‘You’re saying what?’
‘I’m saying it would be sensible to get Saul’s side of the story. And then I really think we should seek some help. For all of us.’
‘You’re the counsellor, Pete – you must know someone.’
‘I don’t mean that kind of help.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think we should get legal advice,’ Pete says. ‘Someone to consult if Jules and Rowan press charges.’
‘What? But they aren’t. Jules says Saffie doesn’t want to report it. She wants it kept between ourselves.’
‘Holly. Be realistic. Does Rowan know yet?’
Jules’s voice on the phone earlier comes back to me: Rowan’s threatening to beat the living daylights out of him. Say he has to explain himself. Before Rowan honours his word, or calls the police.
‘Jules rang earlier. She told him. He hasn’t responded very . . . calmly.’
I sit down again. Stare into my glass.
‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘That’s what I was afraid of. I can’t imagine Rowan keeping the law out of this, whatever Saffie wants. And Saffie is obviously going to stick to her story. In which case, Saul needs to be ready with his defence or he could be charged. And if I remember rightly, men convicted of rape face a seven-year prison sentence. At least.’
‘You don’t seriously think it’s going to come to that?’ Panic rises in me.
‘It would be sensible to be prepared. You must know someone in the legal field?’
‘Well, yes. There are people I could think of.’ I mentally rifle through Archie’s lawyer contacts. ‘There’s a colleague of Archie’s I used to be in touch with. A defence lawyer. Philippa. She works with sex offenders. But surely we don’t need to . . .’
I can’t believe I’ve just uttered the words ‘sex offender’ in relation to my own son.
‘It might be a good idea to have a chat with her,’ Pete says. ‘Just in case.’
*
Pete and I are in bed by the time I hear Saul’s door open, his footsteps on the stairs, a clattering in the kitchen.
In the morning, I find the chicken carcass, and am relieved to see Saul has finished it, cleaning all the remaining meat from the bones.
*
On Sunday afternoon, Pete comes in from the supermarket, where he’s picked up things for the meal he’s promised to cook. He leans across the kitchen table where I’m sitting marking exam papers, trying to take my mind off things, and takes my hand.
‘How is he?’
‘Still won’t speak to me.’
‘I . . . Look,’ he says. ‘You will understand that I had to tell Deepa about all this. And she has, quite reasonably when you think about it, said she doesn’t want the girls coming here again until it’s sorted.’
I remove my hand from Pete’s. ‘What? You told Deepa? Why? Why did you have to do that?’
‘Obviously, she has a right to know that her daughters’ stepbrother has been accused of rape. She has to put their safety first.’
I stare at Pete. Pete is excellent at his job. I know that because people have told me how highly thought of he is in psychotherapeutic circles. But one of the reasons he’s so good at it is that his face can be inscrutable at times. It’s a professional stance he has to take, to appear without emotion in certain situations. It’s inscrutable now.
He gazes back at me, but I don’t have a clue what he’s thinking. Which puts him at an unfair advantage.
‘None of us knows yet what really happened. And you told Deepa?’
Pete looks down. The tiniest flicker of an expression does pass over his face. Something clicks into place.
‘It was your decision to take the girls to Deepa’s yesterday morning, wasn’t it?’ I say. ‘It had nothing to do with her father visiting. Did it?’
He draws in a breath through his teeth.
‘Pete!’
‘I was going to talk it over with you, of course.’
‘It was your decision to take them away from here? You took them to their mother’s because you didn’t want them in the same house as Saul? You made that decision before Deepa even knew about it? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘It wasn’t quite like that. I knew what Deepa would think. I was pre-empting her. That’s all. What difference does it make?’
‘It makes a huge difference.’ I can barely breathe. ‘Because it tells me you don’t trust Saul. It tells me you don’t trust your own stepson with your daughters. I find that . . . I find it so hurtful.’
‘Look, Holly. It isn’t quite as simple as all that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This isn’t just about what Saul did or didn’t do to Saffie. After you told me, I lay awake, and I realized I have to think about my clients. My reputation at work. As do you, in fact. We have to be seen to be doing the right things.’
‘I can’t believe you just said that.’
‘I work with vulnerable teenagers, Holl. If my clients hear about it, it will jeopardize my credibility – as it will yours, and the work you’re doing with the consent workshops. We have to be seen, at least, to be taking reasonable precautions.’
‘Saul isn’t a rapist. So we don’t need to take any bloody precautions.’
‘Don’t you see?’ Pete sounds exasperated. And I know his irritation is partly due to guilt that he’s not a hundred per cent supporting me and Saul. ‘It’s not a question of whether or not this thing actually happened. It’s whether the rumour gets out of hand. People are very quick to judge.’
‘Unless you believe absolutely in his innocence,’ I mutter, ‘I don’t want you here.’
‘You keep insisting nothing happened between those two. You have to take on board the possibility that something did.’
‘Whoa. Hang on a minute. Whose side are you on here? Fucking hell, Pete. How dare you? You’re Saul’s stepfather. You should support him unconditionally. You’re my husband, for goodness’ sake, or at least I thought you were. I now begin to wonder if it means a thing to you. You disappear when I need you. You won’t let your girls stay here.’ A terrible thought crosses my mind. ‘You believe her. You believe Saffie, don’t you, Pete?’
He’s about to reply when a shadow passes across the table and I look towards the doorway. There’s the familiar creak of the wooden stairs.
‘Saul?’
He’s there, on his way up. He’s been outside the door listening to us. He goes on ahead up to his room and I follow him.
‘Saul, I’m so sorry you had to hear that.’ I stand in his bedroom doorway.
‘Pete believes Saffie,’ he says.
I want Saul to deny the rape, in unambiguous language. Once and for all. So I plough on, playing devil’s advocate, wanting him to say he didn’t do it.
‘Well, can’t you see why everyone believes her? The smell of her perfume on your jumper . . .’
‘What?’
‘I smelled Saffie’s perfume on your jumper. And you were playing a song called “Rape Me”, as if rape is a joke.’
Saul suddenly swipes a pile of books from his desk onto the floor. ‘The song’s ironic, if you bothered to listen to the words,’ he shouts. ‘Tell Saffie if I was going to go for someone, it’d be a looker, not her. She’s ugly as fuck.’
‘We’re a little upset, that’s all,’ I try, taking a step towards him. I want to clasp him to me, to tell him it’s all going to be OK. That I know he would never have touched her and that things are spiralling out of control.
But he steps back, holding up his hand. ‘Stop. Don’t come near me. I’m not upset,’ he says. ‘I’m fine. Everyone round here’s the same. All gagging for gossip to make their boring little lives more exciting. Let them have it. They’re all fucking sickos. Saffie. Her school mates. The lot of them.’
6
JULES
Jules listened out for Rowan but could hear nothing. The time was up.
‘You ready, Saff?’
‘Yup.’
Gingerly she pulled the pregnancy test from its plastic casing and looked.
Emblazoned across the tiny window was the word PREGNANT.
Jules’s ears seemed to fill with cotton wool; the world about her retracted. It was like being muffled, protected from the onslaught of emotion that was about to assail her. Them. She gripped the edge of the bath to steady herself, then sat down on it while she took in the implications. Saffie looked at her.
‘Mum!’ she wailed.
How could it be – her thirteen-year-old, her baby girl, carrying a baby of her own? A baby made in the worst imaginable way.
‘It’s OK, Saff,’ she heard herself say. ‘I’ve already booked you in to see Donna. It will be sorted. All you need to do is rest, stay strong. Oh, honey, I’m sorry.’
Saffie sat on the edge of the loo seat.
‘What does it mean? What do I do?’
‘You don’t have to do anything.’ Jules was counting the days since Saul had been here, silently. Saffie would be around two weeks pregnant.
‘I can’t have a baby! I don’t want it.’
‘You don’t have to even think about that, if that’s how you feel. Donna will give you a pill, just a little pill and it will bring on your period, OK?’
‘Will Dad know? Does it show?’
‘No, darling. It doesn’t show. No one is going to know but you and me.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m certain.’
Jules sat on Saffie’s bed and let the information sink in. Saffie had climbed back under her duvet, saying she wanted to stay in bed for the rest of the morning. The bear Saul had given Saffie when she was born sat on the pillow. It had lost one eye. In the end, Jules had to lean over, turn it round so it wasn’t winking at her anymore.
This was all Jules’s fault for letting Saul come and use her internet when her daughter had expressly said she didn’t want him to. And when her husband, too, would have refused to have him in the house. Jules closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The feelings that swept over her weren’t that different to those Rowan had expressed when he heard his daughter had been raped. All of a sudden Jules wanted to beat the living daylights out of Saul.
*
Sunday was an impossible day to get through. Jules knew to keep this new information to herself at all costs, for Saffie’s sake. The only person she would tell would be Donna Browne. And of course, at some point – when she could get her on her own – she would tell Holly. In order to prove that Saffie was not, never had been, ‘a devious little troublemaker’.
*
Rowan continued in his irate mood anyway, threatening to go to the police, threatening to punish Saul in whatever way he could for laying his hands on his virgin daughter. Asking Jules what she had done about it, whether she’d confronted Holly again. Saffie stayed in her room. When Jules found a moment, she went up.
‘We should take you to a clinic straight away, you know, get the pregnancy sorted.’
‘Please, Mum. I don’t want some stranger finding out.’
‘It would be confidential. They deal with things like this all the time. They are very discreet.’
‘Do we have to go to a doctor at all? Can’t I just take the pill you said about?’
Jules sighed, gazed over Saffie’s shoulder at her children’s books and teenie magazines jumbled on her shelf. From her past, a saying came back: too old for toys, too young for boys. Whatever had happened to that stage in a young girl’s life?
‘Even if we could get hold of the pills, it wouldn’t be safe,’ she said, immediately regretting it. She didn’t want to alarm Saffie, or hint that there was any risk involved in the termination. ‘Besides which, it’s important for you to have someone to talk to, confidentially, about what you’ve gone through. Donna’s not back until Friday. Are you OK to wait until then?’
‘I’d prefer to wait if it means I can see her.’
‘Will you be up to school, in the meantime?’
‘I’m not ill,’ Saffie snapped. ‘If I’m off school, everyone will want to know why. As long as it doesn’t show . . . Are you sure it doesn’t?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I’ll just wait to see Donna, then. Get the pill, get rid of this . . . this . . . thing and go back to normal. I’m fine. Holly will talk to Saul, won’t she? He won’t dare come near me again.’
‘Of course,’ Jules said at last. ‘Of course she will.’
*
Rowan seemed to have simmered down toward evening, and they all sat and watched some costume drama together, silently, before he said he was having an early night.
The next morning, Monday, Rowan was up when Jules woke, which was unusual since he had been made redundant.
‘I’m driving Saffie to school,’ he said. ‘Since she insists on going. Saul gets the same bus as her and I don’t want that boy anywhere near her.’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s a good idea,’ Jules said. ‘If she’ll agree to it.’
Later, in the kitchen, as Saffie finished her cereal, Rowan said, ‘We’re going to school in the car, Saffie.’
‘What?’ Saffie dropped her spoon into her bowl.
‘I want to make sure that boy doesn’t come near you.’
‘Dad, that’s so embarrassing,’ said Saffie, swinging round and giving him one of her most withering thirteen-year-old looks. ‘Everyone will want to know why you’re driving me when you never have done before. Please, leave me be.’
‘Then I’m taking you to the bus stop. And I’m going to stay and watch you get on the bus safely.’
‘Saul’s not going to get rapey in broad daylight on the way to school. You’re making everything worse!’
‘I’m protecting you,’ Rowan said. ‘As your father, I think that’s quite understandable, isn’t it?’
‘Saffie, you must see how concerned we are,’ Jules said.
Saffie pushed her uneaten breakfast away and got up from her chair. ‘If you start fussing and Saul notices, he’s more likely to take it out on me. I’ll walk to the bus stop and I’m calling for Gemma on the way.’
‘In the car,’ Rowan said. His face was red, revealing his frustration at the bind they were in. ‘If you won’t let us report that boy, we have to deal with this in our own way.’
Jules glowered at him, hoping he would realize that getting angry was not helping Saffie. Not for the first time, she wished she could form a clearer take on the whole business, that she knew what to do for the best. Rowan, meanwhile, refused to pick up on her unspoken message. He pulled on his Timberland boots and she watched from the door as he and a furious Saffie climbed into the Audi and drove up the road across the fen towards the village.
*
Rowan wasn’t back by the time Jules had showered and dressed, so she checked her bag for money, make-up and mobile (the three Ms – the mantra she and Holly had created to remind themselves of the essentials they needed for work), and then got into her little Fiat to drive to the station. She would park there and take the train to the shop and immerse herself in the business until as late as she could. There was nothing like work to take your mind off things.
A fair was arriving on the green. Lorries and machinery were pulling up on the grass, and Jules had to stop to let a car with a trailer pass. And then, in an auspicious twist of fate, as she waited, Jules spotted her GP and friend, Donna Browne, coming out of the village shop with a newspaper, dressed in Lycra, trainers and a puffer jacket. Jules drew down the car window and leaned out. She knew it wasn’t strictly professional but she had to ask Donna if she could talk to her before Friday.
‘I’d see you now but I’m on leave,’ Donna said. ‘We’re off to Paris for a couple of nights on the Eurostar later today. Shall I put you in as an emergency patient with Dr Alwin?’
Jules looked at Donna’s healthy, clear-skinned face, framed by her dark cropped hair, her tall, athletic figure, and wondered how anyone could carry on as normal while her life felt like an alien landscape with
no pathways or clues as to how to navigate it. She took a deep breath. ‘The receptionist already asked me that, but I need to see you, Donna.’
Donna looked over her shoulder and took a step nearer the car window. ‘Is there anything you want to get off your chest now?’
Jules looked up at the doctor from the driving seat. ‘Would you mind?’
She remembered again Donna’s reservations about treating people outside her practice. But Donna’s children were similar ages to Saffie. She and Jules had run parents’ races at the primary-school sports day together. They’d sloshed back wine at parties. And Prosecco that night in the pub. Saffie had expressed a desire only to talk to Donna about what she’d gone through. And Jules trusted Donna. And she was desperate to know what she should do about Saffie’s pregnancy. So she opened the door for Donna, who slid into the passenger seat.
‘I’ll pull in over there,’ Jules said, indicating a parking space. ‘I don’t know who else to talk to.’
Donna smiled. ‘It’s a funny old life being a GP. I often end up playing the role of priest, counsellor, pardoner. As well as doling out prescriptions. Go on, Jules, I’m not judging. If there’s anything to judge.’
When she’d parked alongside the shop, Jules swallowed. ‘It’s about Saff.’
‘Oh?’
‘She’s been raped,’ Jules said.
Saying the words so bluntly made her afraid she would cry. She wanted to blurt out that she had no idea how to handle this. She blinked hard to push back the tears. Swallowed.
‘I’m sorry to hear that. That’s very difficult for you both.’ Donna was measured, professional, as Jules knew she would be. She was neither over- nor underreacting. ‘Do you want to give me details?’
Jules clutched the steering wheel, feeling the sweat pool beneath her fingers. ‘It’s harder still because the boy who did it is a family friend. He was in our house. It happened at home.’
‘Saffie told you this?’
‘Yes. Not straight away. She didn’t want to tell anyone. Was afraid. Of getting him into trouble. Or of him taking it out on her. But then she missed a period.’
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