Second Chance (18 page)

‘It is rather terrible,' Paul said. ‘I've complained about it before. What is it?'

‘Some supermarket stuff. I put three spoonfuls in each cup, but it's no better, is it?'

‘I'll make some tea,' I said. And, waiting for the kettle to boil, I started telling them about all the people I'd been making tea for; Lorna, the postwoman, Gwenda Rees from the farm, bossy Maggie Davies, George Williams, my mother's secret lover, and the red-haired boy, the Reverend Lewis Owen.

‘Tell me about the funeral,' Annabel said.

For some reason, certainly not to humour me, she wanted to hear about my mother's funeral. So I told her about the isolated cottage, the funeral car, the little chapel full to the door, the flowers, tastefully arranged by the fancy-man of my cousin's wife's younger sister, the wheezing organ and the funeral meal in the vestry with the WI green china, five pounds extra.

I worried that she'd think I was making light of it; I suppose I was, but you can make fun of something while delighting in it at the same time.

‘I wish I could have been there to support you,' Paul said. ‘It must have been unbearably sad. Your mother was a lovely person.'

We drank our tea in silence.

And then Annabel spoke. ‘I want Selena to be buried there,' she said.

Paul and I stared at her in disbelief. ‘Darling, Mummy's arranging to have the funeral at St Botolph's,' Paul said.

Annabel's voice became shrill. ‘For God's sake don't call her “Mummy”. We've been calling her Francesca since we were children. I've never had a “Mummy”.' And I'm the one who was important to Selena so
I'm
the one who's going to decide everything. Francesca wasn't important to her and neither were you.'

‘Annabel, listen to me. Selena is dead and everyone is devastated, you most of all, but the funeral is only something we've all got to get through. That's what Lorna, the village postwoman told me and it's absolutely true. It's not important, Annabel.'

‘It is important, it is. I don't want Father Anthony and all Francesca's silly friends gawping at me. It might be just a bit more bearable if it's only Francesca and Paul and you and me and the sad hymns. Please, Kate, I've never asked you for anything, but please do this for me. Please.'

‘Can we talk about it tomorrow?' Paul asked, his voice parched, almost a whisper.

Annabel stood up and started trembling like someone with a fever. ‘No. You must tell Francesca tonight before she and Matthew go back to Holland Park and start arranging everything.'

‘Perhaps she needs to have something to arrange, love,' Paul said. ‘People have their own way of dealing with unbearable tragedy. Many people have a great need to keep busy. Couldn't you please try to let her deal with it in her own way?'

‘Why are you always on her side? She led you a terrible life, remember, and finally she dumped you. And yet you always,
always
stick up for her. Why?'

Her angry words hung over us. She was asking a question I'd wanted to ask many times, but never had, perhaps because I knew the answer. And now it no longer mattered.

We all seemed suddenly too tired for any more talk or argument.

‘I've been sleeping in Selena's room to keep Annabel company, but she says she'll be all right on her own tonight.'

‘Nonsense. We'll both sleep there.'

‘Tiny room, single bed.'

‘All right, you go to a hotel and I'll stay here. Is that OK, Annabel?'

‘Are you sure? I may start screaming.'

‘Me too, love. You go, Paul. Come round in the morning.'

He kissed us both and left. He looked like one of the soldiers in First World War photographs; a man stumbling out of the trenches.

Annabel and I listened to his heavy footsteps on the stairs. For a time we were both silent, both of us, I suspect, desperately wondering how to get through the rest of the evening.

Annabel turned on the television.
Match of the Day, Stand-Up-Comedy, Horror Movie
(1977),
Prison Drama, Sex in the Nineties
. After a while she began switching channels feverishly as though deriving some grim satisfaction from the noisy, surrealist kaleidoscope she was able to produce.

I put up with it as long as I could. ‘What about some music?' I said at last. She seemed amenable to the suggestion, moving over to the pile of CDs on the book shelf.

But suddenly she spun round to face me, her eyes round and childlike and sparkling with tears. ‘You never even tried to help Selena, did you?' she shouted at me. ‘You were as hopeless as everyone else.' She was shaking with anger and distress.

‘Annabel, neither of you took kindly to anything I said or did. So I usually thought it wiser to say as little as possible.'

‘You couldn't be bloody bothered. You couldn't even see what was in front of your eyes, could you?'

‘Say what you've got to say, Annabel, then we can both go to bed.'

She came over and stood a few inches away from me. ‘OK, this is what I've got to say. You never even bothered to notice that Selena and I were two separate people. That she was sensitive and clever and I was a stupid show-off. You could never be bothered to work that much out, could you?'

‘I think you're exaggerating. I'm not trying to defend myself – I did cut myself off from you as much as I could, I admit that. But I know it's difficult not to idealise someone who's died. I think you were both a mixture of good and bad, like the rest of us.'

‘Don't give me that garbage. She wanted to be completely independent from me. She was sick of being my double, the weaker and less-noticed half of identical twins. She hated me because she couldn't get away from me. That's why she killed herself. Because she despised me and was frightened of me.'

‘Darling, you're being melodramatic. Please come and sit down and let's talk quietly and rationally. Please. Please Annabel.'

‘We hated each other. Everyone thought we were so close. We were, of course, but it was a suffocating closeness. It was hell. She hated me because she thought I'd managed to get away from her. And I hated her because she'd never try to break away. And I feel sure she killed herself because she thought someone else – a boyfriend – was more important to me than she was. He wasn't, of course, he was never in the least important. But somehow I couldn't tell her that. I somehow wanted her to suffer.'

She threw herself at me and started to cry and fling herself about. I knew exactly what to do because I'd gone through the same excesses of grief years ago with my mother. I made her comfortable, stroked her hair and rocked her, saying absolutely nothing, until at last the storm of weeping was over.

Then it was my turn to say something. And I was out of my depth, I knew it. I remembered Paul suggesting that identical twins often retained an element of the rivalry they'd experienced in the womb. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps Annabel and Selena had hated one another to some extent. But I had to set aside that idea.

‘Annabel, she didn't hate you, didn't despise you. You may have developed in different ways and I'm really sorry I didn't notice it. Yes, I accept that you had problems, but I know you truly loved one another as well and you must hold on to that. She loved you and you loved her. There may have been difficulties, you may both have begun to feel stifled by your closeness, I can believe that. The same thing happened to my mother and me when I was a teenager, but I was able to break away from her and go to university. With you two, the relationship was much closer, and more suffocating, but the love was always there. That's something I'm absolutely certain of. Won't you believe me? Don't make things harder for yourself than they are.'

She sniffed and looked up at me. ‘Did you really hate your mother?'

‘Often. She needed me too much, depended on me too much, wouldn't try to make a life without me.' It was true to some extent, I suppose, though it was the first time I'd faced up to it.

Annabel eventually grew calmer and said she would go to bed. She took two sleeping pills which the doctor had prescribed for her – I noticed that there were only two in the bottle, probably a sensible precaution – and then, while still in the sitting room, she got into a pair of pyjamas as though she was a little child. ‘Don't forget your teeth,' I said, enjoying her excursion into childhood. I expected her to glower at me, but she just murmured, ‘I won't,' and went off meekly to the bathroom.

A few minutes later I went to Selena's bedroom, a tiny cell of a room; white walls, white bedcover, books and files organised with the utmost care and neatness on the shelving units, the only incongruous items being the three large posters of Chagall's most surreal pictures on the walls, lovers flying hand in hand over gardens full of butterflies and flowers; a farmyard; a milkmaid, a blue cow, two cockerels, watched over by a huge green eye; a flying grandfather clock with a blue wing. I got into bed, wondering what this revealed about her character... and immediately fell asleep. And was still in that first, deep sleep when Annabel was suddenly by my side, shaking me. (And Paul had endured three nights of this? No wonder he was looking so old and defeated.) ‘I never wanted to come up to this damn place,' she said, her voice shrill again and on the verge of hysteria. ‘I only applied because Selena wouldn't come here without me. For her, of course, it was easy, but God knows how I got in. We both read English up here and she wrote most of my essays and if she didn't, I'd threaten to leave. All I did was have a good time and she did my work as well as her own. And no one noticed that she was brilliant and I was a cheat and a slob. And it killed her in the end.
I
killed her.'

I couldn't decide whether to shout back at her or remain calm. I took a deep breath, reckoning that cool reason required less energy. ‘You didn't kill her, Annabel. She took her own life. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't because of overwork.' I was so tired I hardly knew what I was saying, but words came out.

‘Do you think it was because I might have been charged with manslaughter? She couldn't, surely, have thought that would stick? Even the solicitor chap said there wasn't a chance of it coming to court. And she was here at the time, she heard him say it. I wasn't even the one who got the Es that night. I'd done it plenty of times before, I admit it, but that night I was making out with Laurie Bridgewater and we didn't get to the rave till about three.'

‘And Selena wasn't there at all?'

‘Of course not. Selena was working. She never went anywhere.'

I was about to say that that might have been the trouble, but luckily stopped myself in time. ‘You're getting cold,' I said instead. ‘You must go back to bed now and we'll talk again in the morning. I'll come with you and tuck you in. Up you get.'

She was a tired little waif again, all eyes and straggling blonde hair. I tucked her in and kissed her.

What would tomorrow bring? I had no idea, but felt pretty sure it would be nothing worthwhile or comforting.

When the phone rang, I was amazed to find that it was ten o'clock and that I'd slept for four or five hours. Soon I could hear Annabel talking in the sitting room; quite animatedly at first, then getting more and more excitable, and finally slamming the phone down and starting to sob.

I waited for as long as I could before barging in on her. ‘I'm sorry if I'm intruding, Annabel, but I've got to have a pee.' I looked back at her before going to the bathroom. ‘Try to stop crying by the time I get back, love.'

Not a chance. ‘Tell me about it,' I said, rather reluctantly.

She glared at me. ‘Piss off.'

‘And then have you say I don't care about you? I do care about you and want to help you. Tell me what this latest thing is all about. Otherwise, there's no point in my being here. If I'm no help, I may as well go back home.'

I put the kettle on and made a pot of tea. There didn't seem to be any bread, but I found some cream crackers and some soft cheese. Annabel was still sobbing, but I put some tea and cream crackers in front of her. ‘Horrible breakfast,' she said, swallowing air and gulping. ‘Horrible. I'd get better than this in prison.'

‘What's happened now, Annabel? Is there bad news?'

‘Bad news? Yes, haven't you heard? My sister's dead.'

I drank some tea and tried again. ‘Who was on the phone? Was it Paul?'

‘No, it was Laurie, this friend of mine.' She took the tissue I passed her and dried her eyes. For a moment or two she stared in front of her, almost in a trance. I was really frightened, then. For those few moments, she seemed somewhere in between life and death, contemplating both. Then she seemed to pull herself together. She drank some tea and looked up at me as though ready to talk.

‘So what did Laurie tell you?'

‘There was an item about us, he said, on local radio. About me and Selena. It said that Selena had killed herself because she was ashamed of causing Miranda Lottaby's death.'