The Sunday train is almost empty and is a totally different experience from Joanna’s twice-weekly commute between St Albans and the Royal Academy of Music. A woman with chapped cheeks sits across the gangway and Joanna, fishing around in her bag for her mobile, listens to her gabbling vaguely to herself in a lilting, soothing voice.
‘You doing all right?’ she asks Mike when he finally picks up the phone.
‘Hi, babe. Yeah, all well here. You okay?’
‘Fine. Nearly there. Hardly anyone on the train.’ She stares out at the fast-moving roofs and high-rise buildings that make up the northern suburbs of London. ‘Freddie and Ethan okay?’
‘They’re fine. Watching cartoons with Pauline’s two.’
A twinge of insecurity at the casual way her husband drops the name of their attractive and recently divorced neighbour into the conversation. ‘Pauline’s there then, is she?’ Joanna tries to sound indifferent.
‘Yeah, she is. D’you want a word?’
‘No, no. It’s you I want to talk to.’
Still early, the sun barely up – Joanna sees it has yet to burn away the January frost that has settled on everything.
‘What you up to today?’ she asks, twirling a curl around a finger.
‘Mostly ?’ she quizzes.
‘Pauline wondered if we should take the kids to the aquadrome in Welwyn later.’
‘But you said you hated it there.’ Joanna, busy envisaging the lovely Pauline in her swimsuit splashing around in the pool with Mike. ‘It’s what you tell me whenever I suggest going.’
‘Yeah, I know that, but—’
‘Because Pauline likes it, you want to go?’ Joanna interrupts him and prods the flesh around her middle, the baby weight she gained and struggled to shift.
‘Why are you being like this? It’s your fault if you think you’re missing out on things here – I said I’d come with you, didn’t I? I wanted to come with you.’ She hears his frustrated sigh. ‘Pauline said she’d have looked after the boys.’
‘Oh, because of course that would’ve been great fun, wouldn’t it?’ Joanna darts a look at her only travelling companion, thankful she is still absorbed in her own little world. ‘Don’t pretend you’d have been happy to give up a Sunday sorting out Carrie’s flat.’
‘I wouldn’t have minded.’
‘Wouldn’t have minded ? Oh, come on, Mike, we both know that’s a big lie. Why would you have wanted to do anything for her? You hated her.’ Joanna knows she’s being unreasonable and regrets the unfairness of her words, but they’re out now and she can’t unsay them.
‘I didn’t hate her.’ Mike sounds affronted. ‘I just knew how bad she was for you, that’s all.’
‘But you didn’t have to discourage me from keeping in touch with her, did you?’ Joanna, while acknowledging she’s still in a state of shock about her sister, isn’t sure why she’s attacking Mike.
‘Hang on a minute. I was protecting you.’ Mike holds his ground. ‘You don’t remember, do you? How long it used to take me to put you together again after she’d finished tearing you to shreds.’
‘I know, I’m sorry.’ Joanna softens – it isn’t fair to transfer the shame she has about her only sibling on to Mike. ‘I don’t want to argue with you about it any more.’
‘Neither do I,’ he agrees. ‘But honestly, Jo, I wish you’d let me come with you. It would’ve been nice for us to spend some time together. And I’m sorry if you think I’m fussing, but I’m really not happy with you going there on your own. You said yourself you’re not entirely convinced Carrie stabbed herself … Suppose she was in danger from someone, and that someone tries coming after you?’
The train wheezes to a stop, then remains stationary for some time. Stiflingly warm, the heaters belt out artificial air, and wafts of whatever her travelling companion is eating drift over to her.
‘Pauline can’t hear us talking, can she?’ Joanna ducks her husband’s concern. She hates the idea their neighbour could be privy to any discord between her and Mike.
‘No, she’s with the kids.’
‘It is kind of her to help out while I’m away, taking the boys to school tomorrow – you will thank her for me, won’t you?’
Mike’s answer is lost to the barking Buttons.
‘Someone at the door.’ He tells her what she already senses. ‘I’d better go and see who it is.’
‘Speak later?’ she asks.
‘Speak later,’ he says, then hangs up.
Joanna checks her mobile for other messages, thinks about replying to an email from one of her music students, but scrolls through her contact list instead. Sees her sister’s number and activates the call. Pressing it to her ear she listens to her sister’s recorded voice, the slight hesitancy, the little puff of breath, before inviting the caller to leave a message.
‘I miss you so much.’ She says the things she couldn’t say to Caroline when she was alive. ‘Why didn’t you tell me if you were in trouble? I could have helped. I wanted to be a sister to you but you kept pushing me away.’ Joanna blinks through the sharp winter sunshine flooding the carriage and settling in warm bands across her body. ‘There’ve been times when I could’ve done with you too, y’know. Where did we go wrong? How did we let things get so bad between us?’
With the sway and rock of the train speeding through cuttings again, she dozes off … until a frantic tugging of her sleeve, and she wakes to the face of her co-traveller alarmingly close to hers.
‘Wake up. Wake up.’ The grip, tightening, shakes her arm. ‘This is King’s Cross – they won’t let you sleep here.’
The walk from the tube to her sister’s old flat is short but, needing to sidestep numerous cross-legged beggars and hawkers pushing leaflets into her hands for things she doesn’t want, it takes an age. Joanna has always thought of the London district of Bayswater as a village within a city and, out under a milky sun, the streets around Queensway bustling with colour and life, she is reminded how much she loved coming here. It makes her question if the sleepy little nook of Hertfordshire she and Mike ended up in had in fact been the right move. Often invited by Dora, the visits stopped when she died and Caroline inherited; for reasons Joanna never got to the bottom of, her sister didn’t want her anywhere near the place, or anywhere near her.
When she reaches the flower stall that has always been on the corner before the turn into Edinburgh Terrace, she stops to smell the roses as she always did in the days when she used to stay with Dora. With no Dora or Caroline to buy for, she noses through the buckets of sprays with their leafless, thorny stalks, wanting the heady scent of the ones that grew at Pillowell, but they always elude her. Those types of roses don’t exist beyond her imagination. Like her memories of warm summer evenings barefoot on Dora’s lawn, the air thick with their perfume and the song of the linnet, they were little more than a rumour of the heart. Much like, as things turned out, the postcard-pretty setting of Witchwood, when she thinks of the horrors that were to occur there.
A good-looking man in a pinstripe suit is suddenly at her elbow. He smiles appreciatively at her while he chooses a bunch of flowers. Joanna returns his smile, she can’t help it; contrary to Caroline’s green-tinged accusation whenever they were out together, she doesn’t go looking for this kind of attention, but can’t pretend it isn’t flattering when it comes. ‘If you didn’t go round with a scowl on your face,’ she used to tell her sister, ‘then people might smile at you.’
‘Nice, aren’t they?’ the man says. ‘I can’t resist them.’
‘I’m the same; they’re so pretty.’ She knows she shouldn’t talk to strangers, let alone strange men, but something in the way he searches her face makes her forget the risks others warn of. ‘Are they for someone special?’
‘Maybe.’ He winks, making her blush.
She moves away from the flower stall and is about to step off the kerb when she spots a black guy with Bob Marley dreadlocks, strumming a guitar. She is wriggling coins from her purse when he shifts forward into another song, plucking the opening chords of a calypso melody … yellow bird, you sit all alone like me …
The tune, with its strong associations, makes the horizon swim. Dipping her head to hide her tears, Joanna is back there … back among the tall bulrushes, the cold water up to her middle, teeth chattering wildly as she scrabbled with the noose of weeds … the dangling disbelief in those first few moments when she hoped someone would tap her on the shoulder and tell her it was all an awful joke.
Rooted to the pavement, she realises, perhaps for the first time, how closely she’s lived with this memory. How it has loitered like a blot on the landscape of her mind, the darkness oozing from it, a wound that can never heal. Impossible to contemplate someone as fragile as Caroline coping with such a dreadful experience. Harrowing enough for Joanna to carry around, but at least she’s been able to let it all out with Mike. Who did Caroline have? Because it can’t have been healthy to bottle that up. Nowadays you’d be given counselling, especially when you consider how young they’d both been, but not once did the sisters speak of what happened in Witchwood, boxing the misery away, much as they did when their father drowned.
Joanna misses the way the busker’s smile folds in on itself, but he doesn’t stop playing as others have gathered around, singing and clapping, dropping coins into his guitar case. When her memories release her, she breaks into a run, her holdall banging against her calves.
‘Excuse me … excuse me,’ she cries, ripping through the dwindling crowd and into the quiet terrace to hunt for number seventy-three, aware how the man in the pinstripe suit appears to be following her, and is worryingly close on her heels.