Joanna Glen - The Other Half of Augusta Hope

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Copyright © Joanna Glen 2019

Jacket design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019

Joanna Glen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Excerpt from The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith , ed. by Will May reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpt from The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin , ed. by Archie Burnett reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpt from Los Puentes Colgados , 1921, Fundación Federico García Lorca. Translation and transcription to music, 2007, reprinted by permission of Keith James.

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders. If there are any inadvertent omissions we apologise to those concerned and will undertake to include suitable acknowledgements in all future editions.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008314156

Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008314170

Version: 2019-05-02

For Mark, Charlie and Nina.

A time to weep and a time to laugh,

A time to mourn and a time to dance,

A time to scatter stones and a time to gather them …

Ecclesiastes 3:4–5

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

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Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

My parents didn’t seem the sort of people who would end up killing someone. Everyone would say that – except the boy who died, who isn’t saying anything. He carried his story with him off the edges of the earth, like the others who died along the way.

This story, my story, belongs to them too.

My story starts, like all stories do, with a mother and a father, and here they are – Stanley and Jilly Hope.

Stanley, tall, and stooping to apologise for this, liked to wear a dark wool suit, which, when he sat down, would rise to reveal two white and entirely hairless shins. Jilly was well below his eyeline, squashy as marshmallow and keen on aprons. She had pale curly hair, cut to just above the shoulder, which she patted, to little effect.

My parents put down a deposit on the house in Willow Crescent, in Hedley Green, before there was a house there at all. The riskiest thing they ever did. Empty out their bank account for a pile of mud.

From then on, no more risks to be taken. Life best lived within the crescent, which was circular, and round and round they went with their lives, contented, with no desire for exit.

I, as soon as I was out of my mother’s womb, looked to be out of anywhere I was put in , striving, with some success, to exit the cot, the playpen or the pram.

My first exit (out of my mother) was fraught. I’d turned the wrong way up and wrapped the umbilical cord around my neck, whilst Julia slid serenely into the world shortly before midnight on 31 July. I didn’t appear until some minutes later, by which time it was August, and we were twins with different birthdays.

My sister, born in July, was named Julia; I, born in August, would be Augusta. A thematic and paired approach, as advised by the library of books on naming babies which my mother had stacked on her bedside table throughout the long months of our gestation. Our double exit was complete. Exit was a word I liked, ex meaning out in Latin, and x meaning anything at all in maths, and exit signs in green and white everywhere at school, but with limited opportunities to do so.

Stanley and Jilly Hope were much more inclined towards the in than the out, the staying than the going. They were the first to move into the crescent, and they wore this like a badge amongst the neighbours. We live at number 1 . As if this made them winners.

But the thought crept into my mind quite early on that they were losers.

‘Go away!’ I said to the thought, but it didn’t.

I never told anyone about it, even Julia, though I know it showed in the expression on my face, and this made her sad – and I am truly sorry about that now, sorrier than you know.

She and I were Snow White and Rose Red: Julia, fair, quiet and contained, happy inside herself, inside the house, humming; and me, quite the opposite, straining to leave, dark, outspoken, walking in the wind, railing . Railing, from the Latin, to bray like a donkey ( ragulare ) and railing meaning barrier or fence from straight stick ( regula ), which is how I looked, skinny as a ruler.

Our fifth birthday, one year of school done, and my legs and arms narrowing as I rose an inch above Julia’s head. We were given tricycles, mine, yellow, and Julia’s, pink. Julia drew chalk lines on the drive and spent the day reversing into parking spaces. I rode out of the drive, turned left, curved around to number 13, at the top of the crescent, twelve o’clock, crossed the road precariously to the roundabout and drove my trike into the fishpond singing ‘We All Live in a Yellow Submarine’.