Sarah Hall - The Wolf Border

Lawrence? Are you there?

She can hear murmuring in the background on the other end of the line, the occasional muffled outburst. Emily is monitoring Lawrence’s side of the conversation. Tell her to. . If she wants to. . Why doesn’t she. . over here . Rachel can picture the scenario: her brother’s hand covering the mouthpiece, him trying to find some private space to talk. The small blonde woman flapping her hands spastically beside him, furious at being left out. Nor can her brother see what is really going on — women fighting with each other through him. Though raised in a house of its mastery, he seems blind to female psychology: the competitive undercurrents, the desire for control. In his mind the problem is likely to be due to the stress of the tragedy, the old Binny-Rachel conflict, and Emily’s concern — dynamics he understands or would like to imagine.

Just a minute, Rachel.

Lawrence says something to his wife. His tone is gentle, but firm. Caught between hard places. Emily has had months, years, to dig her trenches. But, influential though she may be, Rachel knows her own position is strong, perhaps the strongest. She has historic authority, simply from being the older sibling in a family where dysfunction reigned. She was neither soft-hearted nor patient as a sister, but she still held his hand all those times, opened tins of mince for dinner, got him to school and back. And there is rare status in being prodigal; it creates a void, a longing even. Lawrence wants a stable family. He needs Rachel, and always has.

Lawrence, she says. Are you there?

Yes, I’m here. Just one minute. Sorry.

There’s another muted outburst: Don’t apologise to her . . She does not envy her brother’s position. He’s a decent man, and tries hard. He has always hated mutability and mess, ever since he was small. A boy does not flee from a bohemian household without the desperate ambition to be proper, and act properly. He does not go on to become a solicitor, to marry, to pay for IVF and care homes without some kind of moral drive. Rachel hears a door shut.

OK. Sorry. Two conversations at once. Go on.

Look, she says. Binny and I didn’t get along, granted, but that has nothing to do with you and I and we shouldn’t let it muddy the water. I just think we should meet and talk. Start from scratch.

Her tone is level, calm, exactly as if she were talking to volunteers, instructing them on sedation, how to inject or take a sample, inserting the syringe into the big muscles of the hindquarters. Be confident, you are in charge . First law of an argument: those who remain reasonable will make others seem unreasonable.

My feeling is no one else can fix things for us, she continues. You and I need to address the problem ourselves. You said as much last time we spoke. I’ve thought about that and I agree.

The tactics are manipulative. An agreeable-seeming sister repeating back to him his own idea. He sighs. He is thinking now, about what he thinks, what he wants. Emily is clever, Rachel knows, but she plays a negativist game, which is easy to undercut.

I’m glad you phoned, Rachel, he says. Because I do think we should try. I’d like to see you.

Great. How about the Saturday after next? We could go for a walk. We could meet halfway between here and there?

No, that’s OK. I’ll come up to you. I haven’t been back since the funeral. We can get a proper walk — maybe Blencathra?

Sure, if you can get up here in time.

I’ll leave early. I’ll get breakfast on the way.

Which will not make Emily happy at all, Rachel thinks. For a moment she feels vindicated, a petty triumph. But it was easy and perhaps unfair. Her brother loves the Fells; he is a nostalgic Cumbrian exile, rank and file. It does not take much to lure him home. His voice has altered; he sounds pleased, excited even. He would probably not admit it, not even to himself, but the idea of being untethered from Emily for a day must be heady.

OK, shall we say the White Horse car park, at eight-thirty, nine?

OK. See you there. Hey. Email me your new address.

I will. Bye for now.

Bye, Rachel. Look forward to seeing you.

They hang up. She feels better. She might have invited him to the estate, but she is not ready to bring him in that close, not yet. Small steps. She makes coffee, takes it out into the garden, and sits on the wooden bench under the quince tree. Yes, she does feel better. Deep down, the thought of estrangement from her brother has been worrying her. And the idea of failing him has always bothered her. Lawrence. Little man , the house visitors all used to call him. How he hated not being big enough to take them on. He never understood Binny, why she favoured the ones she did; he could not get past the visceral dislike of their presence in the small cottage: the sudden forced intimacies, strangers coming shirtless from the bathroom, kissing his mother’s neck, looking at her rump or chest, some kind of hunger in them like starved farm dogs. What’s up, little man? Shoving past them to get out, his face aflame. Don’t get your trousers in a twist. If I were your father, I’d soon teach you some manners . The agonies in his face. His whacking of sticks against the porch roof and the tyres of their cars. Always talking about his friends who did have fathers: fathers who liked them, fathers who lived in the same house, who stayed. Always looking at Rachel as if she could explain, as if she could get him out of a fatherless world.

She’d collect him from school and walk him home along the river. Every rabbit warren and culvert and pile of leaves delayed their return. Will Jonno be gone when we get back? Will Derrick have finished mending the car? She’d let him linger, prodding dead birds and dumped badgers; she’d watch him from a distance. Will there be anyone home except Mum? I don’t know, maybe . He was pitiful, that’s how she’d felt then. Stupid. Only when he was a teenager and some girl showed him, or some friend revealed the details, did everything become clear. The atrocity of what they’d all been doing to his mother. The fact that she was complicit. Two years later he left home.

Rachel sips the coffee. It tastes too acidic. She needs to call the surgery back — the doctor has rung twice and left messages. Instead, she sits and watches the sky. The day and the weather feel split, still and mild at ground level, but the clouds above are moving fast and dark on currents of strong air. Her phone pings. She opens a text from Stephan Dalakis. A picture of the male, as promised, running in the enclosure. Since being found in the illegal trap in North Moravia by the Hnuti Olomouc patrol and the subsequent leg surgery, he has made a full recovery. He is pale, with almost white fur, perhaps three years old. She texts back. Magnificent .

Her thoughts drift back to Lawrence. They’ll walk; try to get along, build some bridges. Either something will take, or it won’t: these things can’t be forced. Emily will have to be dealt with later. Rachel and her brother have spent so little time together as adults, but maybe they’ll have more in common than she thinks. With Binny mediating affairs, nothing was ever straightforward. With their mother gone, perhaps there’s a chance. The only way forward is to try. After another bitter sip, her throat stinging, she tips the coffee out onto the grass.

*

All week, rain. Big splashing drops on every surface like a child’s illustration of rain. Blue vanishing light and winds from nowhere, bringing slant, destructive showers, or fine drizzle. At night there is rain that exists only as sound on the cottage roof, leaving doused grass in the morning and pools in the rutted lane. The streams and rivers on the estate swell. Spawn clings to submerged rocks and reeds as the current tugs. The lake accepts the extra volume indifferently. And then, when it seems the rain will never end, there’s an explosion of sunshine, the startling heat of it through the cool spring air. Within days a green wildness takes over Annerdale. Dandelions come up, early meadow flowers; the moorland ripens, sphagnum, cotton grass, the white filament heads turning in the breeze. Rachel settles in. The fire in the cottage draws well, the place is cosy. A delivery van comes to the estate every few days with food — all she needs to do is supply an order. She hangs the Kwakwaka’wakw wolf carving over the mantelpiece. Her practical life seems simple. She gets into the habit of leaving the front door unlocked — it is a safe corner of the estate, and there have been no more lurking visitors. There’s less to secure than at Chief Joseph — no bear-proof lids on the bins, no summer mosquito plugs.