When we arrive back, I think I see Jenny among the tawdry group of smokers outside the hospital, but when I look again I can’t see her. I must have been wrong.
Outside the ICU, Sarah is on her mobile. I go closer to listen. She’s finishing a conversation with Roger, sounding snappy and disappointed. She hangs up, then phones Mohsin straight afterwards.
“Hi, me. I’ve got five minutes while Jenny’s having some tests done. Dr. Sandhu promised he wouldn’t leave her for a second.”
“Her boyfriend’s giving a statement to Davies, right now,” Mohsin says. “Jesus, honey, why didn’t they tell anyone?”
“They didn’t want to worry us. What’s happening with the hate-mail investigation?”
“It’s turned into stalking and assault, so the inquiry’s upped several gears. Penny’s going to widen the DNA search, and she’s got people sweating blood over the CCTV footage. She’d already narrowed it down to a three-hour time frame when the letter must have been posted. Her team’s weeding out anyone over sixty or under fifteen and then she’ll get stills of those remaining. From those mug shots she’s hoping to get an ID.”
“Is anyone connecting it to the arson attack?”
“Not yet.”
“You?”
She tenses as she waits for his reply.
“I think that knowing someone must have been tracking Jenny, and then physically assaulting her, changes how we should look at the fire. I think that a stalker means it’s far more likely the fire was aimed at her. I think that it’s more than possible now that the witness, whoever they are, was lying.”
“And the attack in the hospital?”
“I just don’t know.”
She waits a moment but he doesn’t say anything else.
“I think you must have been right about Donald White,” she says. “It must be a separate thing.” She pauses a moment. “Has Ivo told you about his missing text?”
“Lord Byron? Thank God there wasn’t texting when I was a teenager.”
“If he really sent his poem at just after three, the fire had already taken hold. She wouldn’t have been deleting poems. Can we get the techno guys to check it out?”
“Sure. Though I don’t know what we’re checking for.”
“I have to get back to Jenny now.”
——
You come to my bed and pull the curtains around, and we are surrounded by ugly brown geometric squares.
“He doesn’t want to see me.”
“Of course he does. He loves you. And he needs you. And—”
“I don’t blame him. I’ve been a bloody useless father. Not just this. Just … Christ. But before, bloody useless before too.”
“That’s not true.”
“No wonder he turned to Silas Hyman. I was never there, was I?”
“You were earning the money so—”
“But even when I was with him, I got it wrong. He’s never wanted me in a crisis. Always you. And now …”
“I’ve just been there. That’s all. And he’s never actually had a crisis before this, just unhappy times. If he had, it would have been you he turned to, because look at you—being so bloody strong for everyone.”
“You do this, not me, and I don’t know how.”
“Of course you do! You just need to be with him, that’s all. Talk to him.”
But you can’t hear me. Your insecurity about Adam blocks out what I am telling you as much as my lack of a voice.
And your loss of confidence with Addie is my fault.
I was always putting you straight and telling you off and pointing out what you should be doing with Adam, never letting you just do it your way, never trusting you as a father to want the best for him too. So many small things—what kind of birthday present, what to write in his homework diary if he hadn’t finished his math so that he wouldn’t get into trouble. “Let him get into trouble,” you’d said and I’d thought you cruel. But maybe if he had gotten into trouble, he’d have realized it wasn’t so terrible. Maybe other kids would have liked him more too. And perhaps I should have risked being late to school with him, as you wanted and I’d thought insensitive. He might have seen that the world didn’t collapse when he was late, and then maybe he’d have stopped worrying.
And even if you were wrong, what right had I to say I knew better? Knew Adam better?
And I’m sorry that I said you didn’t stand up for him at the prize-giving, weren’t proud of him, as if you were always that way. Because a few months later, you demanded a meeting with Mrs. Healey and you made sure Robert Fleming wouldn’t come back the next academic year. And it was nothing to do with you being a man or your celebrity status causing “a smellier stink.” I think Mrs. Healey just realized that she was no match for you when you were protecting your son. And I remember that later that night, when I quizzed you, you told me she’d gotten Robert Fleming and his parents in too, probably hoping to outnumber you. But instead you’d been glad to publicly say that it was all down to Robert, nothing to do with Adam; and you told them you were proud of the way Adam is. What did they make of you, this big, tough man, famous for presenting a macho survival series, having pride in his small, bullied son?
But the memory faded too fast, maybe because we didn’t speak about it again. You didn’t want Adam to find out about your meeting, worried about him feeling even more powerless, while I was anxious he might feel guilty for Robert being made to leave. But I think you should tell him now, so he knows that you’ll always look out for him, protect him. That you’re there for him when it counts. That you’re proud of him.
You are still silent.
“You can do this, Mike.”
Dr. Bailstrom pulls the curtains back.
“It’s important to observe your wife at all times,” she says curtly.
“To prove that you’re right and there’s fuck all to observe?” you snap back at her as you leave, and only I see the falter in your step.
You arrive at Jenny’s bedside, where Sarah is sitting guard. She has Elizabeth’s contract open.
“Is there anything you can remember about when Elizabeth Fisher left?” she asks you.
“Who?”
“The old secretary at the school.”
“No,” you say impatiently. You catch your sister’s expression. “I think Grace organized some flowers for her. Her husband was dying. She’d been there since the school started.”
“Actually, her husband left her,” Sarah says.
I leave with Sarah. I still haven’t seen Jenny, and I wish I knew where on earth she’s gotten to. And the feeling of being irritated is comforting because it’s so familiar—we’re again the Push-me-Pull-you Doctor Dolittle creation that a mother and teenage daughter make, her pushing me away and me pulling her back.
As I get to the atrium with Sarah, I catch a glimpse of Jen outside, screened by a knot of smokers. It is definitely her. I hurry out. She’s flinching as the gravel cuts into her soft feet, the sun scaldingly hot.
I’m worried that she’s waiting for Ivo to come back from the police station.
She sees me.
“I need to remember,” she says. “I know you told me not to, without you, but I need to know the reason I went back into the school. For Addie. There’s gravel by the kitchen exit. And the sound of it—the feel—I thought would help.” She pauses a moment, upset. “But it hasn’t done any good. So far anyway.”
I’m relieved that she hasn’t remembered anything on her own—thank God cigarette smoke smells nothing like a fire. I’m relieved too that she’s not waiting for Ivo.
A smoker strikes a match, cupping it in his hands to light his cigarette. The smoke from a match is flimsy, weaker than candle smoke and unable to push open a memory door.
Then Sarah walks past us on her way to the car park. The sound of her footsteps crunching gravel and the sun overhead joins with the faintest of smoke trails from the match.
“The fire alarm was going off,” Jenny says. She pauses a m
oment as the memory comes into focus. How many times has she done this? Waited for someone to strike a match and for someone to crunch the gravel?
“I thought it was a mistake,” she continues. “Or a practice and Annette wouldn’t have a clue what to do. I thought it would be mean to leave her on her own, so I put the water bottles down on the gravel and I went back in. And then I smelt smoke. And I knew it wasn’t a practice.”
She stops, frustrated.
“That’s it. That’s where I get to.” She’s upset and in pain. “I’d thought I went in because I saw something, you know, something wrong. A person doing something. The arsonist. But it was just to make sure Annette was OK. Nothing else. Christ.”
I put my arm around her to comfort her.
But why, if she went in just to help Annette, wasn’t she able to leave again? Annette had time to phone the Richmond Post and a television station and put on lipstick and still get out with no problem.
If there really is a deleted text, then maybe it wasn’t to get her into the school—her kindness towards Annette did that—but to keep her there. And maybe it was the reason she was at the top of the school. Because she was two floors above Annette’s office when I found her.
She’s shaking, her face knotted in pain. She hasn’t built up any tolerance to this.
“Go inside, sweetheart,” I urge her, and she does as I ask.
She hasn’t said anything about Ivo, and I don’t press her on it.
I catch up with Sarah by her car.
Twenty minutes later we’re again outside Elizabeth Fisher’s exhaust-stained house, Sarah’s Polo half straddling the narrow pavement. In the harsh sunshine an oil spill on the road reflects deformed rainbows.
Elizabeth looks pleased to see Sarah. She leads her hospitably into her tiny sitting room.
“I heard the parents at Sidley House sent you flowers when you left?” Sarah says.
“Delphiniums and some freesia bulbs, with a lovely letter. Mrs. White and Mrs. Covey organized it.”
“They thought your husband was dying.”
Elizabeth turns away and she looks ashamed. “Somehow they got the wrong end of the stick.”
“Didn’t you put them straight?”
“How could I? After those beautiful flowers and their kind letter. How could I say that my husband had left me and that I’d been fired for being too old?”
The pollution from the road has seeped into the room, exhaust fumes heavy in the hot air. Sarah gets out Elizabeth Fisher’s contract.
“I have a query I want you to help me with,” Sarah says. “Your job description has a chunk about new admissions—sending out prospectuses and welcome packs, sorting out the forms?” I remember that Elizabeth had also told Sarah this on her last visit.
“Yes. It was quite an onerous task.”
“Your successor, Annette Jenks, doesn’t have admissions as part of her job description.”
I remembered Annette Jenks’s transcript. At the time, I’d only noticed that she wasn’t the school nurse.
“No, well, I suppose the new girl wouldn’t have to do admissions, or at least—” She breaks off.
She looks suddenly older and frailer.
“After the accident in the playground,” Sarah says, “were there fewer new admissions?”
Elizabeth nods, her voice is quiet.
“The admissions didn’t fall off straightaway. It was after the Richmond Post published that article about the accident. I just didn’t put it together. Why the hell didn’t I put it together?”
“Could you just tell me what happened?” Sarah asks.
“New parents stopped phoning us. Before that I’d get two to three phone calls a week from prospective parents. Some of the mums had only just given birth. One family even tried to reserve a place when the mother was still pregnant.
“But after they printed that nonsense about Silas, we didn’t have any new inquiries. Why choose Sidley House when there are two other private schools in the area with good results and no children almost being killed in the playground?”
“How many new children were coming to Sidley House in September?”
“At the time I was booted out, we were down to six in the two reception classes for the next academic year. Most of the parents phoned to cancel. They wanted their deposit back. The rest didn’t even call us, too rich or too rude to bother.”
When Adam joined Sidley House, both reception classes were full with another fifteen children on a waiting list if a place became vacant.
“Who knew about this?” Sarah asks.
“Sally Healey. And the governors, I imagine. But she didn’t want to worry the other staff, said she’d be able to sort it all out.”
Elizabeth’s posture is hunched now.
“Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
“I believed her. When she said she could sort it all out. She’d done it with the existing parents, persuaded them all to stay. I believed her …”
She falters for a moment and tries to regain her composure.
“She didn’t want anyone to find out,” she says. “That’s why she fired me, isn’t it?”
I get in the car with Sarah. Almost immediately the car phone rings.
“Sarah?”
Mohsin’s voice sounds different. And he almost never calls her Sarah, always “darling” or “baby.”
“I was about to call you,” she says and she’s buzzing. “I just saw the old secretary. The one Annette Jenks replaced.”
“You mustn’t—”
“I know. Shouldn’t have done that. But listen. Annette Jenks didn’t have admissions as part of her job, but it was a big part of Elizabeth Fisher’s job description. That’s the reason Sally Healey got rid of Elizabeth and why she deliberately hired someone as brainless as Annette—”
“Sarah, please. Listen to me. Baker’s had Sally Healey checking up on you. He’s talking about disciplinary procedures.”
“Right. Well. You’d better not be caught fraternizing with the enemy then.”
“Darling—”
She hangs up. The phone rings again, but she doesn’t answer it.
After three days of intense heat, the grass is parched and balding; the azalea flowers, once blooming up to chest height, lie desiccated on the ground.
Sally Healey’s Portakabin door is open. Her face is shining with sweat and her hair clinging to her scalp.
Sarah knocks on the open door. Sally Healey is visibly startled to see her.
“I know that you made a complaint about me. And I understand that. It’s fair enough. But I’m here now as Jenny’s aunt and Grace’s sister-in-law.”
Sally Healey looks shocked. “I didn’t know.”
“If you want me to leave, just say so.”
Sally Healey says nothing and barely moves. The humid air seems to weigh us all down in the small space.
“Shall we walk and talk?” Sarah says, stepping out of the Portakabin.
Sally Healey waits a moment, then joins Sarah outside.
There’s a faint breeze, and carried on it is the distant echo of whistles and children’s voices and small feet pounding the ground.
They start walking around the large playing field and I follow.
“You told me that your school was full on sports day,” Sarah says. “And how hard you’d worked to achieve that.”
“Yes, and we will start again, just as I said. Over the summer I’m looking at properties; we’ll be ready to start again on September the eighth just as in the school calendar and—”
“But in September there are only a handful of new children joining reception, isn’t that right? Possibly none the year after that or the year after that?”
“I can get those children back. I can get new children to join. I’m going to offer bursaries and scholarship schemes. Target families who wouldn’t normally go to private schools.”
But as she speaks her voice is limp, wrung out by the energy needed for such optimism.
Sally Healey is silent.
“I imagine,” continues Sarah, “they only saw the school facing financial ruin. Which would become apparent to everyone in September. Presumably the rest of the school would start to fall apart too. No one wants their child in a school that’s going down the tubes. Was it you—or someone else—who decided to get rid of the member of staff in charge of admissions? To keep things quiet.”
“She was too old to do the job anymore. I told you that.”
“That’s bollocks, isn’t it?”
Sally Healey’s stride has become jerky. She doesn’t reply.
“Was it you who made up the story of Elizabeth Fisher’s husband dying?”
Mrs. Healey says nothing. Sarah is now leading them on towards the edge of the playing field.
“You must have known her husband had left her, for your ploy to work.”
“I’d heard he’d left her, yes.”
“Though you don’t listen to gossip?”
“A member of staff, Tilly Rogers, told me when she found out I was making Mrs. Fisher redundant, in the hope that I would reconsider my decision.”
“But instead you used that personal vulnerable information against her.”
Mrs. Healey turns to Sarah. “I didn’t want her to contact parents and tell them about the fall in admissions.”
“So you made sure she’d be too embarrassed to do that.”
“We just couldn’t afford any more negativity. I’m not proud of what I did. But it was necessary.”
“You then replaced her with an unintelligent young secretary who could be relied on not to notice that no new families were signing up.”
“That’s not how it was.”
“I think that’s exactly how it was.”
We’ve reached the edge of the playing field now. Through the branches of the oak trees lining the driveway, you can just glimpse the black cadaver of a school.
“And this?” Sarah says. She turns to Mrs. Healey, her face rigid. “Whose idea was this?”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Sally Healey says. “Nothing! I spent years building up a school to be proud of.”
Afterwards Page 28