I Thought I Knew You

by Penny Hancock

  ‘I’m telling you so you understand. I’m not as bad as you think I am.’

  ‘You attacked Holly, Rowan. If you went to anger management in Downham Market that morning, it obviously didn’t work.’

  There was a sudden shattering sound overhead. Jules looked up and saw white hailstones were clattering down and bouncing off the skylights.

  ‘As it happens, when I got there and found the house, Applecroft, I couldn’t bring myself to go in. I sat outside for some time. And I figured things out. I decided I was right to feel as angry as I did. Saul had destroyed our daughter’s childhood and he deserved to be punished for it. By the time I’d got that straight in my head, I didn’t go in to the appointment. I realized I needed my bloody anger. I was justified in seeking vengeance for what he did to our daughter. I went for a walk on the Fens to think about it. I decided I’d give him a talking to myself since Holly and Pete were doing nothing. But by the time I’d got home, he’d done a runner.’

  ‘And what made you attack Holly, Rowan?’ Jules seethed.

  After a pause, Rowan said, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt her. I just wanted her to take some responsibility. Holly did nothing to get the truth out of Saul. There she was, a bloody feminist, bellyaching about women’s rights, and yet she did nothing to support our girl when she was raped.’

  ‘But she wasn’t raped, not by her son.’

  ‘When we all thought Saul had raped her, Holly did nothing to deal with it. You know that. I thought you were with me on that?’

  Jules walked across the room and gazed out at the storm. The hail was abating, replaced by white veils of rain.

  ‘I didn’t want anyone to get hurt,’ she said. ‘I wanted to stop anyone getting hurt. I wanted us to sort it out between ourselves so that the kids would be left unscathed and we would all be able to move on.’

  ‘You’re an idealist too, half the time,’ Rowan said. ‘Sometimes you sound as woolly as Holly.’

  It took some time for Jules to gather herself. Then she turned and looked at Rowan.

  ‘I don’t want you here anymore. Get out.’

  ‘Are you telling me to leave?’

  ‘I’m not sure this marriage is working anymore.’

  Rowan stood, his arms hanging helplessly by his side. ‘Jules,’ he said. ‘Please. Don’t say that. Don’t tell me it’s over. I love you. You’re the only woman for me, you know that. I need you.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can do this, Rowan. Not now I know you did that to my best friend.’

  Rowans eyes grew wide, full of panic. ‘Think of Saffie,’ he cried. ‘How will she feel if she hears we’re breaking up?’

  ‘In the long run,’ Jules said quietly, ‘it could be a good thing for her as well.’

  Jules’s phone pinged. She turned her back on Rowan and went to pick it up.

  There was a text from Holly.

  ‘Get out,’ she said to Rowan. ‘I want to read this by myself.’

  25

  HOLLY

  Hailstones bounce off my windscreen as I drive to the station. I manage to get straight on a train and it takes sixty minutes to get to London, but this evening it feels like a lifetime.

  At King’s Cross I take a taxi and we sail down Gray’s Inn Road and along Theobalds Road. In the backstreets, little blue lights are strung out in the trees, and it occurs to me with a gasp that Christmas will soon be on its way. The world has continued to happen, while for me, everything has been on hold. We get to Chancery Lane just before the gates to Lincoln’s Inn close at seven. I pay the taxi driver and clamber out.

  ‘Please,’ I say to the porter in his lobby. ‘I need to go to the chapel.’

  He gives me a small smile, an eyebrow raised. What must he think I need the chapel for at this time of night?

  ‘You’re just in time,’ he says. ‘We lock up in half an hour.’

  I thank him and pass beneath the carriage lamps spilling yellow pools of soft light onto the cobblestones around the entrance. It’s a fine, cold night here. Inside the gates, the city falls silent. It could be two hundred years ago, longer. I go past Old Square, and Stone Buildings, the names familiar, evoking the keen pain I always feel at revisiting the place Archie worked. To reach the chapel entrance, I have to pass beneath the low undercroft, my footsteps ringing out on the cold gravestones laid flat to make up the floor. Most of them are the graves of barristers and benchers. It’s only the much older stones that were also used for servants. As I step over the words ‘Hatch-keeper and Washpot’, etched into an ancient slab, I can almost hear Saul laugh, his childish giggles echoing off the ceiling. His ghost? I shudder. Saul believed Archie’s ghost haunted this place. I think again of his text – ‘Gone to be close to Dad’ – and refuse to let myself think the worst.

  On either side of the chapel entrance, a carved head gazes down, Queen Victoria and some bishop or other, as if watching me, curious as to what I’m doing here when everyone else has retreated to their homes or to restaurants for the evening. I push open the door. Staircases curve up to either side. I hesitate. Both lead to the chapel, but I can’t make a decision, afraid of what I’ll find at the top. Or what I won’t find.

  In the end, I choose the right-hand stairs. I arrive in a little vestibule. I remember with a shock there’s a portrait of John Donne here; he was a preacher to the inn in the seventeenth century. Glancing up at the portrait, it hits me all of a sudden that he looks like Saul! Is it a good omen? That Saul quoted him to me that fateful day on our walk to Jules’s house?

  The handle is icy under my palm as I push open the door onto a dimly lit interior smelling of polished wood. The chapel is silent. And it’s empty. As I should have guessed. It was a crazy thing to do, to leave Freya and Thea and Saffie and Pete, say I had to go, to get the train to London, in the middle of our conversation.

  But now I’m here, I know this is where I need to be.

  I walk over the black-and-white chequered floor, between the carved benches towards the far end of the chapel. Where the pews are older, they have doors, just as Saul told Saffie. Little lockable doors. But I can see nothing behind them, only shadow. I walk all around the chapel, down one side and up the other. There’s no one here. I’ll have to leave, get the train back to the Fens, accept at last my loss. Because I realize that what I’ve been doing is refusing to accept what I always knew ever since I received Saul’s text. I’ve been in denial. It’s time to let him go.

  Before I leave, I sit down on a pew, just to catch my breath and to be silent for a while. Bowl-shaped lamps on stands along the ends of the pews give off a gentle glow. The large stained-glass windows at either end of the room gleam: sapphire, ruby and gold, gently illuminated. Saul believed his dad haunted this building, and a little part of me half believes if I sit for long enough, perhaps Archie will indeed speak to me, tell me he did love me after all. And that Saul is with him and that everything is all right. There is a deep sense of tranquillity in this space, something I haven’t felt for as long as I can remember. After a while, I realize my eyelids are drooping and I’m close to falling asleep. Then something jerks me awake, a dull thud at the far end of the chapel. I open my eyes. And am suddenly aware that there is someone else here. Behind one of the doors to the pews.

  He’s sleeping on the floorboards when I find him, so deep in shadow it’s impossible to see him without looking intently. Behind one of the locked doors to the pews. Head resting on a red hassock.

  ‘Saul,’ I whisper. ‘Saul. Are you real? Are you really here?’

  I put my hand to his face and feel him, his skin, his hair. I need to prove to myself my son is here and he’s alive. I shake him gently, and eventually he opens his eyes and he looks up at me.

  ‘Mum,’ he says.

  And I know then it’s going to be all right.

  *

  Saul sits on the pew next to me. His hair is stiffened into dreadlocks. His clothes are worn, dirty, and he’s wearing a hooded anorak I’ve never seen before. And he looks old
er. His stubble has grown and looks coarser than it was before he left. He tells me it’s where he always thought he would live if he was homeless. On the streets of Clerkenwell by day (‘Good Italian leftovers in the bins,’ he says), but hiding away in the chapel to sleep.

  ‘It’s easy,’ he says. ‘I come in while Lincoln’s Inn is still open, close the little door to the pew, and no one checks. In the morning, I leave and head for the streets. Beg for a couple of quid for breakfast. Or scavenge a pizza from behind one of the cafes. The best pickings come from Andy’s Cafe in Gray’s Inn Road.’

  At night, he says, he looks up from his locked pew at the stained-glass windows, with their depictions of biblical figures (‘All men,’ I almost comment, but refrain), disciples and saints, and he communes with his father. It’s his secret place. A place where he feels very close to his dad.

  How did I not think of it?

  We sit side by side, alone in the empty chapel.

  ‘Unmarried women used to leave their babies here,’ he says. ‘I was in good company.’

  He looks at me. I put out my hand and touch his.

  ‘I never abandoned you, Saul.’

  ‘When you didn’t believe me, it was like you didn’t know me anymore,’ he says.

  I don’t speak for a minute.

  ‘I needed you to say that you didn’t do it. Didn’t rape Saffie.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have had to.’

  ‘No. You shouldn’t. But I needed you to. Because I was frightened. Of what might happen if you didn’t say loud and clear that you hadn’t done it. And I’m sorry.’ My words are so inadequate. I wish there was a better, stronger word than ‘sorry’ in our lexicon.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d believe her.’

  ‘I never believed her. I knew you’d never do a thing like that. But I couldn’t think why she would lie. And I’d spent so many years urging people to believe rape allegations . . .’

  ‘Because girls rarely lie about being raped. You drove that home to me, Mum, over the years.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Of course. All those conversations you have with Pete about what consent means.’

  I feel a shot of vindication hearing this – I’d worried I hadn’t got the message across to Saul.

  ‘So it’s like I know better than any other guy in the land that only “yes” means “yes”. That’s why it felt so unfair that anyone could believe I’d do it. But then I thought, it’s OK, because Mum knows me.

  ‘When I heard Pete saying he’d taken Freya and Thea away because of me, what else could I do but get away? Pete believed Saffie. I thought you believed Saffie. I didn’t see how I could change your minds. I packed that night, and the next morning, instead of getting on the school bus, I went down to the river and started walking to London.’

  I hold his hand tight, tight, feel how rough, how calloused his skin has become. They have become a man’s hands, no longer a boy’s.

  ‘You walked?’

  ‘Across country. You’d be amazed how easy it is to keep out of sight once you put your mind to it. How many places there are to sleep between the Fens and London.’

  Suddenly the bells of the chapel begin to peal and we wait before speaking again.

  ‘“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,”’ Saul quotes. ‘John Donne got the inspiration for that right here. I didn’t know until I got here and saw the memorial to him. It’s hard to spot – it’s in the low right-hand corner of the stained-glass window over there.’

  ‘It’s strange that it’s the same meditation that you quoted to me on the way to Jules’s: “No Man Is an Island.”’

  ‘I’ve often thought, while I was lying here, about what that means. It’s like, if one person dies, we all die a little bit. I did think of ending it all. How I would do it. Jump in the river, maybe. Or lie on the train track. I thought I could do it on the railway line that goes from London to our village. King’s Cross to King’s Lynn. Ironic, eh?’

  ‘Saul, please. That was my worst fear!’

  ‘But then I thought, if I do that, it’ll be like killing you too. It may sound whacky, but I imagined Dad speaking to me. He told me to live, for his sake, and for yours. But I still wanted Saffie, especially, to be fucking sorry for what she’d said. I wasn’t going to come home until I knew she’d taken it back.’

  ‘She was desperate, Saul. Terrified of what might happen if she told the truth. Harry Bell threatened her. He’s been charged now, of sexual exploitation and rape.’

  ‘Fuck. That’s crap. Saffie was raped?’

  ‘Yes. She was raped. She didn’t understand she had a choice. So that’s rape. She thought by saying it was you, it wouldn’t get her into as much trouble as the truth would. She thought Jules and I would keep it between ourselves. She didn’t want to get you into trouble, but she was trapped. It seems terribly unfair, and she was naive to think blaming you wouldn’t be harmful.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘I actually have Saffie to thank. It was she who remembered how you thought Dad’s ghost was here. And how you loved these pews with the doors.’

  ‘She remembered that?’

  ‘She did. Some conversation you had when you were children. I came straight away.’

  I can’t stop looking at my son. I want to smother him, press my nose into his hair, smell him. ‘Saul, I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed you. How terrified I was I’d lost you.’

  In fact, I want to eat him up so he can never go away from me again, as rodents eat their young when they’re in danger. I sit on my hands, force myself to treat him like the adult he is.

  ‘You got my text, though, didn’t you?’ he says suddenly. ‘I chucked my phone away when I left home. To stop anyone following me. But then I thought you’d, like . . . fret. So I borrowed a phone. With a withheld number. I texted that I’d come to be close to dad. I didn’t want you to think I was . . . like . . . dead.’

  I don’t tell him, because it would sound as if I’m chastising him, that I interpreted his message differently.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I got your text. Thank you for that, Saul. I just wish I’d known where to find you. Now I think, if you don’t mind, I’m going to text the others at home, including Jules, because everyone who loves you will want to know you’re here, and safe.’

  And alive, I think. Saul is alive.

  Epilogue

  HOLLY

  Saul and I walk together down the fen road to the river. It’s the kind of winter weather that renders the land paler than the sky. Dark clouds heavy with rain hang over bright fields; white sedge bends in the wind. We take the long country road to the lock and climb the metal steps onto the sluice bridge. I think of the other dreadful afternoon I stood there staring into the water, when I had been told they had found human remains and I believed they belonged to my son. He’s here with me. I can feel him, warm, tall and breathing next to me. We stand side by side and watch the water tumble over the ledge. We don’t speak. And it’s fine. It feels comfortable to stand next to my son and share our silence.

  We’re about to carry on, to continue our walk upriver, when I spot two figures coming towards us along the road. It’s Jules with Saffie. I go to move away – I want this time alone with Saul – but they’re upon us before I can get through the swing gate at the bottom of the steps.

  ‘Saul,’ Jules says. ‘I can’t express . . . Words will not express what I feel. How sorry I am. How happy you’re home and safe.’

  Saul nods at her but doesn’t say anything. Does she see, the way I do, how he’s changed in the time he’s been gone? He’s a man now. He’s looking down at us, our inability to see the truth. He wants neither our apologies nor our approval. He walks away, his camera round his neck, towards the far side of the river. The water is still and clear as glass, the bare trees and the slate sky reflected perfectly. I watch Saul move along the flood bank, lift his camera, angle it towards two swans that have landed. I say goodbye to Jules and start af
ter him.

  ‘Holly?’

  I stop.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  I turn round. Take a few steps towards Jules.

  ‘Now I know Saul is alive and safe,’ Jules says, ‘the decision about Rowan is back in my hands again. I knew he had anger issues, but I never thought he’d do that to a woman. It’s as though I never really knew him.’

  I put my hand instinctively to my head. It still hurts, a persistent reminder of her husband’s attack.

  ‘What I’ve learned over the last few weeks,’ I say, ‘is that you don’t know anyone. Not completely. Put them in a new set of circumstances and they reveal sides you never knew they had.’

  I think of Jules criticizing my mothering. Pete prioritizing his girls over Saul. Saul yearning still for the ghost of his father. Archie needing an intimacy I wasn’t giving him and finding it with Philippa. Why didn’t I see it? I thought I knew them. I thought I knew all of them. But I didn’t. I didn’t even know myself. Not really. The way, as Pete pointed out, I shut down on people when they become problematic instead of working with them.

  Saffie has walked on, is approaching Saul on the riverbank on the far side. I wonder now, as I look at Jules, with the rings under her eyes betraying what she’s gone through herself recently, which of us has had it harder. Jules, the mother of a daughter who was raped, or me, the mother of the boy who was accused?

  ‘Turns out no one’s perfect,’ I say. ‘Not Archie, not Pete. Not me, even.’

  Jules laughs.

  ‘Pete and I might have split up over this, but instead, he’s embraced my faults and I’ve done the same with him. We’re regarding each other and each other’s kids as a kind of reclaimed family.’ I smile. ‘A reclaimed family from this reclaimed land. We’re moving into Cambridge for a fresh start. Between us, we should be able to get somewhere big enough for all five of us when the girls want to come. Saul has found a place in town where he can do his photography course for sixth form. We’re leaving the village. It has too many . . . associations. I want you to know. In case you see the “for sale” sign outside our house. Feel hurt that I hadn’t told you.’