Autumn 2013

By the summer holidays of that year, the year of Serena’s wedding, Bink was no longer in touch with home.

Thus, we knew nothing of the clifftop walk versus the beach walk, or the long shadow its significance cast across her life.

The estrangement had crept up on us, like Gollum after the precious ring, long before the wedding. Mysteriously, and most distressingly. There had been no falling-out, or obvious reason.

An early indicator, at least a year before, had been Bink’s email signature – in the days when she still used emails, as all Cambridge undergraduates do – advising that her home address, during the vac, was not her family home... but Gatsby’s.

Why? I asked her on a rare opportunity.

(They were not living together in any conventional sense. Gatsby was not, that we knew anyway, her boyfriend. Heaven forbid. For all her lunacy, Bink has never been completely mad.)

Why have you put his address instead of home?

Post goes astray at home.

True, there are a lot of people in our family and household. And we have a perfectly serviceable pigeonhole honeycombed to the wall.

Alex, being Aspergic, is capable of far more objectivity – in some ways, much more uncomplicated pure affection – than the rest of us.

I had tried to contact Bink, of course I had. I had broken myself, repeatedly, on the wall of her silence.

So I had learnt to grit my teeth. You have to, not to go mad yourself. With grief.

If she wanted to be in touch with home, she knew how to be. I certainly wasn’t going to contact her through Gatsby. Just what he wanted. Ownership. Control. If we needed her, we could only find her via him. Just as if she really did belong to him.

I wasn’t going to play that game.

My father was ninety-six. If she wanted to know he was dying, she would have to ring home.

Alex doesn’t play games at all. Except Dominion, in the pub. He doesn’t allow personal hurt to get in the way of common sense. (And of course he is not a mother. Worn down loving a daughter you can’t stop loving, however much it hurts.)

If his grandfather was looking frail, Alex would ring Gatsby himself.

Could you get a message to Bink?

Possibly. Possibly not. Can’t say.

(For f’s sake! Who’s playing games now?)

Well if you can, Alex continued quite unperturbed, please could you tell her Grandfather isn’t well. She might want to say goodbye.

That was how we heard. Eventually. In a very roundabout way.

Bink was in a psychiatric hospital.

Had been putting electric wires around her neck.

You’d think you’d tell her family, wouldn’t you?

If you had any heart at all.