‘Yes, he’s been what?’ her mother prompted eagerly and with an icy-cold shudder, Hope realised how close she’d come to blurting out the terrible truth.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter …’
‘Well, if it doesn’t matter, then there’s no harm in saying you’re sorry again, like you really mean it this time. You should never let the sun set on a quarrel and you can’t let this silly situation drag on any longer just because you’re being obstinate.’
It was like trying to have a conversation with a breeze-block, and Hope made the mistake of telling her mother just that. Which led to another argument and conclusive proof that Hope’s red hair was responsible for her sharp tongue and uncontrollable temper. The only way to appease Mrs Delafield and get her off the phone before they ran into a third hour was for Hope to agree that her baby brother, fifteen-year-old Jeremy, could come to stay for half-term. The Delafields and the Bensons wanted to squeeze in a week at the timeshare they co-owned in Corfu but didn’t want to drag Jeremy along ‘because honestly, we need a week away from him. He’s going through that difficult phase that you went through too.’ Of course, there was no question of leaving Jeremy home alone to burn the house down or have a party that would be posted on Facebook, with his parents returning home to find the house razed to the ground by marauding teenagers high on Meow-Meow.
By the time Hope rang off, she was emotionally exhausted and hopping mad again. So mad that she had to go for a brisk walk to work off some of the aggression, which took her as far as the Holloway Road to buy a family-sized bag of salt and vinegar crisps and a huge bar of chocolate, and when Jack finally deigned to come home with a Chinese takeaway as a pitifully inadequate peace offering, Hope felt too bilious to eat it.
Jack took Hope’s refusal to partake of sweet and sour chicken very badly and they segued seamlessly into the next part of their never-ending row, or maybe it was a new row – Hope couldn’t tell any more.
All Hope knew nearly two weeks later was that they still seemed to be locked into a cycle of endless bickering, even though she was trying to be on her very best, most non-confrontational behaviour, which was draining, and she had a ring of bruises around her wrist from repeated elastic band-pinging. Jack didn’t even appreciate the effort she was making. Not that he was around much to witness her restraint – he’d been working late every night.
Probably this weekend they needed to have some fun and go on a proper date, Hope decided to herself on Friday morning. Commit to a date night every week and book a weekend away somewhere. Then when they were on neutral ground, they could talk about becoming properly engaged. It would make both of them feel more secure.
And then there wasn’t time to wonder how she’d broach this controversial topic with Jack because it was five to nine and the school bell was ringing and Blue Class were going on their very first field trip. Hope needed to be clear-headed enough to remember the travel vouchers and make sure that everyone went to the loo before they headed off to the tube, even if they insisted that they didn’t need to go. In fact, especially if they insisted that they didn’t need to go.
WHEN SHE’D BEEN planning the class syllabus in the summer holidays, Hope had decided that she needed a theme for the academic year. Preferably a theme that encompassed geography, science, art, history and all the other subjects that weren’t maths and English (those were closely supervised by Dorothy so she could be absolutely sure that every pupil in the infant school was exactly where they should be, in line with the Council’s guidelines and the national league tables).
Hope had spent most of the summer break failing to come up with a suitable theme. She’d even gone to the British Library for inspiration, and while walking home, she’d taken a wrong turn and stumbled across the Camley Street Natural Park, an honest-to-goodness nature reserve in the industrial wasteland behind King’s Cross and St Pancras stations.
It was a tranquil leafy oasis of woodland, meadows and ponds stuffed full of plants, flowers and fungi, geese, ducks and butterflies. Blue Class could learn about the lifecycle that transformed frogspawn into tadpoles into vile, slimy, jumping frogs. They could take photos with the class camera of wild flowers and recreate them out of coloured paper, paint and glue when they were back at school and there were even two resident rabbits, Coco and Merlin, for them to coo over. Best of all, it was only one stop from Highbury and Islington on the Victoria Line.
As she shepherded them through the gates of the park in a slow-moving crocodile with the help of Andy, her classroom assistant, the dreaded Gurinder, on loan for the morning, and three parent volunteers, the excited jabbering of her class was validation enough. Hope knew that some of them had whopping great gardens and weekly deliveries of an Abel & Cole box full of seasonal vegetables, but a good half of them lived in grim blocks of flats and their only brush with nature came from a few withered trees breaking up the relentless grey concrete.
They stopped at the visitors’ centre to meet their guide, a cheerful girl with dreadlocks, who took them down the meandering path that circled the ponds and pointed out rare species of fungi, kingfishers and a bat box. Each new discovery was greeted with rapturous oohs and aahs and lots of hands shooting up to ask questions.
Once the guided tour was over, Hope split them into supervised groups of six, gave each group a worksheet to complete and shooed them away so she could sit on a bench and quickly scribble down notes for their next visit. That was the plan, but it was such a gorgeous day for early October, neither summer nor autumn, but somewhere in between, with the sun high in the sky and only the faintest of breezes stirring the reeds and rushes, that Hope put down her pad so she could tilt her face towards the sun and bask a little in its warm glow. She usually applied sunblock like a fiend but on the other hand, she didn’t want to end up with a vitamin D deficiency.
Hope could hear birds warbling and her class shrieking and yelling and generally sounding like they were so over-stimulated that it was going to be hell to get them through the next chapter of their Key Stage Two Numeracy workbooks that afternoon. Hope sighed. She’d deal with that then. Maybe dangle the promise of a rare gold star for the whole class if they worked in total silence and …
‘Hey, stranger,’ said a deep voice, and someone sat down next to her on the bench. ‘Haven’t seen you for a while.’
It wasn’t some random bloke trying to hit on her, as Hope had first suspected. It was someone far worse. Hope opened her eyes so she could shoot Wilson a wary, anxious look.
‘Oh, hi,’ she muttered, hand raised to smooth back her hair in a nervous gesture, until she realised that it was neatly braided and pinned up. Hope could feel her face heating up in embarrassment even as she twisted her lips in a vague approximation of a smile. For the life of her she couldn’t think what to say next – or at least something that wouldn’t hark back to the unhappy circumstances of their last meeting.
Wilson sat back and crossed his legs as if he planned to stay there and not say anything for quite a while. Hope looked around wildly for salvation in the form of a stray six-year-old who looked as if they might be about to fall into a pond, but they were all diligently examining leaves and fighting over who got to hold the worksheet, damn them.
‘So, how’s the hand?’
Hope seized on this conversational gambit gratefully and held up the appendage in question. ‘It’s much better, thanks,’ she said, turning up her palm so Wilson could see the shiny pink scar that itched slightly when she thought about it. ‘And you, you’re all right?’
Wilson dipped his head. ‘Yup.’
She could feel him looking at her as she stared fixedly ahead, not just because she was reliving her abject mortification all over again, but also because the whole tiny-child-falling-into-pond scenario was a distinct possibility.
‘You look different,’ Wilson continued, echoing Hope’s thoughts and confirming her suspicions that his mind was playing back to their last fraught, high-volume, tear-soaked and, oh God, snot-dripping enc
ounter. ‘All buttoned up. Are you wearing your teacher’s hat? Are those children yours?’
‘Only between eight fifty-five and three thirty,’ Hope told him, allowing herself to relax slightly because she did have thirty chaperones. Thirty-five, if she included assistants and volunteers, Hope amended, as she caught Gurinder’s disapproving eye. ‘We’re doing this year-long project on “The World Around Us” and they have a really good education programme set up here. It dovetails really nicely with Key Stage Two in the National Curriculum.’
‘Right, yeah, sure it does.’ Wilson was staring again. She prayed that it wasn’t because he was remembering the last time he’d seen her, when she was blotchy and red-faced like a laboratory bunny in the custody of a major pharmaceuticals company. It was probably because he’d always seen her in mufti before and now Hope was wearing one of her school uniforms: black Gap curvy-fit trousers, a filmy black and white polka-dot blouse and a red cardigan that Jack’s nan had knitted for her and which her mother insisted clashed with her hair. A pair of black Converses completed her ensemble, which was meant to be smart without being too smart. Practical but not boring, unlike Wilson who was wearing his usual uniform of dark wash Levis, white T-shirt and black v-neck, accessorised with an old-fashioned camera hanging from a strap round his neck.
‘This one of your usual haunts, then?’ Hope asked, horrified to discover that the words that came out of her mouth sounded biting and sarcastic. ‘I mean, this is quite a hidden little spot, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. I’m shooting just down the road and thought I’d take a walk while they finish building the set,’ Wilson offered. ‘Hard to believe we’re in the middle of London.’
‘Right.’ Hope scanned the pond again for any sinking six-year-olds. ‘So …’
‘So …’
‘Like …’ Hope took a deep breath. ‘About that night, well …’
‘Well, emotions were running high.’
Hope seized on that in the same way that she hoped one of her pupils would grab hold of a lifebelt if they did fall in the pond. ‘Right! And there was alcohol, lots of it, and it was all very upsetting and intense, and I’d been completely stressed out before the party even started.’ She stopped again because she was gabbling like an utter fool and there was the faintest hint of a smile playing around Wilson’s mouth. ‘What I’m trying to say is that I said stuff and you said stuff, like, we both said stuff we shouldn’t have said, and the situation that we found ourselves in didn’t bring out the best in either of us, and I’m not really sure how to deal with you sitting next to me when I thought I’d never see you again.’ One day explorers would discover a land where everyone spoke in run-on sentences and Hope would move there and the inhabitants of that land would make her their queen, Hope thought to herself as she tried to catch her breath.
‘Oh, so that’s why you unfriended me on Facebook,’ Wilson finished for her. ‘Don’t mention it. I completely understand.’
‘Well, Jack and I agreed that we wouldn’t have any contact with you and Susie again,’ Hope explained.
Wilson’s eyebrows shot up. ‘So, you and Jack are still together, then?’
There was no reason for him to sound quite so amazed. ‘Of course we are! We’ve been together all this time and that thing with Susie … you were right, it was just a kiss. And yes, I acted like a gigantic tool and made a ginormous deal about it, when really it was a very tiny deal.’ Her voice was shrill and desperate as if she wasn’t just trying to convince Wilson but herself as well. ‘Obviously Jack and I have some stuff that we need to work through.’
‘Obviously.’ Wilson cleared his throat. ‘Funny. You didn’t really strike me as that … well, never mind.’
‘That what?’
Wilson gave her a cool look. ‘That stupid or that gullible.’
‘Look, I told you, Jack and I have been together for over thirteen years and you don’t just throw away that kind of commitment because of a … a … kiss,’ Hope exclaimed, trying to run her fingers through her tightly constricted hair again. ‘OK, a kiss and some light flirting.’ Wilson opened his mouth to say something, but Hope rushed on because she didn’t want yet another debate about that night. She was sick of talking about it. ‘Anyway, are you and Susie still together?’
Wilson shrugged. ‘Off and on. More off than on.’
‘So, if I hadn’t unfriended you on Facebook, I’d have seen that your relationship status was set to “It’s complicated”?’ Hope asked in an attempt at some levity.
‘I think we’re at that stage in breaking up when we’re just having one long row interspersed with bouts of make-up sex, y’know?’
Hope didn’t know, as she’d never broken up with anyone before. It sounded exhausting and also needlessly dramatic. Either you were broken up or you weren’t. Whenever Lauren and Allison were going through the death throes of a relationship, she always longed to tell them that it would be a lot quicker and a lot less painful to stop weeping and wailing and endlessly analysing every single look, line and misdemeanour and just cut the boy who’d done them wrong out of their lives. End of. Obviously she’d never actually acted on that impulse but instead had been there with tissues and ice-cream and an endless litany of ‘It’s his loss and anyway, you were far, far too good for him.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said to Wilson, who didn’t look like he needed tissues, ice-cream or her platitudes.
‘If I tell you something, will you listen and process it, and not go flying off the deep end like you usually do, right?’
Nothing was more guaranteed to get Hope all riled up than someone telling her not to get riled up. She surreptitiously pinged her elastic band and took a deep breath. ‘I’ll try,’ she agreed unenthusiastically.
‘Good enough, I suppose,’ Wilson said with a shrug. ‘OK, right.’ He was twisting his hands together nervously, those long fingers rubbing against each other. ‘Susie’s all cut up about you and about me and blah blah, but mostly she wants to talk about Jack and how they’re “in the grip of something more powerful than doing the right thing”.’ Wilson’s top lip curled. ‘That’s a direct quote, by the way. There’s another woman who loves to over-dramatise.’
‘It’s simply not true,’ Hope said furiously, because kissing was one thing, one very horrible, deceitful thing, but the suggestion that they might be in the thrall of an over-whelming passion, and actually having sex, was more than she could bear to deal with. It was far easier to just deny everything. ‘Jack would never do that to me. He said it was just one kiss. He’s promised that it will never happen again and he loves me – and Susie, well, she can just fuck off!’
‘Eloquently put, as usual.’
‘Why do you always have to be such a knob …?’ Hope shut her mouth with an audible snap as a small hand tugged on her cardigan sleeve.
‘Miss! Miss!’ said Sorcha urgently as Hope turned to look at the tiniest member of Blue Class in horror. How much had she heard? ‘Miss!’
‘What’s the matter, Sorcha?’ Hope asked, trying to modulate her voice from screechy to calm and in control.
‘It’s Stuart,’ Sorcha said indignantly, hands on hips. ‘He’s all up in my business, Miss.’
The storm had passed and, miracle of miracles, Wilson was actually smiling indulgently because Sorcha was flaxen-haired and blue-eyed and looked like she’d been booked from Central Casting in response to a plea for a whey-faced moppet. Hope was made of stronger stuff. ‘I don’t know what that means,’ she lied, though Wilson had been all up in her business not two minutes ago. ‘You need to use your words.’
Sorcha’s eyes crossed as she tried to come up with another explanation. ‘He was shouting right in my face,’ she revealed. As far as Blue Class were concerned, hurting puppies and kittens, being up yourself and shouting right in someone’s face were crimes of pure evil. ‘He grabbed the worksheet even though Andy said it was my turn to hold it, and he wouldn’t give it back, and then he said he was going to pus
h me in the pond. He was totally disrespecting me, Miss.’
‘Right, let’s go and sort this out,’ Hope said briskly, as she got to her feet. Sorcha grabbed hold of her cardigan sleeve again so she could tug Hope in the direction of horrible Stuart. Hope turned her head to fling a goodbye at Wilson but he was standing up too.
She could feel his eyes on her back as she let herself be dragged over to the little group of children who were watching Andy tell Stuart off.
‘Everything all right here?’ Hope asked because she didn’t want to step on Andy’s toes, even if she did feel that sometimes his approach to discipline was a bit too touchy-feely to be truly effective.
‘I think some of us are finding the concept of working together a bit challenging,’ was the woolly answer Hope got. Andy was an idealistic Philosophy graduate who’d just returned from three years’ volunteer work in Cambodia. Now he was trying to make a difference in Islington. There were times when Hope wished he’d go and make a difference somewhere else but at least he wasn’t Gurinder, who was bearing down on them with a grim look on her face.
Hope chose Timothy, quiet studious Timothy who’d already written the Latin names for five different plants on the disputed worksheet, to get an impartial take on what had happened. What had happened was a lot of shoving and shouting and ‘then Stuart threw the worksheet on the ground in a fit of pick …’
‘Pique,’ Hope corrected gently.
‘And it’s all muddy. It was very hard to make my handwriting especially neat without a desk to rest on and now it’s ruined,’ Timothy finished on an anguished wail. ‘Will I still get a sticker for correctly identifying a marsh warbler when Andy thought it was a reed warbler?’
‘I think this is a good time to remind everyone’ – Hope glared pointedly at Stuart who stared back at her defiantly – ‘that as well as giving out stickers, I can also take them away.’
From the shock that greeted her words, it was apparent that Blue Class hadn’t been aware of this. ‘And I also want to remind you that we’re supposed to be coming back to Camley Street throughout the year so we can learn how the different seasons affect the world around us.’ Hope paused, because all of Blue Class was now assembled in a semi-circle around her and she could do a quick sweep of their anxious faces. ‘I’m not sure they’ll let us come back if you can’t behave like big boys and girls instead of a pack of savages.’