Afterwards

  “Are you talking about a court order for withdrawing food and fluid?” Sarah asks, and I think if a tiger was reincarnated as a police officer, she would look like Sarah.

  “Of course not,” Dr. Bailstrom says. “It’s early days and would be premature to—”

  “But that’s where you’re headed?” Sarah interrupts, prowling around her, growling.

  “A lawyer?” she asks.

  “A police officer.”

  “A tigress protecting her brother who she’s been a mother to,” I add, to try and clarify the situation for him, and loving Sarah for this.

  “We simply want to be straightforward with you,” the sock-it-to-them doctor continues. “In time, yes, there may be a conversation about whether it’s in Grace’s best interests—”

  Sarah interrupts again. “Enough of this. I agree with my brother that Grace can think and hear. But that’s not the point.” She pauses, then drops a word at a time into the silent pool that this room has become. “She. Is. ALIVE.”

  Realizing he’s met more than his match in Sarah, the doctor turns back to you. I see that Jenny has slipped in.

  “Mr. Covey, I think—”

  “She’s more intelligent than the lot of you,” you say, interrupting while I cringe—they are consultant neurologists, darling, brain surgeons. You take no notice. “Knows about books, paintings, all sorts of stuff; interested in everything. She doesn’t see how clever she is, but she’s the brightest person I’ve ever met.”

  “What goes on in that head of yours?” you’d asked me, a year into our romance, with admiration and affection. While you had wide open prairies in your head, I had libraries and galleries, stuffed full.

  “It doesn’t all just disappear,” you continue. “All those thoughts she has and feelings and knowledge; all that kindness and warmth and funniness. It can’t just go.”

  “Mr. Covey, as neurologists, we—”

  “You’re scientists. Yes. Did you know that four billion years ago it rained for thousands of years, making the oceans?”

  They are listening politely; they’ll allow you this time to go mentally AWOL after devastating news. But I know where you’re going with this. You’d told Addie about it a few months ago, livening up his water-cycle homework.

  “The water that rained down four billion years ago is exactly the same water we have today,” you continue. “It might be frozen into glaciers, or in the clouds, or in rivers or raining. But it’s the same water. And exactly the same amount. No more, but no less. It didn’t go anywhere. It couldn’t.”

  Dr. Bailstrom taps an impatient red heel, either not getting it or not wanting to try. But I like the idea that I’m a melted bit of glacier joining the ocean, the same but outwardly changed. Or, optimistically, part of a cloud, which will be rained down again, back to where I came from.

  “We will continue to do tests,” Dr. Bailstrom says to you. “But there really is no chance that your wife will ever regain consciousness.”

  “You said that she could live for years,” you say to her. “So one day there’ll be a cure. And we’ll just have to wait, for as long as it takes.”

  Had we but worlds enough and time.

  In time, a cloud rejoins the ocean.

  Wait long enough and a dull piece of grit becomes a luminous pearl. I feel it in my hand, round and smooth until it became warm; Adam’s hand in mine as he falls asleep.

  17

  A little while later Mum arrives at my bedside. Unlike you and Sarah, she didn’t argue with the doctors, and I’d seen each medical fact—supposed medical fact—hitting her face like flying glass, cutting new lines.

  “A nurse is with Addie,” she says. “Just for a little while. I can’t leave him long. But I had to talk to you on my own.” She pauses a moment. “Someone’s going to have to tell him that you’re not going to wake up.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Mum, you can’t do that!”

  I have never, ever, said fuck to my mother before.

  “I just want what’s best for him,” Mum says quietly.

  “How can this be best for Ads? Jesus!”

  It’s been years since we argued, and even then it was more of a disagreement. Of all times and places, we shouldn’t start now, here.

  “I know that you can hear me, Gracie, angel. Wherever you are.”

  “I’m right here, Mum. Right here. And soon their tests will pick it up. I’m going to be Roger fucking Federer, smashing the ball at a hundred miles an hour over the net for a ‘YES I CAN UNDERSTAND YOU!’ And once they know that I can still think, then they’ll try and find a way of getting me well again.”

  “I’d better get back to Addie.”

  She pulls the curtain back. Jenny is outside and has clearly overheard; the curtains obey the laws of science after all.

  She looks so anxious.

  “Granny G is wrong,” I say to her. “And so are the doctors. I can think and feel, can’t I? Talk to you now? Their scans aren’t sophisticated enough, that’s all. So one day, hopefully soon, I’ll give them a great big surprise.”

  “Roger fucking Federer?” she says.

  “Absolutely. Venus Williams, if I don’t fancy a sex change. Honestly, sweetheart, once they give me the right scans, they’ll know I’m OK.”

  But she’s still anxious, her head bent down and her narrow shoulders hunched together.

  “You were so brave. Going into the school for me.”

  “Dad said that too, and it’s really nice of you both, but it’s not in the least accurate and makes me feel a fraud.”

  She half smiles. “Oh right. So what does qualify as brave? If you’re not allowed running into a burning building to rescue someone?”

  “It was just instinct, that’s all. Really. Something any mother would do for her child.”

  But I’m not being totally honest. Most mothers—maybe all apart from me—would instinctively risk her life to rescue her child. And to start with I ran without thinking too. I just saw the school on fire and knew Jenny was inside and ran. But once I was inside.

  Inside.

  Every moment in that heat and choking smoke, my love for Jenny had to fight against my overwhelming urge to run away. A riptide of selfishness, which was trying to pull me out of the building. I was ashamed to tell you before.

  “You said you could get back into your body?” she asks.

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “I think that if you can get back into your body,” she continues, “it means you’re not going to die. When my heart stopped, and I was technically dead, I suppose, it was warmth and light leaving my body and coming into me, not the other way around. I think it’s living that’s the other way around.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Because surely she is right.

  We are interrupted by Sarah arriving, with a ramrod-straight woman with steel-gray hair in her late sixties, whom I know but can’t quite place.

  “Mrs. Fisher,” Jenny says, surprised.

  The old secretary at Sidley House.

  She’s brought me a fat bunch of sweet peas wrapped in newspaper, and the scent is glorious, temporarily overpowering the sanitized smell of the ward.

  Sarah looks along my vases of flowers, then deftly bins Silas Hyman’s institutional yellow roses. She smiles at Mrs. Fisher.

  “I think in the race for space here, yours win,” she says lightly, but I see her notice Mr. Hyman’s card and pocket it.

  “I didn’t think I’d actually see her,” Mrs. Fisher says to Sarah. “I just wanted to bring her flowers. We used to talk about gardening sometimes. But I hardly know her.”

  I remember now that Mrs. Fisher is the only person on her stretch of allotments to grow sweet peas rather than their edible cousins. She told me about it on Jenny’s first day at school, distracting me with flowers, and by the end of our horticultural conversation Jenny had stopped crying and was on the reading rug.

  “Would you mind having a chat with me?” Sarah asks. “I’m a po
lice officer and Grace’s sister-in-law.”

  Sisters-in-law. I’ve never before properly considered that we have our own separate and connecting thread in the matrix of the family.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Fisher replies. “But I really don’t think I’ll be of any help.”

  Sarah escorts her into the relatives’ room. Jenny and I go with them.

  “Before you ask me anything,” Mrs. Fisher says, “I have a police record.”

  Jenny and I are both startled. Mrs. Fisher?

  “I was an activist for CND and Greenpeace. I still am, but I don’t tend to get arrested nowadays.”

  Sarah looks a little judgmental, but I know not to misinterpret that now.

  “You said you were the secretary at Sidley House?”

  “For almost thirteen years. I had to leave in April.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Apparently I was too old to do the job. The head teacher told me that if I looked at my contract I’d see that there was ‘a policy of nonvoluntary retirement for all support staff at sixty.’ I’m sixty-seven. She’d waited seven years before enforcing the clause.”

  “And were you too old for the job?”

  “No. I was still bloody good at it. Everyone knew it, including Sally Healey.”

  “So do you know why she got rid of you?”

  “You don’t mince your words. No. I’ve no idea.”

  Sarah takes out a notebook, an incongruous Paperchase one with little owls on it, and writes something down.

  “Can I have your details?” Sarah asks. “Your full name is Mrs.…?”

  “Elizabeth Fisher. And it’s Ms., however you pronounce it. My husband left me six months ago and I think it’s customary to drop the ‘Mrs.’ at that point. The ring won’t come off. I have to get it cut, apparently. The symbolism is a little brutal for me at the moment.”

  Sarah looks sympathetic, but I feel cold. Mrs. Healey sent all the parents a letter saying Mrs. Fisher’s husband was terminally ill and that was the reason she’d had to leave the school. I’d organized a card and Maisie had traipsed off to some super-snazzy flower place in Richmond for a bouquet for her and, at my suggestion, bulbs.

  “Can you write down your address?”

  As Elizabeth writes down her details, I want to tell Sarah about the lie Mrs. Healey told the parents. Why did she do that?

  “Do you know Silas Hyman?” Sarah asks her—a logical question but not the one I hoped for.

  “Yes. He was a teacher at Sidley House. He was fired for something he didn’t do. A month before me. We’ve spoken on the phone once or twice since then. Kindred spirits and all that.”

  “Why he was fired?”

  “In a nutshell? An eight-year-old boy called Robert Fleming wanted him out.”

  “And the longer version?”

  “Robert Fleming loathed Silas because he was the first teacher to stand up to him. Silas called Fleming’s parents in, during the first week he had him in his class, and used the word wicked about their son; not suffering from some attention deficit disorder or a problem with socialization. Wicked. But unfortunately that’s not the form with fee-paying parents.

  “In March, when Silas was on playground duty, Fleming told him that an eleven-year-old boy had locked himself in the toilets with a five-year-old little girl, and she was screaming. Fleming said he couldn’t find any other teacher. So Silas went to the little girl’s aid. For all his faults, he’s very kind like that. And Robert Fleming knew that.

  “While Silas was away from the playground, Fleming forced a boy called Daniel up the fire escape and then made him climb over the edge. God knows what Fleming must have said to the little chap to make him do that. Then Fleming pushed him. Daniel was badly injured. Broke both his legs. It was lucky it wasn’t his neck.

  “Part of my job was school nurse. I looked after him until the ambulance arrived. Poor little mite was in such terrible pain.”

  I’d had only Adam’s version of events, and adult rumors, distorted as time went by. It became an accident, not deliberate, and the blame was targeted on Mr. Hyman for not supervising the playground rather than on Robert Fleming. Because who wants to believe an eight-year-old child can be that disturbingly manipulative, that vicious, that malevolent?

  But we already knew that he was from Adam, who lived in physical fear of him. We knew this wasn’t like regular teasing and bullying. I think it was when he pulled Adam’s tie around his neck, leaving a red welt for a week afterwards, saying he’d kill him if he didn’t “kiss his butt.” Or the skipping rope that he wound around Adam, tying him up, while he drew swastikas on his body.

  Jenny called him psycho-child, and you agreed.

  “Those aren’t things that a boy should be doing,” you said. “If it was an adult, we’d say he was sociopathic. Psychopathic, even.”

  It was after the swastika incident, just before this last half-term, that you demanded a meeting and got a guarantee from Mrs. Healey that Robert Fleming wouldn’t be coming back to Sidley House in September.

  “Mrs. Healey knew that a playground accident like that should never have happened in a primary school,” Mrs. Fisher continues. “She needed someone to blame, so she blamed Silas Hyman. I don’t think she wanted to fire him for it. She’s not stupid. She could recognize a gifted teacher, as a business asset if nothing else. But then there was that scurrilous article in the Richmond Post and the phone didn’t stop ringing with parents wanting action. So she had no choice as she saw it. Parents have a great deal of power in a private school, especially a new one.

  “The really horrifying thing is if that wicked boy had been blamed and hauled over the coals, there might have been a fighting chance of stopping him before it was too late.”

  He wasn’t hauled over the coals, was he? Mrs. Healey gave him a quiet exit.

  “You think he’ll do something again?” Sarah asks.

  “Of course he will. If he can plan and execute at eight breaking a boy’s legs, what will he do at eighteen?”

  Did Robert Fleming leave the playing field during sports day? No. I can’t believe that. I know we were told that almost all school-time fires are started by children, but not fires that can kill people. Not fires like this one. I refuse to be like DI Baker and think a child capable of that.

  “You said that after the Richmond Post article the phone didn’t stop ringing?” Sarah asks.

  “That’s right. And Sally Healey was forced to fire Silas.”

  “Do you know who told the press?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Does Silas Hyman have any enemies?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “You said earlier, ‘for all his faults.’ What do you mean by that?”

  “I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “But there is a reason?”

  “I just mean that he was arrogant. Male teachers in a primary school are a rare species. He was a cockerel in the henhouse.”

  She pauses a moment and I can see she’s fighting off tears.

  “How are they,” she asks. “Jenny and Mrs. Covey?”

  “Both of them are critically injured.”

  Elizabeth Fisher’s ramrod-straight posture bends a little and she turns her face from Sarah, as if embarrassed by her emotion.

  “I was there at the start, and so was Jenny. Reception children would come to my office to show me the work they’d done. Jenny Covey would come in and give me a hug and then walk out again. That was what she’d come to show me. In year one she got into Perler Beads. Other children would do meticulous geometric patterns and she’d do something completely random, no design or math to it—and it was wonderful. All those colored beads just put together any old how. Just so … energetic and unworried.”

  Sarah smiles. Does she remember Jenny’s Perler Bead phase? She probably got an anarchic mat for a Christmas present.

  “And Adam’s a lovely little boy,” she continues. “A credit to Mrs. Covey. I wish I’d told her that, bu
t I didn’t. Not that it would have made any difference, what I thought, but I wish I’d said it anyway.”

  Sarah looks moved by her, and Elizabeth Fisher has the encouragement she needs to continue.

  “Some of them, they hardly bother to say hello to their mothers at the end of the day, and the mothers are too busy gossiping to each other to really focus on their child. But Adam runs out there like a plane coming in to land, with his arms out to Mrs. Covey, and she looks like there’s no one else in the entire place but him. I used to watch them out of my office window.”

  She doesn’t have anyone to talk to about us, I realize, not with her husband gone. And she can hardly contact anyone at school after the excruciatingly embarrassing flowers-for-a-dying-husband.

  “Do you have any idea who might have set fire to the school?” Sarah asks.

  “No. But if I were you, I’d look for someone like Robert Fleming as an adult—because no one intervened early enough.”

  As Jenny and I return to my ward, I remember that meeting you had with Mrs. Healey about Robert Fleming. I’d been annoyed she’d listened to you when she hadn’t listened to me all those times I’d gone into school and complained. I’d thought it was because you’re a man and I was just another mum with Kit Kat crumbs in my pocket and spare PE socks in my handbag. You said it was because of your celebrity status: “I can kick up a smellier stink.”

  Maisie is arriving next to my bed. She pulls the flimsy curtains around it.

  “Another visitor,” I say to Jen. “It’s like a seventeenth-century salon in here this evening, isn’t it?”

  “A salon was in France, Mum.” She gestures to the brown geometric curtains around my bed. “And it had walls. With oil paintings and ornate mirrors.”

  “Nitpicky. It had a bed, didn’t it?” I reply. I’d told her about salons a few months ago. I’m touched she listened.

  “And there was a woman at the center of the attention. N’est-ce pas? All right, so she was meant to be a glittering witty intellectual …”

  Jen smiles.

  Maisie sits down on the side of my bed, rather than the visitor’s chair, and takes my hand. I now know that the confident, exuberant, not-giving-a-hoot! Maisie doesn’t exist. But she did once. I’m sure of that. I don’t know when Maisie started imitating herself as she used to be, the person she still should be.