerable than the person I am. My hair all stuck to my face like that with the water I’ve just splashed over it – it makes me look like the teenager I must have been, once before: raw with bereavement, scared to the core, angry, so angry at having been abandoned.

I never cried for Flo.

I put my hands up to my white face now, pressing my taut skin, feeling all the muscles and bones underneath it, peering into the hollow raging eyes in the mirror now, the eyes that no longer look like mine. No, I don’t remember ever crying for Flo when she died. All I can remember is feeling mad at her for leaving me, for dying so selfishly and unexpectedly and ruining my life. And I never wanted for Hollie to step into the breach. I never asked her to.

I lean against the little washstand now, gazing closer into the bathroom cabinet mirror. I didn’t want her to give up her dreams of a career after university. I never expected that she should sacrifice her life to stay and look after me. All this time, here was I thinking she’d changed her plans about the year abroad so she could carry on hanging out with Richard, and now she tells me
it wasn’t like that at all. She tells me she wanted to go! Can I believe that? That my scaredy-cat, stick-in-the-mud sister actually once had some dreams of her own that would have taken her far away from the tiny little world she now inhabits? I do believe it, though. The minute she said it, I knew it was true.

My stomach feels raw and tense now that I’m leaning so close up against the washstand. That isn’t just because I’ve been retching. It’s because of the baby, I know. The gift I promised her so glibly last Christmas. The gift I thought it would be so easy to give to her. It needed to be done as an act of love, just like Richard said, but this baby was never that, was it? Never made by an act of love – only by the insertion of a cold plastic tube inside me – and I had no love from Richard either, even when, so desperately needing him, wanting him, I tried to steal it. I offered this gift because I wanted to get my hands on the money from this house, too, in itself a charitable desire, but not the kind of charity that begins at home. Not the kind of charity that comes from people who love one another, who do little acts of kindness for each other because of love and nothing else, with no hope of gaining anything else.

Fingers shaking, I turn on the taps again, let the clean, purifying water rush through the sink, swirling away the remains of the mess I’ve just made; but the odour remains. The empty, hollow pain in my gut remains. Hollie wants me out of here, and with good reason. There’s no going back from this, I’m on my own now. Like I would have been if Hollie had just upped and left me all those years ago after Flo died. And the loneliness at that thought is greater than the unending Amazon I travelled to come back home again; it’s more impenetrable than the densest green part of the rainforest. When I look into this stranger’s eyes in the mirror I know she’s going to have to travel to some pretty scary places.

In my heart, I always knew that. That the scariest challenges I’d face would be the ones I left back home. Oh, Hollie! What
did I just do to you? The sounds of grief coming out of my throat don’t sound like my own, they’re somebody else’s. Someone I left behind such a long time ago. I don’t know her, though I recognise her. She isn’t pretty and she isn’t me, though she may be who I was. But the one undeniable thing I know about her is this: she is honest, she is real.

I don’t stop for anything but my handbag, not even a change of clothes because I need to be out of here before Hollie comes back again. I can’t face her. I slip out of the back door quietly so as not to alert Chrissie who’s still sitting in the living room, and my heart gives a lurch. I won’t see her again either, will I? I’m leaving them all behind. Halfway to the garden gate, looking back over my shoulder for the last time at the cottage I once couldn’t wait to get away from, my prison, when I was younger, I see it all now in such a different light.

Auntie Flo’s garden still has so many of my childhood memories tucked in among every clump of violets and peeping out from behind all the garden gnomes and ceramic fairies she planted in each shady corner. There’s the yellow witches’ broom Flo and I grew from cuttings taken on a holiday in Devon when I was eight. There’s the wooden pergola – heavy now with early wisteria – that Hollie and I clubbed together to put up for Flo’s sixtieth birthday. God, I love this place. I love it more than any other place in the world. Why has it taken me coming to the brink of losing it all before I could see that?

At the carp pond, the sweet sharp fragrance of Daphne still lingers, though the pink and white confections at the end of each branch have long disappeared. They always made me think of wedding cakes. I thought I’d left all this behind, I thought none of it mattered to me any more. When my fingertips brush against the leaves of the Daphne bush, the golden edge of their dark leaves takes me back to the sunlight spinning down through the dark green canopy of the Yanomami forest and I try with all my might to feel gladness, because I have a second place I can call
home. I have a second family I can run back to. I’m not going to be alone.

But just at that moment, Ruffles pushes his nose into my hand, a low keening noise resonating deep in his throat because even though I’m carrying no suitcase he
knows
that I’m going. He knows that I can’t come back, and all fantasies of Brazil vanish into the dust. Oh God, they can’t matter as much as my real home, my real family.

I stand up straight and just run for it, the dog too slow to keep up with me now, the old wooden gate slamming shut behind me, before anybody can come along and see I’m still here where I’m not welcome any more. I’ve got to let her get on with her own life in peace, just like she would’ve done if she’d left me all those years ago. It’s better this way.

‘Before it’s too late,’ Richard repeats. ‘You know how impetuous she is. If you girls have had a big bust-up there’s no telling what she’ll do next…’

But it
is
too late. Doesn’t he see that?

‘She betrayed me,’ I choke. The proprietor gives me an anxious look as I cover my mouth with a napkin.

‘Hollie.
You
are the one who gave her the opportunity to do so, don’t forget. You are the one who brought this poison into our marriage…’ I flinch, but he continues regardless. ‘You knew and I knew it, what repercussions it might have, but we went ahead regardless. And you remember the reason why? This was always all about the baby, wasn’t it, Hol?’

I turn away from him, pushing my chair to the side so as to escape him but he won’t let me, he takes hold of my wrist, forcing me around to look at him and face him.