Rosamund Lupton
Sister
© 2010
To my parents, Kit and Jane Orde-Powlett, for their life-long gift of encouragement.
And to Martin, my husband, with my love.
‘Where shall we see a better daughter or a kinder sister or a truer friend?’
Jane Austen, Emma
‘But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet Leese but their show, their substance still lives sweet.’
Shakespeare, Sonnet 5
1
Sunday evening
Dearest Tess,
I’d do anything to be with you, right now, right this moment, so I could hold your hand, look at your face, listen to your voice. How can touching and seeing and hearing – all those sensory receptors and optic nerves and vibrating eardrums – be substituted by a letter? But we’ve managed to use words as go-betweens before, haven’t we? When I went off to boarding school and we had to replace games and laughter and low-voiced confidences for letters to each other. I can’t remember what I said in my first letter, just that I used a jigsaw, broken up, to avoid the prying eyes of my house-mistress. (I guessed correctly that her jigsaw-making inner child had left years ago.) But I remember word for word your seven-year-old reply to my fragmented home-sickness and that your writing was invisible until I shone a torch onto the paper. Ever since kindness has smelled of lemons. The journalists would like that little story, marking me out as a kind of lemon-juice detective even as a child and showing how close we have always been as sisters. They’re outside your flat now, actually, with their camera crews and sound technicians (faces sweaty, jackets grimy, cables trailing down the steps and getting tangled up in the railings). Yes, that was a little throwaway, but how else to tell you? I’m not sure what you’ll make of becoming a celebrity, of sorts, but suspect you’ll find it a little funny. Ha-ha funny and weird funny. I can only find it weird funny, but then I’ve never shared your sense of humour, have I?