the lily pond, and his friend, the bronze boy, two rabbits running from the flowerbed which lines the orchard wall, the front door open, welcoming him home. Then he registers the house as it is. He brings the two together, holding up separate postcards of the same place, before and after the war, or something like that.
‘I thought they said on the news it was just a tremor. What’s happened? How did it happen?’ But then his questions are overtaken with laughter, a sort of inarticulate hysteria. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t stop,’ and they come again, unstoppable soundless cramps from deep within him. ‘I can’t believe the tower’s finally gone. This is what’s meant by an act of God.’ He wipes his eyes, red from dust and crying. ‘God just comes along and does what I never dared do.’
Diana doesn’t understand, he can see that, but it is too hard to explain. He tries to pull himself together. ‘All these years, my father and that bloody tower. God knows how much I’ve hated it and, oh, I don’t know, all the talk and plans about pulling it down which never materialised because I never quite had the guts, and now – look at it – just sky. Nothing but sky.’ Somewhere in that heap is his sampler, which he has been able to recite off by heart since he was a boy. ‘Rase it, rase it,’ he quotes to Diana, ‘even to the foundation thereof. Little Edith was a prophet after all.’
Too late he realises how insensitive he is being; of course Diana is going to be devastated by the collapse of the tower, not to mention the fact that this has pretty much buried the pool, literally and metaphorically. He is sorry, she must be so disappointed, having spent all that time and effort decorating the place, putting her very own mark on Wynhope, that’s what she said, but he’ll find her another little project, he promises, and if he’s honest, he could never really have fallen in love with the tower, however spectacular the curtains. It was always going to take something more fundamental than a new coat of paint to put it right. The sun is rising directly behind the ruin, rays of light colour the drifting dust, and he is struck by its beauty, a Turner watercolour, Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, a place where the past is no longer a series of impenetrable walls and locked doors, but a softer world, a portal to a different sort of future.
He feels a little shaky himself. ‘It’s quite ethereal in its own way, isn’t it?’
Diana is no longer listening, she is stumbling away from him towards the coach house.
‘We went to my mother’s funeral,’ she hisses as she shakes herself free from him, ‘or have you forgotten?’
‘I haven’t forgotten, everything got so topsy-turvy. I just forgot they were staying, that’s all. I’m sorry. Where are they?’
‘They aren’t anywhere. The boy is in the flat. And Valerie, my half-sister in case you’ve forgotten, was sleeping in there.’ Diana flicks her head towards what is left of the tower.
An eye for an eye. He might have known the tower would not give up that easily, and the house standing there smirking with its hands on hips. How angry he is with Diana, that she wanted a pool, because it must be something to do with the pool, that she has been here and allowed this to happen, and above all, that there is a boy, another boy with a body in the tower and a future to be faced all alone. John comes out from the flat to meet him. Edmund feels keenly his white-collared impotence as his handyman talks about tractors and ropes and heavy lifting gear. In the end, though, it is clear that any rescue attempt would not only be futile, but dangerous, and nothing can really be done until the emergency services arrive. As Edmund steels himself to go into the coach house, he acknowledges to himself that he’d rather be tearing at stones than talking to orphans and that both were probably equally ineffective.
Now he hates me. Diana feels it like the moment the wind gets up from the beach and smashes the glasses on the terrace and the summer holiday is over. Maybe he’ll always hate me for this moment. He married me because what I brought was order, agreement, no history, no future. And now it’s all about the dead, again. Off he goes, running after the boy. That’s what it will be like, everyone worried about the child as if childhood itself is a reason. The boy will talk, no one will understand her part, no one will worry about the fact that she has lost a mother and a sister in the space of a week, but then perhaps she can tell them everything and she means everything. She can say let me start at the beginning, let me tell you the whole story. Studying the scene from the doorway, Diana makes out a still life in a dim light of a darker sort than those museum paintings: Mr and Mrs H peering out of the window waiting for the emergency services, where are they, what’s taking so long, Michael and the dog both hiding under the table, and great big scribbles in blue biro all along the bottom of the white sofa where the boy is continuing to graffiti his unintelligible message, scarring himself and his story into the fixtures and fittings, even as Edmund, perched on the armchair, is talking to him. He’s apologising, as usual. Sorry, so sorry, so bloody upper-class. Down on his hands and knees now, we’ll do everything we can for Mummy, promises promises. He isn’t getting much response, reaching into the child’s hiding place as one might coax a cat from a drain.
Having little success, he gets to his feet and joins her.
‘It was pretty bad for me too, Ed,’ she says.
‘I don’t know what to say to him.’
‘What did people say to you?’ she whispers. They never talk about his childhood, either.
‘Sorry, that’s what people said. That they were sorry.’
This is it, then. I am not holding him, he is not comforting me, and if Mrs H doesn’t shut up blathering on about making up the four-poster bed in the tower and who would have thought it, then I will slap her.
There is no need. They are all silenced soon enough. It comes again. This time they recognise it knocking at the door. At first it is almost imperceptible, the slightest vibration everywhere and nowhere, changing everything and nothing. Hypersensitive, their brains process the immediate, recently gained experience to confirm that the tremor is beyond their control, that they just have to hold their breath as it clatters the cutlery in the kitchen and jiggles the cabinet where the glasses are kept in strict, glittering lines. The tremor is neither strong nor long, barely a few seconds, probably the sort of thing that happens unnoticed several times a year, but that’s irrelevant; all that counts is the deep-seated realisation that now, because the ground can move, nothing can ever be relied upon again. Each of them gasps, but the boy screams, he screams the inaudible scream of the iconic picture hanging on walls with a dreadful casualness, in flats and bedsits the world over.
Irrationally, the aftershock even undermines their faith in the coach house and they need to get out. Out is bland daylight, any magic of the dawn gone, just the dripping of the gutters and the dustbins ready for collection and everything as normal, except for the severed limb hanging limp and brutalised on the side of the house and John and Edmund shouting Valerie’s name across the picture-perfect gardens and the scream of sirens growing closer on the main road.
For Diana, no one illustrated it like this before, but somewhere inside herself she recognises that this is hell and hell is where she belongs.
Chapter Fourteen
There are old photograph albums in his study that have sepia pictures like this: three in a line at Wynhope, the lord of the manor, his wife, the heir to the estate and the family dog, with the staff standing loyally to one side. A fire engine, an ambulance and what looks like two army vehicles with winching gear drive straight through the portrait that Edmund is remembering and skid to a halt in front of them. Monty leaps to meet them, wagging his tail. Reverting to his army training, John steps forwards and briefs the officers, Diana hangs back, Edmund hovers somewhere in between them.
‘Please God they’ve come in time,’ he says.
‘I don’t think it’s possible,’ Diana whispers. ‘Not the way it came down.’
‘Poor you’ – Edmund pulls her close – ‘I can’t imagine how awful it must have been.’
‘It was horrible, Ed, horrible. We’d gone to bed, I don’t know, Valerie didn’t even want