The Dream House by Rachel Hore Page B

wasn’t fair that Nicola should go to stay with friends and not her. But after a while, she learned to avoid pain by avoiding Nicola. She made her own friends, but their interests were less high profile – writing for the school magazine, listening to music, outings with the Natural History Club. But still envy twisted inside, though she knew Nicola was hurt by her behaviour. For Kate, though, keeping away from her sister was a survival technique. She loved her sister – indeed, along with the rest of the school, how could she not? But Nicola’s continued to be the name on everyone’s lips. Nicola became deputy head girl, while Kate didn’t even get to be prefect. Nicola won a place at Cambridge . . . Kate was advised not to apply.
    But it was Nicola who drove too fast one rainy July night down a narrow country lane after an evening out, the headlights cutting a swathe through the black woods on either side. She misjudged the bend, plunging the car through the undergrowth and into the trees. She must have died instantly, the coroner said.
    Hundreds of people attended the funeral.
Golden girl mourned by all
, the local paper said. Kate had never felt so lonely in her life. Her parents, felled by grief, turned in on themselves. They should have reassured Kate that they were glad they still had her, that she was precious to them, but it was as though they had lost their only child. Her mother hardly spoke for weeks after the tragedy, not least because the doctor had dosed her up with sedatives. And her father, alien to the language of emotion as his own father had been before him, could only manage to hug Kate awkwardly, then turn away so she wouldn’t see him cry.
    Resentful, self-pitying, it was a while before Kate realized she too was mourning her sister. The year of her A-levels was one of the worst of her life. She tried to lose herself in her work, but away at school, cut off from her parents who were, anyway, too self-absorbed to help her, she felt isolated. Many of the staff and pupils were devastated by the loss of Nicola, but the fact that in death Nicola was raised to a pedestal of beauty and perfection made it harder for Kate to grieve. Only in the visits to her grandmother in Hastings was she able to unbottle her grief to someone who really understood and cared, and to cry herself to sleep in the old lady’s arms.
    Since having Daisy and Sam, Kate had often wondered what her relationship with her sister would have been like if the accident hadn’t happened. She concluded that she would probably have grown out of her jealousy. Nicola would have become a happy and successful woman, married, had children. Sam and Daisy would have loved playing with their cousins and their mums would have laughed and cried over their own childhood, healing each other in the process, sharing the burden of trying to get on with their now-ageing parents.
    But if Nicola hadn’t died, their parents would surely now be entirely different . . . Barbara might not have started to drink, Desmond might have been warmer, bluff and relaxed in retirement. They might have got on well with their adult children, have been close to their grandchildren. If Nicola hadn’t died . . .
    ‘Are the children allowed sweets, dear?’
    Kate pulled her attention back to her mother, who had appeared with a suspiciously dusty box of mint imperials. Then Desmond bustled in with the tea tray and laid it on the glass coffee-table. He brushed at the sofa, plumped the cushions and sat down.
    ‘Well, we’ll miss you, there’s no doubt about that,’ he mumbled. ‘But your mother and I, we’ll . . . harrumph, I’m sure . . . When are you off?’
    ‘July probably,’ broke in Simon, coming to join them. ‘Fits in with Daisy’s schooling. And I’ll be able to take a bit of holiday to help.’
    ‘I had some lovely holidays in Suffolk when I was a girl,’ Barbara said, with unusual vivacity. ‘Frances and Marion – you know, my cousins – lived that