Gregory Hall - A Sleep and A Forgetting

GREGORY HALL

A SLEEP

AND A

FORGETTING

Cover

Title Page GREGORY HALL A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING

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By the Same Author

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About the Publisher

June’s

That Saturday, just as Catriona Turville had been about to leave the house for her usual morning run, the postman delivered her sister Flora’s suicide note.

As she sat on the bottom tread of the staircase in her navy-blue tracksuit, the bright early Spring sunlight shining through the stained-glass panel of the front door and splashing the encaustic tiles of the hall floor with bars and blotches of red and blue, she wondered, while tying the laces of her new, alarmingly white trainers, how long their pristine cleanliness would survive the dog shit which lay in whorls like enormous worm-casts half-hidden by the long grass of the park, and speculated whether the overweight middle-aged man who had been sweating and panting over the exact same route at the exact same time rather too coincidentally for the previous three days, and who had appeared to gaze longingly after her as she effortlessly outpaced him, would get around either to speaking to her or assaulting her, when there was the clatter of heavy-shod feet on the tiled front path, a shadow behind the glass, and the white envelope fluttered through the letter box on to the coir mat.

She had had no premonition of disaster. She unhurriedly picked up the envelope. Recognising the sender from the small, precise handwriting of the address, she felt nothing other than mild curiosity. Her sister rarely if ever wrote letters. But there could be nothing bad, as otherwise Flora would surely have phoned. The telephone was her preferred method of communication. She phoned Catriona at least twice a week, usually for quite long conversations.

Catriona sat down at the kitchen table to read the letter, intrigued as to what news it could be that needed to be communicated in this manner, and quite glad of a genuine excuse to delay her departure and thereby upset the timetable of her fat fellow jogger.

Minutes later, the trivial concerns and inconveniences of London living brutally thrust back to the far distant periphery of her mental universe by the cataclysmic impact of the news, her body numb, she sat staring at the sheets of writing-paper in her hands, the warm, comfortable room at that moment become as cold and alien as one of the moons of Saturn.

She read the letter yet again, its words already imprinted on her memory.

The Old Mill

Ewescombe Lane,

Owlbury

Glos.

Friday morning

My dearest Cat,

There is no gentle way to tell you what I have decided to do directly I return from posting this letter. It will hurt you as it will hurt everyone I love and who loves me. By the time you receive this letter, the sister you know and love will be dead.

I’ve often thought of killing myself but I’ve never had the courage. But now I have found the drug to put an end to my suffering and to give me peace. Now I am afraid only of the loss of the dear faces which have been the only things that have kept me sane all these years.

I love you, you must know that. And I know you love me. But somehow, that love has never been enough to exorcise the ghosts of the past. Terrible things have happened to us, the memories of which are with us every waking moment and in our dreams, though no nightmare could ever be as bad as the reality.

We have never before spoken of such things, have we? They have spread their darkness over us so thickly that no light that we could generate would pierce it. Perhaps if we had talked, really talked about what happened all those years ago, things might have been different. But we never did and now we never shall.

I’m not blaming you, dearest Cat. Your remedy is to endure the unendurable in solitude, and by your power of mind to endeavour to forget the unforgettable. But I have never had your strength. I’ve decided I can’t go on any longer waking every day to the dreadful things inside my head.

What I am about to do may seem weak to you, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. I’m about to do the strongest thing I’ve done, to seize the remedy for my agony.

Please come directly you receive this. You must be here to help my darling Charlotte. I need you to use your strength for her.

I hope it’s going to be like one of those hospital anaesthetics where everything suddenly blanks out like a TV screen, except that this time there won’t be any nurse to say, ‘Welcome back, sweetheart’, a micro-second later.

I’ve chosen this weekend because it’s half-term. Bill is away in the States at a conference and won’t be back before Wednesday. Charlotte has gone to a study centre in Devon with her school for the entire week.

Now, you must destroy this letter and never tell anyone you received it. Charlotte must never know the secret of our past. It has destroyed our lives. It must not destroy hers.

Goodbye, my dear. As your old Wordsworth says, ‘We must grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.’

Love, hugs and kisses, my beloved, from your very dearest little sister Flora.

The words of Flora’s letter hammered inside her skull as if they were physical blows. For a hideous moment, like a storm-tossed lake of black polluted water spilling over the edge of a crumbling dam, those terrible memories to which Flora referred threatened to sweep away the wall which confined them and flood Catriona’s conscious mind. She stood rigid, her eyes closed, forcing her mind to counter this image, as she had countered many others, as if they were spells cast by a magician, battling to keep that filthy tide from engulfing her. Then she was breathing easily. The water in the lake was aquamarine, the sun was shining through the clouds and the massive curve of white concrete, springing majestically from side to side of the rocky valley, was unbreached.

Flora was right. That was how she tried to bear the unbearable. By the constant effort of forgetting. By struggling with her memories in solitude and in silence. And in that silence, she had always assumed that for Flora, the demons had been less tormenting. Now it was clear that she had been wrong. Dreadfully, unforgivably wrong. And now it was too late.

But was it? Wasn’t the threat of suicide sometimes a way of forcing hidden matters into the light? Had Flora indeed travelled to the undiscovered country? Would she, could she have done that? What if she had lost her nerve at the last moment? Or what if she hadn’t, by accident or by subconscious design, taken enough pills? Maybe she was even now waking up, groggy and sick? Please, let it be so! Let it not be too late to act!

Catriona grabbed the kitchen phone off its hook and jabbed out her sister’s number. It rang, and for a few glorious seconds, she imagined a drowsy arm reaching out at the other end, and then a fuddled voice saying, ‘Who’s that?’ and Catriona replying, ‘It’s me, silly. What do you think you’re playing at?’

The ringing tone went on and on. There were several extensions in Flora’s house and they would be chirping in unison like an avian chorus in the morning silence. After five minutes she gave up. She had done it. That was the only logical conclusion to draw from the silence. Flora alive would not have allowed that dreadful letter to arrive without warning to unleash its appalling message. She would surely have called, or she would have come to London. At the very least she would have answered the phone.