And what about Ivo? She’d want me to see him as grown-up too. But he didn’t tell us when she’d been attacked with red paint or persuade her to go to the police. So how can I see him as a man? As anything other than an immature and irresponsible boy? In every way the opposite of you.
And it’s not just the red paint, it’s the not finishing a history essay because she’d rather go to a party, and spending too long with her friends instead of revising for exams. It’s living so much in the present, not thinking of the future, and that is the joy of children, yes, because they haven’t yet grown up.
You don’t agree with me, I know. You take Jenny’s side, as I often take Adam’s, our family splitting down the familiar fault line.
“You know what would really stop the world having wars?” Adam asked. He’d just finished reading Give Peas a Chance but wasn’t convinced that a worldwide boycotting of vegetables by children would stop global warfare.
“What?” I asked, peeling potatoes, hopeful they would now be eaten.
“An alien invasion from space. Then everyone in the world would band together.”
“True,” I said.
“But drastic,” you said, coming in.
“Imaginative,” I corrected.
Do I always correct you with Adam?
“Like the testudo,” you said to him.
Adam smiled at you, then saw my blank expression.
“Roman soldiers held up their shields over their heads to make a shell around the whole group,” he said. “So no one could get hurt.”
“Testudo is Latin for tortoise,” you said, enjoying—infuriatingly—that you were being erudite over me.
My flow of thought about testudos and aliens is brought to an abrupt halt as Sarah parks on a fast busy road in Hammersmith, her car half straddling the meager pavement.
I follow her to a small terraced house, the bricks stained black by exhaust fumes.
Sarah rings the doorbell. A moment later Elizabeth Fisher calls through the door, without opening it.
“If you’re from any religion or an energy company, I’m already sorted out on both fronts.”
I’d forgotten how funny and stern she could be at the same time. But it strikes me that she’s also nervous, afraid even, about opening the door. She’s on her own in a rough neighborhood. I’m struck, again, by the financial discrepancy between the staff and the parents at Sidley House.
“It’s Sarah Covey. Grace’s sister-in-law. Can I come in?”
“Wait one moment.”
From inside is the sound of her unbolting the door and the chain being taken off.
She opens the door, dressed in smart trousers and ironed shirt as she was every day at Sidley House, her posture rigorously straight. But her smart trousers are a little shiny on the knees where the cloth has worn.
“Has anything happened?” she asks, worried.
“No change,” Sarah replies. “Would it be OK if I asked you some questions?”
“Of course. But as I said before, I really don’t think I can help.”
She leads Sarah into her tiny sitting room. Outside the traffic thunders past, shivering the walls.
“Can you tell me what your duties were at the school?”
Mrs. Fisher looks a little taken aback, but nods.
“Certainly. I did all the basic secretarial ones, such as answer the phone and type up letters. I was also responsible for the registers. I was the first point of contact for potential new families, sending out prospectuses and organizing invitations to open days, then getting the paperwork ready for all the new children. I was also the school nurse, the part of my job I enjoyed the most actually, really just putting on ice packs and sometimes using an EpiPen. I’d tuck the child under a blanket on my sofa and then wait with them for Mum or a nanny to arrive. We only ever had one serious incident. The one I told you about.”
Her job had so many more responsibilities than Annette Jenks’s. And she did it well. So why did Mrs. Healey really get rid of her?
If she’d still been there—still been school nurse—everything would have been different.
“What about the gate?” Sarah asks.
“Yes, I’d buzz people in. There was an intercom, and I made sure they identified themselves first, by name.”
“Did you have a screen monitor?”
“Good God, no. I just spoke to them. It seemed quite adequate. You get to know voices as well as faces after a while. But in fact, it was pretty shoddy security. Half the children and most of the parents got to know the code. They weren’t meant to, of course.”
“Do you have a copy of your job description?” Sarah asks.
“Yes. It’s in my contract.”
She rummages in a bureau and takes out a document, which has clearly been much thumbed, encased in a plastic wallet.
“The part about retirement age is on page four,” Elizabeth says, handing it to Sarah.
“Thank you. Do you have a school calendar?”
Elizabeth sits down, clearly in her customary chair. She gestures to the wall opposite, the one she’d see most easily. The Sidley House School calendar is hanging there.
“All the staff are given them at the end of the Christmas term. I look at it quite frequently …”
I see how much she misses the children. She always put them first, making adults wait if a child was in her office needing a grazed knee tended to, or with a piece of artwork or writing or Perler Bead creation to show her.
“Do you know what the code on the gate is?” Sarah asks.
“It was seven-seven-two-three when I was there. They’ve probably changed it by now.”
But it was the same. I remember Sally Healey telling Sarah.
It dawns on me that Sarah might think Elizabeth Fisher is the culprit. But surely she can’t? The idea is ridiculous. These must just be standard questions. Because Elizabeth may know the code to the gate and have a calendar with Adam’s birthday and sports day on it, and feel wronged by being sent packing, but there is no way on earth Elizabeth Fisher set fire to the school.
——
The pain took about an hour to kick in this time, and I am now racing back to the hospital, the gravel tearing at my feet. Too late, I see Jenny watching me from inside—I must be grimacing in pain.
She hurries up to me, anxious.
“Mum?”
“I’m fine, really.”
And I am, because the moment I’m back here the whiteness of the walls again soothes my scorched skin and the cool, shiny floor heals the cuts on the soles of my feet.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have bossed you into going. It hurt you too, didn’t it?”
“Not really.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“OK, a bit. Nothing more. And it’s gone now.”
“Is it your way of trying to commit suicide?”
“What?” I am at a loss.
“If you experience that amount of pain for long enough—”
I interrupt her. “No. Really not. Your body didn’t change a jot when you went outside that time with Granny G and Adam, did it?”
She nods in agreement.
“Anyway, us cabbages are pretty tough.”
“Mum!” she says, shocked but smiling at me.
We follow Sarah as she makes her way to the ICU.
“So are you going to tell me what happened, then?” Jenny asks. “No, don’t tell me. You’ve discovered it was Mrs. Healey having the affair with Silas?” She sees my expression. “It was a joke.”
But is it so comically ridiculous? Mrs. Healey is only in her late forties. There’s no difference in the age gap between her and Silas Hyman than between Sarah and her beautiful gazelle policeman. But Jen’s right. It’s an absurd idea. It was Mrs. Healey who fired Silas, Mrs. Healey who brought his career crashing to the ground. And even if that hadn’t been the case, Mrs. Healey is far too professional to have an affair with a junior colleague.
Yes, I’d once
have thought that of Sarah.
I outline our meeting with Mrs. Healey to Jen. Listen to me—“our meeting,” as if I was an active participant rather than eavesdropper. But, weird as this must sound, I do feel a little like Sarah’s silent partner.
“The thing I find strangest,” I say, “is Donald phoning Mrs. Healey the night of the prize-giving and countermanding Maisie. Why would he protect Silas Hyman like that?”
“Maybe because he was there, Mum, like you were, and didn’t find Silas threatening at all. Just like you didn’t. Not until this happened and blame started being thrown around the place.”
I find her innocent certainty about Silas Hyman, a man more than a decade older than her, another reason to still see her as not yet an adult.
“Maybe Mrs. Healey wasn’t worried there was going to be a fire,” Jenny continues. “But planned to start it herself and wanted to make sure the fire precautions were in place so the insurance paid out. She banged on about her bloody precautions on TV, the night of the fire. Even then she wanted to make sure everyone knew.”
I remember Mrs. Healey’s pink linen shirt and assembly voice.
“I can reassure you that we had every fire precaution in place.”
“She knew the fire precautions wouldn’t make any difference,” Jenny continues, “because the building was old and the fire was so intense.”
She must have been thinking about this, working it all out.
“But Mrs. Healey was at sports day,” I say. “People would have noticed if she’d left.”
“She’s a mini-dictator. Nearly all the teachers are on short-term contracts, which she can choose not to renew. And if they’re chucked out by her, they’re still dependent on a reference from her to get another job. She could have blackmailed someone into it.”
Jenny is so keen for this to be the scenario, for her injuries to have been an accident, not deliberate. Right from the beginning she’d thought—hoped—that it was something to do with the school as a business, an insurance fraud.
“She’d choose sports day,” Jenny continues, “because there’d be virtually no staff to try and put it out. I mean, Annette would be next to useless and I wouldn’t be much better, and that only leaves Tilly, who’d have her hands too full of young children to try and do anything to stop it spreading.”
I agree with her about sports day being a deliberate choice of date. It also meant there was hardly anyone there beforehand to see the arsonist open the windows, pour out the white spirit.
“But what good would it do her?” I say, gently.
“She’s a part owner, right? So she’d get her share of the insurance money.”
“But why would she want to burn down a successful business? She’s already trying to find premises to get the school going again. There won’t be any financial benefit. She’ll just use the insurance money to rebuild.”
I can’t yet see Jenny as an adult, but I am trying to be more straightforward with her.
We move on to Elizabeth Fisher, who Jenny has always liked. Like me, she knows Elizabeth would have had nothing to do with it.
We still haven’t spoken about the three weeks, less a day, left to her. My grip on your optimism isn’t strong enough to confront the ticking clock, the speeding car, with spoken words. And I think Jenny is deliberately turning her back on it too. It’s as if looking at it properly, even peeking, would turn us to stone, terrorized and mute. But the fact is there, huge and monstrous. And we are playing “Grandmother’s Footsteps” with a gorgon.
As we arrive on the ICU, you see Sarah. And you run. Literally run. I see the urgency in your body with big news to tell her. A heart must have been found! The monstrous fact smashed to pieces.
Then I see your face.
25
Mike?” Sarah asks.
“He was here. Watching her through the glass. I saw him watching her through the glass.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know. He had a hood up, and there was a trolley in the way so I couldn’t see his face.”
“How did you know he was dangerous?”
“He was still.”
Sarah looks at you, waiting for more.
“Totally still,” you say. “No one is totally still. Everybody’s moving. No one just stands there, watching. He was waiting for her to be alone. For me to leave her.”
I think of that figure on the edge of the playing field, the figure I noticed because of his stillness.
“He wants to kill her,” you say.
“Did you see anything else?” Sarah asks.
“He turned away, when he saw me looking, and I just saw the coat, that’s all. A blue coat with a hood.”
“That’s it?” Jen says. “Some guy in a coat was a bit still?”
But I see that she’s afraid.
“I’ll be in the garden.”
“OK.”
She leaves, turning her back on this.
“It could have been Hyman,” you’re saying to Sarah. “If Jen saw him at the school or something else that incriminated him, maybe his accomplice”
You’ve said this before, and it’s as if repetition gives increased validity to your suspicion.
“Or the hate-mailer has become more dangerous than we realized,” Sarah says, and again I wish to God I could tell her about the red-paint attack.
“When they stop having to sedate Jenny so heavily, she’ll be able to tell us if she saw something,” you say.
But neither Sarah nor I share your confidence. Sarah, because she’s not sure that Jenny will ever get well enough for the doctors to stop sedating her; and me, because I know that at the moment she can’t remember anything past texting Ivo at two thirty.
“I’ll phone the station,” Sarah says. She leaves the ICU to make the call.
I hug you, resting my face against your shirt, feeling your heart beating.
I feel so close to you now, my darling.
We are the only people who know the man in the blue coat is real. Sarah takes it on trust from you, but you and I know. And we are totally united against the threat to our daughter. We are Earth battling the aliens, a testudo of a family.
And although you don’t make Jen finish her homework or revise, or tell her that she ought to do retakes, you guard her ferociously and devotedly when a hate-mailer sends her vicious letters, when a maniac is out to kill her.
And when a doctor says she has three weeks to live without a transplant, you tell her that she will get one.
You say you won’t let her die. And I wish to God I could believe that.
A momentary swish of air as a young man on a ventilator, unconscious and totally still, is wheeled quickly past us. He can’t be more than twenty. His mother is with him. We both watch him.
Sarah rejoins us.
“Can you stay with Jen?” you ask. “Till the police get here? I need to be with Addie, just for a bit, and—”
She puts a hand on your shoulder.
“There’s nobody coming. I’m sorry.”
Like Jenny, the police were hardly going to find someone standing still cause for alarm. The trail of trust in your suspicion ends with Sarah.
“I’ll go and see Silas Hyman, find out where he’s been this morning,” she says. “And I’ll talk to the Richmond Post, and see who told them about the fire.”
“But first, I need to see Addie and—”
Sarah interrupts you. “If someone is trying to kill Jenny, we need to find out who it is as soon as possible. And that will help Addie too. Because I don’t want him to spend another day being accused of this.”
You nod, perhaps remembering all those police statistics Sarah’s quoted at us over the years, the number of cases solved decreasing exponentially with the amount of time that elapses—trails going cold, witnesses missed who then became untraceable, door-to-door inquiries not done in time.
You stay by her bed, but I know that you again feel the pain of being torn in half.
I go to Jenny in
the garden. The sun is directly overhead, the shadows tiny silhouettes of what make them, offering no shade.
Jen is sitting with her arms around her knees.
“I’m going with Aunt Sarah,” I say.
She turns to me. “You know when you last saw Addie?”
I nod, flinching at the memory. Mum had told Adam I wasn’t going to wake up again and I’d tried to comfort him but he couldn’t hear me.
“Just before,” Jenny continues, “you asked me if a scent could have made me hear the fire alarm at school. You know my mad person’s tinnitus?”
“Donald had just gone into Rowena’s room,” I say. “I thought it could have been his aftershave, or cigarettes.”
“Like a sensory teleporter?” she says, caught with the idea. “Beam me up, Scotty!”
A you and Adam catchphrase. I smile at her. “Something like that.”
“Do you think a smell could make me remember more of the fire?”
I think of the night stocks in this garden and the grass-scented air at the playing field today, and how each time I was captured by the past, for a few moments actually there. Her sensory teleporter isn’t so off the mark.
“It might,” I say.
But being back in that fire, even for a few moments, would be terrifying.
“It’s before the fire that I need to remember,” she says, seeing my anxiety. “When the person was lighting it.”
“I’m not sure you can control your memory like that.”
“I have to do something to help Addie.”
I remember his small face as Mum led him away, the bruised shadows of grief under his eyes, how his whole body seemed mute.
“You go with Aunt Sarah, and I’ll go on a scratch-and-sniff tour of the hospital,” she continues.
I nod, because I’m not worried about her remembering anything too close to the fire—there’s nothing in the hospital that smells remotely like a fire, or even like the school.
“You’re sure it doesn’t hurt you to go outside?” she asks.
“Absolutely.” Fingers crossed behind my back.
This time I don’t think she’s getting rid of me. But I do think there’s another reason she wants to stay in the hospital.