The Mistress: A gripping and emotional page turner with a killer twist

by Jill Childs

  That first week, once I knew she was back, I made it my business to look out for her. When I was on playground duty, which was some part of most days, I watched her every chance I could, scanning the swirling mass of running, screaming children, unbuttoned coats flapping. Clara Higgins, her best friend, was usually close at hand. They crouched on their haunches in corners together, heads almost touching as they whispered, or ran, hand in hand, weaving in and out of the manic chaos.

  It wasn’t easy to give her my full attention. I was constantly distracted by the more mundane playground tasks of adjudicating fights, scolding bullies and sending injured or badly behaved children to the office. I also had to fend off the attentions of a minuscule reception girl with a single long plait. Rosie, was she? Or Rebecca? She wasn’t settling well and had taken to hanging around whichever teacher was on duty. She grasped my fingers in her tiny, warm hand and clung to them as if I were a lifeboat in a dangerous, tempestuous sea.

  Anna seemed as lively since her return as any other child. Her features had always been a little pinched, but her colour was high and her hair, usually gathered into two stubby plaits, flew as she chased around, screeching, with Clara.

  Every time I tried to wander over to where they were playing, dragging the needy reception girl after me, Anna and Clara darted off to another part of the playground, deep in some game of their own invention. It was like trying to lasso water. I’d just need to be patient and seize my opportunity once it came.

  Sixteen

  Two months later

  I straightened my skirt. I was wearing a dress today, just for him. In those two years after Matthew and before Ralph, I’d lived in trousers and shapeless jumpers. Then, meeting Ralph, I had wanted to emerge again, to come out of hiding from the world.

  ‘Ah, she has legs!’ He had reached for them when I slid beside him into the passenger seat of his car, ready to be taken out. He’d run a warm hand over the smooth mesh of my tights, from calf to my knee and a little further to my thigh. ‘Orwell could never have written “Two legs bad!” if he’d seen yours.’

  Then that smile. It turned me to liquid. Always.

  Now, I bit down on my lip, took a deep breath and walked on, feeling his eyes, in a face enlarged to poster size and glued onto a black-edged board, follow me into the chapel.

  It was a beautiful day. That was all wrong. The sun had no business shining. The bright light fell in multi-coloured shafts through the polished stained-glass windows and threw patterns across the stone flags underfoot. The rows of seats in the body of the chapel were filling quickly. There was a muffled sound of whispering and creeping, of people gathering on tiptoe, people who were afraid to be heard, who were frightened of causing offence.

  I ran my eyes across the crowd. A lot of teachers from school were here, bunched together in knots of friends, hushed with embarrassment. The bearded science teacher and another I didn’t recognise hung together by a row of seats as if they didn’t know whether they were allowed to sit down there. Olivia, her long hair cascading freely down her back, was seated at the end of a full row of Lower School staff. I ran my eye along the row. Elaine Abbott, too. Hilary Prior. Everyone’s clothes were unnaturally muted. Brown. Grey. Black.

  Then I saw them. Off to one side, watching us all from their seats at the back, tucked away in the corner shadows. Detective Inspector Johns and a man – another detective, for sure. They sat very still, backs straight, heads slowly pivoting, observing everyone.

  I stopped. A young woman in a black jacket, her face professionally sympathetic, stepped forward and handed me a thin paper booklet, mistaking my hesitation perhaps for grief or nerves. She gestured to the side.

  ‘More seats upstairs,’ she whispered, as if it were a sad secret.

  I took her advice and turned, climbed a short flight of steep, winding stairs and emerged to find a small balcony six rows deep, the organ ranged behind it, overlooking the chapel. I found a place at the front and leaned forward, forearms resting on the polished wood lip. From here, in the cheap seats, I could see without being seen.

  It was a comforting building. The far window was dominated by a vast cross, splintered into glassy fragments and buried within multiple shades of green and brown. It was a symbol which was vivid enough to signal its intent to churchgoers, but discreet enough not to offend those who didn’t believe in any world after this one and preferred to see nothing but nature; grass and leaves and branches in the shapes and hues.

  A bulky middle-aged man squeezed in beside me, a woman settling on his far side. He handed her a memorial booklet and leafed through his own in a flutter of pages. I looked at the one in my hand, already marked by my warm, sweaty fingers.

  Ralph Edward Wilson. His photograph was printed on the front, inside a black border. The same portrait as the one at the entrance, glued to a board.

  My eyes ran over the hymns and readings printed inside. Keats. Shakespeare. T. S. Eliot. Sarah Baldini was doing the Shakespeare. Poor choice. She might be a head teacher but she had a high, reedy voice. John Wilson was giving the tribute. John Wilson? I shook my head. Ralph’s father was already dead. He didn’t have a brother. Some cousin, perhaps? He’d never mentioned one. I closed the booklet and Ralph’s eyes found me again.

  Hey, they said. Is this for real? All this fuss for me? I hope there’s a chance of a drink afterwards. A good stiff one.

  I could almost hear him laughing.

  Below, music started. A slow jazz number. The blues.

  The final stragglers hurried to take their seats, forcing others to bunch up, to lift up coats and bags and lay them across their knees. The women in black jackets found spaces, here and there, and led people to them.

  Helen. I took a moment to recognise her as she came into view underneath us and shuffled down the aisle towards the empty front row. Her head was bowed. Her shoulders sagged. She was wearing a long grey coat which flapped round her knees and leaning heavily on the arm of a stout, broad-shouldered man. The falling shafts of sunlight, thick with dancing dust, picked out strands of silver in his dark hair. They were a grotesque parody of a bride and father, walking down the aisle to a husband on their wedding day, their friends and family gathered to bear witness.

  My breath caught in my throat. It was Helen, of course, but she looked so utterly different from the woman I’d known before. She looked, from the way she walked, the way the man supported her, the way people on the ends of rows glanced at her then looked quickly away, as if she’d aged a decade in a matter of weeks, desiccated by shock and sorrow. She was a widow. A grieving widow. And it was all because of me.

  She reached the front and the man lowered her into a seat as if she were incapable of bearing her weight without him. The mournful music stopped and there was a general shuffling and coughing as a man in simple clerical robes – someone I’d never seen before and suspected Ralph, atheist to the core, would never have met either – appeared at the front of the congregation, opened his arms in a gesture of both welcome and blessing, smiled sadly and began to speak.

  I closed my eyes and tried not to hear. I had no rights here, I knew that. I was an anonymous nobody. If I was in pieces with grief, deep in mourning, I had to keep it to myself. I wasn’t his widow. But this Ralph, this loving father and devoted husband, this wasn’t the Ralph I’d loved.

  Seventeen

  The day I finally decided to say yes to Ralph and go out for a drink with him, I chose my clothes with care. At the end of the school day, I went to the staff toilets to re-apply my make-up in secret and spray my mouth with minty freshener.

  Olivia, all long legs, glanced up at me as I walked into the writing meeting and found a place along the desks and – did I imagine it or did something in her face change? I felt suddenly hot as I sat down. The fat girl at school plastering on lipstick at the school disco and thinking the jock would suddenly notice her. Maybe he was playing with me, that was all. A bet, even. A private joke.

  Then he walked in, his leather br
iefcase spilling papers, and his eyes scanned the room, then found mine and settled there and he smiled and I was beautiful again, shy and happy and glowing like a teenager and who cared what anyone else thought, let them, he was here and it was all to come.

  That evening, he hung back as the others gathered up their jackets and coats and headed off to the Half Moon.

  He batted them off. ‘Maybe see you there.’

  I hung back too. I knew. My whole body was primed and stiff with knowing.

  He waited until the corridor was empty, then turned to me, his eyes searching.

  ‘Let’s go for a drink,’ he said. ‘Somewhere quiet.’

  I went to find my car and drove up the hill to the turn-off for the Upper School buildings. He’d parked on the far side of the road there, waiting for me. He indicated and carefully pulled out in front as he saw me approach.

  We drove in convoy through the suburbs and into the countryside. It was grizzly weather, already dark with the onset of winter and cold. When I turned, following him off the road into a shadowy, almost deserted pub car park, I sat for a moment, staring over the top of the steering wheel into the blackness.

  What am I doing? A foolish question when I already knew.

  He appeared at the side-window, physical and real, and drew me out of the car, walked me through the chill with my hand tucked into the crook of his arm, as if we were already an old married couple, and into the warm. It was midweek. He led me into the quiet snug and settled me into a table there.

  ‘Let me guess.’ He waved his hands about and pretended to be a stage magician reading my mind. ‘Madam’s tipple is, methinks… port and lemonade?’

  I laughed. ‘Not even close.’

  ‘Guinness.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘Really?’

  He disappeared and came back with two glasses of Shiraz. His signature wine, I soon learned.

  ‘I’d get a bottle, but not tonight.’ He nodded through the window at the darkness of the car park. ‘We’re driving. Next time.’

  Next time. I smiled. It felt so thrilling and yet so easy, so familiar, right from the start.

  He was good company. He sizzled. All I had to do was sit back and forget myself, to feel the wine thaw me out and to let my shoulders fall, to let myself laugh, to set down my own awkward heaviness and be someone softer, someone lighter. Someone more like him.

  He crackled with life. Funny stories about his English students and his battles to make them read. About the tricks he played on them and the bets he struck with the boys who refused to study anything written before they were born.

  He was edgy and flirty and intense and I stopped worrying about why I was there and where this might lead and whether this was really a good idea and all the other anxieties that had made me hesitate until now and I just let it happen.

  At the end of the evening, when we got to our feet and made to leave, he stopped me in the shadowy porch and turned me to him, as gently as if I were china, then slid his arms around me and kissed me on the lips, reverently, chastely. His eyes glistened in the low light.

  ‘Laura Dixon.’ That voice, low and languid. ‘What have you done to me?’

  As if it were all my fault.

  I drove home in a blissful daze, looking out at the dark, quietening streets as if I’d never quite seen them before. My body tingled. My lips still felt the pressure of his. My breath pulsed in shallow, excited bursts. I was alive. I was attractive. I was falling in love and, oh my, how madly.

  My phone pinged just as I was putting my key in the front door of my flat. My hand fumbled with the lock. I didn’t let myself check my phone, not at first. I wanted to savour the moment, to tease myself. Maybe it was an overdraft alert from the bank. An automatic reminder of some routine appointment at the dentist or the optician.

  Smiling, I closed the door and took off my coat, hung it on a peg. Went through to my bedroom, my head buzzing with wine and adrenalin, and then, only then, took out my phone.

  Safely home?

  My smile broadened in the darkness. I dropped back onto the bed, phone in hand. I texted back in a rush, before my more sensible self could intervene and stop this new, reckless woman bursting out from nowhere:

  Come for dinner. Friday night?

  I hit send. I lay on my back, ears buzzing in the silence and stared at my phone.

  Nothing.

  I sat up and carried it through to the kitchen, keeping it close while I filled a glass from the tap and drank water.

  Nothing.

  I started to panic. What if I’d misread him? I’d made a fool of myself. Oh, how embarrassing. What if he told people? How would I face them at school?

  I carried the phone into the bathroom and set it on the edge of the bath while I washed and cleaned my teeth. Nothing.

  Maybe I should text again: Only joking!

  My face in the mirror was tight with tension. He probably befriended every new writer. Took them for a drink. It was just his style. Chatty. Gregarious.

  I was getting into bed, distraught, when my phone finally pinged. I snatched it up.

  Love to. Hold the Guinness.

  I put the light off and imagined him here, in the flat. He’d bring it back to life. His energy. His zest. I’d cook properly from one of my old recipe books. Something I hadn’t done for years, not since Matthew left. And a decent dessert.

  All I had to decide now was what to wear.

  Eighteen

  They played jazz again at the end of the memorial service. The melancholy sax tore my heart out. The man whose hair was flecked with grey helped Helen to her feet first and led her out. Once she was out of sight, the mood changed. People stretched and chatted in low voices and made for the exit.

  Upstairs, in the balcony, voices hummed around me. I folded the order of service in half and stuffed it into my bag, then followed the crowd downstairs.

  Everyone spilled out, blinking, into the sunshine. The chapel was surrounded by gently sloping lawns with wide, well-tended rose beds. In front, curling to the front steps, was a broad, tree-lined drive where cars could deposit and collect the chief mourners and, in other more normal circumstances, the hearse.

  As I emerged, the crowd was starting to thin. Some people were striking out in small groups towards the main car park at the other end of the drive, funereal coats, redundant in the warm sunshine, hanging limp now over their arms. Stragglers greeted each other and stood gossiping, grateful for the sunshine.

  I scanned the faces. The people coalesced around different periods of Ralph’s life. Family members, some who clearly met rarely, explained to each other in loud voices who was whom and exclaimed about the passage of time. Children, vaguely remembered in pinafores or short trousers, had transformed into unlikely adults. Adults, once vigorous, were now stooped and bald. There was no sign of her, at least. That would have been more than I could bear.

  A car door slammed shut and an engine purred into life. I looked across. A shiny black car was sliding away. Helen gazed vacantly out from the back seat.

  Elaine Abbott, always polite, waved me over to join the group of Lower School teachers.

  ‘They’re having drinks at a restaurant down the road. You coming? Hilary’s got room if you want a lift.’

  I hesitated. ‘That’s okay. I drove here too, actually.’

  I didn’t know whether to go on to the wake with them or not. Part of me wanted to see Helen; I didn’t quite know why or what I wanted to say, but it seemed important. I needed to know how she was, if there was anything she needed to tell me about the police investigation, if she had any hint of what they really knew.

  Hilary said in a low voice, ‘Funny funeral with no body.’

  ‘It wasn’t a funeral. It was a memorial service,’ Olivia corrected.

  Hilary pulled a face. ‘Same difference.’

  Elaine said, ‘Legally, he can still be declared dead, even without a body, if everything points to that. I mean, I don’t want to be gruesome –’ she
looked around and lowered her voice – ‘but frankly, even if they did find a body at this point, what kind of state…’ She left the thought hanging.

  ‘They can identify just about anything nowadays, can’t they? Bit of bone. Teeth…’ Hilary said.

  ‘Do you mind?’ Olivia pulled a face. ‘It’s not CSI.’

  Elaine said, ‘Anyway, that’s why the investigation’s so important. Once the police think they know what happened, they can make progress on a death certificate.’

  ‘Even without a body?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  Olivia said, ‘But they don’t know what happened.’

  Elaine shrugged. ‘I’m just saying, once they do.’

  Hilary said, ‘Jayne says they searched all over the heath. Even dragged the reservoir. Didn’t find a thing.’

  Olivia looked sceptical. ‘How would she know?’

  ‘She got it from John Bickers,’ Hilary went on. ‘But the reservoir’s very deep. They might’ve missed him. And, as you say, by now… What? Don’t look at me like that. I’m just saying.’

  Elaine shivered. ‘Let’s go. This is getting morbid. I’m just sorry for his poor wife. Imagine. Not knowing.’

  Olivia said, ‘I need a drink.’

  ‘She’ll get his death in service pay-out.’ Hilary was unstoppable. ‘That’s something. And his pension, eventually.’

  ‘Only once he’s declared dead.’ Elaine looked thoughtful. ‘I wonder if Sarah Baldini could make discreet inquiries? Check that Helen can manage? It’s not just her, is it? She’s got Anna too.’

  Olivia said, ‘I’m glad Helen didn’t bring her today.’

  I sensed that she was picking up on an earlier conversation.

  Hilary frowned. ‘She needs to be told.’

  Olivia said, ‘I know, eventually. But she’s only seven.’