Perfect Little Children

by Sophie Hannah

  I get out of the taxi, pay the driver and walk up the long drive that’s lined with square-trimmed shrubs in square silver planters. 4451 is the only modern-looking house on this stretch of the road. The others mostly look like oversized doll’s houses, with wrap-around verandahs, pillars, protruding porches and porte cochères, and rows of cute-looking wooden sash dormer windows with shutters and roofs of their own poking out from red-tiled roofs that tweak up at the edges like slightly lifted skirts. This house, by contrast, looks futuristic: a huge geometric puzzle that someone has expertly solved by slotting together an angular white object and a dark gray one.

  I ring the bell and Flora opens the door. Behind her, I see more smooth expanses of white and dark gray, as if the same materials have been used inside as out. There’s a sunken bar area with a glittering array of bottles and beautiful wood and leather high stools arranged in a crescent shape around it. Next to the bar is a shiny cylindrical column that goes up through the ceiling. I think it might be a lift. An elevator. Yes, it must be; there’s a door in it, discreet but visible.

  There are white and gray rugs, white and gray sofas, white and gray cushions. It looks immaculate, like a movie set before the cameras and cast arrive. The only details in the scene that jar are me and Flora. If someone had told me three weeks ago that today I’d be here, in this place and this situation, I’d have said it was impossible. I was never going to see Flora again. That was something I was sure of until recently, until knowing anything for certain started to feel impossible.

  Flora’s eyes are red, her skin pale, her hair pulled back into a short ponytail. She’s wearing a blue bathrobe over black leggings and a white T-shirt. “Come in,” she says.

  “Whose house is this?” I ask. “Does Lewis own it?”

  “His company does. Usually it’s for work contacts who need somewhere to stay.”

  “Figures. That’s why it looks perfect inside and out.”

  “How did you guess?” says Flora.

  “What?”

  “That Lewis thought Georgina was ugly because of her eye. You said it on the phone before as if you knew, but you can’t have known. My parents couldn’t have told you. I didn’t say a word to them. Neither did Lewis.”

  “You told me, Flora. When you said Georgina was beautiful. You said it so vehemently, as if you were arguing with someone who thought the opposite. That someone wasn’t me. It wasn’t hard to figure it out from there.”

  “So you understand why Lewis overreacted in the way that he did,” she says, walking away from me. Reaching the other side of the room, she turns on a tap and fills a glass with water. “Want some?”

  “No thanks.” I don’t think she does either. She didn’t like standing too close to me.

  The kitchen part of the open-plan ground floor has a wall made of glass that reveals a neatly landscaped terrace at the back of the house with a rectangular swimming pool embedded in it. As I move nearer Flora, the artworks on the walls of the living room area become visible. My breath catches in my throat.

  Murmurations. Framed black-and-white photographs of large groups of birds making graceful shapes against a variety of skies. Exactly like the pictures in the living room at Newnham House.

  Flora looks at me as if to say, “Don’t come any closer.” I’m worried she’s going to run away from me again. The glass looks as if it might slide open if the right button were pressed.

  “How did Lewis overreact?” I ask.

  “The last time we came to see you.”

  “You mean when you fed Georgina? No, I still don’t understand that. Tell me.”

  “She was so little, and premature. She slept nearly all the time, and her wakeful periods were in the night, always. That was the only reason Lewis said yes, when you invited us that last time. When she was asleep, there was no problem at all. She looked as perfect as Thomas and Emily had, even to Lewis. It was only when she opened her eyes that you could see the flaw.”

  Flora sips her water. I wish I’d asked for some.

  “She slept nearly all that afternoon, do you remember? Even when Thomas started wailing about his blister, she didn’t wake. I’d promised Lewis that she wouldn’t. He said, ‘Good. I don’t want anyone knowing I’ve got a cross-eyed daughter.’”

  “That’s—”

  Flora puts out a hand to silence me. “Please don’t say it’s awful or terrible or anything like that. You’re going to want to say that so many times if I tell you the truth, and I already know it’s terrible. You saying it doesn’t help.”

  I nod.

  “That afternoon, the last time we saw you all as friends, I’d promised Lewis that if Georgina showed signs of waking, I’d take her off somewhere so that no one saw. I knew he had no need to worry. She only ever woke when she was hungry, and the second she started to feed, her eyes always closed again. I promised him I’d make sure no one saw her with her eyes open, and I kept my promise. No one saw a thing. Lewis was paranoid about it, though. As far as he was concerned, feeding meant she was awake, which meant there was a risk she’d open her eyes. He thought I was being reckless—that I might expose the shameful family secret: a nonperfect child. That’s why he screamed at me.”

  I don’t know how I’m supposed to listen to this story and not react. My face must be expressing all the things I’m not saying in words.

  “I had other strict instructions that day too,” Flora says.

  “Like what?”

  “Not to say anything about Georgina being premature. Lewis insisted: you and Dominic couldn’t know that my body had failed and ejected her too early. That’s how Lewis saw it. Zannah and Ben had both turned up on time, healthy and perfect, and Lewis needs to feel superior in order to find life bearable. For the first time, he didn’t. He blamed Georgina and me. Mainly me. Even Lewis understands that you can’t blame a baby for anything. He used to say it all the time: ‘It’s not her fault I don’t want her.’ Sometimes it was, ‘It’s not her fault I wish she’d never been born.’”

  “Flora . . .”

  “It wasn’t only the strabismus,” she goes on. “He never wanted a third child. He had his perfect boy and girl and he wanted to stop at two. He always said two was the perfect number, and that was how many children we were going to have. I should have listened. If only I’d listened . . .” She covers her face with her hands. Her body heaves and she says something I can’t make out. I think it was “None of it would have happened.”

  “So you and Lewis didn’t agree to have a third child?” I say.

  Flora shakes her head. “He’d never have agreed. Never. I tried to persuade myself that I didn’t want another baby, but . . . When you want something so much, you don’t think straight, do you? I kept telling myself, ‘You’re so lucky already, you’ve got Thomas and Emily,’ but the urge didn’t go away, and I thought Lewis would . . .” Her face contorts in pain. “I miscalculated. I hadn’t seen the worst of him then—never directed at me, anyway. I’d seen him lay waste to other people, but . . . you remember how it was, Beth. He was so hard to resist when he was on your side and you had his approval. It made you feel invincible. I felt like the luckiest woman in the world when Lewis saw me as an asset. Then I went against what he wanted and got pregnant again, and everything changed.”

  “But if he knew you were trying to get pregnant and he didn’t want to . . .”

  “I didn’t tell him.” Flora looks at me with pity. “You think I’d have had the nerve to defy him openly? No. I said it was an accident. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then you won’t mind getting rid of it.’ And he saw the look in my eyes and knew everything: that I’d disobeyed him, which would have been bad enough all on its own, and that I’d lied about it.”

  “What happened? How did he react?”

  She stares into the distance. Finally she says, “You can’t imagine, Beth. He looked at me and I knew: everything was finished. He would never love me again. I was condemned. Lewis doesn’t give second chances.”

  �
�He used to boast about that.” It was a feature that he had and we all lacked. There was a quote he liked, about it being your fault if someone hurts you more than once. He presented it as hard-earned wisdom, not intransigence, and we never questioned it. His belief in himself was so strong, we all fell in with it.

  “I begged him to forgive me, said I’d end the pregnancy. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I’d have done it. I was so scared, even then. Not scared of what he might do at that point, just scared of what my life would be like if I wasn’t the beloved wife of the great Lewis Braid anymore.”

  All of this happened when Flora found out she was pregnant with Georgina. That’s why telling her best friend was the last thing on her mind. “But you kept the pregnancy. How come, if you knew Lewis was against it?”

  “He told me to. Said, ‘No, you won’t be having a termination.’ As if he was in charge of me. I told him I didn’t want one, I thought it was what he wanted, and he said, ‘No, it’s not. Not now that I’ve had a chance to think about it. You chose to get pregnant, and now you’re going to see it through. We’re both going to live with the consequences of your unilateral decision.’ Do you want to hear the most ridiculous thing of all? I was relieved! I thought maybe he was coming around to the idea of a third child. He was still sounding so cold and . . . different from the Lewis who’d loved me, but if he was telling me to keep it, I thought . . .”

  “You allowed yourself to hope.”

  Flora nods. “I was sure that when the baby arrived, he’d love it. But that was never going to happen. He ruled that out, the second he saw through my ‘accidental conception’ lie. He might not have made his whole plan on day one, but he drew a line that was going to stay drawn forever. I should have known. If I hadn’t been so desperate for another baby, I would have known. It was deluded wishful thinking. Lewis doesn’t change his mind, and to think that he would after I’d gone against him like that . . .” She shuts her eyes.

  “What if Georgina hadn’t been born prematurely?” I ask. “If she’d appeared bang on time, if she hadn’t had the problem with her eye?”

  “It could so easily have been fixed.” A tear rolls down Flora’s face. “One operation—that’s all it would have taken. I told Lewis that. He said, ‘Do you know what the trouble with you is, Flora? You don’t know how to think properly.’ I asked him what he meant. He said I had to work it out; he wasn’t going to tell me—part of his effort to improve my thinking capacity. I did in the end. Work it out, I mean. Even if Georgina’s eyes were fixed, even if she was the most flawless-looking, healthy child in the world, it still wouldn’t be okay that she was there. She was never supposed to exist. We were supposed to be a family of four.”

  I wish she hadn’t hidden all this from me. I nearly say it, then realize there’s no point. It’s not going to make her feel any better to think that if she’d told me everything then, all those years ago, Georgina might . . .

  Might still be alive? Why?

  I’d have told her to take the kids and get as far away from Lewis as possible. Would that have worked, though? Or would he have made a different plan to punish her? “His whole plan,” she said.

  “Flora?” I can’t put off asking any longer.

  “What?”

  “Did Lewis murder Georgina?”

  She looks away.

  “Flora?”

  “It was my fault.”

  “Georgina’s death was your fault?”

  She nods.

  “The story you and Lewis told me about the wine and the argument you had, how it led to Georgina’s death—that was true?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me what happened. How did Georgina die?”

  I wait.

  “Flora? I think Lewis killed her. I think he’s the one who belongs in HMP Peterborough. Not you.”

  She shudders. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Daily Responses.”

  “How do you . . .” Her mouth gapes open.

  “Lewis took a phone call this morning on the way into work. He didn’t know I was behind him. I was about to call his name, but then his phone rang, so I didn’t. I eavesdropped instead. He spoke very briskly, as if to a business associate, and said ‘Are you ready for Daily Responses?’ It sounded kind of religious, like a ritual. Then I went inside and all the VersaNova receptionists were wearing badges with cheesy new-age mottos on them. Stupidly, I assumed Daily Responses was some kind of corporate mindfulness bullshit, but it isn’t. Lewis wasn’t talking to a colleague on the phone. He was talking to you.”

  She stares at me blankly.

  I go on, telling her what she already knows. “It is a ritual—I was right about that part. A daily ritual, I assume, if it’s called Daily Responses.” Lewis giving it a name makes it even sicker. “I only realized later that the questions I heard him ask fit perfectly with the things I heard you say just over a week earlier, when you got out of your car in Hemingford Abbots in the middle of a phone call. No wonder you were crying. It’s a form of torture. Has it been going on ever since Georgina died?”

  Flora nods. “Some days I can get through it fine. Others, I go to pieces. You must have seen a bad day.”

  “Daily Responses: three questions and three answers, the same each time. I heard Lewis ask you the questions this morning: ‘Where are you? Where should you be? And what are you?’ And that day on Wyddial Lane, the first time I’d laid eyes on you in twelve years, I heard you recite the replies.”

  Question 1: Where are you?

  Answer: Home.

  Question 2: Where should you be?

  Answer: HMP Peterborough.

  Question 3: And what are you?

  Answer: Lucky. I’m very lucky.

  “He must have recorded you saying it at some point,” I tell her. “When he phoned me the first time, I heard your voice in the background saying answer number three.”

  Flora turns on the tap and pours herself more water. She doesn’t offer me any.

  “Maybe he records it every time.” I wouldn’t put it past Lewis to collect Flora’s Daily Responses and file them away. “He didn’t this morning, though. The thing is . . . I don’t think you do belong in prison, Flora. I don’t think you killed Georgina. Lewis did, didn’t he?”

  “I think so,” she says.

  “What does that mean?”

  She opens her mouth and lets out a sigh, long and loud. “It’s a relief to say it after so many years. I’ve never said it before. Yes, I think Lewis murdered Georgina. The story he told you about me and the wine was a lie. Not the wine part—that was true. I did have a couple of glasses. By then, I needed at least a glass a night just to keep me from screaming and falling apart. I kept thinking ‘There must be something I can do’ but I had no idea what it might be. My husband hated me and one of our children, and had no intention of relenting. I couldn’t leave him. That would have meant leaving Thomas and Emily too—he’d never have let me take them away from him, I knew that. What I didn’t know was that he’d made a foolproof plan to take them away from me. Forever. And then make me suffer, forever. Killing Georgina was only stage one. There was plenty more to come.”

  We stare at each other in silence. Now I see what she meant. To say, “That’s horrific,” or “That’s evil,” could never be enough.

  “Tell me about the night Georgina died,” I say, though I’m not sure I can bear to hear it.

  “I started to feel unusually sleepy. I felt so bad, I had to mention it to Lewis, who accused me of drinking too much. Now it seems so obvious that he drugged me, but it didn’t occur to me then. However grim things were between us, I wouldn’t have suspected he’d do that. I thought I must be coming down with something. Lewis told me to go to bed and said he’d look after the kids. I didn’t want to leave Georgina with him, but I could hardly keep my eyes open.”

  “Did you fear he’d hurt her?”

  “Not in the way he did. I thought I knew exactly what he’d do. It was what
he’d been doing since she was born: being Wonder-Dad to the other two and ignoring Georgina completely. Since I’d told him I was pregnant with her, he’d shut out both of us as much as he could. The only time he turned on the charm was if he thought Thomas or Emily might notice something was wrong. He still wanted to preserve the illusion of the perfect family for them, so he’d make a point of being nice to me when we were all together, and sometimes he’d cuddle Georgina too, though he never looked at her. The second Thomas and Emily left the room, the act would end and the coldness would resume.”

  I want to kill him. I’ve never had this feeling before, about anyone.

  “I remember just before I fell asleep, worrying that he might leave Georgina unchanged and unfed,” says Flora. “She would always cry if she was hungry or uncomfortable, though, and there was nothing wrong with her lungs. She could scream loud enough to make your hair stand on end. But she never did, or if she did, it didn’t wake me, thanks to whatever Lewis put in my food. I know he drugged me. I know exactly how much I drank that night—two glasses of wine, same as most nights. There’s no way that would have knocked me out. If wine was all I’d had, I’d have woken up when Lewis came into my room and . . . stopped Georgina breathing.”

  “I’m so sorry, Flora.”

  “He probably used a pillow.” Her voice shakes. “I woke up in the middle of the night to find him shaking me and telling me the same lie you’ve already heard, the one he made me tell too: I drank too much wine, took Georgina up to bed, rolled over and smothered her to death by accident while in a drunken stupor. All a lie. When I dragged myself up to bed, she was still downstairs with Lewis. But he said my memory couldn’t be trusted, because I’d drunk so much. He sneered at me. Said how could I deny I’d taken her up with me when he’d seen me do it. Even if I had, I’d never have put her in bed with me, not when I felt as bad as I did. I’m not an idiot. I was a good mother.”

  “I know you were. You don’t need to convince me. I’m on your side.”

  “Now you are,” Flora mutters.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.” Her face twists, and I see how much she wishes she hadn’t said it. She takes her glass of water over to one of the gray sofas and sits down. “You didn’t know, and you couldn’t have rescued me and the kids even if you had. I couldn’t rescue us. It was crazy of me to think you might be able to, but I couldn’t stop hoping. I thought, ‘Surely she’ll suspect something’s wrong, and—’” She breaks off with a shrug. “I don’t know what I thought you could do, but I had to cling to something.”