by Lisa Jewell
She pulls on a black satin camisole top with lace trim and a lace-paneled back. She teams it with fitted black trousers and high-heeled black sandals and she fixes her hair into a side ponytail that sits on her shoulder. She blobs her face with things that promise to illuminate and shimmer.
Shaun does a double take as she walks into the hallway. He says, “God, wow, Soph, you look lovely.” And she can tell he means it.
The noise from the main hall is deafening. It has a barreled, wood-lined ceiling and windows set up so high they only let in light, no view. But there are three pairs of huge double doors open onto the lawn, where there is a marquee, and tables and chairs laid out in the early-evening sun. She and Shaun wander across the lawn together, her arm linked through his, throwing smiles at people and stopping to say hello. They find an empty table and Shaun leaves Sophie to go and get them drinks. Her gaze travels across the scene as she waits for him to return, to the clusters of lovely young things curled around one another in little pockets, impenetrable, slightly terrifying, the power and yet the patheticness of them, the know-all- and know-nothing-ness. It’s not just their youth that glitters, she ponders as she watches them, it’s their backgrounds, their innate privilege, the suggestion in the way they touch their hair, the way they hold their drinks, the way they scroll so nonchalantly through their phones. They come from places that aren’t like the places most people come from and they have the high-gloss veneer of money that shines through the scruffiest of exteriors.
Sophie comes from modest houses and cars that drive till they die and state schools and weekly Tesco shops and biscuits off plates at her grandma’s flat every Saturday. She hadn’t missed out on anything: there was always food and holidays abroad and shopping trips to Oxford Street and takeaways on Friday nights; there was always enough of everything. Her life was perfect. But it was matte, not gloss.
She thinks about Dark Place, about the Jacques family, about the swimming pool that must once have sparkled icy blue in the summer sun, the art that must once have sat on the Perspex plinths, the music that must once have tumbled out of double doors and across the manicured lawns, the especial laughter of people with numerous cars and horses and chalets in the Alps. Their daughter, Scarlett, had once been a student here, according to Kerryanne Mulligan.
Shaun reappears with two glasses of wine and takes his seat next to Sophie. “Sorry I took so long,” he says. “Got waylaid.”
“Let’s drink these,” she says, “and then we can mingle.”
“Urgh, God, do we have to?” he says, dropping his forehead against her bare shoulder.
She ruffles the back of his neck and laughs. “I kind of think we do have to, yes. You’re basically the king. You have to get out there.”
“I know.” He lifts his head and puts a hand on her knee. “I know.”
They drink their wine and within a minute or two are joined at their table by a couple called Fleur and Robin who are the geography teacher and the photography teacher respectively and who live in a cottage just outside the village and have a Border terrier called Oscar and a rabbit called Bafta and are both very talkative indeed. Halfway through this conversation they are joined by a middle-aged man called Troy, who has a magnificent beard. He is the philosophy and theology teacher and he lives on campus and has a lot of recommendations for local delicatessens, wine shops, and butchers. Someone whisks Shaun away and for a while it is Sophie and Troy, and that is fine, Troy is very easy to talk to, and then they are joined by someone with a French accent and someone with a Spanish accent and soon her table is overrun with people whose names she barely has time to catch, let alone their jobs or roles at the school, and then she notices a younger man, standing at the periphery of the group that has gathered around her table: he’s holding a beer in one hand; his other hand is in the pocket of a pair of navy chino shorts. His brown hair is short and wavy; he’s wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to just above his elbows and white trainers, without socks. He has a nice physique. He looks a bit like a film star, one of the ones called Chris, Sophie can never remember which is which.
He’s talking to an older woman; Sophie can tell he doesn’t know her all that well, that he’s making an effort to be charming and polite. She sees him turn very vaguely in her direction, as though he can feel her eyes upon him, and she looks away. The next time she glances over she sees that the older woman has turned to talk to someone else and left him adrift. He lifts his beer bottle to his lips and takes a thoughtful slug. He sees her looking at him and smiles. “You must be Mr. Gray’s partner,” he says, approaching her.
“Yes,” she says brightly. “My name’s Sophie. Lovely to meet you.”
He passes his beer bottle to his other hand and offers her his hand to shake. “Great to meet you too. I’m Liam. I’m a classroom assistant here. I work with some of the kids with special needs, you know, dyslexia, dyspraxia, that kind of thing.”
He’s well-spoken, but there’s a kind of rough Gloucester undercurrent to his accent.
“Oh, that sounds really interesting.”
He nods effusively. “Yeah, it’s amazing. I mean, it’s not, like, my life’s ambition or anything, it’s just temporary, but for now it’s really, really satisfying.”
“So, what is your life’s ambition, then?”
“Oh, yeah, right.” He passes his hand around the back of his neck and screws his face up. “Haven’t quite worked that one out yet. Still trying to find one, I reckon.” He smiles. “Twenty-one going on fifteen. Failure to launch.”
He sounds apologetic and Sophie finds herself reassuring him.
“No,” she says, “you’re working, you have a really important job, that’s more than a lot of young men your age these days.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Maybe.” Then he says, “So, what do you think of Maypole House?”
She glances around and nods. “Yes,” she says. “I like it. It’s not what I’m used to. I mean, I’m a Londoner, born and bred, I’ve never lived outside London before, so country living is a bit of a shock to the system.”
“Oh, this isn’t country,” says Liam. “This is not country, believe me. I was brought up on a cattle farm in Gloucestershire. That was country. This is just a nice place for people to live who don’t want to live in cities.”
Sophie smiles. “Fair enough, I guess.” Then she says, “How long have you been teaching here?”
“Well…” He smiles sheepishly. “I actually used to be a student here, believe it or not. I was sent here by my parents when I was fifteen to do my GCSEs because I was getting too, er, distracted by other things at my old school. And then I liked it here so I stayed on to do my A levels. Failed them all. Retook them. Failed one. Thought about retaking it… So yeah, I was a student here for…” He narrows his eyes as he makes the mental calculation. “… four and a bit years? It might possibly be an all-time record for the Maypole. Most students aren’t here for much longer than a couple of years. And now they can’t get rid of me.”
He laughs and Sophie laughs too.
Then she says, “So, you must know a lot about the place, about its history?”
“I am the world expert in Maypole House, yes, that’s about right.”
“So if Shaun needs to know anything, you’re the man to talk to?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Just send him my way. I’m his man.”
“So… you were here last summer,” she begins carefully. “When those teenagers went missing?”
A shadow passes across his face. “Yeah,” he says. “I was here then. Not only that, but I was there.”
Sophie starts. “There?”
“Yes. At the house. The night they disappeared. I mean. I was friends with Scarlett, the girl who lived there. I didn’t see anything, obviously. I didn’t know anything. But yeah. Shocking times, really. Shocking times.” He changes tack, swiftly, to Sophie’s frustration. “And what about you? What do you do for a living? If you were in London, did you have to leave yo
ur job, or…?”
She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No. I mean, I was once a classroom assistant, like yourself, in fact. At a primary school in London. But now I’m self-employed, I can work from home, so nothing much has changed for me in that way. You know. Though, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t quite managed to get back into any kind of discipline yet. I keep getting distracted by things.” She laughs, lightly, but actually she is worried by how, after nearly a week at Maypole House, she hasn’t written a word of her latest book. Every time she opens it up and begins to type, she starts thinking about Tallulah Murray and Dark Place and Scarlett Jacques and the rosebush across the common and the pink baby feet tattooed on the underside of Kim Knox’s arm and the engagement ring in the dusty black box hidden inside her makeup drawer. She thinks of Martin Jacques, whom she googled after snooping on his mail, thinks of the man she saw online, tall and haggard with a quiff of thinning steel hair and a stern expression, the man who is described on LinkedIn as the CEO of a Guernsey-based hedge fund and is currently, according to another Google result, living alone in Dubai, having separated from his wife.
She’d found no mention of his ex-wife or grown-up children on any page of the internet but the separation seemed the obvious explanation to Sophie of why Dark Place had been abandoned and left to rot.
“Oh well,” says Liam, “I’m sure once the college gets into a routine, you will too.”
She smiles gratefully. “That’s a very good way of thinking about it,” she says. “Thank you. You’re very wise.”
As she says this, she sees Shaun appear over Liam’s shoulder. She’s struck for a second by the contrast between them: the twenty years that divide them. Shaun looks, for all his handsomeness and charisma, old enough to be Liam’s father.
“Hi,” he says, putting a hand out to Liam, “Liam, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Good to see you again.”
They conclude that they’ve already met and the conversation becomes diluted with other people and other topics and soon Sophie is no longer talking to Liam at all; he’s been absorbed into another group. She finds herself alone and walks across the lawn toward the bar inside the marquee. Here she gets herself a second glass of wine and carries it back outdoors. She can just see Shaun across the lawn, deep in conversation with Peter Doody and Kerryanne Mulligan.
Then she sees Liam walking across the lawn toward the main hall and, on a whim, she follows him. He carries on walking though the hall and out the doors on the other side. Then he crosses the back courtyard and heads toward the accommodation block. She sees him tapping the security code into the panel and, with a buzz and a click, he’s gone. She sits on a bench in the courtyard, glad of a moment to herself before going back into the fray. The wine is warm but she drinks it anyway. The evening sun is strobing through ribbons of purple cloud and she turns her face into it, her eyes closed, listening to the distant din of chatter and laughter.
She shudders slightly to right herself, and then she opens her eyes and, as she does so, she sees a pair of tanned feet overhanging the bars of a balcony on the third floor of the residential block, the edge of a paperback book, a cold beer sitting on a table.
It’s Liam.
For a moment she toys with the idea of calling up to him, of inviting herself in, of drinking a cold beer with him and asking him what he thinks really happened at Dark Place that night.
She shakes her head to herself; then she heads back through the cloisters to the party.
17
JANUARY 2017
Zach spends the night with Tallulah on New Year’s Eve and never goes home. When Tallulah wakes up for her first day back at college five days later, she awakes in a bed shared with her baby and her baby’s father. She and Zach haven’t had sex again since New Year’s Eve, but they sit side by side on the sofa at night and they kiss each other goodbye and hello and they hug and they touch.
Tallulah’s mum is pleased. Tallulah knows that she’s always felt guilty for marrying a man who wasn’t cut out for the hurly-burly of family life, who ran back home to his mum the minute she said she needed him and left them all behind without a glimmer of remorse. And Tallulah can tell that she is pleased that Tallulah and Zach are going to make a go of being a proper family and that Zach is going to relieve some of the pressure on Tallulah as a single parent.
Tallulah kisses her mum goodbye on her first day back at college. In the front garden she looks up and sees Zach and Noah at her bedroom window, Zach holding Noah’s tiny hand up and waving it for him. She sees him mouthing, “Bye-bye, Mummy. Bye-bye, Mummy.” She blows them kisses and then walks away.
At the bus stop she finds herself looking for Scarlett. Scarlett never appeared at the bus stop again after that first time and Tallulah didn’t see her to talk to after the Christmas party but for some reason Scarlett has left an imprint on Tallulah’s psyche. Their two interludes feel important to Tallulah, and she feels like something is meant to happen now, a third act, a conclusion of some sort. The bus arrives; she takes one last look across the common, toward Maypole House, sighs, and gets on board.
* * *
After lunch that day Tallulah decides to visit the art block. She’s never been in the art block before; it’s a squat square building in the middle of campus, kind of ugly. The corridors inside are decorated with rows of slightly alarming self-portraits. She finds a door toward the end of the corridor that says YEAR ONE FINE ARTS and peers through the window. The room is empty but locked. She passes through more corridors lined with more art and then finds one that is labeled as SCARLETT JACQUES Y1.
Tallulah stops. It’s a portrait of Scarlett in a crop T-shirt and oversize shorts draped inside a huge red velvet throne-like chair, wearing a tiara at an angle, high-top trainers, her hair scraped back, and hoop earrings, wrists layered with rubber bands. At her feet sits a gigantic brown dog, almost the same size as Scarlett, also wearing a crown. Both of them stare directly at the viewer, the dog looking proud, Scarlett looking challenging.
It’s an arresting image; it draws the eye first to Scarlett and then to every other detail: a pile of silver cream chargers on the floor catching the light, a small window behind with the suggestion of a face, staring as though watching her. There’s a gun on a table, an Apple phone, a dish with a fresh red heart in it that looks as if it’s still beating. On another table there’s a cake with a slice missing and the knife used to cut it has a drop of blood on it.
Tallulah has no idea what any of it means, but it’s beautifully painted, all in sun-bleached shades of pink and green and pale gray with shocking slashes and spots of red. She finds herself mouthing “Wow” to herself.
“Amazing, isn’t she?”
She turns at the voice behind her. She’d thought she was alone. It’s one of Scarlett’s gang; she can’t remember her name.
“Yes, I mean, I haven’t seen her work before, but this painting is incredible.”
“You know she left?”
Tallulah blinks, feels a kind of tightness in her stomach. “What?”
“Scar’s gone. She’s not coming back.” The girl makes a kind of popping noise with her mouth, as though Scarlett were a bubble that had burst.
“But why?”
“No one really knows. I keep messaging her and she keeps saying she’ll tell me when she can, but she can’t tell me right now, so, yeah…”
Tallulah turns back to the painting. “What a waste,” she says.
“Yeah,” the girl agrees. “She’s a fucking idiot. All that work and all that talent and she’s just walked away from it. But there you go. That’s Scar. An enigma. Wrapped in a blanket.” She smiles. “You’re Tallulah from the bus, aren’t you?”
Tallulah nods.
“Mimi. We met at the Christmas party.”
“Oh, yeah. Hi.”
Mimi cocks her head at Tallulah and says, “Are you doing art?”
Tallulah shakes her head. “No, just fancied looking at the art. Someo
ne said it was really good.”
Mimi looks at her curiously for a moment. Then she pulls her heels together, straightens up, and says, “Anyway, time to get on. And if you see Scarlett around your neck of the woods, tell her to stop being a fucking dick and get in touch. Will you?”
Tallulah smiles. “I will,” she says. “I promise.”
* * *
After that, Tallulah looks for Scarlett every time she leaves the house. She knows that Scarlett’s boyfriend, Liam, is a student at Maypole House, so it’s more than possible that Scarlett would be in the village from time to time. Every now and then Tallulah flicks through her photo roll to get to the picture of her and Scarlett at the Christmas party and tries to remember the way she’d felt that night, the person she was when she was under the red-hot glow of Scarlett’s attention. She googles Scarlett’s name from time to time too, idly, just in case she’s ended up in the newspapers somehow. She doesn’t know where Scarlett lives, just that it’s somewhere walking distance from the village, which could be anywhere; there are at least three hamlets near Upfield Common and the roads between are peppered with private driveways leading to the sorts of big houses that Tallulah imagines Scarlett to live in.
And then one day, during the last week of January, Tallulah sees Scarlett getting out of the passenger seat of a Smart car parked outside the co-op on the high street of the village.
She’s wearing what look like pajamas, with her fake fur coat over the top. Her hair is straggly and she’s wearing beaten-up trainers over fluffy socks. In the driver’s seat of the car, Tallulah sees a young man. He’s staring at his phone and there’s the dull thud of music emanating from the car. A moment later Scarlett emerges with a carrier bag and jumps back into the Smart car. The boy in the driver’s seat looks at her briefly, turns his phone off, and drives the car toward the road that goes to Manton.