by Jill Childs
He broke off. I ran the back of my hand across my eyes.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? I’d no idea…’
His voice sounded so strangled, it hurt me to hear it. ‘I meant to, Laura. I really did. It’s just all happened so fast. And I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe you’d heard that I… well, you know what school’s like.’
I shook my head. I imagined Olivia whispering to Hilary about the two of us leaving the group together. The gossip in the staffroom, in the corridors. He was right. I knew exactly what school was like.
‘I’m sorry. I’ve done this all wrong, haven’t I?’
I couldn’t answer.
‘Laura. You still there?’
I swallowed. ‘I’m still here.’
‘It’s different with you, Laura. It really is. You feel it too, don’t you? Don’t tell me you don’t.’
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.
‘We’re good together. We belong together. Don’t walk away from me.’ He sounded so desperate. ‘Don’t do that, Laura. Please.’
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t do this on the phone. I needed him here. I needed to see his face.
‘But you’re married, Ralph.’
‘I know. Just give me time. Please. I don’t want to lose you.’
The room swam. I was so tired. I didn’t want to hear any more. Not yet. I needed time too, to think. I listened to the silence, imagining life without him, going back to the emptiness.
‘I don’t know, Ralph.’ I hesitated. ‘Just try and be honest with me. Please.’
He let out a rush of breath. ‘Oh, Laura. I just want to see you. When can I see you?’
I shook my head. ‘Let’s talk tomorrow.’
After we hung up, I sat very still, too sad even to cry. A text pinged through from Number withheld.
Love you, Laura Dixon.
I felt something twist and loosen inside me and all of a sudden I was smiling, despite everything. My fingers typed a reply before I could stop them.
Love you too.
Twenty
The memorial service stifled the endless chatter in the staffroom. The speculation about Ralph Wilson seemed exhausted, at last. Life moved on.
Gradually, I stopped looking up quickly, heart racing, every time the staffroom door opened, in case it was a summons. I stopped stammering when John Bickers paused to chat to me in the corridor, stopped wondering what his motive was, whether the police had asked him to watch me, whether I was on their list of suspects.
There were days, wonderfully ordinary days, when I realised I was once again utterly absorbed in teaching for whole stretches of time; writing up lists of ideas on the whiteboard or helping the class make 3-D maps of Peru or hearing their high, insistent voices debate the question of the week: was it better to be rich or happy? If they could be an animal, which would they be? On those days, I dared to think that perhaps it was okay, after all.
Perhaps we really had got away with it.
It hadn’t entirely left me, though. Some nights, I still woke at 3 a.m., body sweating, and stared in panic at the dark ceiling. I still saw in the darkness, from time to time, Ralph’s crumpled body at the bottom of the steps or the all-knowing, all-seeing eyes of Detective Inspector Johns, boring into mine and reading my guilt there. I drank whisky and warm milk to chase away the ghosts and practised deep breathing.
I wondered about Helen. I imagined her lying awake, red-eyed, as haunted as I was. I saw her kicking off the bedclothes, hollowed out with guilt, and pacing round the house. The shadowy sitting room. The deserted hall. Standing at the closed door to the cellar, remembering.
I wondered how often she thought of me and, when she did, what feelings took her. We were bound together by what we’d done. We were the keepers of a terrible, unspoken secret, a secret that could destroy us both.
I thought a lot about what she’d done. I understood it, I decided at last. She had been in shock and, if she had to lose her husband, her daughter’s father, it was better to suffer a mysterious disappearance than to be the widow of an adulterer whose lover sent him tumbling down the cellar steps, naked, in a fight. She was right: the headlines, the trial, the endless gossip… it would be intolerable for her and for Anna too, as well as ruinous for me.
But I couldn’t help feeling that the business between us had been left unresolved. I owed her. What I didn’t know was what payment she might demand.
The more time passed, the more I wanted to know. The more I felt I had to know.
It was about that time that Sarah Baldini sent round a fresh memo about the annual whole school photograph. It had been postponed when Ralph went missing. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the school wouldn’t be shown to its best advantage if we were all arranged in rows, scrubbed up, while a police investigation continued just out of shot.
Now all that was over and it was being revived.
Emails went out to parents with a few days’ notice.
Freshly ironed uniform, please. No jewellery. Regulation hair accessories only. Clean, polished shoes.
The day of the photograph was blowy but dry. After morning assembly, Elaine took charge of organising the Lower School children to file up the hill, walking, one class after another, in an endless crocodile, to the Upper School. The photographic company had erected a tiered platform there, as they did every year. The Upper School, dominated by slouching, self-conscious adolescents, was already being ushered into place along the back section. The sixth formers, allowed to wear their own clothes at school, rather than school uniform which was mandatory for everyone else, painted a splash of colour down the last two rows, bounded only by the final row of teachers. Height wasn’t the only reason the sixth formers were hidden away from view at the back.
We set about threading the line of younger children into the front rows. The year ones knelt up along the front, then the reception children sat right at the front, legs crossed. We teachers formed a frame, along the back and making two neat lines down either side, hemming the children into position. Only Sarah Baldini and John Bickers, the two heads, sat on actual chairs, right at the front, in the centre.
I was one of the last to take my place. I was helping Elaine to shoo the reception and year one children closer together so we had a chance of fitting them all in shot, scolding the children who thought it hilarious to ruffle up the neatly combed hair of the younger children in front of them and breaking up arguments before they had the chance to develop into fights.
I stood for a moment by the photographer’s tripod, scanning the scene to catch any unruly behaviour. It was quite a sight. Nearly nine hundred pupils, from the smallest four-year-old to the coolest, lankiest eighteen-year-old, gathered together for the annual picture, all but the oldest dressed alike in white shirts and blouses, dark blue ties and pinafores, hair short or long, slicked back or tied back with blue and white scrunchies. To the left, the hill was thick with trees, marking the border between the Upper and Lower School. Behind the final row, the Upper School’s main building – the oldest part of the campus – sat squat but imposing.
My mouth twisted as I took it all in. I’d stood in this same spot several times before, marshalling the ranks as the pupils got ready for the final inspection by Sarah Baldini before she took her seat, arranged her legs to one side, her hands in her lap, then signalled readiness to the photographer. There were children now in years four and five, standing with all the self-assurance of eight- and nine-year-olds who were starting to find their feet in life, whom I could remember in previous photographs as small, scared reception children, hunched cross-legged on the grass.
It had meant something to me, once, this mammoth display of the school’s children. It had stirred me. But now, with all that had happened in the past year, without Ralph, I felt empty.
For the first time, it hit me. I’d have to leave. It was killing me, this pretending to the world that nothing had changed. Every day I was here, in these buildings where we�
�d met, I was weighed down by guilt and fear. More than that, I looked for him, longed for him, missed him. He was everywhere. In every classroom, every corridor, every corner.
How could I carry on here now, without him?
Twenty-One
One Thursday, I was setting up my year three class for a craft activity when I saw Anna race past the classroom windows, down the empty corridor. It was afternoon playtime and the children were supposed to be outside. I dropped my pots of wax crayons on the table and hurried after her.
I found her standing by one of the stacks in the Lower School library, her face blotchy and wet with tears. She turned her large, frightened eyes on me as I approached. Ralph’s eyes.
‘Anna! What’s the matter?’
I pulled out a clean tissue and offered it to her.
She gulped, her breath snagged with crying and running, and blew her nose noisily.
‘Sit down here.’ I sat at one end of a reading settee and patted the empty place beside me. ‘Let’s have a chat.’
She hesitated. Her eyes stuck to her black school shoes, reluctant to meet mine. The leather shone with polish. Whatever Helen was going through inside, she was clearly managing her grief well enough to take care of her daughter.
‘Come on. Tell me all about it.’
She turned and perched as far from me on the settee cushions as she could, twisting the tissue between her fingers.
‘I’m not cross, Anna. I just want to help.’
Silence, broken only by her rough breathing.
‘Anna?’
I was bracing myself for some upset in relation to Ralph’s death. Distress, perhaps, sparked by another child saying something tactless in the playground about his disappearance, as young children did. Mean taunts or persistent questions about what had happened.
She gulped. The tissue was starting to shred now into wet strands.
‘It’s all right, Anna. You can tell me.’ My tone was calm and friendly.
She tipped her head sideways and gave me a quick glance, reading my face. ‘It’s my bookbag.’
I leaned in, wondering if I’d misheard. ‘Your bookbag? Have you lost it?’
She nodded miserably.
‘Have you told Mrs Prior?’
She shook her head, her thin shoulders hunched. Even her plaits drooped.
‘You’re worried she’ll be angry?’
A fresh tear gathered and splashed down her cheek and she swiped it with the back of her hand.
‘Anna. Listen.’ I lowered my head and inched closer to her. ‘I want to be your friend. See? I want to help you. Whatever problems you have, I’m on your side. Okay?’
She didn’t move. I wondered for a moment what she knew about me, then brushed away the thought. Whatever her mother felt, she’d never share it with her seven-year-old. Helen wasn’t that kind.
I spoke softly. ‘How are things, Anna? You had some time off, didn’t you? Is everything okay, you know, at home?’
She nodded without looking at me. I let the silence expand, waiting for her to say more. She didn’t.
Outside, in the playground, the five-minute bell rang. Very soon, hordes of children would come charging in through the double doors, hurtle up the stairs and hurry along the corridors to their classrooms, marshalled by shouting teachers: ‘Don’t run, children!’ ‘One at a time!’ ‘Edward, don’t push!’
I didn’t have long.
‘Now, about this bookbag. Where did you last see it?’
She screwed up her face. ‘Don’t know.’
‘Could you have left it at home?’
She shook her head.
‘Did you do reading this morning?’
She nodded.
‘Where? In here? In the year two corner?’
She mumbled, ‘In here.’
‘That’s why you came back here, to look for it?’
She nodded.
‘Well, you’re not allowed in here at playtime, are you, Anna?’
Downstairs, the final bell rang. Any moment, they’d be upon us.
‘Look. You run down and join your class, okay? If Mrs Prior asks where you were, just tell her you were having a chat with me. She won’t mind. I’ll have a good look round.’
She jumped to her feet.
I put a hand on her arm as she turned to race off.
‘And remember, Anna, any time you want to talk, you can always come and find me. Okay? I won’t tell anyone. I’m your friend, remember. Your secret friend.’
She fled without answering.
I made a hurried search of the library area and found her bookbag upside down, flattened by a floor cushion. Her daily reading diary was inside and the story she was reading, along with an empty snack box, covered with brightly coloured stickers, and a half-crayoned colouring sheet.
I hesitated. Judging from the stomping feet, my own class were already on their way up. I didn’t have time to fight my way against the flow, take the bag along to Hilary Prior’s classroom and be back before class started.
Of course, I should really have taken it down to Anna at the end of the school day. But by then, I had a much better idea.
Twenty-Two
The Lower School car park was almost deserted by the time I headed out, Anna’s bookbag on the passenger seat beside my work bag. Without thinking, I parked in the next street, out of sight of their house, as I always had in the past when I came to see Ralph. I only realised my mistake as I was walking down to their road. Hopefully, Helen wouldn’t even notice.
I was almost at their gate, striding past the neighbours’ house with the open curtains and large wall-mounted TV – switched on as usual – when I noticed him. He was sitting in a parked car, slightly further down the street from Ralph and Helen’s house. He was in the driving seat but turned away, offering me a hunched shoulder. His head was bowed, his nose was deep in a newspaper. I stopped and looked. My heart raced.
Was it the same man? It couldn’t be. The man I’d seen at a distance, disappearing into the cover of the trees as we walked away from the chapel after the memorial service. The man I’d seen sitting on a wall at the bus stop near my flat. I blinked. He was wearing an old-fashioned cap, hiding his hair. His jacket was different to the one I’d seen him wearing outside my house. I checked out the car. A crimson, four-door saloon. The paintwork along the passenger door was scraped and patched roughly with white.
He was too still. Unnatural. Too long on the same page of his newspaper. Almost as if he knew I was scrutinising him, as if he were waiting for me to lose interest and move on.
I tore myself away, opened the gate and went down the path to the gleaming, freshly painted front door. I pressed the front-door buzzer. It felt strange not to rap with bare knuckles, as Ralph had taught me.
As I stood there, waiting, looking into the streaks of reflected light across the glistening black, the time seemed suddenly to warp and I had an unnerving sense of flashback to my last visit to the house. When the door opened, I almost expected it to be Ralph who answered the door, furtive, barely revealing himself on the threshold, eager to usher me inside.
Helen. A small brown towel in her hands. A look crossed her face, fleeting and annoyed. After a pause, she smiled, feigning polite surprise.
‘Miss Dixon!’ Her voice was too loud, too cheery. ‘This is very unexpected! Anna isn’t in any trouble, I hope?’
‘Not at all.’ I held the bookbag high as if it were the chancellor’s red box. ‘Just returning this. She was quite upset at school that she’d lost it. I found it after class and wanted to get it back to her as quickly as possible.’
We stared at each other, both hesitant, as if we were waiting for someone offstage to give us a cue. She reached out to take it from me.
‘Do you mind if I say hello to Anna, Mrs Wilson? I won’t stay a moment.’ I kept tight hold of the bag and made to step over the threshold. ‘I just want to reassure her that she won’t be told off tomorrow.’
She hesitated, then reluctant
ly opened the door wider to let me in. When she closed it behind me, I felt suddenly trapped. The hall was suffocating. This is where Helen had stood when she came home that evening and found us, one dead, one alive. My eyes strayed to the top of the stairs, where I had stood, then to the tiled space at the bottom.
Helen’s eyes were on my face, taking it all in. When she spoke, there was an artificial brightness in her voice, as if she were auditioning for a part. Her body told a different story. Her eyes, when they met mine, were hard and vengeful. Her shoulders stooped prematurely, as if she were bowed by a great weight.
‘Anna’s watching something at the moment. In the sitting room. You won’t get much out of her, I’m afraid.’
She led me dutifully through to the sitting room. Anna and Clara sat side by side on cushions on the carpet, legs crossed, their eyes focussed on the iPad which was propped up on the coffee table in front of them. Some cartoon was playing, I had no idea which.
‘Hi, Anna!’
No response.
‘I found your bookbag!’
Helen smiled. ‘Sorry. No use trying to get their attention during screen-time. They look forward to it all day.’
She reached out and took the bag from me, opened it and checked through the contents.
‘Well, we mustn’t keep you.’
In the hall, as she tried to bustle me back out into the street, I leaned in and whispered, ‘Someone’s watching the house. A man.’
She glared.
‘Crimson car with a scrape. Go and look.’
She hesitated, then went back into the sitting room. I stood in the doorway and saw her pass the girls, then stand to one side of the window, carefully peering out without being seen. She came back.
‘You’re seeing things.’
‘I’m not!’ I pushed past and crossed to the window myself, moved back the net curtain and scanned the road. He’d gone. I turned back to her. ‘He was sitting right there, across the road.’ I hesitated, wondering how much to tell her. ‘And he was in the chapel grounds, watching everyone leave. At the memorial service.’