The Half Sister. Catherine Chanter

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      Chapter Eleven

      It’s true, earthquakes of all sorts are nothing new to Edmund; he is a well-travelled man, geographically at least, so when he was woken up in his city flat by the loose change rattling on the mantelpiece and the gin bottle chiming with the decanter, he recognised what was happening. Turkey. New Zealand. But it was Japan that came back to him as he stood in his pyjamas looking out over the Thames and the night-winking City of London, feeling the subtle tremor slip away. Tokyo was another year, another escape from some unpleasantness or other; then he’d watched skyscrapers actually shaking as if someone had knocked the Christmas tree and he’d wondered if he was going to die there, and he’d hoped, half hoped that it might be so. This was a poor relation of an earthquake.

      Kept awake by a nagging feeling of guilt that he should have pulled himself together and gone with Diana to the funeral, Edmund was restless anyway, and now he knows it’s pointless to try to get back to sleep and he sits on the edge of the bed playing with his phone. Within minutes Twitter has got a #earthquake and it is not long before an app alert is triggered automatically by significant price movements in British shares on stock exchanges in the Far East. Property. Lloyd’s Insurance. Land development companies. Energy. All significantly down. On the news feed he selects the map and with finger and thumb slowly focuses his way through the concentric circles – England, the south, Twycombe – until the epicentre of the earthquake is revealed as no more than a few miles away from home, and as he returns the map to its former size, the circles look like ripples in the river at Wynhope when the surface of the pool has been broken by no more than a falling acorn. Diana’s phone goes to voicemail, the landline is unobtainable. Dressing quickly, he keeps one eye on the coverage on the television, disoriented by being here when he should have been there, where everything is happening in flickering orange and flashing blue lights. He feels the unfairness of all those ordinary decisions we take unaware of their extraordinary consequences. Already viewers are sending in live selfie recordings: late-night half-empty beer bottles dribbling across a coffee table; a shelf stacker from a supermarket capturing the moment when all the tins of tomatoes take to the aisles; a webcam proving that animals feel it first as a cat leaps from the sofa and flees through the flap seconds before the room starts to tremble. The narrative runs along the bottom of the screen. Earthquake 5.4 rocks southern England. At least one aftershock. Two fatalities reported so far. Hospitals on full alert. Emergency services overwhelmed and requesting the public not to call unless absolutely necessary. Safety procedures activated at Bindley nuclear power plant. People are advised to remain in their homes if possible.

      Edmund’s overwhelming need is to get back to Wynhope. Although there have been more times than he can count when he has wished the place flattened, fantasised about fires and coming home to find nothing but dust and a chance to start again free of the past, now that this is a possibility, however unlikely, he finds his own foundations shaking. He is making assumptions that Diana is fine and he is not going to challenge them; Diana is nothing if not a survivor and he is nothing if she has not survived. No news is good news. It might be a cliché, but like so many clichés, there is a truth in it which helps him sleep at night. Let sleeping dogs lie, that is another. He prays for Monty to be alive.

      As he drives towards Wynhope, the thin yellow line of dawn is behind him and an imperceptible watering down of darkness lies ahead.