‘Let’s rewind a second,’ Philippa says. ‘If they’re not pressing charges, what do the girl’s family want to do about it?’
‘Jules wanted me to make Saul confess. She thought we could deal with him between us. What’s awful is she’s implied he’s got social problems and that I haven’t helped him.’ I swallow. ‘The reason I’ve come to you, Philippa, is that I have talked to Saul and he has, understandably, taken offence that I even questioned him.’
‘Hmm.’
‘And now the girl’s dad has threatened us. Says he’s going to the police. I’m afraid it’s going to escalate and I suppose I felt . . . Pete felt . . . we should be as prepared as we can be to defend Saul if he does.’
‘You say Saul denies anything happened at all?’ Philippa says.
‘He was shocked I could even ask him such a thing. Because she’s in year eight. They have very strict codes about these things. And anyway, I brought him up to respect women. Girls. And he’s hardly confident around them. It just isn’t Saul,’ I add, lamely. ‘He wouldn’t behave like that.’
‘If what she says is true,’ Philippa says, ignoring my last remark, ‘Saul has broken the law according to the Criminal Justice Act 2003.’ Her voice has taken on a professional briskness. ‘He could be given a five-year sentence at the least.’
‘That’s why I’ve come to you. If Saffie doesn’t retract her allegation and her dad does what he’s threatening to do, Saul could end up in prison for an offence he never committed.’ My voice quavers dangerously, though I’m trying my best to stay composed.
Philippa looks at me over the rim of her coffee cup.
‘They definitely weren’t in a relationship?’
‘Not according to Saul. No.’
‘Is there any evidence? To indicate they had intercourse?’
‘Like what?’
‘Condoms, underwear, clothing ripped off. Not to put too fine a point on it – stains?’
I think for a second of Saffie’s scent on Saul’s jumper. Of his pornographic images. Of the song ‘Rape Me’ that he insists is ironic. Of his even reciting those words to me, ‘She was asking for it.’
I shake my head. ‘Nothing forensic, as far as I know. Saffie only told Jules two weeks after it happened.’
‘Did Jules see any sign of a struggle?’
‘Not that I know of.’
Philippa is looking at me steadily. And all of a sudden, I have the oddest sensation that I’m dabbling my fingers in something toxic. Something that will stick and won’t wash off. Philippa’s asking the kind of questions I know are used to catch out complainants in rape cases. The kind of insidious, intimate questions that are dredged up to humiliate the victim and grind them down. Until they retract their allegations. Should I be here at all? Seeking help to defend an alleged rape? Then an even more unpleasant thought occurs. Is Philippa doing this deliberately? To highlight what I’d be putting Saffie through by pursuing this? Is she trying to put me off seeking help to defend my son?
She sighs. ‘Holly, this is obviously hard for you. You’ve brought Saul up alone. It’s been you and him for so long. You probably still think of him as the little kid he once was. But children change when they hit adolescence. Sometimes catastrophically. The best . . . Well, the only thing you can do is tell Saul that the girl’s father will take legal action if he doesn’t explain himself and, if necessary, accept help. Which might mean involving the school and social services. Then perhaps he’ll see it’s better to settle this between you.’
‘But he didn’t do it.’
She raises an eyebrow at me. ‘Nevertheless, I can’t envisage this father believing that. Would you? If it was your daughter?’
‘That’s why I called you. My question is, Philippa, would you be prepared to defend Saul if they do decide to involve the law?’
She sips her coffee slowly. ‘I might know someone who . . .’
‘I’d like it to be you, Philippa. I know you. I can trust you. I don’t want some stranger who doesn’t know Saul. Someone who might humiliate him.’ Again, the feeling I’m somehow soiling my hands sweeps over me. ‘I don’t want someone who might humiliate either of them, Saul or Saffie,’ I add. ‘To get to the truth.’
Her face has changed imperceptibly. She looks uneasy.
‘You know what Saul was like, don’t you? You remember what a sweet child he was? Still is.’
She puts down her cup. For the first time since we arrived she looks ruffled.
‘It’ll be her word against his,’ I plead. ‘I need someone who has absolute faith in him.’
‘I can’t represent Saul,’ she says. ‘It wouldn’t be . . . Let’s just say you’d be better with someone else.’
‘Because you believe Saffie?’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’ Her tone is clipped. ‘It just wouldn’t be appropriate for all kinds of reasons.’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘I’m a family friend. There’s a conflict of interest.’
‘Philippa, we’ve hardly seen each other in the last few years . . . No one’s going to associate us.’
Why do I feel a sense of doom? A crushing in my chest, as if all I’ve been clinging to is about to topple? The version I’ve always had of my son, my family, my past, it all teeters.
‘I’ll give you the numbers of a couple of colleagues who I know will be completely professional.’
‘I don’t want a stranger. I don’t want to put Saul through the stress of talking to someone he’s never met before. He’s had such a tough time.’
‘It’ll be someone very experienced.’
I glare at her. ‘I thought you’d want to help,’ I say. ‘For Archie’s sake, if no one else’s. But I can see you don’t want to. Let’s forget it.’
To my surprise, Philippa pushes her chair back at this, gathers her nice suede gloves to her, prepares to leave. Tears prickle in the corner of my eyes. I don’t stand up. I’ve made a fool of myself. I haven’t presented a rational front and now heat rushes to my face. I don’t want to tell her that I am this desperate because Pete took his daughters back to their mum’s. That I’m afraid he believes Saffie too. That I am alone. That Archie would never have believed her for a second because he knew his son. And that therefore I thought Philippa, as Archie’s colleague, would support us as well. I catch her hand as she begins to walk away. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It’s at times like this I miss Saul’s dad so very badly.’
‘You’re not the only one,’ she says, looking down at me. ‘Everyone misses him.’
And I feel the scratchy wool of her coat press against my cheek as she pecks the air over my shoulder, before she hurries out across Lincoln’s Inn Fields back to work.
Philippa’s abrupt departure leaves me shattered. I wish I’d been less emotional. Hadn’t upset her. I can’t face work, and, since I haven’t got tutorials until later, I wander along the north edge of Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the Sir John Soane’s Museum. This is a mistake. The area is steeped in memory. There’s a queue outside the museum already. Saul loved coming to this museum, with its collection of sculptures and artefacts, when he was little. The dim light lent it a mysterious atmosphere, and he was fascinated by the wall panels you could open to discover paintings behind, like mini-theatres. He was always intrigued by secret doors, those low doors under stairs, doors into secret passages. Crawling into small spaces behind doors to hide. He had a phase, too – perhaps it was when they were doing the Egyptians at school – when he was intrigued by the funerary urns in the Soane’s Museum. And the gruesome shackles that showed how slaves had once been kept. Saul was horrified by these, couldn’t believe humans could have their limbs forced into those tiny metal hoops to be chained up. And yet he would ask me time and again to take him there, to look at them, and ask me to tell him that John Soane helped to free slaves.
I turn and stare for a few minutes back across Lincoln’s Inn Fields trying not to imagine the spot where Archie collapsed.
In Saul’s early days, we would often walk across the grass from here to Archie’s chambers to meet him from work. We would stand beneath the fan vaulted ceiling under Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, and I’d read the engravings on the gravestones laid out flat on the ground. Saul was intrigued by the fact you could walk over the graves of dead people. Most of the names were of barristers and benchers, but the oldest stones included servants who’d worked at the Inns of Court. Saul was especially amused by the servant ‘William Turner’, who was a ‘Hatch-keeper and Washpot’, and would beg me to read out the words, which always made him collapse into fits of childish giggles.
On other days, Saul and I would go for pizza in the Lincoln’s Inn Fields cafe and wait for Archie there. Sometimes, around the time Jules was setting up her first business, I would bring Saffie. Often it would have got late by the time Archie arrived. I was content to sit with Saul and Saff while they ate ice cream, or went outside to play under the trees. I’d drink a glass of wine and my heart would sing when I spotted Archie coming across the fields from his chambers, tall and handsome in his suit. Once or twice he brought Philippa with him and Saffie or Saul or both would fall asleep on our laps while all three of us adults sat and talked until late.
Why won’t she represent him? I leave Lincoln’s Inn Fields wishing I’d never gone there, never remembered those more innocent days.
*
Later, on my way home after work, I rest my head against the window on the train as it pulls out of King’s Cross. My meeting with Philippa has left me deflated. She was so frosty, so unyielding. The one person I thought would sympathize and jump at the chance to help me and Saul has refused to.
I wake with a lurch at Cambridge Station, realizing I’ve slept most of the way home. The back four carriages of the train are unhooked, leaving just the front four ploughing onwards into the Fens. It feels symbolic, this unleashing of the city train after Cambridge. A lizard dropping its tail to protect itself from predators. From here on, we enter uncharted territory. Here be dragons. A bucolic region where the modern world is left behind. Where Philippa’s cool, calm rationale has no reach. The villages out here were isolated, surrounded by swamps, houses built on stilts to protect them from the incoming tides. Before the land was reclaimed by the Dutch, mythology held sway, and rumours spread like the malaria that was endemic here at that time. I wonder how much has really changed.
It’s a quarter to seven by the time I’m walking up the road from the station through the drizzle. A car passes, drenching my coat and tights and my soft leather boots with spray from a puddle. My city wear. I swear under my breath at the driver, but the truth is, I’m feeling near to tears again as the cold soaks through to my skin. The whole world is persecuting my son and me.
Of course, getting wet is my own fault. Pete’s been saying for some time that I should buy clothes suitable for living in the country. A Barbour jacket and wellies. I’m still in denial. Still insisting on clothes better suited to stuffy buses and Tubes and well-heated offices. Clothes that I wore as a PhD student with grand plans for professorships in the inner city. When I saw myself – smugly perhaps – as part of an urbane professional couple. I have to let that image go. It’s over two years since we moved, I remind myself. Two years. And six since Archie died. High time I moved on.
The walk home refreshes me. The air, though damp, is invigorating after polluted London. There’s the scent of woodsmoke mingling with the soil and rain. I remind myself the driver didn’t mean to spray me. Getting upset with the world is not the way forward.
The fair’s in full swing on the green. Music thumps; generators roar; kids screech as they’re twirled about on the waltzer, flung towards the sky, hurled round in circles or dropped from great heights.
A bus passes and stops by the green. The schoolgirl who jumps off and springs along in front of me is Saffie. I remember telling Jules on our way to the pub that Saffie must be on an emotional rollercoaster, and her replying it was more like the dodgems. Joking together in the car on our way out for drinks, unaware we were about to fall out. Now, seeing Saffie walk towards real dodgems, real rollercoasters, I think how crazy it is that we’re letting Saffie’s story wrench us apart. And I have a sudden thought. I’ll talk to Saffie myself. Saffie can explain to me why she said Saul raped her. Once she realizes she can tell the truth without getting into major trouble, the whole issue will be dealt with. We won’t have to involve Philippa or her lawyer contacts. I will explain to Saul that it was all a terrible childish mistake on Saffie’s part.
Saffie and I always used to be close. I used to regard her as the daughter I never had, and she knows that. It’s why she came to me instead of Jules when she stole the cosmetics recently, and I’d reassured her everyone makes mistakes, that it was better to confess what she’d done to her parents, learn not to do it again.
When Jules and I used to meet up for Saturday-morning coffee in the park in London, before they moved up here, Saul would tear around on his bike while Saffie was still small enough to want to sit on our laps. I would hold her, and take her to look at the ducks or the deer. I would often have her overnight, or take her to children’s theatre – or, as my earlier meeting reminded me, she’d come with Saul and me for pizza in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I used to pretend for a few hours that she was mine, and to imagine what it might have been like to have a daughter as well as a son. And I loved it. I loved her. My beautiful little odd daughter.
I speed up, but as I get close to Saffie, she stops at the kerb, looks both ways, then crosses to the fair on the green. A shadow detaches itself from behind one of the kiosks and another girl steps out to greet her. They chat for a while, and tiny lights flair up. They’re smoking. They stand together in the darkness as I approach the shop and go in. I buy milk, some cereal for Saul for the morning, a couple of packets of horrible bars of chocolate and crisps to placate him after complaining that we never have any food of the type Jules stocks. When I come out, Saffie’s coming back across to my side of the road.
‘Hi,’ I say. ‘You’re late home from school.’
‘Extra maths,’ she says, blanching quite clearly at the sight of me.
I search her face for signs of trauma. But how can you see trauma on a young girl’s face, for goodness’ sake? Girls of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, they’re changing every second, the expressions that cross their faces mutable. I know that.
‘Saffie, please, can we talk?’
‘I need to get home,’ she says, and I wonder if the wide-eyed look she throws me before she turns on her heel is fear or defiance.
*
The house when I open the door has that chilly quality buildings quickly take on when they are empty of people for more than a few hours. Saul goes to the darkroom after school on a Monday to develop photos from the old film cameras they’re being taught to use. He won’t be in until later.
I switch on the lights, a stab of resentment hitting me that Pete’s stopped the girls from coming over. Even though it’s a weeknight, when they are usually at their mum’s, they would have come over for the fair. And right now I could do with seeing them more than ever.
Pete comes in at seven thirty. I’m at the stove, stirring the rice, a glass of wine already poured beside me.
‘Smells good,’ he says, hanging his coat up on the hooks we’ve screwed onto the back of the kitchen door because the hallway is too narrow to accommodate five people’s outdoor wear. ‘What is it?’
‘Mushroom risotto. I had to cook, to take my mind off things.’
Instead of the relief I was anticipating at seeing Pete, I feel irritation. How can he act as if nothing’s happened? We haven’t made up since our argument the night before about his taking his girls away from me. From Saul.
‘Holly, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I behaved badly. I can see that now. It was a knee-jerk reaction. My first thought was, I have to let Deepa know I am protecting the girls. I didn’t give enough thought to what you were going through. Or how my
response would look to Saul. Can you forgive me?’
I stir the rice, slosh in a splash of wine, add some stock. My interest in food has evaporated. I’m cooking for Saul, not for Pete or for myself.
‘What did you actually tell the girls?’ I ask him. ‘How did you explain they weren’t going to be coming here for . . . for how long?’
‘It was only this weekend,’ he says. ‘Unless this whole thing gets drawn out.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘If we don’t get a confession from Saffie that he didn’t do it. So that we can all move on.’
‘We’re not getting one from Saffie,’ I say. ‘I just saw her. She wouldn’t speak to me. I expect she’s afraid of taking it back now.’
Pete doesn’t reply to this. I know what he’s thinking. That she’s not going to take it back if it’s true.
‘I hope Freya and Thea don’t think it was my idea that they went to their mother’s this weekend. I’ve worked so hard on gaining their trust,’ I go on, ‘as their stepmother, and now it’s going to be undone just like that.’
I’m also hoping Pete hasn’t told them about the rape claim. They’re young girls. Freya goes to the same school as Saffie. They’re not going to keep such a story to themselves.
‘I made it very clear it was their mother who wanted them home this weekend. To see their grandfather.’
‘Was he actually there?’
‘Yes, he was. I wouldn’t have lied to them about that.’
I switch off the hob and sit down. Pete’s expression is one of anxiety. Or fear. Of me?
‘How very convenient for you. What would you have said if he wasn’t there? I hope you didn’t tell them the real reason.’
‘Of course I didn’t. I don’t want this to spread any more than you do, Holly, please. If Umish hadn’t been there, I would have thought of something. Try and see this from my point of view, as their father.’ He’s stomping across the kitchen now, looking for a drink. ‘Where is Saul anyway?’ he says.
I Thought I Knew You Page 14