Anticipation (18 page)

She hands it across.

Dear Madam,
I read.
I am sorry to inform you that Miss Vivien Anderson is no longer a patient at this hospital. Please be advised that, in accordance with hospital policy, your letter has been forwarded to Miss Anderson’s last known address.

I look up at the letterhead.
KENTON HALL
. An elegant, classical font. Above is a line drawing of a familiar-looking old stone house. Below, the words
Private Psychiatric Hospital
are set in smaller type.

Together, Maggie and I stare at the second envelope. Gingerly, as if it’s a faulty jack-in-a-box, my mother turns it over. All there is on the back is a stationer’s brand.
Pandora
.

Of course we open it. Who wouldn’t?

‘What does she say?’

‘Shhh,’ Maggie snaps. ‘Just wait. Anyway, it isn’t from her. It’s from her mother.’ She frowns. ‘Her adopted mother, I mean. She says …’

She says that Vivien took her own life twelve years ago. In the man-made lake beside Sainsbury’s. Serendipity Water.

I’m so sorry,
Mrs Anderson writes,
that you never had the chance to know your sister. I wish we could tell you why.

It’s a very nice letter, warm and generous and kind.

Maggie puts it back on the table between us. And we sink past it, through the brown smoked glass and into the weed. Swans’ feet moving above our heads. Down into the mud, with the shopping trolleys and lager cans, not dead yet but getting there. Hearts still beating. Holding our breath. Down and down. Until we come
out here. The swirling Axminster of the other side of the world. A decade later.

Maggie gets up and walks out. I hear the bathroom door lock.

After a while, I turn the TV on.
M*A*S*H
is just starting, green and orange people running, faded but full of care. Quietly, I sing along to the theme tune. We’re learning it in music.

I’m halfway through the chorus when Maggie comes out again. She stares at me. I stop singing and pick at a hole in my trackpant knee, and she carries on into the kitchen.

It’ll be a long time before she knits that next row.

We don’t ring Grandpa William. What’s the point? It would just be cruel. Old men should hear only happy stories. And Grandpa William doesn’t ring us. His duty is done — there’s nothing to report now.

Maggie is free to make dinner in peace, if she remembers. Most days, she’s in her room with the door shut when I get home from school — asleep, I presume, from the silence. If she’s not out by five, I take her a cup of tea. It’s meant to make her get up, and some evenings it works — the pill bottle rattles and out she comes. Other nights, the room is dark and the tea is still sitting there untouched when I go back an hour later.

I take it away and tip it down the sink. Finish watching
Gilligan’s Island
with no one to tell me to turn on the news. Cover her share of whatever home ec. horror I’ve managed to whip up with plastic wrap and put it away in the fridge and do the dishes. Make tomorrow’s school lunch. Take last week’s leftovers out and feed them through the Cousins’ fence to Hector.

I have a lot of time to think about Vivien. Slipping out of life much the same way she slipped in, without anyone noticing, without anyone jumping in. My sinking aunt tangled up in an oversized hand-me-down life, unable to kick off the weight of all that invisible Harding baggage.

Or maybe that’s just what she did. Exhaled them, Sarah and
Ted, Harry and Babs and Beth and the rest, with her last breath. Her oxygen-starved cells finally getting round to throwing out that old rubbish.

What if Vivien did pop back up? If a passing shopper grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, breathed a second chance into her nostrils? Would she learn from her mistakes? Choose a darker night? Go back to college? She’d nearly finished her master’s degree, Mrs Anderson wrote. When she wasn’t planning to die, she wanted to be a research chemist.

It would be nice if we wrote back to Mrs Anderson. We don’t. Because what can you say?
There was nothing you could do.
Bad blood will out. (Or in our case, sink, most likely.) I’m sorry we got it all over your life. Someone should have warned you.

(Seven years later, in the middle of Waterloo Bridge, I’ll think of her. When I lay my hand on a stranger’s arm and wish him a merry Christmas. And he looks at me, a hunted, haunted, horrible look, full of fear and need and the tumble of brown water.

‘You wouldn’t come near me,’ he’ll say, ‘if you knew what I’ve done.’

And I’ll take my
Big Issue
and walk on. Ignore the clatter of ghosts behind me.)

Back in 1984, I pack my lunch and wonder what we were doing, here in this house, while Vivien died. My own options were limited, since I was only three — eating, crying, sleeping, clinging to Daddy’s knee. But what about Maggie? Did she feel anything? A ripple? A truncation of blood? I don’t know how it feels to have a sister. Neither did Maggie, she would say. And yet she did, because she had one.

Mrs Anderson sent us another picture. Funnily enough, it’s almost the same as the one that Vivien sent herself, except that Mrs Anderson is in it too. They’re huddled together in front of Kenton House, smiling, leaning into each other in that easy way that Maggie and I can never manage. Mrs Anderson is
appley-round
and nicely permed and lovely. Perhaps, if I’m honest, she looks a little bit sad — as if she might have begun to suspect her spotless life will be required to clean up someone else’s nosebleed
— but you can tell it’s not her usual expression.

Vivien looks like she knows she’s forgotten to do something — put the cat out, take her lithium, get over herself? — and is trying to think what. It’s a look I know. She and Maggie could be peas in adjacent pods, withered on the same stem. They have the same eyes, the same hands, and even — despite the intervening decade — the same haircut. (I have all those things as well. There’s really only one way to cut our hair, one length that suits us. Unless you want to get it set every week, as Maggie used to do until a year or two after that look went out of fashion.)

I wonder how much else they had in common. If they stirred their tea, crossed their ankles, swallowed their pills the same way (three at a time, without any water). If Vivien, too, spent a number of years considering duck ponds.

And about now, I start doing it too. Dilly-dallying on my way home from school, throwing my uneaten sandwiches (why do I even bother making them?) to the mallards. Watching them swarm across the water, every duck for itself. Back-biting, darting, snapping. Stirring up God knows what with their paddling feet.

In time, Maggie does pick up her knitting again. In 1986, she even finishes that Fair Isle. By then, I’ve moved out of Bradbury Street and am flatting in Strathern — a five-minute drive away, but my mother packs the jumper up and sends it to me in the mail. I try it on once to give my flatmate a laugh, but I never wear it.

I’ve started work as an office junior for a firm of solicitors. Not the commerce degree I’d planned, but it’s a nice office — solid and oak-warm and discreet — and the job pays well, and the thought of another year in my mother’s house was more than I could stand.

Here on the other side of town, time flies like the wind, and before you know it Annabel and I have saved up enough for backpacks and round-the-world fares and we’re off on a southerly gale, the flat grey grid of familiar streets below and behind us. Retracing my grandparents’ flight.

Not that I think of it as going back. I just want to put all the
distance in the world between me and Bradbury Street, where Maggie is adding the final stitches to her history, weaving in loose ends, cross-stitching tight little asterisks over and over the same sore spot so that her threads can never pull free.

And it doesn’t occur to me, as we take off, that there’s only one direction you can go from the end of a story.

Sure enough, in a few months more we’re circling London. You can barely see the scars. Down there, under office blocks and housing estates, ornamental lakes and carparks, are V2 craters and fire-blackened bricks, but you wouldn’t know it. Shattered attics have been reglazed. There’s a new roof over the terrace where Aunt May lit her last match. Pear trees are blossoming down in Kings Close, where there’s no sign of the day Evelyn Harding, exhausted by outliving everyone, shut the
Examiner
on her daughter’s face, closed the windows and doors and neglected to light the gas.

Then again, I’m not looking that hard. Annabel has the window. I’ve seen the Atlantic before, after all. And I believe, back then, that nothing good can come of staring into water.

High above Jake’s boat, a solitary passenger jet makes its way over the Hauraki Gulf, heading for open ocean.

We used to play a game in London, Annabel and I, on those days we could see the sky. Look up and count the planes. Without turning round, we could always find at least three. And all around them a lattice of jet-trails mapping the currents, melting in the breeze. So many lives there — in the skies, on the streets — flowing in and out, slipping over and around each other, doing their best not to collide.

Just as Annabel and I slide apart, in time, making our own ways out through the press of bodies in an Edinburgh bar. She to a party at some Swedish guy’s flat, I to catch our train. And we say we’ll meet up back in London, but I’ve moved out of the big old Twickenham house with its comings and goings and labelled shelves, gone east to be closer to work, and with the whole city
between us we can’t make our schedules click, and we never do. (She’s married to a Danish investment banker now. Two kids and a lakefront villa in Geneva.)

There were so many different lives to be lived back then, loosely looped as the end of a ball of wool. You could dig your hand in, open your fingers, spread the strands apart. Follow them one at a time, not making anything yet. Never crossing over.

Why did I come back?

I’ve had twenty years to wonder.

Because the market crashed, and the estate agency no longer needed a pretty face to help brokers spend their bonuses. Because I’d met Greg (such a long way to go to meet a boy from Winton), and his two-year visa was running out, and he was sick of bar work. Because in the four years I’d been there, London had never once felt like home. And at twenty-two, that still seemed like a bad thing.

‘So, you doing anything tonight?’ asks Jake, whose questions are never about the past.

I shake my head. Like Ella pulling out of a wet rose bush. ‘Nothing. Why?’

The three of us are out in unfamiliar water. Jake’s anchored off Whangaparaoa somewhere, in one of those glossy bays I’ve never needed to learn the names of.

Jake nods at the fish bin. ‘Shame not to eat those while they’re fresh.’

A gull screams overhead.

‘Dinner at my place, eh?’ he continues. ‘What do you say? I make a mean ceviche.’

I laugh. ‘You learn that in the jungle?’

‘Nah, mate. Peter Gordon.’

‘What about Ella?’

He pauses. ‘We could sneak her in.’

‘Why don’t we just do it at my place?’ Familiar territory — it’s safer all round. We all know how to behave there.

‘Done,’ says Jake.

We look around, at sun and blue water. Sedate volcanoes studding the sea.

‘You in a hurry to get back?’

I stretch my legs out. ‘No.’ There’s nowhere I’d rather be right now. I like this slow drift out here, where everything seems fluid.

I don’t know much about Jake’s past, either. And I like it that way. But it’s hard to maintain. There’s such a lot of the past. We have more of it now than future, he and I, the imbalance worsening by the day. All that weight gathering behind us. You have to manoeuvre carefully — no sudden stops or turns — if you’re going to keep it back.

For instance — Greg hated fish. Of all kinds. It was one of the few things he felt strongly about. Ceviche would have been his worst nightmare.

It wasn’t true, what Maggie said about him, all those years ago. He wasn’t like my father. Greg was an accountant. He could never have sold anything. He couldn’t see what people needed — the chinks in their armour, their wishes and fears — let alone believe, in his heart and soul, that he had it, right there in his briefcase, waiting for them to sign. Greg didn’t believe in anything much. Except maybe me, for a while.