Chapter Twenty-Four

TWENTY-FOUR

There were dandelions and daisies around his headstone, sunny yellow and soft cream amid the grass, which was overgrown but gave the impression of lushness rather than untidiness. Carla longed to lie down on the grass, to lie down right there, to sleep and not wake up. She had brought with her a red cashmere blanket, which she laid out, and instead of lying, she knelt, leaning forward, as though in prayer. She touched with the tops of her fingers the top of the black granite headstone, still shockingly new among the grayer, mossier graves, and said, “Happy birthday, sweetheart.” She leaned back on her haunches and allowed herself to cry for a little while, in small, hiccupping sobs. Then, she wiped her eyes and blew her nose and sat down, cross-legged, her back straight, to wait. Before long, she saw Theo, as she’d known she would, making his way toward her along the path. He raised a hand in greeting. She felt her heart beat feebly in the base of her throat.

He stopped a few paces away from her. “I’ve been worried, you know,” he said, but she could tell from the tone of his voice and the cast of his face that he wasn’t angry with her. He had a chastened look, the same one he’d worn when she found out about the publicist. So, he knew. He knew that she knew about Angela, that there was something to know about Angela.

“I lost Ben’s Saint Christopher,” Carla said, moving a little to one side, to make space for him on the blanket. He sat down heavily, leaned in to kiss her, but she shrank back, saying, “No.” He frowned at her.

“Where did you lose it? What were you doing with it?”

“I . . . I don’t know. If I knew where I’d lost it, I wouldn’t really have lost it, would I? I had it out, because . . . just because I wanted to look at it. I’ve looked everywhere.”

He nodded, his gaze moving over her, taking her in. “You look awful, Carla,” he said.

“Yeah, thanks. I’ve not had a great couple of weeks,” she said, and she started to laugh, just a giggle at first and then a full-throated cackle. She laughed until tears ran down her face, until Theo lifted his hand to brush them away. She flinched away from him, again. “Don’t touch me,” she said. “Not until you tell me the truth. I don’t want you to touch me until you tell me what you did.” Part of her wanted to run away from him, part of her ached to hear him deny it.

Theo rubbed the top of his head with his forefinger, his chin dropping to his chest. “I saw Angela. I went to see her, because Daniel had come to me asking for money, and I’d given him some but then he wanted more. That’s it. That’s the whole story.”

Carla twisted her fingers into the grass, pulled a clump up with her hands, pushed it back into the soil. “Why didn’t you tell me, Theo? Why wouldn’t you tell me that Daniel had come to you, of all people . . . ?”

Theo threw up his hands. “I don’t know! I don’t know. I didn’t know what was going on and frankly”—he looked her dead in the eye—“I wasn’t sure I wanted to.”

Carla felt her skin flush from the base of her neck to her cheekbones. “So you saw her . . . once? Just that one time? Theo?”

“Twice,” he said quietly. “She asked to see me the second time, and I went. I couldn’t tell you, Cee . . . it was”—he exhaled hard—“just before she died. I went to see her and a week or so later she was found at the bottom of the stairs. It looked bad.”

“It looked bad,” Carla repeated. “And was it?” she asked, her voice soft. “Bad?”

“Cee . . .” He reached for her hand and she let him take it. “I don’t want to have this conversation here, do you? It’s Ben’s day. It’s his eighteenth. I don’t even want to think about her today.”

“Why did she ask to see you?” Carla asked. Theo didn’t answer. He leaned across toward her and kissed her on the mouth, and she let him.

“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I don’t like it when you disappear.”

They sat for a while in silence, hand in hand. Theo had brought cognac in a hip flask; they took turns sipping from it, passing it back and forth between them.

When the alcohol was burning hot in her chest, Carla asked him: “What would you do differently? If you could? Would you still marry me if you knew what was to come?”

“Of course I would, I—”

“I don’t think I’d have married you,” she said. Theo winced. She squeezed his hand, dropped it. “I don’t mean that to be cruel, but if I had known, I don’t think I could have. Only, I suppose it didn’t really matter who I married, did it? It might have happened anyway, mightn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” He took hold of her wrist, finger and thumb looping around the slender bone. With his other hand he reached out and touched her face; he tried to turn her chin so that she would face him, but she pulled away.

“The poison,” she said. “It came from me, from my family.”

“You are not your sister,” Theo replied.

Then, finally, she met his eye. “You should forgive her, Theo.”

---

Theo tried to get Carla to go home with him, but she insisted that she wanted to stay awhile. At first he offered to stay with her, but eventually she managed to persuade him to go. Though not before he’d handed over a USB drive with a draft of his latest novel for her to read. “Theo, really? I do have quite a lot going on at the moment, you know? I haven’t even—” Her voice caught. “I haven’t even done anything about the funeral. Daniel’s funeral, I need to . . .”

“I could do that,” Theo said, still pressing the USB stick into her hand. “I could make those arrangements, but . . . Cee. You’ve always been my first reader. You can’t just stop being my first reader; it doesn’t work like that.”

Carla watched him weave his way through the gravestones, a little the worse for the cognac, dappled sunlight picking him out as he made his way to the main road. She waited for a while, to make quite sure that he was gone, that he hadn’t turned back, wasn’t loitering somewhere keeping an eye on her, before she took from her pocket a handful of ash and sprinkled it over the grass covering Ben’s grave.

She tried to conjure up her sister’s lazy drawl, her throaty laugh.

---

•   •   •“Do you remember that house in Vaugines, Cee?” Angela had asked her, years ago. They’d been sitting on the sofa in Angela’s living room in the house on Hayward’s Place, weak sun shining through half-closed curtains, illuminating the room with a dirty yellow glow. Angela sat with her feet tucked up underneath her; she was smoking, picking at her nails. Her hands were steady, which meant she’d already had a drink. “Do you remember that place, by the olive grove, with all those strange animal head sculptures on the walls? And Daniel and I stayed in the pool house? Ben was still a baby, he was tiny”—she held out her hands to demonstrate—“warm and perfect like a loaf of bread.”

“Of course I remember,” Carla said. “It was the first holiday we ever took him on. Theo and I spent all our time on those daybeds beneath the trees, falling asleep with him tucked in between us.” She closed her eyes. “What were those trees? Were they oak trees, do you think? Or maybe plane . . .”

“Those incredible sunsets,” Angela said. “Remember those? All that rosé.”

“And you couldn’t get Daniel out of the pool, not for love nor money. Do you remember how cross he got, because he wanted to teach Ben to swim and we kept telling him Ben was way too little?”

Angela shook her head. “Did he? Did he really?” she asked, bending forward to stub out her cigarette in the ashtray on the carpet. “It seems impossible, doesn’t it? Thinking about it now, from here”—she gestured at the ugly room around them—“that we were all so happy. It seems unimaginable. All that happiness, wrecked.”

Carla’s own hands shook; her arms, her legs, her whole body trembled as she rose to her feet, as she stared down at her sister, lamenting their lost contentment. “Unimaginable,” she croaked. “It is, isn’t it? Just a few moments of carelessness, an hour or two of unthinking neglect, a door left open. And here we are.”

She remembered the way her sister stared at her then, glassy-eyed, her mouth working but making no sound.

Carla took another handful of ash, and brought it to her lips before she pressed it down, into the earth.