‘Two years after Grace was bully-murdered, as I call it, I went to the Edinburgh Fringe and spotted a young woman whose face I recognized in a dreadful, low-budget show.’
‘Lisa?’
Adam nods. He walks back to the edge of the roof and peers over it, as if to check that the courtyard is still there. ‘I introduced myself to her. She offered her sympathies and said nice things about Grace. When I told her I was head teacher here, she nearly jumped on me. She was desperate for me to use my influence to get her some opportunity or other in London. Said she was flat broke, and looked it, I have to say. Very shabby package, she was. I tried to extricate myself tactfully from her clutches, but I couldn’t deter her from giving me her contact details. I kept them, though I don’t think I had any intention of seeking her out. Fate, you see? Then, years later—dish best served cold and all that!—once I’d started to make my Ruby plan . . . well, it’s not exactly a starring role in Guys and Dolls at a Delfont Mackintosh theater, but I offered Lisa a fascinating and unique assignment and I paid her well for it. She was delighted by the whole package—the money, obviously, and the chance to do something for Grace’s memory, and to help me. I think she was rather fonder of Grace than I’d realized. Quite attached to her, she seemed to be.’
‘I still don’t understand why you needed her,’ I say.
‘Symmetry. I wanted to give Ruby a taste of her own medicine, so she’d know how it feels when another girl, a girl you haven’t harmed at all, suddenly launches a hate campaign against you. I wanted Ruby to feel the ache of loneliness that comes from knowing someone has chosen you and only you to victimize—someone who is a stranger to justice, who accuses you of things you haven’t done, who does things to you and then denies them when you know it must be her.’ Adam laughs. ‘And then, when we escalated to the noose, and the notes . . . well, I wanted her to think she might die. Or, even better, to decide that was her only way out.’
‘What was your planned endgame? If I and the others hadn’t found out the truth about Lisa, and if she hadn’t fled as a result, what would have happened?’
‘Oh, once she’d reduced Ruby to a cowering wreck who would never be the same again, once Ruby had slit her wrists or whatever method she chose, “Imogen” . . .’—he makes air quotes with his fingers—‘. . . would have moved to a different school.’
I don’t suppose it matters, but there’s one more question I have to ask. ‘Is Lisa a really terrible actress, or did you tell her to act like a creepy psycho throughout? I mean . . . she wasn’t subtle. Pretty much from the word go, she behaved like the worst cliché of a sociopath.’
‘She did.’ Adam nods. ‘On my instructions. I told her to ham it up, to really go for it. I said, “Ruby and Kendall Donovan will never be able to prove it’s you because you’ll have alibis, and so the more obvious you are, the more it will torment them that you’re getting away with it.” ’
‘Why target Jess, with the music box?’ I ask.
‘Ruby was the target—I knew everyone would be sure it was her. And I didn’t want to be too obvious. But, Carolyn, I would never harm Jess.’ He sounds offended. For a moment, he looks like the old Adam again. Then his new face reappears. ‘I like Jess. Really. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more obviously on your side last year. I hope you can understand the extent to which I truly was, in my heart of hearts. I thought to myself so often, “How Carolyn disapproves of me! And how she would approve if she only knew the truth!” I was protecting Jess, you see—I wanted her to feel safe here.’
‘So you were already making your . . . plan, last year?’
‘Oh yes. Plans as complex as this take a good few months to put together.’ Racki frowns. ‘And still they can go wrong.’
‘Your plan hasn’t gone wrong,’ I tell him. ‘Like you say: You protected Jess, and Ruby’s learned her lesson. You don’t have to . . .’ I point to the edge. He’s so close to it now, and keeps looking at it. I feel sick. What if I can’t do anything to stop him?
I have to. I want to, for the simple reason that he was always on Jess’s side. He tried to save her from Ruby—went out of his way to do so, spent money on it.
He lurches forward suddenly, toward the edge.
‘Adam, you don’t have to go to prison,’ I say quickly.
He stops. Stares at me as if I’m mad. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Perhaps we can . . . reach an agreement. Make a deal—one where I keep your secret and you get to keep your job.’
His eyes dart back and forth: to me, to the edge.
Am I really going to do this? Looks as if I am. ‘It’s not a joke,’ I tell him. ‘I can convince the others that Lisa Daisley acted alone. You can keep your job, your life, everything.’ Everything you haven’t already lost. ‘At least come inside and let’s talk about it.’
Slowly I walk toward him, holding out my hand.
ELISE
On stage, one of Adam’s more athletic students backflips down a ‘marble’ staircase made from blocked foam and cleverly painted card. She comes to a halt at the bottom of the stairs in a smooth center split before throwing her torso forward until she’s lying flat on the stage, facedown and with her arms outstretched. Unmoving. I shake my head slowly, in a mix of incredulity and respect. Carolyn is ballsy, I’ll give her that.
‘You can fall out, you can fall fast, you can fall hard . . .’ The chorus paces menacingly around their friend’s prone body, their voices crossing over in rapid rounds that remind me of childhood nursery rhymes. ‘But fall too deep and you’ll fall apart.’
I seem to be the only member of the audience to have noticed that the end-of-year production is a thinly veiled dramatization of what happened last year. Adam introduced the play as ‘the most exciting and original musical since Hamilton,’ and Bronnie and Kendall have sat, rapt, since the opening notes. Surely they recognize themselves in the mild, rather dumpy deportment mistress and the once-glamorous etiquette queen who’s gone rather to seed?
Set in a girls’ finishing school in the 1940s, Carolyn’s Minding Manners is a murder mystery musical clearly designed to showcase Jess’s talents above all other participants. Carolyn’s tweaked the facts (she is a lawyer, after all—no libel suits for her . . .) so there are three friends, not four; two baddies, not one; a host of cameo parts and chorus roles and some surprisingly catchy tunes. A song from the first act runs through my head.
There’s a bigger life to live outside of paying a bill,
no one ever got rich from a corporate treadmill,
I got money to burn but now I know I gotta earn
your love.
I smile wryly. No prizes for guessing that Carolyn based that particular character on me. On the old me, that is. I still work hard, but I close the laptop in the evening. Most evenings. Well, some evenings. The point is, I’m trying. Sadie and I spend more time together: She joins me for yoga from time to time, and I go to see films with her and resist the temptation to sneak a look at my emails. I’ve started running every morning—replacing one addiction with another—and when I get back I make a smoothie and take one up when I wake Sadie. Almost like a proper mum . . .
In the aftermath of Imogen-gate, it was obvious Carolyn was hiding something. Obvious to me, at any rate. Perhaps not to Bronnie, whose ostrich approach to bad news is at times irritating and at others enviable. I look at her now, clasping Carl’s hand, smiling broadly at the stage, where Bel is singing a duet in a key a fraction higher than her natural range, and I feel a twinge of envy. A lack of ambition must be very relaxing. She swears she’s stopped any shady dealings with ghost students, but I’ve discovered I don’t really care. In fact, I like her more for knowing that she’s capable of breaking the rules from time to time. Bel sings:
Whatever they say, I’ve got your back.
However much you hurt, however under attack,
I’ll be there, by your side, with a ready comeback—I’ve got your back.
Carolyn isn’t sitting with the rest
of us. She’s in the wings, a spiral-bound score clutched to her chest. Every now and then, as a performer enters or exits the stage, the tabs will swing to one side and we’ll catch a glimpse of her black-clad figure. Her lips move almost imperceptibly, following every line, every lyric. She’s in her element.
And in a flash I understand what’s been niggling at me ever since our showdown with Lisa Daisley, ever since Carolyn stormed off, saying she was determined to find out who Lisa had been working with, only to return with an air of casual indifference. It’s all sorted. No big deal. No mystery. Nothing to see here . . .
Adam Racki.
Whatever Carolyn found out was important enough to Adam for him to strike a deal with her: to allow her a platform as a debut musical theater writer.
He bought her silence.
Adam’s changed too. He’s lost weight, hair. Aged a decade in one academic year. Whereas once he strutted around school like he was Laurence Olivier himself, now he scuttles along the corridor and skulks in his office. The pretentious quotes from plays are a thing of the past. Despite his fine performance that day, I’m convinced that Adam Racki knew full well who Lisa Daisley was. Maybe he knew full well what she was doing in his school, what she was planning. After all, there’s no record of Lisa—or Imogen—in the student files, and Bronnie swears blind she knows nothing about her arrival.
Could Adam have been helping Lisa? What else would make Adam nervous enough to hand over his famous end-of-year production to an unknown writer? After all, the reputation of the school depends on the quality of its students, its performances.
I don’t care. Lisa’s gone. Adam Racki’s handing over the Academy reins. He’ll be someone else’s problem now. Sadie and the other girls are leaving OFA and going their separate ways. Jess has a job already, much to Carolyn’s undisguised triumph. Only chorus, but it’s Les Mis, and it’s West End, and—well, maybe she has what it takes to make it in show business. We’ll see. Ruby’s auditioning for 42nd Street on the West End, so according to Sadie she’s been tap dancing like her feet are on fire for the last week. She doesn’t stand a chance, but I have to admit the girl’s got guts.
Bel spins across the stage, leaping into the arms of a boy who doesn’t look old enough to leave school, before joining him in a reprise of their duet. I wonder if she’s told her parents about her own audition plans.
‘Bronnie will never allow that,’ I said when Sadie told me.
‘Bel’s determined. Full board, a hundred quid a week, and you get to see the world.’
I can see the appeal, and a seasonal contract on a cruise ship is certainly more secure than touting audition pieces around the West End, but I don’t fancy Bel’s chances wriggling out of those apron strings of Bronnie’s.
As for Sadie . . . My heart swells with a smugness that must surely rival Carolyn’s. I was dreading the end of the year, building myself up to that conversation, where I sat Sadie down to tell her a few home truths about the future. Ninety percent of actors are unemployed at any one time. Only a tiny number of those earn enough to support a family . . .
In the end, I didn’t need to say anything.
‘I’m going to start a business,’ Sadie announced. She handed Nick and me a sheaf of typewritten papers. We were sitting around the table, having dinner—another of the small changes we’ve made over the last few months—and I spread out the papers so I could see them better. It was a business plan. A brilliant one. SWOT analysis, financial projections, a list of potential clients and investors. A clear argument for need, and solid research into the competition.
Mediplay, Ltd. will provide role-play actors for healthcare training, giving trainee doctors the chance to break bad news to a ‘real’ relative, or to explain a diagnosis to a difficult patient. I’ve invested, of course—it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. Nick, Sadie, and I have spent hours working through the fine print.
I’ll be there, by your side,
I’ve got your back (and I’ve got yours)
I’ve got your back.
Bel and her partner finish their duet and we all applaud. I sneak a glance down the row, to where Kendall is clapping feverishly next to Bronnie. Ruby still comes over from time to time, but she’s quieter now, and Sadie says she wakes crying in the night sometimes, haunted by the feeling of a noose around her neck. Kendall has her in therapy, of course, for what that’s worth. Eighty-five pounds an hour, Greg says.
Greg.
I soften. A sweet man. It almost went wrong—in the way it often goes wrong when men confuse great sex with something more complicated.
‘You’ve got history with Kendall,’ I pointed out, when he said he and I would be good together. Were good together. ‘You’ve got a daughter.’
‘But this . . .’ We were lying in bed, and he ran a finger down between my breasts, leaving the rest unspoken.
I was firm. ‘This is good because it’s new. If you have this every day, you’ll get bored.’ So will I, I added silently. No need to dent the man’s ego.
‘My relationship with Kendall is broken.’
‘Mend it.’
‘I don’t know how.’
So I told him. Infidelity gets such negative press, but let’s face it: You’re happier with your run-of-the-mill home cooking when you know you can eat out a couple times a month, right? Greg tells me he and Kendall are much happier now, and I get to add some excitement to my San Fran business trips. Everyone’s a winner. Kendall should thank me, really. Okay, so I’m breaking the rule about no return matches, but . . . rules were made to be broken, right?
I scrutinize her profile: the soft hair, the innocent eyes, the fragile bone structure. You don’t fool me, Kendall Donovan. For all her self-help claptrap—her cancer ‘journey,’ her existential angst—Kendall is not a nice person.
Greg finally told me everything.
He told me about Ruby, and the bullying at school, and the night Vee died. About the call from Kendall, hysterical and incoherent, and the race to save a life already snatched away. He told me how traumatized Ruby was, and how desperately Kendall wanted to make things better, and how everyone leaped to conclusions that made it Ruby’s fault.
And then he told me about the security system. ‘Kendall worried a lot when she got sick. She got nervy. Paranoid. She bought drapes, in case someone might look in, even though the garden wall is ten feet high. She worried we’d be burglarized, or that someone would snatch Ruby on her way home from school.’
‘So you got an alarm?’ I remembered the flashing light I’d seen on the outside of Greg’s and Kendall’s gated home.
‘And cameras.’
I raised one eyebrow.
‘Kendall got me jittery, too. What if we were burglarized? What good’s an alarm if the cops don’t get there in time?’ Greg’s alarm company installed cameras above each entrance to the house, and one in the hall, facing up the stairs. ‘If anyone climbed through an upstairs window,’ Greg said, ‘the hall camera would get their face as they ran out.’
Despite the warmth of the restaurant we were in, an icy chill began to creep down my spine. I wanted to stop him talking—I didn’t want to hear the rest—and yet, at the same time, I couldn’t not know how it ended.
‘You didn’t tell Kendall about the cameras, did you?’ My voice was barely a whisper.
Greg shook his head. ‘I figured if she thought I was taking her concerns too seriously she’d get even more paranoid. To be honest, I didn’t think about it myself much.’
Until the night Vee died.
The camera in the hall, facing up the stairs, didn’t capture intruders, their pockets stuffed full of the family silver. It captured Ruby and Vee and Kendall.
It captured what really happened.
I picture Greg sitting in a darkened study, the light from his monitor flickering across his face as the ugly truth unfolded, frame by frame.
I think about sleeping with Greg. I think about ditching the pills, and cutting down on the booze, a
nd helping my daughter go into business. I think about how much has changed in a year. No, I don’t feel guilty at all.
I look at Kendall. But you should.
BRONNIE
Sometimes I thought this moment would never come, I thought we might never get to the end-of-year musical that marks the beginning of the summer holidays. Considering how much I love my job, it’s amazing how happy I am to be having a break from the Academy and everyone in it. It’s been quite a year. Even though Imogen—I still can’t call her Lisa—was no longer around at the beginning of the January term, the repercussions of her actions are still being felt. Something fundamental has changed within the school; the dynamics are no longer the same, and I’m not sure whether that’s a good or bad thing.
The one thing I’m glad about is that my illegal work for Adam was brought to an abrupt end; at least I can sleep easy at night now. I feel very lucky to have got away with it, but that was largely due to support from the other mums, who told Adam he was wrong to have coerced me into creating ghost students, using the threat—even if only implied—of losing my job if I didn’t comply. They made him put a stop to it at once, and although there might be payback at some point—pretending that twenty students had suddenly decided not to come back for the January term was a bit risky—the authorities concerned don’t seem to have picked up on it so far. And, of course, my salary is back to what it was before, which means no more silk dresses for me. Not that I mind; every time I see mine hanging in the wardrobe, it’s a reminder of what I did, and a reminder never to do anything illegal again. I’m glad that Carl doesn’t know, and only hope that he never finds out. I hate having secrets from him, but when it comes down to it, I realize that we all have secrets.
I might have created accounts for ghost students, but I didn’t know that Imogen wasn’t registered at the Academy. It’s why there were no background checks, which would have picked up that she was using a false identity. Adam said it was an oversight, and I still don’t know whether to believe it. Maybe that’s his secret. There’s definitely something he’s not telling us about Imogen’s presence at the Academy, but when it comes down to it, I don’t really care. All I care is that she’s gone, and has taken her creepy ways with her.
The Understudy Page 28