by Lisa Jewell
‘Look,’ said her mother, resting her e-cigarette on the table next to her and turning the screen of her computer to face Jenna. ‘Look what’s happening. Just across the border in Mold. There’s a woman, same age as me, same political history as me. Mr Fitzwilliam was the head at her local school before he came to Melville and it happened to her too. It started from the minute he arrived, she says. Scratches on her car. Chips in her kitchen surfaces. Light bulbs loosened. Bits of broken glass in the bath. And she says she was in the Lake District too.’
Jenna stopped unzipping her rucksack and stared at her mother. ‘What? When we were there?’
‘No.’ Her mother returned her gaze to the screen, picked up her e-cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘No. When she was a child, I think. But still.’
Jenna rolled her eyes and pulled her homework books out of her bag. She knew that Mr Fitzwilliam had been the head at a school in Wales before he’d been brought into Melville Academy. That much was probably true, but the rest of it …
She went into the kitchen and made herself a low-calorie hot chocolate with a sprinkle of miniature marshmallows. She took her homework and the hot chocolate up to her room and arranged herself cross-legged on her bed.
‘Is he there?’ she heard her mother call up the stairs.
Jenna didn’t even need to peer from her window to verify that the innocuous bespectacled man who sat at his computer every evening in the house behind theirs would be there, because he always was.
‘No,’ she called down. ‘Can’t see him.’
She pulled out her phone, desperate to text Bess or Facetime her, desperate to tell her about her freaky encounter with Mr Fitzwilliam’s son on the way home from school. She opened WhatsApp and held her finger over the video call button. But then she put the phone down again. Bess was probably still in Caffè Nero with their friends. Instead she opened up her laptop and typed Tom Fitzwilliam Mold into her browser.
The school in Mold had brought him in in January 2014. He’d turned it from a school in special measures to an outstanding school within two years and left for his new role in Melville at the end of the winter term in 2016. Before Mold he’d been in Tower Hamlets. Before Tower Hamlets he’d been in Manchester. And before Manchester, back in the year 2001, the year Jenna had been born, he’d been promoted to deputy head of a school in Burton upon Trent where he’d taught since he was twenty-eight.
Mr Fitzwilliam was squeaky clean. His reputation was unblemished. Everywhere he went he brought nothing but light and harmony. Happy children and sunshine. But the woman in the Lake District didn’t like Mr Fitzwilliam, Jenna’s mad mum didn’t like Mr Fitzwilliam and now, for no particular reason, Jenna herself did not like Mr Fitzwilliam.
Was the woman in the Lake District also mad, perhaps? And in that case, was she, Jenna, perhaps mad too? She thought back to her encounter with Freddie Fitzwilliam and her curiosity began to bloom. What had he wanted to say to her? And might it have shed some light on the strange things she’d been thinking and feeling?
She closed her laptop and picked up her phone again. She checked Snapchat to see what Bess was up to but she hadn’t posted. She felt a terrible hollowness open up inside her, a sense that she was all alone, that she had in fact always been all alone, that the corners of her life were folding in and folding in and that there was nothing she could do about it.
31
Freddie caught his breath at the top of the escarpment before straightening and continuing to his front door. He had not meant to approach Jenna Tripp like that. He hadn’t even been expecting to see her. He did sometimes see her on the walk home, but she was usually with Bess or some other girls. It took him by surprise to see her walking alone. It had seemed preordained in some way, so soon after the question of the Lake District had raised its ugly head again. He thought, as he followed behind Jenna Tripp, that it must mean something, her being there, alone, right then. He’d thought it must be destiny. He’d thought a lot of strange and entirely fatuous things (how could someone as clever as him be thinking about destiny, for goodness’ sake?) when she’d turned suddenly and clamped her eyes on his and he’d had to wing it, horribly, with panic blowing and building inside him at the realisation that he was much closer to her than he’d thought he was, oppressively close, and that the only way to make it seem better than it was, was to make it look as though he was deliberately catching up with her to start up a conversation.
Once he’d started the conversation he’d felt a terrible awareness growing and boiling inside him, from the pit of his gut upwards, that not only was he having a weird conversation with a stranger but that the stranger was a teenage girl and that it was, in fact, quite possibly the first time he’d had a conversation with a teenage girl since becoming a teenager himself. And Jenna Tripp, now he was here, standing right next to her, was even prettier than she looked from a distance and her lips were very full and soft and her breasts made a shape in the fabric of her blazer that was both innocuous and awe-inspiring. He found that he could look neither at her face, because he wanted to touch her mouth, or away from her face, because then there were breasts, so had chosen instead a neutral corner where her shoulder met the wall of the shop behind her and fixed his gaze there.
And then he’d realised that he was mad to be having this conversation with her, that she would tell his dad and that his dad would then know he’d overheard their conversation, and that anyway, he didn’t really know what it was he was trying to uncover, that he shouldn’t have approached her before properly formulating a line of enquiry. The whole thing had been shambolic and embarrassing and humiliating and that was why he’d needed to stop for a moment before he could face the normality of walking through his front door.
Instead, though, he was confronted by a stepladder and paint-spattered dust sheets flung up the stairs and the smell of wet paint and the entirely abnormal sound of his mum laughing in the kitchen.
He followed the sound and came upon his mother leaning up against the kitchen counter, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea and Alfie the painter sitting across from her at the kitchen table in his overalls, huge long legs crossed at the knee, fingertips tapping the sides of another mug, halfway through a story that was clearly the funniest thing his mum had ever heard.
‘Good evening, my friend,’ said Alfie the painter.
‘Afternoon,’ Freddie replied with a satisfying spritz of pedantry.
‘Hello, darling.’ His mum turned briefly and hit him with a smile the likes of which he had not known she was capable of producing. ‘Alfie’s telling me stories about being a groundskeeper at a dreadful-sounding holiday resort in Ibiza! You wouldn’t believe the things they get up to on these all-inclusive holidays!’
Alfie threw Freddie a look of what could only be described as awkward regret. Freddie suspected that he had not meant his stories to elicit such amusement but that now they were he’d decided to go with the flow.
‘Anyway,’ said Alfie, giving the mug one last ripple of his big, paint-stained fingernails and lowering his gigantic foot to the floor. ‘I had better get back to it. I’ve got one more coat to do on the skirting boards before I go. Thanks for the tea, Nicola.’
Freddie stared at him. He tried to work him out, ferret out some dark intention, some element of shade or wrongness. But there was none to be found. He was as he appeared. A large, harmless man of small ambition and mediocre intellect. But something about him had caused his mother to postpone her afternoon run, to drink tea in the kitchen, to laugh, really properly to laugh, to glow, even.
Freddie added this to the growing conundrum of his entire existence and went to his bedroom.
Freddie had completely abandoned The Melville Papers. He no longer logged anything that he saw from his bedroom window, not even Jenna Tripp and Bess Ridley in their PE kits. The comings and goings of Lower Melville were of no interest whatsoever to him any more. The truth was that all of Freddie’s time these days was taken up in pursuit of Romola Brook. Or not
so much in pursuit of, but in paying homage to. Appreciating. Adoring. Studying. Learning about. He’d started a new log. It was called The Romola Papers.
He followed her home most nights now, if she happened to leave school at the same time as him. Last night she’d gone home via Tesco Metro where she’d picked up a packet of custard creams and some dog food. He’d added this fact to his log. Just in case he ever wanted to buy her biscuits. Tonight she hadn’t been there. He’d waited for ten minutes until the school caretaker had come and locked the gates and then he’d given up. But that was OK because he could still find her on the internet.
He placed his camomile tea on his desk, removed his tie and clicked his way on to a conversation that Romola was having on Instagram with someone called LouisaMeyrickJones. It was pretty boring. To do with a teacher who’d been unfair during lunch break and how so and so had been in tears and then so and so joined in and there was lots of talk about how maybe they should report the unfairness and so on and so forth and Freddie was about to switch screens and find something else to do for a while when someone else popped up and said something about the spring ball.
He read on.
It was a joint event with Freddie’s school, just over a fortnight away.
A few weeks ago, he would barely have noticed the reference. But now he saw it as the portal to something extraordinary.
‘Mum!’ he called down the stairs. ‘Are we doing anything on the twenty-fourth of March? It’s a Friday?’
He waited a moment for his mother to reply. ‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. ‘Why?’
‘There’s a party I want to go to. A type of ball. At my school. Can I go?’
‘Of course you can, darling! How lovely!’
‘The tickets are really expensive,’ he called down. ‘Twenty-five pounds. Am I still allowed to go?’
‘Yes.’ His mother’s face appeared at the bottom of the staircase. ‘Absolutely. I think it’s great that you want to go. We’ll have to get you a tux! How handsome you’ll look! Just imagine it!’
32
10 March
Joey ignored the insistent beeping of the car horn, at first. Either it was someone hooting at her from a white van in which case she had no interest in looking up and having to deal with some moron and his mate with their tongues hanging out. Or it was someone hooting at someone else entirely and then she’d look like a sad loser who’d been secretly hoping it was two morons in a white van.
But then she heard a male voice calling out ‘Josephine!’ and she turned to see Tom Fitzwilliam leaning from the passenger window of his car and signalling for her to approach. ‘Can I give you a lift? I’m heading into town.’
He pulled his car into a space alongside her and she looked at him, then up towards the city. She’d been on her way to the bus stop.
‘Er, yes. Thank you. If you’re sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure! Jump in.’
She slid in next to him and reached for the seat belt. ‘This is very kind of you,’ she said.
‘Not at all. I see you at the bus stop a lot but I’m usually heading the wrong way for you.’ He turned to her and smiled and Joey thought: I am in a car with Tom Fitzwilliam. I am in Tom Fitzwilliam’s car. Here I am. I am here. It is happening. Right now. She clicked her seat belt into place and returned his smile. ‘Well, thank you,’ she said. And then, ‘Where are you off to? Not going into school today?’
‘No,’ he said, peering into his wing mirror ready to pull back into the morning traffic. ‘Today I have a big meeting at the town hall with the LEA. I’d love to tell you all about it, but then I’d have to kill you.’
He smiled again and there was something wicked in it, something that made her feel like maybe he actually would.
‘So, you’re still at the soft play centre?’ he said, eyeing the logo on her polo shirt.
‘Unfortunately, yes,’ she said. ‘Although it is growing on me. Nice people.’
‘People are everything,’ he said. ‘That’s one thing I’ve learned. If you’re with the right people then you’re generally in the right place.’
‘Unless it’s a prison.’ She laughed. And then immediately hated herself for the sound of her laughter, so harsh and fake.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Even if it’s a prison. Seriously! Or at least, if you are in prison because you’ve done a bad thing and not because of a terrible miscarriage of justice.’
She ran her hands down the leather sides of her seat. How many times had she stared into the passenger side of Tom’s car when it was parked outside her house, imagining herself sitting right here? And now it was actually happening and Joey’s head could barely process anything. She pulled herself straight and shook her head slightly.
‘So, you’re not still planning on leaving the country, then?’ he asked with a small smile.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No. I’m over that.’
‘Good,’ he said, ‘that’s good.’
The traffic out of Melville was heavy and there was a chance, without the expediency of bus lanes, that she might arrive late to work. She did not care. She breathed in the smell of Tom Fitzwilliam’s car: worn leather and showered man. She stared at his hands where they gripped the steering wheel. Such good hands. She could not look at them without imagining them on her face, inside her clothes, pulling at her. She felt her need for him bubbling up inside her, so fast and so red hot that she was convinced he must be able to tell what she was thinking.
As they approached the turning to the Academy she watched the sea of grey blazers pouring from all directions. It was incredible, she thought, that the mild-mannered man sitting next to her was responsible for each and every one of these half-formed people every single day.
‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Do you think you’ll stay in Melville for much longer?’
‘Well, we’ve only been here a year,’ he said. ‘I’d like to see through two years minimum. That’s when you know that all the huge changes you made when you arrived have rooted themselves. It’s like snagging, you know. You want to be around just to tidy up all the bits you missed when you were doing the big job.’
‘Have you ever failed?’ she asked.
He glanced at her quickly before returning his gaze to the windscreen. ‘Failed?’
‘Yes. At one of your schools? Have you ever been brought in to fix a school you couldn’t fix?’
He smiled. ‘No,’ he said, ‘or at least, not yet.’
‘What would you do? If you couldn’t fix it?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve genuinely never thought about it.’
They fell silent for a moment. The traffic barely moved, and Tom pointed over Joey’s shoulder. ‘Oh, look,’ he said, ‘there’s the bus you would have been on if I hadn’t picked you up.’ They watched its wide rear-end pass them by in a wreath of grey fumes. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You’d have been there earlier if I’d left you.’
‘I forgive you,’ she said.
He turned and smiled. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good.’
‘So,’ she said a moment later. ‘How long have you and Nicola been together?
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘God. I’m not sure. Twenty years, I guess. Something like that.’
‘And is your son – is he yours? Or both of yours?’
He laughed. ‘You’re very full of blunt questions.’
‘Sorry. It’s just Nicola looks so young to be his mum. I thought maybe she was a second wife?’
‘No. Very much a first wife.’
Joey nodded, running some vague arithmetic through her head. If Nicola was the age she looked – roughly the same age as Jack and Rebecca, then she and Tom must have got together when she was … No. She must be older than she looked.
‘Where did you meet?’
‘We met, as unromantic as it sounds, on a bus in Burton-on-Trent. She came up to me and told me that I’d been a teacher at her school.’
‘She was a schoolgirl?’
Tom laughed. ‘No
! Not then. She was nineteen, twenty, something like that. She remembered me, but I didn’t remember her. I didn’t actually teach her. She was in a lower set.’
‘Well, phew, thank goodness for that because that would have been a bit cringey.’
‘Would it? Why?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Teachers. Students. It’s all a bit murky, isn’t it?’
He turned to her and for a moment she thought he was going to shout at her, tell her she was wrong. But then his face softened and he smiled and said, ‘I suppose it could be. But in this case, it was murk free, I promise.’
Joey smiled tightly and changed the subject. ‘So, does your son go to your school? To the Academy?’
‘No. No. Most definitely not. Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with my school. Clearly my school is brilliant! But it’s easier, when you move around a lot, to go private, otherwise you’re farting about with catchment areas and waiting lists and criteria. Private you just show up with your chequebook and your child’s last report card and you’re away.’
‘Jack tells me your son’s a genius?’
‘Yes. He is a bit. Very high IQ. Brilliant at languages and technology. Regional chess champion a couple of times. And he’s already done three GCSEs and he’s only in year ten. So yes. Very bright. But he’s a funny little guy.’
‘Is he?’
‘Yeah. He is a bit. I think he’s just starting to notice girls as well. Which should be interesting. Not sure his basic skill set really extends to charming the ladies. But we’ll see, I suppose.’