the arboretum, expressing delight at the things that are easy to love like spring flowers and pink sunsets. Mikey sticks close. These trees are nothing like the park, no kids playing their music on the ramp, no benches, no bins where you can shovel the dog shit. He pulls on the catkins hanging from the hazel branches and the two women watch him.
‘Why didn’t you want kids, Di?’
‘Usual thing to start with, I was more interested in my career than baby puke. I had nothing, remember that, I was sixteen, starting from ground zero. It took one hundred per cent of me, making it, moving up, photocopying girl, receptionist, letting agent, estate agent, property portfolio manager – that’s when Edmund employed me. That’s when we met. And I did make it, Valerie, all this didn’t just fall in my lap, you know.’ Diana pauses as she takes in the extent of her very own country house. Other people might think she married it, but in her own way she knows she earned it. Suddenly she remembers who she is with and why. ‘What were we talking about?’
‘Kids,’ says Valerie.
‘Oh yes, kids.’ Diana pulls her coat closer around her. ‘So I didn’t have time for relationships. There were men, typical men, just not worth it. Certainly, I never met anyone I wanted to have children with. Then there’s our childhood. I thought if I can’t even remember being happy as a child, then how can I ever imagine having happy children?’
‘Mikey looks okay, doesn’t he?’ says Valerie. ‘Things don’t have to repeat themselves, Di.’ After years of feeling more ignorant than her sister, Valerie now believes it is possible that she understands more than her; not Greek myths or Latin words for clumps of trees, but things that matter like love at all costs and never giving up.
‘Then when I met Edmund and things got serious, we obviously talked about it – vasectomy reversal, sperm donation, adoption – but do you know what?’
‘No, tell me.’
‘We realised we didn’t want children – as a positive choice, I mean. There’s only ever been one moment when I felt a sort of flutter of what might have been, but other than that, we’re happy as we are. Edmund’s everything to me.’ Realising the truth of what she says, Diana grins. ‘Call me greedy, but I’d hate to share him with anyone other than the dog, that’s hard enough, isn’t it, Monty?’ She claps her hands and shoos the dog off into the shrubbery. ‘Go on, hunt somewhere else, you jealous old thing, you.’
Sisterly talk, thinks Valerie, sitting as sisters should sit, and Mikey running in from the wood to join them, beautiful, standing in the centre of the orchard spinning time on a broken sundial. On the old wrought-iron bench, Valerie turns ripe words over in her hands. One thing she has learned in life is that there are things better said than left unsaid and this moment will not come again.
‘Look, I don’t know what you want to happen today, what you want to talk about. All I can say is I know it must have been hard for you, your dad dead, me the favourite, and yes, my dad was a bastard at times, I recognise it now of course, the way he put Mum down, the way he bullied you, but . . .’
‘Bullied?’
‘Well, yes, bullied.’
‘Is that the word you’d use for it, is it? Bullied?’
Pulling a branch down from the apple tree above them, Diana examines the buds, little lips, tightly sealed. Dull word, bullied, like sullied. Not the right word at all.
This bench is wide enough for three and there is space in between them. Their eyes fix on the rows of skeleton trees joining hands in the dim light. The boy hits the sundial with his stick over and over again. As she gets up abruptly, Diana tramples the garish daffodils at their feet. Suffocating the last of the daylight, the thick evening is blurring the edges of things, the blue tits and the wren are mute, surrendering the space to the rooks and damp disappointment.
Leaving, Diana calls out to her sister huddled in a borrowed coat like a tart on a park bench at the end of the night. ‘Just forget it. I’ll go and check on supper. You take your time. Come on, Monty, home.’
They stay together: Mikey watching the robin on the wall watching him, Valerie hearing the word ‘bullied’ hit her like a ball on a wall, thud, thud, thud. Why just walk off like a teenager? Go on, then, shut yourself in your room and turn the music up. She was Mikey’s age when Diana walked out; what did her sister expect her to understand about family life at that age? What does she want from her now? And, yes, ‘bullied’ is the word she would use, whatever vocabulary Diana decides to impose on their childhood story.
As her anger subsides, Valerie concludes that, despite appearances, she has it all compared to Diana; she would not swap all the listed country houses and underground swimming pools and grass tennis courts and banks of daffodils in the world for what she has: her son, her Solomon, the past put to bed and a second chance. As she and Mikey find their way back, they pause in front of the tower, chinks of light shining through the windows on the top floor like eyes through a helmet. It looks like an army man, thinks Mikey, but he wonders what’s keeping it standing to attention, now that they’ve dug up its boots. Valerie tells Mikey that, if she had to, she would climb to the top and stand on the battlements to fight for him, and he says he’d get a sword and a horse and he’d defend the tower with his life for her.
‘Seriously, Mikey,’ she says, ‘nothing beats telling the truth. Nothing worse than secrets and lies. That should be our motto. No more secrets, no more lies.’
Marching round the pond, stomping his feet on the flagstones as he salutes first the tower and then the bronze boy, Mikey finds a sergeant-major voice, chanting for the benefit of the swarming starlings, ‘No more secrets, no more lies,’ he sings, punching the air, ‘no more secrets, no more lies.’
Chapter Seven
‘That’s downstairs,’ says Diana, leading the way a little unsteadily. ‘Now let’s see where you’re sleeping.’
The large glass of Merlot downed on her return to the house was probably a mistake, but at least now, dealing with bricks and mortar, she feels a renewed resilience. She is still pleased she invited Valerie, she has just rushed into the past too quickly, knocking things over as she went. It’s difficult with Michael around, she doesn’t know how much he knows.
‘When we have house parties, we use the coach house,’ Diana explains as they climb the stairs. ‘Edmund’s elderly aunt was in there when I arrived. She’s the one who looked after him when he was a teenager, after both his parents were dead. I said to Edmund, she needs to go, it’s not as if you can’t afford a decent nursing home. You weren’t going to catch me mashing her banana and wiping her bum.’
‘That’s what I get paid to do at the care home,’ says Valerie.
Valerie has a job? Diana thought she lived on benefits. Propped up against the banisters, Diana laughs rather hysterically. ‘Not my thing at all. If I ever reach that stage, put me down. Seriously, pop a little something in the wine and wave goodbye.’ She opens a bedroom door and turns on the light. ‘Now, this is one of the spare rooms, but we don’t want to give you that. Did you ever watch that? Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’
Valerie can imagine the programme appealing to Diana. Quite apart from the money (and she’s certainly come into the money), her father used to call Diana a know-all, then Diana would say she’d be the one with the last laugh and here she is, laughing.
‘This room’s lovely, Di!’ says Valerie. ‘I’d be fine in here.’
The pale shade of olive green turned out better than Diana hoped when she redecorated. Stroking the fine silk bedspread she traces the embroidered feathers of the red parrots, down the climbing stalks of the emerald blue flowers, the smooth and knotless surface of wealth. She is good with colour and fabrics; the rental clients always came back to the properties she used to manage for Edmund’s property company and they commented on how the flats were furnished in impeccable taste. They, like her, were nearly always outsiders, and she knew how to construct English class for