‘She was getting undressed. She’d left her door ajar and she thinks he’d been watching her. Then he came right into her room, and when she asked him to leave, he grabbed her. Said she was asking for it.’
‘Jules, those words aren’t Saul’s.’ My voice is calm. I’m in tutor mode and I’m dealing with this as I would with one of my students. Waiting for the emotion to settle so we can reach firm ground upon which to untangle the details of this ludicrous allegation. ‘He might have checked up on her, but Saul would never say a girl was “asking for it”. He lives with me, for goodness’ sake.’
‘It’s what he said.’
‘When did she tell you this?’
‘This morning.’
‘Just this morning? Why not that night? Why would she wait two weeks to tell you? If it’s true.’
Jules looks at me incredulously. ‘Holly, you know the reasons girls don’t cry rape better than anyone. She was afraid. Afraid of snitching on Saul. Or that I wouldn’t believe her. Or that I’d blame her. She’s been traumatized all this time and trying to carry on as normal. I feel awful that I didn’t bloody notice there was anything up. She’s been refusing her tea, which is very out of character. And looking exhausted. I put it down to those teenage mood swings, or PMT . . .’
I stare at my friend, letting her words sink in. She’s right, of course. I know the reasons women – girls – keep silent better than anyone. So I should believe what Jules is telling me. That’s the theory, though. Reality is different. Reality is always more slippery, more fuzzy-edged.
‘I’m at a complete loss, Holly. I don’t know what to do. Saff doesn’t want me to report it . . .’
‘Report it?’ I’m only slowly taking in what a serious allegation Saffie has made. How difficult it will be to disprove if she sticks to it. Though also, of course, as I know all too well from my Rape Crisis days, how difficult to prove. If Saul denies it. Which he will. Because he cannot have done this.
‘She begged me not to tell anyone. She didn’t want me to tell you. She wasn’t going to tell me, even. Poor child.’ Jules stops, takes a breath. ‘But she realized she had to, because an experience like that, an assault, it doesn’t just go away. As you know.’
‘Is she hurt?’ I ask quietly. ‘Is she bruised? Is there any evidence that she’s been assaulted?’
‘I didn’t want to say . . . but her period’s late.’
‘She’s not pregnant, is she?’
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘How late is it?’
‘Only a few days. But she’s terrified, of course. Distraught, in fact.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘Is that enough evidence for you?’
Yes, I should say. Yes, of course. If she’s pregnant. But even then we don’t know Saul’s responsible. It could be anyone.
I open my mouth to speak. Then stop. I can’t imagine the gauche Saffie I observed the other evening in a relationship. She’s still such a child, for goodness’ sake.
Jules goes on, ‘I’ve decided the best thing, the only thing, is to deal with this together. Without telling anyone else, as Saffie requested. So we have to talk to Saul. See what he has to say for himself.’
A ray of sun has highlighted, as if deliberately, the photo of Archie and Saul I keep on my desk, the one where Archie’s carrying Saul, aged about two, in a backpack up a hill in Scotland, both of them squinting with identical expressions into the camera.
‘We can’t do that. Saul’s not in any state at the moment to have things like this levelled at him,’ I say.
‘Holly! You talk to boys about this kind of behaviour all the time. Surely you aren’t afraid of asking your own son what he did to my daughter that night?’
‘Please don’t say “my daughter” and “your son” as if we barely know each other!’
A thick silence settles between us. The ray of sunlight on the photo flickers and fades, leaving us sitting in the dark shadow of Senate House. There’s the rumble of traffic outside. The chatter of students passing on the street below. From above, the plaintive, out-of-place squall of a seagull.
‘I’m not telling Saul Saffie’s accused him of the vilest act imaginable when he’s got so much on his plate right now. It’ll ruin his life at school and in the village forever. Knowing she’s saying things like that about him . . . he’ll go under.’
‘You’re saying you’re going to ignore it?’
‘I’m saying you should question whether Saffie’s telling the whole story. Saul’s an easy target. Everyone at that school’s got it in for him. The kids bullied him mercilessly in year nine . . . don’t you remember? He refused to go to school at all because of it; Donna said he’d developed school phobia as a result.’
‘That has nothing to do with this.’
‘But this is Saffie and Saul we’re talking about. You don’t believe Saul would risk something like that, even if he had it in him? In your house, while you and I were out together and could have come in at any time? You know him. Think about it.’
‘Guys in that state don’t do a risk assessment.’
‘In that state? Who exactly do you think Saul is?’
Out of the blue the image comes to me, Saul wielding his iPad when I was getting ready to go out that evening. The fleeting fear that he’d turned into someone else entirely in a matter of seconds. It’s happened a few times lately. But only when he’s been tired after school, or hungry, and the moods recede as quickly as they come. It doesn’t make him violent. It doesn’t make him capable of rape.
‘Have you forgotten the poster on your wall when we were students?’ Jules asks. ‘Every man is a potential rapist.’
I can’t believe how clipped my voice sounds, even to me, when I reply, ‘Except my son.’
Now Jules’s face darkens. ‘You have to believe this, Holly. You might not like to think Saul has it in him, but you yourself called him a misfit. Well, you were right. He’s been in dire need of serious help for some time now, and you’ve done nothing to sort him out.’ These words explode from my friend’s, Saul’s odd mother’s, mouth as if they aren’t new thoughts but ones she’s been waiting to vent for months.
I begin to tremble. For a few moments I can’t speak. Only the other night, when I expressed my concerns about Saul, she was telling me not to worry about him. That he was a normal, healthy adolescent boy. Only the other night she was telling him to his face how much she loved him. As I stare at Jules, her hands in her lap, her blonde hair pinned up, her face with its high cheekbones, her narrow, knowing eyes, I see Saffie curled on the sofa in front of Saul with her make-up and too-tight jumper.
If we’re going to start casting aspersions about our parenting, I can play at that game. Only a few weeks ago, Jules had discovered a cache of expensive cosmetics in Saffie’s room, but found it impossible to prise the truth out of her daughter. In the end, she’d called me in to talk to Saffie, and we learned she’d been shoplifting with one of her friends for weeks.
I try to stop the next words coming out of my mouth. Jules is the person who has accompanied me through life since university, through the birth of my son and the death of my husband. I love her – and Saffie – more than any other friends in the world, and if I say the words that are on the tip of my tongue, I risk losing them both. But what she’s just said about Saul has punched the breath from me.
‘I think you need to take a closer look at what’s going on with Saffie,’ I say. ‘Who she’s mixing with. Because she’s turning into a devious little troublemaker.’
*
Jules and I got to know each other back to front. It was one of the things we both joked about way back when we were students: I first met her as she emerged from her bedroom in our tiny university flat in her pyjamas, before I’d ever seen her dressed. I’d made her a herbal tea to ease her through a chronic hangover.
‘Don’t you break the shells first?’ she asked, coming into the kitchen, where I was boiling us eggs.
‘That
’s poached. You don’t know how to boil an egg?’
She’d never learned to cook, had lived mainly off microwave meals since she was a child. She thought you added pesto to spaghetti water, so I showed her how to make pasta and pesto too. In turn Jules taught me how to blow-dry my hair, and how to apply eyeliner so it flicked up at the edges. I held her fringe away from her face as she threw up into the sink after another night of too much cheap Chardonnay, before I knew her Polish parents had split up and that she’d come to live with her mum and an older brother in England at sixteen. We learned each other’s domestic habits (she chucked tins into the bin without washing them, while I rinsed them out for the recycling; she stocked up on essentials, while I liked to live hand to mouth) before we knew the courses we’d picked.
Jules was upbeat, positive and open, always telling me what was going through her mind, while she said I was empathetic, that she could tell me anything. At times, she drove me mad. She was vainer than me and fussed about her clothes and which shoes to wear. Her love life was of eternal interest to her whether I wanted to hear it or not. She was pernickety about money, never spending a penny over whatever she owed for our kitty, while I would happily assume it would all even out in the end. And yet, despite our differences, we were hardly ever apart. Living together from the start meant that there were no demons to uncover. And so we flat-shared throughout our university years.
People commented that we were opposites: blonde, pretty Jules who liked heels and full make-up when she went out, and shy me, with the floppy brown hair that refused to be coerced into anything other than a straight bob even after Jules’s blow-drying lessons, uncomfortable in anything other than black jeans, black T-shirt and DMs. Even our degrees were miles apart. She took business studies, while I took English literature.
All the boys loved Jules. Often, my hopes would rise as a boy I had my eye on made his way across the room towards me, only to be dashed when he asked, ‘Who’s your friend?’ But we bonded firmly in those first weeks and became inseparable.
‘Our friendship is the intersection in a Venn diagram,’ Jules said once. ‘On one side, there is my love of fitness and partying and dance, and on the other, your love of literature and cooking and feminism, but in the intersection are our emotional lives. And that’s where we’re a perfect fit, where we understand one another absolutely.’
Someone else said that Jules was the cover, while I was the book. It wasn’t quite as simple as that, of course. The reality was Jules was complex: vivacious one moment, anxious the next. She worried about her mother, who suffered poor health and whom she felt she didn’t see often enough. She was unusually perceptive, too. And although I was the English student, she tackled harder books than I did, had raced through the whole of War and Peace and Anna Karenina in English, her second language, neither of which I had read back then. At times it was me who had to drag her out, encourage her to have a drink and to go out dancing. So we weren’t quite as easy to pigeonhole as it might have appeared. But the main thing is, we loved each other.
Our friendship continued when we were both living and working in London.
We lived in the same postcode and were in and out of each other’s houses the whole time. In addition to becoming Saffie’s odd mother, I was a listening ear after each of Jules’s miscarriages. She confided in me the time she was unfaithful to Rowan and, at her request, I had never spoken about it again. She stood by me during the dark months after Archie’s death when I was so wrapped up in my own grief I took no interest in anything else. And we shared the care of each other’s children before she introduced me to Pete and I began a new life with him. We talked to each other incessantly, and we still do.
Did.
The minute I’ve called Saffie a troublemaker, I wonder if she’ll ever speak to me again. But what she’s said about Saul is so very much worse.
2
JULES
Holly’s words left Jules speechless, as if winded. Eventually, she managed, ‘I didn’t come in here to have my daughter insulted. I came to seek your help. I thought we could sort this out together, but I was wrong.’
She rose from her chair and left Holly’s office, her eyes pricking, her throat aching. Once in the corridor, she turned back. Put her head round the door. ‘I shan’t be employing Saul on Saturdays. It goes without saying I don’t want him coming anywhere near my family anymore. Or my shop.’
‘Jules, wait!’ Holly called after her, but Jules didn’t look back.
She hurried down the silent walkways, beneath the portraits of alumni she’d never heard of. Outside, along the side of Russell Square, tourists moved in shoals towards the British Museum, selfie-sticks held aloft. Jules kept moving against the tide, afraid if she stood still, she would start to cry and wouldn’t be able to stop. She took the path that cut a diagonal line across Russell Square, passing the central fountain, where children in wellingtons and bright scarves jumped in and out of the spray. It occurred to Jules that it was only a few years since Saffie would have been one of them, leaping through jets of water, not caring about getting her clothes soaked. She had always been an extrovert, guileless child. A vision of her that morning came to Jules. Saffie’s eyes were wide with panic, her face full of anguish as she told Jules what had happened to her. Would her daughter ever be happy in her own skin again? Rape took away a person’s sense of self, their security and their identity. Everyone knew that. Jules should never have left her daughter alone in the house with Saul. Saffie had been assaulted in the place she should feel her safest, by someone she trusted. Which made Jules feel doubly awful. And yet how could she have guessed that the boy Saffie had known since babyhood had become so disturbed he was capable of doing that to her?
As she reached the Underground station, Jules’s throat constricted. She found the city oppressive. The air closed in on her. She couldn’t face a crowded Tube and decided to walk back to King’s Cross. She took the surprisingly quiet backstreets and was almost at the station when she stumbled upon a pharmacy tucked away in a little row of shops and went in.
The petite Asian woman behind the counter was discreet and informative. She said what Jules already knew in her heart of hearts – that it was too late for Saffie to take the morning-after pill. Jules felt a further stab of remorse that her own actions had resulted in Saffie facing a possible pregnancy. This could all have been avoided if she hadn’t drunk so much, and if Saffie had told her that same evening. No, she corrected herself, it would have been avoided if she had listened to Saffie and never let Saul come to their house in the first place.
Saffie had stood in the kitchen in her school uniform on the night of Tess’s birthday drinks, a peanut-butter cookie in one hand, her big blue eyes made wider by lashings of mascara and smoky eye shadow, and literally stamped her foot when Jules had told her Saul was coming to use the internet.
‘I don’t get why you object so strongly,’ Jules had said. ‘You and he are practically siblings.’
‘Were. When I was five.’
‘You used to call Saul your odd brother. He’s your oldest friend.’
‘No, Mum. Holly’s your oldest friend. That doesn’t make Saul mine. My friends think he’s a creep.’
‘What? Even Freya?’ Freya, Pete’s daughter, spent whole weekends with Saul during her stays at Holly’s. Holly had never mentioned Freya disliking her new stepbrother.
‘No, not Freya.’ Saffie had rolled her eyes, as if her mother were slow on the uptake. ‘But everyone knows she has to be nice about him. Because he’s her stepbrother. No one else is. Everyone else avoids him.’
‘I think that’s very unkind. I hope you don’t exclude him because he looks a little different to the rest of you?’
Jules hadn’t been able to understand her daughter’s reluctance about having Saul over. After all, her friends wouldn’t be there, so no one need know he’d been. In the end, it had only been by insisting that Saffie could spend the evening in her room if she wanted and didn’t have to
speak to Saul that Saffie had agreed to have him in the house at all.
Jules knew how devastated Holly would be to hear what the kids had already been saying about Saul at school, so she had omitted this part of the story in Holly’s office. Why did I spare her feelings? Jules wondered now, as she scanned the pharmacy shelves for a pregnancy test. Holly needed to know how Saffie’s friends viewed Saul – then she would realize that this allegation wasn’t so very far-fetched after all.
Jules’s breath caught in her throat. Holly hadn’t spared her feelings. Having your child insulted was worse, far worse than being criticized yourself. It was like having your very core attacked. And it was deeply unfair. If Jules could have shown Holly the terror in Saffie’s eyes, Holly wouldn’t have accused her of being a troublemaker. But Holly should have believed Saffie anyway. As her godmother. As a woman who had argued for years – even before the furore over recent high-profile cases – that all rape claims should be taken at face value.
The pharmacist didn’t look at Jules as she folded the paper bag over the pregnancy test and handed it to her, for which Jules was grateful. The box deep in the pocket of her coat, Jules continued to the station.
She wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing, buying the test. She’d already agreed to take Saff to their GP and family friend, Donna Browne, rather than to a well-woman clinic. And if – God forbid – her little girl was pregnant, it was perhaps best they found out with their doctor present so they could get advice about how to deal with it as quickly and with as little fuss as possible. But she had to do something, and this felt like the only thing she could do.
On the train home, without having registered the rest of the walk back to King’s Cross, Jules turned her face to the window and allowed the tears to cascade down her cheeks. She had never expected Holly to find this easy, but she had not anticipated a point-blank denial. Or for Holly to turn on Saffie. Holly had always stood up for her ‘odd daughter’, even when Jules and Rowan were at their wits’ end with her. Saffie was ebullient, always had been, and excitable at times, but she had never been devious; it was not a word you could apply to her. If anything, she was the opposite. Naive, and gullible. And although she’d got herself caught up recently in that shoplifting incident, which Jules suspected was driven by one of her less savoury friends, she had never been prone to lying. Saffie had no front. What you saw was what you got. Having her daughter described like that was deeply unfair. As the train passed Alexandra Palace, and they rattled through the first green spaces of the Hertfordshire countryside, Jules wondered whether she could have handled the meeting with Holly better. She replayed in her mind Saffie’s revelation earlier that morning, ending with her seeking Holly’s support. Pointlessly, as it turned out.
I Thought I Knew You Page 4