I Thought I Knew You

by Penny Hancock

  I look at Jules. My friendship with her, which I had taken to be the steadiest in my life, has veered off into a territory I never foresaw. Because friendship does not remain constant, as I had once believed, and Jules’s response to her daughter’s allegation is revealing a different woman to the one I thought I knew. A woman who has turned on her odd son as if she was waiting for an opportunity to do so. Who has been secretly judging me for the way I’ve brought him up. Not only that, Jules is a woman who is prepared to insult my dead husband.

  I walk away from her towards the village, and Jules moves towards her house across the railway line, as the barriers on the crossing clang down behind her.

  *

  There was only once in the past when Jules and I almost fell out.

  Soon after Archie died, Jules came round to see me. Saul, just ten, and Saffie, seven, were playing together upstairs and I was showing Jules photos I’d taken the previous month while we were all on holiday in Aldeburgh. We’d rented a house overlooking the broad pebble beach, the scuffed hulls of upturned boats lying against a restless sky. We spent days wandering up and down the High Street stopping for coffees or queuing for fish and chips. Jules and I had browsed in delis and shops selling sea-themed bric-a-brac, second-hand books and antiques while Archie and Rowan went fishing and drank pints in the pub. Saul and Saffie trailed along behind us begging for ice creams, to go to an arcade, for more chips. A classic English seaside holiday. Nothing special, nothing remarkable.

  Until I realized I would never have one like it again.

  ‘Look,’ I said, poring over the photos on my laptop of a smiling Archie, black hair swept by the wind off his high forehead, eyes shielded behind Ray-Bans, holding up a pint in a pub garden. ‘We had no idea as we sat there that in a few weeks Archie would be dead.’

  ‘You mustn’t think like that,’ Jules had consoled me. ‘You must hold on to those good memories. See them as something to cherish.’

  I rounded on her. ‘How do you know,’ I snapped, ‘how it feels to have lost someone?’

  I banged the laptop shut. I didn’t want to look at those happy days, so recent and yet so infinitely far. For a little while, I couldn’t speak to Jules, whose lack of understanding made me feel even more bereft than before. I left her and went into the kitchen to fume silently on my own.

  When I got back to Jules, half an hour or so later, she looked at me sadly.

  The sadness was partly because I was being selfish and abrasive with her while she was trying to help. But it was also, I was about to realize, because she had just lost someone. When she told me quietly that she had been pregnant but had had another miscarriage just after that holiday, her third in a row since she’d had Saffie, I couldn’t speak for shame.

  ‘I’m so very sorry,’ I said eventually. ‘I have become horribly volatile and self-centred since Archie died. And I’ve become so inward-looking I have forgotten other people have tragedies too. What I said was unforgivable.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘You’re grieving. I’m not surprised you feel angry when people say stupid things. And it was a stupid thing.’

  ‘It wasn’t. It was a wise thing. You were telling me to cherish what I had. It’s just so hard to put into practice.’

  There was perhaps a small pause then that I didn’t register at the time. Jules’s beautiful blue eyes gazing into mine with a look I took to be sympathy at my loss.

  ‘I can’t see much good in life since losing another baby, either,’ she murmured.

  ‘You’re grieving too.’

  ‘Yes. For my last chance to have another child.’ She tried to smile.

  ‘But it’s not your last chance. You mustn’t think like that. You can try again. You must try again.’

  ‘No, Holly,’ she said. ‘I decided if I lost this one, I couldn’t go through it again. Saffie’s perfect anyway. She’s healthy, she’s beautiful, and I’m grateful to have her.’

  ‘If it’s any consolation,’ I said, ‘Saul’s the only child I’m ever going to have too. I wouldn’t want another child with anyone else now I’ve lost Archie.’

  We sat for some time at the table and drained the rest of a bottle of white wine, and commiserated, and I knew she forgave me for my outburst. That was the sort of friend Jules was.

  Saul and Saffie came hurtling downstairs then, Saffie dressed as a superhero, Saul brandishing a lightsaber at her. I poured them juice, and Saul opened the garden door and ran outside, Saffie in hot pursuit.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice, and kind of right somehow,’ Jules said, ‘if Saul and Saffie have a baby when they grow up? Their child would be both of ours.’

  There was a crash and a howl and Saul came to the garden door saying Saffie had pushed him off the climbing frame. Saffie, six inches shorter, three years younger, rosy-cheeked, came behind, saying Saul had called her a wimp and he deserved it. Jules and I looked at each other and laughed. I suggested it was time for a DVD, and once they were quiet, I returned to Jules.

  ‘Their baby would be the other child neither of us is going to have,’ I said.

  She put her hand out and squeezed mine, and I knew then that our friendship, in spite of everything, was intact. Would always be intact.

  Now, on the wet fen road, as I make my way home to see if there’s any news of Saul, it seems the very thing we dreamed would seal our bond forever – a mutual grandchild – is smashing our friendship apart.

  ‘Grandma Holly and Granny Jules,’ Jules had said. ‘That’s if the kids don’t kill each other first.’

  *

  ‘The police are rerunning all the CCTV footage they’ve collected from around the village,’ Pete says from the kitchen as I come in the door. I peel my parka off and fling it on a chair. ‘They’re interviewing the fairground folk. Been down at the train station questioning commuters. They’ve done house-to-house enquiries. A couple of kids say they saw Saul come out of the house yesterday morning.’

  ‘That hardly helps. I saw him leave the house. It’s what happened afterwards that matters.’

  Pete barely reacts to my mood. He fails to pick up the fact I’m reeling from another blow.

  Saffie pregnant! Archie not being there for Saul? What did Jules mean?

  ‘They say it was hard to see where he went,’ Pete goes on, ‘because of the fair on the green. No one saw him on the bus. They’re running checks on drivers leaving the village yesterday morning.’

  ‘I saw Jules,’ I tell Pete. I sit down at the kitchen table, hug myself. Rock back and forth on the chair. ‘Saffie’s pregnant.’

  ‘She’s pregnant?’

  ‘It doesn’t prove anything except that she’s been sleeping with someone.’

  ‘Oh my God. That poor kid.’

  ‘Why do you keep sympathizing with Saffie? Saul’s missing and you continue to believe she’s the victim.’

  ‘But she’s pregnant,’ Pete says. ‘Perhaps it’s time we considered Saffie is telling the truth. Perhaps if we support them, they’ll support us, and we can work together to find Saul and—’

  Without knowing I’m going to, I pick up a wineglass – the first thing that comes to hand – and hurl it across the kitchen. It shatters on the quarry-tiled floor. In that second, I see Saul lifting his iPad as if to hurl it across my room the night I was getting ready to go out with Jules. Frustration, anguish – we all have our tipping points.

  ‘She might be pregnant, but it wasn’t Saul who raped her,’ I say. ‘He’s done something terrible to himself because he’s been wrongly accused.’

  I want to add that Archie would never have doubted Saul, but Jules’s words are fresh in my mind. Archie had other things on his mind when Saul was a child.

  Pete catches my arm before I pick up the next thing close to hand – a jar of marmalade – and stops me smashing that on the floor too. I sob, beating my fists against Pete’s chest until he enfolds me in his arms. ‘Calm down,’ he breathes into my ear. ‘It’s OK. Saul’s going to be OK.’


  *

  By evening, the local news has got wind of the fact Saul’s missing. The coverage shows villagers searching through the river, along the ditches, across the muddy fields and through disused farm buildings. I recognize the family who run the village shop. The barman from the White Swan. They’re all out there helping. Doing what they can.

  ‘Keeps himself to himself a bit,’ says a boy introduced as Noel, the tall, good-looking boy I’ve seen chasing Saffie on the green in the mornings. ‘He’s, like, quiet. Takes a good photo.’

  The boy’s dad, Rob, comes on. I recognize him. His name is familiar. I realize with a jolt that he’s the man Jules had the affair with when she first moved up here. The microbiologist.

  ‘We all feel for him,’ Rob says. ‘All of us with teenage boys ourselves. We want to do everything we can to find him.’ He’s slender, dark, quietly spoken, with a sensitive face. I can see why Jules was attracted to him. Rowan’s opposite.

  ‘He’s one of our quieter, more serious students,’ Harry Bell, Saul’s form tutor, says into the camera. ‘A good pupil. One we value highly. We’re deeply shocked at school to hear he’s missing.’

  Saul’s head teacher, Joanna Blackwell, comes on, says they’re all devastated about the news and are doing everything they can to help find him. I don’t want to watch anymore. I reach for the TV controls to switch it off. Pete and I still haven’t spoken, the tension of earlier hanging in the air between us. Pete gets up, and goes upstairs without speaking. I’m about to follow him, to apologize for my outburst earlier, to explain it’s because I can’t handle this any longer, that I’m at my wits’ end, when there’s a ping on my phone. It’s a text. I don’t recognize the number. I open it and read. I stare at the text for some time, my head throbbing.

  ‘Gone to be close to Dad. Love you, Mum. Saul xxxx’

  ‘Pete!’ I call, at last.

  He doesn’t answer.

  I look again at my phone.

  ‘Gone to be close to Dad. Love you, Mum. Saul xxxx’

  My fingers tremble as I text a reply. ‘Saul, I’m worried sick. Where are you?’

  The minute I’ve pressed ‘send’, a window pops up. ‘Your text was not delivered.’

  I dial the number, but the phone tells me the number is blocked to incoming calls.

  I go to the bottom of the stairs, call up to Pete.

  ‘Pete, come here, please. Look at this. Read it.’

  ‘We should tell the police,’ Pete says. He holds my phone, gazes down at it.

  ‘I’ll ring them. Give them the number.’

  ‘What does he mean, though? “Gone to be close to Dad”?’

  Pete frowns.

  ‘Do you think perhaps he’s gone to Archie’s grave? Isn’t it in East Finchley Cemetery?’

  I stare at Pete, relief flooding through me, thankful that he has come up with a plausible explanation. That he’s doing what he can to help after all.

  ‘Maybe! Maybe you’re right.’

  ‘You’re to relax, Holly. I’ll bring you a drink. This could be the news we’ve been waiting for.’ He pulls me to him and kisses me. For a few moments, I allow the warmth of his body against mine to squeeze all the tension and fear and anxiety away. Saul’s text means he’s alive. That we’ll find him. That everything will be OK.

  Pete brings me a glass of wine, and I stare out of the window while he goes to phone the police. It’s dark outside, and the leaves on the trees, lit up by the street lights, look white underneath, blood red on the top. The grass, black in patches, silvery under the lights, is churned up now the fair’s departed. If Saul’s run away because of what we said, it’s obvious he would choose a place he feels he might be close to Archie. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Pete comes back in, puts his arms round me.

  ‘She says they’ll send some officers to check out the cemetery. They’ll do all they can to track the number.’

  ‘Oh, oh God. Thank goodness. Thanks, Pete.’ I turn to face him, letting him embrace me.

  ‘This is good news,’ he says into my ear. ‘They’ll find him, Holly. They will.’

  *

  Later, overwhelmed with exhaustion, I go to lie down in bed. Jules’s face looms and fades, the way she looked on the road in the rain, begging me to share the trauma of the termination with her. After a while, I sleep.

  Soon after Archie died, I used to have a recurring dream in which they discover Archie is not dead after all, has just passed out for a while. When I woke up, the sense that he was in the bed next to me, his chest rising and falling, was warm and comforting. If I reached out, I would be able to touch his shoulder, his back, to snuggle into him. I experience the same sense of relief as I wake with a start now. Archie is next to me, a mound of warmth. Saul is sitting on the bed. If I stretch out a hand, I can hold his. For a few minutes, before fully waking, I have a sense of completion. I haven’t lost my husband after all. Saul has come home. Saffie has dropped her allegation against him. Jules and I are friends again.

  Then something disturbs me, the wind rattling the windowpanes, the patter of mice in the roof, and reality slams in.

  I look at the alarm clock on Pete’s side of the bed. It’s three in the morning. I’m not in our London house at all, but out in the Fens. Archie’s dead. Saul isn’t here.

  I shake Pete awake. ‘Did the police phone back? Did they look in the cemetery? Have they found him?’

  Pete puts his arms round me. ‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘They promise they’ll ring the minute they have anything. I’ve been lying here, half awake, in case the phone goes.’

  Saul’s text floats into my mind’s eye and I pick up my mobile to check it again.

  ‘Gone to be close to Dad.’

  I shake Pete again.

  ‘I know what Saul means. He’s done it, Pete. I’m sure. “Gone to be close to Dad.” His dad’s dead, Pete. It’s as the police first thought. What else can he mean? Except that he’s killed himself?’

  10

  JULES

  Bumping into Holly on the country road left Jules feeling desolate. Holly hadn’t been at all supportive. On the contrary, she had refused to show any sympathy. Jules understood Holly’s anguish at not knowing where Saul was. But Holly had made no attempt to understand her distress at discovering Saul had left Saffie pregnant. It was as if they were two different women to the ones who were best friends until a few days ago. Jules needed Holly to take back what she’d said about Saffie. She’d hoped she might even agree to share the emotional burden of putting her through a termination. But to do that, Holly had to first stop denying that Saul must be responsible, which she point-blank refused to do.

  Jules hadn’t meant, ever, to tell Holly those things about Archie. She had always thought it better that Holly cherish her memories of him as the perfect husband and father she believed him to be. But Holly had driven her to it, with her insistence that if Archie were alive, he would somehow prove Saul’s innocence. It was ridiculous of Holly to continue to see Archie through rose-coloured spectacles. (Jules didn’t admit to herself, not yet, that her response might also have been to do with Holly’s calling Rowan a brute.) And so Jules had cracked, and told Holly the one thing she had sworn she’d keep from her. That Archie wasn’t such a golden boy after all. It was time she faced up to reality: her men were no more perfect than Rowan was.

  A lot less perfect, in fact.

  As she walked home, the only human figure on the wet arable landscape that rolled away to the horizon, she realized that without Holly to share what she was going through, she felt lonelier than she ever had in her life.

  *

  Later that afternoon, Jules found Rowan slumped in front of the TV. The police and a posse of local volunteers were combing the Fens, dragging the river. Looking for Saul. Familiar faces blown up so large on their home cinema screen they might have been here in the sitting room rather than out there beyond the picture windows, crawling through the wet mud of the Fens. The good, neighbourly people of the village.
People Rowan and Jules knew. People they had competed with at the pub quiz, or chatted to in the playground when Saffie was still at primary school.

  ‘We’re here to help the lad,’ Tina from the village shop said into the camera. ‘We’re here to help find him.’

  ‘All lines of enquiry are open,’ Detective Inspector Venesuela, in charge of the investigation, said. He faced the camera. He was youngish, and looked as if he was enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame. He spoke in a self-important tone, puffing out his chest. ‘We are in the process of questioning witnesses. There is some evidence the sixteen-year-old may have intended to harm himself, but this is not conclusive.’

  Jules knew very well what the detective meant by ‘harm himself’ and she objected to this ludicrous euphemism. It shocked and angered her in equal measure. Saul leaving evidence that he was contemplating suicide was harrowing, but at the same time deeply guilt-tripping. How was that going to make Saffie feel? Jules would do her best to keep her daughter away from these news bulletins.

  ‘Holly’s honoured Saffie’s request that no one else should know Saul raped her, at least,’ Jules said, sitting down next to Rowan.

  ‘She’s afraid of her son becoming the stuff of gossip,’ Rowan said. ‘That’s all it is.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a police strategy. I mean, it’s quite possible Saul’s disappearance has nothing to do with what he did to Saffie. The main thing is,’ Jules said, ‘everyone’s pulling together to find him.’

  She told herself Saul would soon turn up. And when he did, she would make sure he finally admitted what he’d done. And then they would all share the trauma of the termination together. And once that was done with, Saffie could be given counselling, and Saul would be given anger management, or something, just as Rowan had had, and they could move on.

  Rowan wasn’t about to move on, however.

  ‘Good student, my arse,’ he growled as Harry Bell, Saul’s form tutor, came onto the screen and spoke about Saul’s studiousness, his seriousness, what a treasured pupil he was. ‘That boy’s a waster. Everyone knows that. And just look at that load of do-gooders.’