on the mantelpiece and the gin bottle chiming with the decanter, he recognised what was happening. Turkey. New Zealand. But it was Japan that came back to him as he stood in his pyjamas looking out over the Thames and the night-winking City of London, feeling the subtle tremor slip away. Tokyo was another year, another escape from some unpleasantness or other; then he’d watched skyscrapers actually shaking as if someone had knocked the Christmas tree and he’d wondered if he was going to die there, and he’d hoped, half hoped that it might be so. This was a poor relation of an earthquake.
Kept awake by a nagging feeling of guilt that he should have pulled himself together and gone with Diana to the funeral, Edmund was restless anyway, and now he knows it’s pointless to try to get back to sleep and he sits on the edge of the bed playing with his phone. Within minutes Twitter has got a #earthquake and it is not long before an app alert is triggered automatically by significant price movements in British shares on stock exchanges in the Far East. Property. Lloyd’s Insurance. Land development companies. Energy. All significantly down. On the news feed he selects the map and with finger and thumb slowly focuses his way through the concentric circles – England, the south, Twycombe – until the epicentre of the earthquake is revealed as no more than a few miles away from home, and as he returns the map to its former size, the circles look like ripples in the river at Wynhope when the surface of the pool has been broken by no more than a falling acorn. Diana’s phone goes to voicemail, the landline is unobtainable. Dressing quickly, he keeps one eye on the coverage on the television, disoriented by being here when he should have been there, where everything is happening in flickering orange and flashing blue lights. He feels the unfairness of all those ordinary decisions we take unaware of their extraordinary consequences. Already viewers are sending in live selfie recordings: late-night half-empty beer bottles dribbling across a coffee table; a shelf stacker from a supermarket capturing the moment when all the tins of tomatoes take to the aisles; a webcam proving that animals feel it first as a cat leaps from the sofa and flees through the flap seconds before the room starts to tremble. The narrative runs along the bottom of the screen. Earthquake 5.4 rocks southern England. At least one aftershock. Two fatalities reported so far. Hospitals on full alert. Emergency services overwhelmed and requesting the public not to call unless absolutely necessary. Safety procedures activated at Bindley nuclear power plant. People are advised to remain in their homes if possible.
Edmund’s overwhelming need is to get back to Wynhope. Although there have been more times than he can count when he has wished the place flattened, fantasised about fires and coming home to find nothing but dust and a chance to start again free of the past, now that this is a possibility, however unlikely, he finds his own foundations shaking. He is making assumptions that Diana is fine and he is not going to challenge them; Diana is nothing if not a survivor and he is nothing if she has not survived. No news is good news. It might be a cliché, but like so many clichés, there is a truth in it which helps him sleep at night. Let sleeping dogs lie, that is another. He prays for Monty to be alive.
As he drives towards Wynhope, the thin yellow line of dawn is behind him and an imperceptible watering down of darkness lies ahead.
Chapter Twelve
A rumbling in the distance disturbs the dull night – not again, surely not another aftershock, Diana can’t stand much more – but this is just a car coming up the drive over the cattle grid, its headlights illuminating the pale trunks of the silver birch trees standing watch in front of the coach house. Edmund? No, he’s in London, probably doesn’t even know what’s happened. It is Mrs H and her husband John. Feeling an unfamiliar relief that everything can be given to someone else to sort out, she runs to meet them as they pull up behind the garages, but the thought of the housekeeper seeing her like this, bedraggled like a bag lady, and John seeing her in the clothes she wears to bed, slows her down. They have coats done up over their pyjamas and a torch. The spotlight exposes everything about her; they would like to do that, she knows, expose everything about her.
‘We’ve got a crack in the back wall at the lodge,’ says John, ‘so we came up to make sure everything was all right at the house.’
‘Mikey, come here, my love, you’re freezing. Look at you still in your shirt and your best trousers.’
Gratefully, Diana relinquishes responsibility for the boy to the housekeeper, who wraps her arms around the child and presses her cheek against his face. Mikey allows himself to be folded up in her. He holds on tight to Grace’s coat, and when he is sure she is not going anywhere he lets go, just a little, and struggles to think how he can tell her what’s happened, what he saw and what he heard and how his aunt has got the key in her pocket and how nobody knows what’s important and how nobody’s doing anything, but it’s hard to make sense of it all and in the end it’s something much simpler he needs to say. He takes her arm and drags her to the drive.
‘Please can you help my mum?’ he asks her and he points.
‘Of course, my love, where is she? Valerie?’
‘Oh my God,’ says John as he turns the corner and instinctively covers his mouth against the dust. ‘What the hell?’ He systematically swings the torchlight from the house to what is left of the tower, then on around the garden where the last of the snowdrops blink white beneath the twisted rose bushes, and on past the impenetrable wall of yew hedges, all vaguely shrouded in a layer of unnatural cloud. For John, the image in front of him takes on the characteristics of Belfast in the 1980s: sirens, the smell of sweat on uniforms and urine on the kiddies’ pyjama bottoms, counting the men in his platoon and finding the numbers short. He rounds on Diana.
‘This can’t just have been the tremor, it wasn’t that strong.’ Suddenly he laughs loudly, incongruously. ‘It was the pool, wasn’t it? Bloody ridiculous, that pool. Destabilised the whole lot. I said so. That’s what’s done it. So where’s your sister?’
‘She was going to sleep in the tower, John,’ says Grace. ‘Oh my, you don’t think . . .’
‘In there?’ John directs the beam to the wreckage then starts to run. ‘She might still be okay.’ He shouts, ‘Hello? Valerie, isn’t it? Can you hear me? Valerie! Valerie!’
‘Valerie!’ Hand in hand, Grace and the boy catch up with him. ‘Valerie, my love, can you hear us?’
The only other sounds are the dog howling from the house and the relentless pulse of guilt inside her head. Valerie is dead, Diana knows it. The key is in her pocket. She hasn’t done anything wrong, she was put in a terrible situation, and, yes, she failed in some ways, but it was not her fault. Everyone will blame her, no one will believe her. The familiar phrases beat their logic into the rails like an oncoming train, whining their threat down the track, the time to save herself is now. They all have their backs to her. In one swift and violent movement, she flings the key to the tower into the border behind her. It must have fallen in the shrubs, a shining lie, bright amongst the dark leaves and red berries, or perhaps it fell beneath the camellias. Edmund taught her that yews protect against evil and camellias hate the morning sun; they both have reason enough now.
She joins in with a more confident voice. ‘Valerie, can you hear me?’
Everything is failing: the security lights do not come on again, the alarm is reduced to an intermittent whine, Monty howls and stops, howls and stops, and Mrs H is possessed with pointless questions. Whatever happened? Did anyone hear her calling? Why couldn’t she get out? Instinctively Diana glances back at the flowerbed behind her, smelling of secrets and drizzle. John is the gardener; she imagines him, fingers probing the warming earth.
‘What is it? What’s in there? What have you seen?’ cries Grace. ‘Is it her?’
‘It’s nothing,’ says Diana, turning away, ‘there’s nothing to be frightened of there.’
‘Is the house safe?’ asked John.
‘The boy will catch his death out here,’ says Grace.
‘What about Monty?’ pleads Diana. ‘Sir Edmund will never forgive us.’
‘I thought you said you could help my mum.’