Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  Jenny’s heart has become a watch after all.

  Beating or ticking into an ending of silence.

  11

  Jenny is waiting for me as I come out of the ICU.

  “Well?” she asks.

  “You’re going to be all right,” I say. A brazen, barefaced lie. A deceit. A shawl woven of untruths in which a mother wraps her child.

  She looks so relieved.

  “But they can’t be totally sure?” she asks me.

  “Not totally.”

  As close as I will get to the truth.

  We see you coming out of the ICU and going towards my ward. Sarah must be with Jenny.

  You sit next to my comatose body and you tell me what the doctors have said. You tell me that she will get a transplant. She will be all right. Of course she will!

  I press against you and I can feel your courageous hope for Jenny.

  I hold on to it as I hold on to you.

  For now, at least, I can believe in your hope for her and the ghastly ticking down of Jenny’s life is paused.

  Jenny is in the corridor.

  “Shall we go to the garden?” she suggests. She must see my surprise because she smiles with a note of triumph. “I found one.”

  She takes me to a corridor with a glass wall. I look through the glass to see a courtyard garden. It’s in the heart of the hospital, walls rising up on all four sides. It must have been designed to be seen from the many overlooking windows, rather than be used. The entrance on the ground floor is a nondescript, unmarked door, presumably only used by whoever looks after it.

  Through the glass, the garden looks so pretty with its profusion of English flowers: tissue-paper pink roses and frilly white jasmine and velvet peonies. There’s a wrought-iron seat and a fountain; a stone birdbath.

  I go outside with Jen, thinking the garden will be a gentle place to be.

  The walls surrounding this garden have trapped the heat, funneling it down. The water in the birdbath has evaporated. The edges of the tissue-paper roses have curled and dried; the peony is dropping with the weighted humid air.

  Summer boxed in.

  “At least it’s sort of outside,” she says.

  Through the glass wall, which abuts one side of the garden, you can see through to rooms and corridors. We watch people walking along. And I know why she likes it now, because even though it’s not outside proper, we are separate from the hospital.

  As I sit with her, the lie I told digs into me like razor wire.

  We carry on watching people through the glass wall. For a long time. Jen seems soothed by it and it is quite soporific, like watching tropical fish in a tank.

  “That’s Rowena’s dad, isn’t it?” Jenny asks.

  Among the melee of fish-people I spot Donald.

  “Yes.”

  “But why’s he here?”

  “Rowena’s in the hospital,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I saw her with Adam outside the school, and she looked fine then.”

  After Maisie’s visit, I’d again forgotten about Rowena, my anxiety for Jenny still making me too selfish to have room for her as well.

  “Maisie will be with her,” Jenny says. “Shall we go and visit?”

  It’s sweet of her to think I’d like to be with my old friend.

  “It gets kind of boring here after a while,” she says.

  We’re near the burns unit now and are catching up with Donald. A nurse is with him. As we follow him, I’m glad that for a little while at least Jenny and I have a focus that is not on her injuries or mine.

  Donald is wearing a dark suit, jacket still on despite the hotly humid day, and he is carrying a briefcase.

  I can smell cigarettes on his clothes. I’ve never noticed that before, but my sense of smell has become so much more acute now, overpoweringly so.

  We’re now close enough to hear the nurse talking to him. Her voice is briskly competent.

  “… and when someone has been in an enclosed space in a fire, we have to monitor them extremely carefully in case there have been any inhalation injuries. It can sometimes take a little while before there are any symptoms, so it’s wise to be on the safe side.”

  Donald’s face looks severe, barely recognizable from the smiling, avuncular man I last saw at the prize-giving. It’s probably these horrible, glaring striplights partitioning the corridor ceiling, which gouge out shadows in people’s faces, making them look harsher.

  The nurse presses a keypad on the door to the burns unit and holds the door for him.

  “Your daughter’s bed is this way,” she says.

  But surely he’s been to see her before? He wouldn’t have waited a day before coming to her bedside. Maisie has told me how protective he is of his family countless times. “He’d kill crocodiles for us with his bare hands! Thank goodness there aren’t that many crocs in Chiswick!”

  Jenny and I reach Rowena’s side room a little before Donald and look through the glass panel in the door. Rowena has a drip in her arm, and her hands are bandaged. But her face is undamaged. How could I not have thought her face beautiful before? Next to her is Maisie.

  I wait for Donald to arrive and take Rowena in his arms and for the three of them to be reunited.

  I brace myself against the stinging contrast.

  Donald goes into the room, passing Jenny in the doorway. I notice she’s very pale.

  “Jen?”

  She turns to me, as if snapping out of a reverie.

  “I know it’s mad but for a moment, well, it was like I was back in the school, really back there, and”—she pauses—“I heard the fire alarm going off. I heard it, Mum.”

  I put my arm around her.

  “Has it gone now?”

  “Yeah.” She smiles at me. “Maybe it’s mad person’s tinnitus.”

  We look through the glass in the door to Rowena’s room.

  Donald is going towards Rowena, and I think she looks panicked. But that can’t be right, surely? His back is towards me, and I can’t see the expression on his face.

  Maisie is hurriedly pulling down her sleeves to cover large livid bruises on her arms.

  “I told you he’d be here soon,” she says to Rowena in a too-cheerful, nervy voice.

  Donald has reached Rowena. He grabs hold of her bandaged burnt hands; she gives a sharp scream of pain.

  “Quite the little heroine, aren’t you?”

  There’s hatred in his voice. Repulsive and raw and shocking.

  Maisie tries to pull him away. “You’re hurting her, Donald, please. Stop.”

  I’m in the room now, wanting to help, but there’s nothing I can do but watch. Still he holds Rowena’s bandaged hands, and she’s trying not to cry out.

  I think of Adam flinching from Donald’s lighter as he lit a cigarette after the prize-giving, his foot grinding the stub into the ground.

  He lets go of Rowena’s hands and turns to leave.

  Rowena is crying.

  “Daddy …”

  She gets out of bed and walks shakily towards him. She looks fragile and slight in the cotton hospital gown, so much smaller than Donald in his hard dark suit.

  “You disgust me,” he says as she reaches him.

  Maisie puts her hand on him, trying to stop him from leaving.

  “Your bruises,” he says to her. “Have you shown anyone?”

  Maisie drops her head, not looking at him. Her fun sleeves cover her bruises now; it’s the same long-sleeved shirt she’d been wearing at sports day, despite the heat.

  “It was an accident,” Maisie says to him. “Just an accident. Of course it was. And you can hardly see anymore. Really.”

  Donald abruptly leaves the room.

  “He didn’t mean it, sweetheart,” Maisie says to Rowena.

  Rowena is silent.

  I turn away from them and leave the room, as if they’re too naked for me to watch, the bones of the family exposed.

  I reach Jenny, who’s b
een watching through the glass in the door.

  “I never knew,” she says to me, shocked.

  “No.”

  But I think again about Maisie’s “bulimic hog” comment, her bruised cheek, her cracked wrist, her lack of self-confidence. I again see the image I’d glimpsed as I looked into my dressing-table mirror the night of the prize-giving—that dense murky network of something sinister.

  I’d dismissed it as an illusion at the time. But a little later, going to sleep that night when thoughts slip out from being censored, I’d wondered.

  But I didn’t ask Maisie about Donald, didn’t even give her an opening to a conversation. Not just because in daylight it seemed an absurd suspicion, but because I thought it was a territory beyond our friendship. I didn’t want to—didn’t know how to—step outside our customary domestic landscape in which we were both so comfortable and sure-footed.

  But she doesn’t constrain our friendship that way, isn’t cowardly that way. She thinks she should have gone into a burning building for me. And I didn’t even ask her if she was OK. If there was anything she’d like to tell me, talk about.

  And Rowena.

  Even if I’d managed not to see what was happening to Maisie, I should have seen what was happening to her. A child. Because when Donald grabbed hold of her burnt hands, that surely wasn’t the first time he’d hurt her.

  I remember her in reception and year one at Sidley House, that elfin beautiful child. Was it happening then? Later, perhaps—year three or four?

  “I thought she was a spoilt little princess,” I say to Jenny, guilt making my words taste sour.

  “Me too.”

  Maybe she’s also remembering the hand-embroidered pillowcases, and hand-painted rocking chair and fairy-tale bed and princess party dresses. I used to worry that when the little princess grew up, her adult life could only be a disappointment to her.

  Never once guessing at this.

  “She had to be the best,” Jenny says. “At everything. It used to freak me out.”

  She’s remembering her a little older, nine or ten maybe.

  I’d wished Jenny had a little more ambition, yes, but I’d found Rowena’s need to excel repellent at times. It wasn’t just the scholarship to St. Paul’s Girls, it was being two grades ahead of anyone else on the violin as well as captain of the swimming team and the lead in any play or assembly.

  “She was trying to make him love her, wasn’t she?” Jenny says.

  Surely it can’t be so simple. Can a seventeen-year-old really be able to see through years of abuse to such a simple reason for a child’s behavior?

  But I think it is that brutally in-your-face obvious.

  “Yes,” I say to Jenny.

  And I’d condemned her for being overly competitive. Not once seeing an abused child trying to win her father’s love.

  Was that why she worked so hard to get into Oxford? Was she still trying to make him love her?

  “You disgust me.”

  Rowena is lying in bed again now, her face turned to the wall. Maisie has a hand on her, but Rowena doesn’t turn to her.

  Maisie. My friend. Why didn’t she leave Donald? For Rowena’s sake if not her own. It must kill her to see Rowena being hurt. Why has she kept up this elaborate charade, protecting him?

  Jenny and I walk away from Rowena’s room.

  “I used to avoid her,” Jenny says. “When we were children. I mean, it was more than just not liking her. She gave me the creeps. God, in retrospect … I mean, I thought she was weird, but she was just different because of what was happening to her at home. And it’s hardly surprising if she was cruel.”

  “Was she cruel?” I asked.

  “Cruel’s too strong. She was just … well, as I said, weird. There was this one time, she cut off Tania’s ponytail. For Tania it was like the main thing about her, having this long hair. We were all jealous of it, used to spend break time plaiting it. So cutting it off, well, it’s like violence. When you’re nine.”

  “I’d forgotten that.”

  “I think she must have been lashing out at someone else for a change and that was as near physical violence as she could get.”

  “Yes.”

  “I avoided her after that. We all did. God, if I’d known.”

  “And recently? While you’ve been teaching assistants at Sidley House?”

  I’m hoping that Rowena’s been one of the gang, happy and popular, that she’s breaking free of Donald.

  “I barely saw her. During lessons we were in separate classrooms, and at lunchtime she goes to the park.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Well, the pub has a really nice outside bit, so most of us go there.”

  We arrive at the ICU, where Jenny waits outside and I go in to join you.

  You’re sitting at Jenny’s bedside. On the other side of her is a uniformed policeman, who’s pretending not to be there as you talk quietly to her.

  Your gentleness and loyalty and love are such a contrast to Donald.

  Why didn’t I see through his disguise of overly indulgent father? And was it there not just to throw outsiders off the scent but also to confuse Rowena? Because how can a daddy who buys princess party dresses and over-the-top birthday gifts and a hand-painted rocking chair with hearts on it also be cruel to you?

  At Sidley House, I’d thought Maisie too soft on Rowena. Rowena talked back to her and her tongue could be sharp and she rarely did what Maisie gently asked of her. But how could Maisie discipline her for small instances of bad behavior when Donald was abusing her? When his abuse was probably the reason for Rowena’s “bad behavior” in the first place?

  When I was safely pregnant with Adam, Maisie had confided in me that she was desperate for another baby. She’d been putting it off for “various reasons” but she was nearly forty so it was “now-or-never time!” Six months later, not pregnant, she told me that Rowena had “absolutely forbidden!” her to have another baby. I’d thought it another instance of spoilt-princess Rowena bullying tenderhearted Maisie to get her own way. I thought it wrong that a child of nine could dictate to an adult in that way.

  But I think now Rowena may have been trying to protect another child, not yet born.

  The PC gets a hissing message on his radio. He tells you that Detective Inspector Baker wants a meeting with you and is waiting in the office on the ground floor. He’s barely more than a boy, but he sees your anxiety plain as day.

  “It’s all right, sir. I’ll be here with her.”

  Jenny and I go with you to your meeting with DI Baker (it no longer seems like following you).

  “Do you think they’ve found something?” Jenny sounds anxious.

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. But there must be something.”

  I’m anxious too—that at this meeting with DI Baker she’ll find out what the doctors have said about her heart.

  I don’t think you’ll tell anyone because saying the words will make the facts more solid. I think you’ll justify this as waiting until you can tell everyone that a donor heart has been found, that everything will be all right. No need to worry. You always tell me of potential calamities after you’ve sorted out a solution. Calamities. As if walking out of an A-level exam early or denting the car get any rating on a calamity scale.

  But I still believe in your hope for her; I’m still clinging on to it.

  As we reach the office on the ground floor, Jenny stops.

  “Do you think it could be Donald who started the fire?” she asks.

  “No,” I say immediately.

  “Maisie and Rowena were almost the only people in the school at the time,” she says. “Maybe it was aimed at them.”

  “He couldn’t possibly have known that,” I counter.

  I’m not arguing with logic but from emotion. I cannot bear to think a father and a husband can be that evil. And surely there’s a world of difference between bruises and trying to burn someone alive.

  But I remember that figure I
saw yesterday afternoon on the periphery of the playing field: an innocent bystander, most probably, but just conceivably Donald.

  And earlier with the nurse. Could he have been pretending that this was the first time he’d been to the burns unit? Could he have come last night in a long dark coat? Though God knows why he’d want to hurt Jenny.

  It was only eight weeks ago that I looked into my dressing-table mirror and saw connections between instances of possible abuse. Just eight weeks.

  Would anything be different if I hadn’t turned away?

  We go into the office, which is oppressively warm and airless. Like the family rooms and the doctors’ offices it has peeling institutional green paint and ugly carpet tiles and a clock. Always a clock.

  DI Baker doesn’t get up from his chair when you come in.

  “I know you don’t want to go far from your daughter and wife,” he says to you. “Which is why we’re having our meeting here.”

  You nod your thanks, surprised by his demonstration of thoughtfulness. Like me, you think you may have misjudged him.

  “A new witness came forward shortly after we met,” he continues.

  Sarah barges into the room, uncharacteristically flustered. No, flustered is wrong. She’s angry and she’s been running. Her blouse has dark patches under the arms, her forehead filmed with sweat.

  “I’ve just come from the station,” she says to DI Baker. “They told me—”

  “No one should be telling you anything,” he says curtly. “I’ve given you a week of compassionate leave, so take it.”

  “It’s a mistake,” she says to DI Baker. “Or deliberate misinformation.”

  “The witness is entirely credible.”

  “So why wait till now to report it?” she asks.

  “Because this person knows how much the Covey family are dealing with and didn’t want to add to their distress. But with the press accusations felt it was their duty to come forward.”

  Sarah is more emotional than I’ve ever seen her.

  “Who is ‘this person’?” she asks.

  He looks at her with silent rebuke, and then he continues.

  “They have asked for their identity not to be revealed, which is a request I granted. There will be no trial so no need for identification. Neither we nor the school will be pressing charges.”