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This is a story about prisoners. No court of law has found them guilty, but they are incarcerated all the same and like most captives, they struggle to be heard and their route to freedom is tortuous.
Wynhope House hardly looks like a cell, but the past builds invisible walls, secrets and lies like chameleons take on the colours of their habitat. Built on the back of the slave trade, the listed manor house is set in several hundred acres of its own land in the affluent Home Counties, the ancestral home of city speculator Sir Edward and Lady Diana, formerly the letting agent for his London properties and for the last three years, his third wife. They enjoy the sort of freedom that can be bought: housekeeping staff to oil the wheels of everyday life; holidays abroad if they need to escape; lots of rights, not too many responsibilities.
When Diana’s mother dies, she invites Valerie, her estranged sister and her nine-year-old nephew Michael to stay after the funeral, hoping that her undisclosed memories of an abusive childhood home will finally be validated. Their conflicting narratives make for a bitter evening and when Diana drunkenly turns the key on the tower wing where Valerie is sleeping, she is confident that the beasts of the past are safe behind bars and her sister and the boy will be gone from her life in the morning.
That night, an earthquake rocks Wynhope. Valerie is trapped, Diana has the key in her pocket and a moment of complete control in her mind. The tower splits from the house and falls, standing on the dew damp grass in the dawn, Michael witnesses his aunt, failing to save his mother, an act for which he cannot forgive, believing it is intentional. For their own poignant reasons, Diana and Edward never wanted children, but they are the only family Michael has left so Wynhope becomes his home and his cell, Diana his gaoler and his prisoner, Edward his co-conspirator.
The consequences of that night rock the foundations on which their lives are built, each of them tries to dig their way out from under the rubble on their own, in their own way. Edward leans on the crutches of religion, travel and work which he believes have served him well in the past, but faced by falling financial markets and a crumbling marriage, he turns his back on the problem with disastrous results. Michael retreats into mutism, playing out his feelings through a fantasy world of circus animals and virtual reality games, until that is no longer enough and his anger is unleashed upon the real word. Diana tightens the ropes of self-control which have held her together ever since her childhood fell apart, unaware of how to close to breaking point she is.
Fresh air is hard to find. No-one has ears for anyone else’s story. Suffocating, each privately countenances ways to achieve a more permanent silence. These solutions may or may not be legal, may or may not succeed, may or may not be fatal, but there is one certainty known by captives throughout history which they must come to understand if they are to be free of the sentence: no prisoner can be forced to sing and no-one who sings is truly a prisoner.
