Bloodline

Not that Dad and I had become close. He still liked to boss me around. The difference was that now I took no notice of him, and went home when I could stand it no longer. Nowadays, instead of rows, we simply had long periods of non-communication. Clare had been right when she had said I’d rather put my head in the sand than do something more constructive. I had found it to be the recipe for a quieter life.

Well, now I had to do something, although I would have happily found some sand-hole in which to hide my head.

I turned on BBC Radio 5 Live and listened to the four o’clock news bulletin. Clare was the lead story, but they didn’t mention her by name. ‘Police are investigating how a thirty-one-year-old woman fell to her death from the balcony of a central London hotel late last evening.’

I clicked off the radio and got out of the car.

I decided that standing on the step battering on the great oak front door, as I had done with Clare all those years ago, was not the right approach. Knowing my father, he would probably think I was a burglar trying to get in and call the police.

Instead, I used my mobile to call their number.

I could hear the phone ringing in the hallway and, presently, my father answered it in the bedroom.

‘Yes,’ he said, sounding very sleepy.

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘it’s Mark. I’m outside. Could you come down and let me in?’

‘What do you want?’ he asked, clearly irritated.

I could hear my mother in the background asking who it was.

‘Dad, just come down and open the front door.’

‘It’s Mark.’ I heard him telling my mother. ‘He’s outside and he wants to get in.’

I didn’t hear her reply but he came back on the line. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’m coming down.’ He had that tone which implied he was doing me a huge favour.

If only he knew.

How, I thought, am I going to tell him that Clare was dead?

I used the policeman’s trick and made them both hot sweet tea.

My mother sat in an armchair and wept, rocking back and forth with a tissue pressed to her nose while my father expressed any grief he might have with anger, most of it directed towards me as if abusing the messenger could somehow change the message.

‘How did this happen?’ he demanded, standing full-square in the middle of their drawing room.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Well, you bloody well should know,’ he bellowed. ‘Why didn’t you ask the police?’

‘I did,’ I said. ‘But they couldn’t say.’

‘Nonsense,’ he shouted at me. ‘You just didn’t ask them in the right way.’

‘Would it make any difference?’ I shouted back. ‘Knowing exactly what happened won’t bring her back.’

My mother uttered a whimper and I went over to comfort her as her stupid fool of a husband marched round the room bunching then relaxing his fists. I suppose grief affects people in different ways. He clearly wanted to lash out at something — to have someone to blame, someone to hit.

In truth, part of me felt the same way.

‘We had better call James, Stephen and Angela,’ I said. ‘Before they hear it on the radio.’

‘You do it,’ my father instructed.

Oh, thanks, I thought.

‘I’ll ask them all if they’d like to come here. Is that OK?’

‘Yes,’ my mother said between sobs.

I thought my father was about to say something, but he obviously had second thoughts and kept quiet, just nodding.

I went into his study and used the phone on his big oak desk in the bay window to pass on the bad news to our siblings, waking each one in turn.

‘Oh, God, Mark,’ said James, my elder brother, ‘I’m so sorry.’

He made it sound like it was more of a loss for me than for him, which, I suppose, was true. Losing one’s twin, I was discovering, was like losing half of oneself.

They all agreed to come to Oxted although, in Stephen’s case, it would take all day to get there as he and his wife, Tracy, were on holiday near Saint-Tropez in the south of France.

‘Just come as soon as you can. We all need to be together.’

I wondered why I had said that to him. Did we all need to be together? We had hardly been together in the past. Other than Clare, Stephen was the youngest of my siblings but he was still some sixteen years older than me. I had no memory of him living at home because he had also flown the nest as soon as he’d been able, just as we all had.

Once or twice over the years we had gathered together for Christmas but they had never been great social successes, mostly descending into bitterness and recrimination rather than uplifting us all into happiness and goodwill.

The last time all five of the Shillingford children had been under the same roof had been at a London hotel where we had gathered two years ago to commemorate my parents’ golden wedding anniversary.

Now we would never all be together again.

I sat at my father’s desk and was again close to tears. But I made one final telephone call, to Lisa, the producer of the Morning Line, the Saturday-morning racing programme on Channel 4. I knew she wouldn’t still be in bed. She would be already at Newmarket racecourse getting ready for the live broadcast that started just before eight o’clock.