I study him and my daughter, watch them talk verbally and nonverbally. The language of their bodies shows a certain closeness, a familiarity of non-physical touching.
‘No! Just don’t!’ Phoebe insists.
He is on his knees now, crouching at her side, staring into her eyes, trying to communicate with her.
‘Excuse me, Mr Bromsgrove, perhaps you would care to explain what you think you’re doing in here?’
‘Yes, Curtis, what do you think you’re doing?’ The Mr Bromsgrove says.
My gaze shifts back to the two older men. ‘Do you two really not understand?’ I ask, because no one can be that clueless. The two older male faces that were full of judgement and disdain merely a few minutes ago swivel towards me with confusion.
‘OK,’ I say, stupefied by them. ‘This young man, Curtis, is the one responsible for Phoebe’s “condition” as you called it, Mr Newton.’
If I didn’t know how awful it felt to be in that situation, how shocking and sickening and frightening, a trickle of Schadenfreude, pleasure at the misfortune of others, would have run through my veins at the look dawning on The Mr Bromsgrove’s face. But I take no pleasure from this moment. No one needs to find out that no matter how hard they’ve tried, they’ve let their children down.
‘Is that true?’ The Mr Bromsgrove asks. I’m not sure if he is questioning Phoebe or his son but my daughter lowers her head as tears spring into her eyes. Young Bromsgrove stands to face his father, his stance one of a prize-fighter about to go toe to toe with his greatest opponent.
‘Yeah, Dad, it’s true,’ he says.
And for a moment I think I’m going to stand up and punch his stupid lights out.
XI
Outside the school, I lean against my car and centre myself.
By ‘centre’ I mean I take a moment to stop the shaking, to stop my mind going to those words on that letter which will cast me back to reliving the events of eighteen months ago all over again.
Phoebe is in class, having insisted that she wanted to stay at school. Curtis, in the year above, is in class, too. The office after the revelation had exploded with quiet pandemonium: Mr Newton had virtually kicked Mr Bromsgrove to my side of the desk with stern looks to go and stand with his son. (He was obviously stripped of his The and downgraded from heart-throb, ‘good guy who teens confide in’ status to common or garden bad parent.) Phoebe sobbed for a bit, not loudly, but enough to have Curtis drop to his knees again and awkwardly encircle her with his arm, putting his head against hers and whispering that it would all be OK. Mr Bromsgrove, diminished without his The, stood near the pair of them, impotent and confused. I’d watched them all like I watched myself relive the early weeks and months of losing Joel last night – there but with no real role in it. Sometimes it feels like no one would notice if I fell off the face of the planet.
Except, Kevin. He’ll notice I’m not there. He will be sitting in his little glass-walled office, looking at the clock he’s had installed on the wall to the right of my desk, noticing with every tick of the red second hand that I am not there.
I’d wanted to take Phoebe home, to cuddle up with her and talk to her about this guy Curtis, ask her again how she felt about him. Ask her again if she had any idea what she wanted to do. Not what she wanted, though. She wanted to get back to normal, stay at school, be away from me.
‘Mrs Mackleroy,’ Mr Bromsgrove shouts to me from the school gates. I pause in opening my car door and stand waiting for him to approach.
‘I hoped I hadn’t missed you,’ he says. He is a little breathless because he’s probably run from wherever he was in the maze that was the school. Understandably, neither he nor Mr Newton offered to show me out. They allowed me to walk Phoebe in the general direction of her class and then probably hoped I’d drop off the face of the Earth. ‘If I were you, I don’t think I’d be able to simply drive away, either.’ He smiles a smile that would make a couple of dozen other playground mothers swoon. He is undeniably good-looking.
I say nothing to him because his pleasantness and smile have been so absent since all this began.
Disconcerted by my lack of response to his small talk, Mr Bromsgrove tries again: ‘Would you like to go out and have a drink so we can talk about this situation?’
‘Not especially, no.’
He blinks at me in surprise, obviously not the reply he was expecting from a mother as bad as me. I am supposed to be grateful, I think, that he wants to talk to me at all, and desperate to share this with him. Mr Bromsgrove shuffles his surprise away behind a serious expression. ‘OK, how about if I put it this way – I would like to talk to you about the fact our children have not only had sex, but they’ve potentially created our grandchild and what that will mean for our families. I would like to do that in a non-school environment. Would you be so kind as to meet me at eight-thirty tomorrow at The Cuthbert, which is near where you live, I believe?’
‘Fine,’ I say. Phoebe talks to him, she talks to his son, it could help me to talk to him, find out what she’s thinking. ‘Seeing as you asked so nicely.’
‘Eight-thirty, then.’
I nod and don’t bother with goodbyes before I get into my car and leave. Mr Bromsgrove is openly puzzled as I drive away. Probably because his good looks let him get away with treating most people however it suits his mood. And if his mood changes, if he decides the person is now in favour or has fallen out of favour, they usually accept it, allow him to dictate the terms of their interactions because, well, he’s the good-looking, confident one. I am not most people.
As I navigate the roads from Hove to Brighton, two things keep nibbling at my mind, like a caterpillar chewing on two different leaves that can’t decide which one to settle for and finish completely: the opening words of the letter; and the awkward way Curtis put his arm around Phoebe – it was almost as if he’d barely touched her before.
XII
I’m hoping Kevin is in a meeting when I get out of the lift at work.
I swipe myself into the office, and as I head for my desk, I risk a look at his glass-walled office at the other end of this floor. He isn’t there. I’m grateful for that small mercy. His responses to my calls about not coming in or coming in late have been decidedly frosty. I used to be his second in command, Assistant Director of Operations, in our business strategy firm, the person who he trusted to do his job when he wasn’t there. And now he thinks of me as someone to whom he can say …
‘Oh, it’s a nice surprise to see you, Saffron. I wasn’t sure if you’d be dropping by today or not.’
I continue with the action of putting my laptop and bag on my desk while I close my eyes and count to ten, wish myself somewhere else again.
4 months after That Day (February, 2012)
‘Saffron, we wanted to sit down today to touch base and find out how you feel you’re getting on at the moment,’ said Gideon, CEO and President of Houlsdon Business Solutions.
I might have been working through the fog of losing Joel, but I could see clearly what was happening: at the end of the day, when I’m about to turn off my computer and dash out to collect Zane and Phoebe from Imogen’s house, I’m ‘invited’ into the Managing Director’s office via email – so all officially noted – for a ‘chat’. The other people in there apart from Gideon were Kevin (my direct boss) and the HR Manager, Mrs Piller. Once in the oak-wood-panelled office, I was asked to sit down in the smallest chair in the room. The HR woman was positioned beside the door in her roomy chair, so not ‘officially’ there; Kevin, who would normally sit beside me, was on the other side of the desk and had his seat placed to the right of Gideon’s. A quick glance at each of them wearing identical concerned expressions was enough to tell me I was about to be sacked. Not only that, they were going to do it in a way that would make me agree that it was the only way forward, meaning I would get minimal money and I would be too humiliated to even think about suing them for constructive dismissal.
‘Isn’t it more importan
t how you think I’m getting on?’ I replied. I wasn’t playing. If they were going to sack me, then they’d have to do it the old-fashioned way – I wouldn’t be manipulated into ‘resigning’.
Helpfully, I looked down at my hands to allow them to visually decide who was going to do what was necessary. I’d obviously scuppered their plans: they thought I was so stricken with grief that I would willingly fall on my sword out of embarrassment because I was no longer over-achieving for them.
‘We appreciate that the last few months have been difficult for you,’ Gideon said, his words painstakingly chosen and quietly delivered. ‘It’s obviously taken some bravery for you to continue to come to work every day when things have been so … difficult … We simply think, after assessing your work of late, that …’
His flow of considered words halted when I directly faced him. It’s easy to sack someone when they won’t look at you, it’s easy to impart news of someone’s failings to their bowed head, but only a complete bastard wouldn’t hesitate when a widow looks you in the eye as you’re about to cast her and her children into the fires of financial ruin. Gideon wasn’t a complete bastard, simply a businessman who wanted the results he’d been getting from me for the past seven years, who wanted me to work double my stated hours for the same pay so he could make his profits and keep his shareholders happy.
‘This isn’t easy for me to say, Saffron, you’ve always been a good worker but …’ ‘But we’re not a charity. But we’re not going to make a profit if you can’t put in your horrendously long hours any more. But we’re no longer going to underwrite your inability to “get over it”.’
‘I’ll take a demotion,’ I said in the gap between his words. I wasn’t going to help them sack me, but I needed a job. I’d never find another one when most of the time I could barely think to the end of the sentence that was coming out of my mouth. And what would I say when any potential new employer asked me why I left my last job? ‘My husband was murdered and because I couldn’t put in ridiculously long hours any more, I was sacked.’ Any other job I got would want those hours, they wouldn’t want to ‘carry me’, either. What would I say, too, when they asked me who killed Joel and why? ‘The thing is, I do know who did it, and I think I know why, but I can’t tell the police. All I can tell you is that he bled to death alone on the side of a road in Hove and I dropped a bowl of blackberries when I found out.’
‘I’ll take a demotion,’ I repeated to the vacuum of sound in the room. ‘I’m sure you’ve already got someone lined up for my job.’ Right on cue, Kevin flushed a deep crimson, confirming that he’d been working tirelessly to stitch me up. ‘I could help do a comprehensive handover and I’d be on hand if they needed guidance on how we work here. Also, I doubt you’d find someone as experienced as me who wouldn’t mind doing a job a step or two down the ladder for less money.’ No one said anything. ‘Without possibility of promotion,’ I added to let them know that I wasn’t going to be hanging around, expecting to get my job back – because heaven forbid I asked for a bit of time to get myself back to full strength. Heaven forbid that after seven years working for the company, after bringing in and retaining more than 20 per cent of their new, big-money accounts, I expected them to cut me a little slack.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Gideon asked.
‘I have to feed my children,’ I replied.
He stared at me across the desk. He understood. He had children, he had a wife, he understood that I’d do anything to keep my job when I was all they had to rely on. He understood so much he avoided eye contact with me for the rest of the meeting while we ‘thrashed out’ the terms of my degradation. Sorry, demotion.
*
‘Kevin.’ Everyone on my bank of desks either keeps their head down, picks up their phone or focuses intently on their computer screen. We aren’t friends any more. I used to be their boss, albeit the one they came to with pretty much everything because there was no way on Earth they’d approach Kevin, now I am one of them. I am also that weird woman whose husband was murdered as well as the employee who Kevin spends a lot of time picking at. They are grateful for that, because if it wasn’t me, it’d be them. In a way, like I was when I was his second in command, I’m still their buffer from Kevin.
I manage to create something approximating a contrite, apologetic smile by the time I fully face my direct manager. My life is imploding, but I’ve actually done all my work I’d needed to do this week, I’ve fitted the reports on three ongoing projects as well as the two initial pitches to encourage companies to use us to plan their business communications and sales strategies, around everything that is going wrong. However, because I haven’t been sitting at my desk while doing these things, Kevin feels he has the right to be like this.
‘I’m sorry about the past few days, Kevin,’ I say. ‘I’ve had quite a few family things crop up this week but we’re back on track. And I’m back at my desk.’ I pull out my chair. ‘Raring to go.’
‘I hope this isn’t going to become a habit,’ he says. ‘We’ve all got families, Saffron, but most of us don’t let them interfere with our work.’
Of course we don’t, if we’ve got a stay-at-home partner who does everything while you swan in and out of the office being a cock. It wasn’t until Joel died and Kevin shafted me because I wasn’t over-performing that I regarded him again, properly, fairly. And I saw him for what he was: an over-entitled weasel who could work whatever hours he wanted because he had someone at home to do the stuff he wouldn’t lower himself to do.
Joel and I always shared the home stuff, carefully plotting our lives so one of us was there to make dinner, supervise homework, do bedtime, look after a sick child, listen to anything that troubled them. With just me, I was running really fast to stand still: I’d had to take a demotion, I barely had time to speak to my son, and my daughter was pregnant.
3 years before That Day (April, 2008)
‘Would Madame care to join me for some champagne on the beach?’
My husband had draped himself over my desk with a couple of champagne flutes and a very expensive bottle of Veuve Clicquot Vintage beside him. I’d found him there when I returned from the toilet.
‘How did you get past security?’ I queried.
‘I’m Joel Mackleroy, do you really need to ask me that?’
‘Ah, yes, the cheek of a baboon and the charm of a swan.’
‘So, how about it?’
‘Where are the children?’
‘With Fynn, so we can go celebrate our anniversary down at the beach.’
I frowned as panic spiralled up through me. I’d been so taken up with work lately, had I forgotten an important day? ‘Which anniversary?’ I asked.
‘Which anniversary?’ he scoffed. ‘Can’t believe you’ve forgotten. The anniversary of our first—’
‘Joel Mackleroy as I live and breathe,’ Kevin interrupted. He came towards us with his hand outstretched. Joel took himself off my desk and towered over Kevin as he shook his hand. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m taking my wife away from all this.’
Kevin kept hold of Joel’s hand, because he did that with men taller and better-looking than him. It was his way of trying to make those qualities rub off on him. ‘I don’t blame you coming all the way here to tear her away. I’m always telling her she shouldn’t be working so much.’
‘No you’re not, Kevin,’ I said with a laugh.
‘Well, maybe not, but I mean to.’ He turned to Joel again. And with a nod to the champagne and flutes: ‘Special occasion?’
‘Anniversary.’
‘Oh, I thought your wedding anniversary was in September?’
‘It’s not that anniversary,’ Joel said and hitched his eyebrow at my boss. In response Kevin’s weaselly face became a ball of puce embarrassment.
‘Oh, erm, right. Well I’ll leave you to it then.’
‘You are so mean,’ I whispered to Joel once we were alone.
‘Sometimes that’s the
only way to deal with people like him.’
*
In the present I face Kevin. ‘Yes, I know others don’t let their families interfere with their work,’ I say in the sort of tone Joel would use. I don’t want this to get out of hand, for me to start having crazy thoughts about telling Kevin where to go when I need a job. ‘I’m really sorry about Tuesday and yesterday. Did you get the stuff I sent you?’
‘Yes,’ he says sourly.
‘Is there something wrong with it?’ I ask.
‘No. It simply would have been easier to have you here to go through it.’
I don’t reply to Kevin. Instead, I sit down and turn on my computer, decide to clear my head by concentrating on work. I force my lips together while I wait for the computer to flash through its waking up process. I have so much I want to say to Kevin.
Since Monday, when I was brutally ripped from the shell of numbness I’d spent the last eighteen months living in, since I was shown that how I have been existing in the world has not worked, I am starting to re-experience the world. Rapidly, painfully, the numbness is thawing. Who I am, is coming back. And who I am is someone who would normally call out people like Kevin. I want to tell Kevin that after the way he used to fawn over Joel, for him to notacknowledge (even with a mealy mouthed ‘I’m sorry’) what happened makes him despicable. For him to not take into account how hard I’d worked but to instead to screw me over when I was still shocked and bewildered, makes him a lowlife. For him to continue making comments even now, eighteen months later, makes him a slimeball. All of these statements sit like a bitter herb on the tip of my tongue, begging to be spat out at him.
‘I expect the Ibbitson and Howell files to be on my desk before you leave tonight,’ he says.
I nod with my back to him, unable to speak. If I do, all the sourness I feel towards him will come gushing out in a torrent. Eventually, he walks away and my shoulders want to relax, to unclench so I can slouch a little in my seat, chill out slightly. But I can’t. Not when Kevin has unintentionally set off a line of the letter crawling like news tickertape through my head: I need you to know I didn’t murder him.