We’ve arrived at the burns unit and you’re scrupulously washing your hands, following the diagrammed instructions to the letter. Sarah does the same. Then a nurse lets you in through the locked door. As we reach Jenny’s side ward I brace myself. You turn to Sarah.
“It’s not the hate-mailer who did this to her.”
Your voice is furious and it startles her.
A nurse is taking the last of the dressings off Jenny’s face.
Her face is blistered beyond recognition, far worse than in A&E. I quickly turn away. Because I can’t bear to look at her. And because I’ll have to tell Jenny what I’ve seen, rather than just glimpsed, because surely you can withhold your knowledge of something if you’ve only just glimpsed it? And not made sure of it by looking again?
But you don’t look away.
The nurse sees your distress.
“Blistering the day afterwards is quite normal,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that her burns have become any worse.”
You lean towards Jenny, your face close to hers, and then you kiss the air above her as if it will float down on top of her.
And in that kiss I know why you’re adamant that it can’t be the hate-mailer.
Because if it is the hate-mailer, you haven’t protected Jenny. You haven’t stopped him from doing this. And that would mean it’s your fault. You’d be responsible for her eyes and mouth needing to be sluiced, for her blistered face, for her limbs wrapped up in God knows what, for her decimated airways.
For her possible death.
A burden you can’t pick up.
“It’s not your fault,” I say, going to you, putting my arms around you. “Really, my darling, whoever did this, it’s not your fault.”
I understand now why you haven’t just been suspicious of Mr. Hyman but grabbed on to him, certain that it’s him. Anyone but the hate-mailer.
And maybe you are right.
I remember again Maisie saying, “That man should never have been allowed near our children,” and seeing that she hated him. Maisie, who thinks the best of everyone and is kind to a fault.
Maisie must have seen something bad in him too. “You’ve always been naive,” nanny voice says. Perhaps I’ve just been blind.
9
As we wait at Jenny’s bedside for DI Baker, I think back to the rest of that prize-giving/homecoming evening. I don’t think there’ll be anything useful, but I need to escape from here back into the sanctuary of our old life.
Jenny was on the downstairs computer with Facebook open. She’d had her long hair cut while you were away and it no longer shielded her face when she leaned forward. “Rowena’s studying this evening,” I said as I passed her.
“I thought her place at Oxford was for sure,” Jenny replied, not hearing my subtext of criticism.
“She still wants to get the best A-level grades she can. They are really important for your CV as well as university.”
“Well, bully for her, Mum,” she said. “Night,” she called, as you went upstairs.
“Night, sweet prince,” you called back, as you have done since she was about five. Only now it’s you who was going to bed before her.
I joined you in our room.
“It would be nice if she knew where that quotation came from. She’s got her English A level in about seven weeks and she doesn’t have a clue.”
“I thought her set text was Othello.”
“That’s not the point. She should know her tragedies.”
You started laughing.
“I just want her to do well. So at least she has a shot at university.”
“Yes, I know,” you said affectionately. You kissed me. And the sum of our marriage was bigger than our differences.
Our argument about Adam was still there, as present as his warm sleeping body in the bedroom next to ours, just as my anxiety about Jenny hovered somewhere in the house as she played on her social networking site rather than open a book. But I was just so pleased you were home.
You told me about your trip and I told you about small details while you’d been away, omitting Mr. Hyman and Adam, which had pretty much dominated, but wanting this time with you for myself.
A little later on, while you went to have “a shower that isn’t from a bucket,” the latent anxiety stalking the house tracked me down. I thought about Rowena. At Sidley House, she had been top of every subject, in almost every team, star of the assemblies, and now she was off to Oxford to read science while our daughter would be lucky to pass a single A level.
My anxiety fanned outwards into jealousy. I knew from Maisie how much Donald adored his family. I was sure that if it had been Rowena bravely standing up in the church, Donald would have supported her and been proud. The perfect family.
I took off my makeup, which I’d put on so carefully earlier. Your face has become more famous over the years, but mine has just become older, and I’m always conscious of this when you’ve been away and we remeet each other.
I remembered Maisie’s peculiar remark about her appearance. Perhaps it was because I was looking in the mirror. Or maybe it was because I was searching for a flaw in the perfect family. Anyhow, for whatever reason, I remembered again her “bulimic hog” comment, and it burrowed away until it connected with other apparently innocuous incidents—the way she checked herself in our hall mirror on the way out, and then hurriedly looked away. “God, what a crone,” she’d say. “Beyond Botox!” The bruise on her cheek from a “trip against the garden shed—that’s the problem with two left feet!” The cracked wrist: “Went dashing out on the icy pavement, in pumps. My own silly fault. Just went flying, what a twit!”
One by one, none of these incidents had seemed worrying, but put together at my dressing-table mirror they became a dense murky network of something sinister.
But I made myself stop. I’d been looking for flaws, but my imagination had conjured up something so much worse. Because surely it was imaginary.
So, enough, I said to myself, sternly. Ugly jealousy makes for ugly imagery. Enough.
I’d hoped thinking back would be a little respite, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Because that uncomfortable memory about Maisie is still with me now, as if my mind won’t let me fold it flat and put it away. And it’s pulling at another—the memory I couldn’t retrieve earlier, the one that frayed before when I’d tried to hold it.
It’s Maisie leaving the sports-day playing field, but then stopping to check her face in her handbag mirror. A gesture that I’ve come unknowingly to associate with her. The gesture that made me realize how unconfident she is now compared with the flamboyant mothers’-race Maisie in her not giving a hoot! days. Such a small thing; not the important memory I’d hoped for. So I wonder why it won’t leave me.
DI Baker arrives and flinches when he sees Jenny. Is that why you wanted him to come here? To make him realize?
If so, you were right. I want Baker to know what this is about too.
“I hope you will be reassured to know,” he says in his bland, irritating voice, “that Mr. Hyman’s alibi has been checked by one of my officers. He couldn’t have been at the school at the time the fire started.”
A red flush of anger colors your neck.
“Who gave him the alibi?”
“It would be inappropriate for me to tell you that. I will assign a family liaison officer to keep you informed of any new information.”
“I don’t want an F.L.O.,” you say, and I notice he doesn’t like you using police lingo. “I just want to know when you’ve arrested Hyman.”
DI Baker pauses a moment and turns his back on Jenny’s bed.
“We will be pursuing the hate-mail inquiry urgently,” he says. “And treating the arson as the attempted murder of your daughter.”
Sarah puts her hand on your arm, but you shrug her off.
“I have a meeting to go to,” you say.
You murmur something to Jenny, too quietly for anyone but her to hear, then leave the room. DI Baker turns t
o Sarah.
“I gather we interviewed her friends, but didn’t do any forensic tests, except for the DNA test on the used condom? You presumably know the case well, having a personal interest.”
“Yes. But we didn’t find a match.”
“No samples were taken from a boyfriend or friends?” DI Baker asks.
“No, we didn’t have—”
“We’ll do it now. What about the locations of the postmarks?”
“Random,” Sarah replies. “But all within London. One of the letter boxes has a CCTV camera in the street. There’s a slim chance the hate-mailer was filmed posting the letter, but at the time we didn’t have the resources to—”
“I’ll put someone on it.”
I leave and find Jenny in the corridor, back from her wanderings.
“I saw Tara,” Jenny says, choosing, for the moment, a neutral kind of subject. “She was hanging around on the ground floor.”
“The lazy journalist’s way to ambulance-chase,” I say. “Wait for them to come to you.”
“Does Aunt Sarah think it’s the hate-mailer?” she asks, ending our decoy conversation.
“I think she’ll be considering everything. About the hate-mailer, was there anything you—”
“No, don’t start. Please. It was bad enough you and Dad doing it at the time.”
“I just—”
“No one I know would do this to me,” she says, just as she did at the kitchen table during the hate-mailer days.
“I’m not suggesting for one minute that it’s one of your friends. Really. I just want to know if there was anything you didn’t tell us.”
She looks away from me and I can’t read her expression.
“You got pretty fed up with us constantly wanting to know your movements,” I say.
“You policed me,” she corrects. “Dad tailed me, for heaven’s sake. I used to see him.”
“He just wanted to make sure you were safe. That’s all. And when you refused his offer of driving you to—”
“I’m seventeen.”
Yes, only seventeen. And so pretty. And so unaware.
“Then Maria’s party, you wouldn’t let me go,” she continues. “Because it didn’t start till nine. Nine. Everyone else went, but you grounded me because of something I didn’t even do.”
Jenny made me a dictionary a couple of years ago, as a kind of joke, so I could understand her vocabulary. (I had to promise I wouldn’t actually use any of the words myself.) Grounded was one word I already knew.
She’s right though. It wasn’t fair, was it? She hadn’t done anything to deserve what she saw as punishment and we saw as protection. And our increased need to keep her safe just fueled her desire to pull away from us. Thinking about it now, “hate mail” is the right term for it, not just because of what the messages said and the awful things that were posted—but because while it was happening it sapped so much happiness out of our family.
“I went,” Jenny confides, “to Maria’s party. It was the night I was staying over at Audrey’s house after the squash tournament. She’d been invited too.”
Why has she felt the need to come clean about this? Did something happen at that party? I wait, but she doesn’t say anything more.
“Was there anything you didn’t tell us about the hate mail?” I ask her again. “In case we ‘policed’ you even more?”
She turns a little away from me.
“Sometimes, I’m back there, inside the school,” she says quietly. “I can’t escape. Can’t get out. I can’t see anything. I mean, it’s not like a memory. Not like that. Just pain. And fear.”
She’s shrinking into herself, making herself as small as she can.
I put my arms around her. “Hey, it’s over. All over.”
There must be something she didn’t tell us. Because asking her made her think deeply about the fire, made her feel it again, as if she connected the two. But she’s trembling and I can’t ask her again. I can’t. Not yet.
I think that she will tell me though, in time.
When I used to pick her up from school, she’d tell me, as Adam does now, that school was “fine, Mum.” But an anxiety was often tucked into a uniform pocket, a problem slipped up a sleeve, fears hidden under a sweater. You had to wait patiently for the pocket to be emptied as you drove home, a rumpled problem pulled out during homework, the fear finally revealed from under the sweater on the sofa at TV time. You had to wait till bath time to hear if there was anything really big; I suppose there was nowhere for it to hide anymore.
She gestures towards the burns unit.
“So how am I?” she asks.
I’ve been preparing my answer.
“I didn’t see you properly. But the nurse says you’re doing everything they’d expect. It’s still another few days until they’ll know about the scarring.” That much is true at least.
“Is Dad there?” she asks.
“No, he’s had to go to a doctors’ meeting,” I say. It’s the meeting with my doctors about me. They’ll have the results of my brain scans now. I decide to use the decoy conversation again. “Shall we go and see what Tara is doing?” I suggest.
“Shouldn’t we be with Dad?”
“He’ll be all right on his own for a little while.” I don’t want Jenny to hear what the doctors say to you. I don’t want to hear. Not yet. Not yet.
“D’you remember when I got the dog mess?” she asks.
“It was in a box, like the ones you get to post a book,” I say, surprised that she wants to think about this.
“Remember Addie?”
“I think it’s a terrier’s poo,” he said, peering into the box. I was horrified he’d seen.
“Adam, really, I don’t think you—”
“I mean, if you look at its size, it’s from a small dog’s bottom.” Jenny started to smile. “Maybe a Yorkie?” he hazarded.
“Or a Scottie?” suggested Jenny, smiling more.
“No. I know!” Adam shrieked. “It’s a poodle’s poo!” And for a few minutes their giggling filled the house.
10
Tara is by the hospital shop, multitasking flicking her hair with texting.
“D’you think she’s waiting to collar Dad again?” Jenny asks.
“Probably.”
She’s like a glossy, pretty vulture waiting for more news carrion.
Through the glass wall of the shop, next to the old fruit and teddy bears, is a pile of Richmond Posts. I imagine people reading the paper and then discarding it in their recycling box on Tuesday, Jenny’s laughing face looking up at the refuse collectors before they empty the boxes into the back of their truck.
“It’s not fair that she can print this about Silas,” Jenny says. “And there’s fuck all he can do about it. Sorry.”
I find it endearing that she still apologizes for swearing. Maybe we should come clean now and tell her we do it behind her back all the time.
She met Mr. Hyman when she was working at Sidley House last summer but didn’t get to know him well. After all, she was just a lowly teaching assistant. Her loyalty towards him is because of what he did for Addie. I think she flourishes “Silas” as proof she crossed from the pupil to the teacher side of the school. Although all us mothers, like our children, call him Mr. Hyman.
Is she naive to still be loyal to him? But I don’t want to taint her view of the world with my ugly universal suspicion. Not unless I have to.
I never told Jenny or you about confronting Tara in March when she printed her first “Playground Plunge!” piece.
Tara just teased me for calling him Mr. Hyman. “Jesus, where are you living, Grace? In a Jane Austen novel?”
“Caught the TV adaptation then?” I gibed back.
In my head.
Ten minutes later.
When I went to the editor, Tara dismissed my defense of Mr. Hyman as being about me, rather than him. More specifically, me being jealous of her. I was thirty-nine years old, with a part-time job writing a revi
ew page. What wouldn’t I give to be a twenty-three-year-old Tara with her talent as a real journalist and her soon-to-be-meteoric career when mine had hit the skids so many years before?
Of course she didn’t say that directly; she didn’t need to. Like her prose, she could say what she wanted to, without ever being caught articulating it directly.
And her article was printed.
How could I tell Jenny—or you—that I was such a pushover? Sarah wouldn’t have stood for it for a second. It was around then that my nanny voice became particularly strident.
Because Tara did have a point, of sorts. I did fall into the job at the Richmond Post, and never climbed out again. I used to pretend to everyone, pretty much, apart from Maisie, that child-care costs meant it wasn’t worth me going for a full-time, career-style job. I’d tell myself, and you, that given it was an either/or choice, I chose to be with Jenny and Adam. But my nanny voice would butt in and tell me that it was me who was creating the either/or scenario. “Plenty of other women juggle careers and children and keep different plates spinning.”
“My life isn’t a circus performance,” I’d retort, admirably fast, to myself.
But the nanny voice always won by using the list attack. “You lack,” she told me:
Aspiration;
Ambition;
Focus;
Talent;
Energy.
It’s the energy one that clinched it. I’d hold my hands up. “Yes! You’re right! Now I need to go and help Adam with his homework and check that Jenny isn’t still on Facebook.”
Tara is reading a text on her mobile. She sets off down the corridor, a sashay to her stride. Jenny and I follow her.
Jenny smiles. “Starsky and Hutch or Cagney and Lacey?”
But actually there is something a tiny bit thrilling about following someone.
In the cafeteria Tara meets a man at a table. Older than her, a little paunchy. I recognize him.
“Paul Prezzner,” I tell Jenny. “He’s a freelance journalist. Not a bad one actually. He mainly gets his stuff into the Telegraph, has done for years.”
“She’s got a broadsheet onto this now?”