Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  “Flights this time of year get really booked up,” I say. “It might take him quite a while to get a standby.”

  She turns away from me, as if caught out, a little embarrassed. “Yeah.”

  ——

  I leave the hospital with Sarah.

  As we drive I think about the young man I saw in the ICU. I’d wondered if he would die or if he was brain-dead already and just being kept alive. I’d wondered if he was the right tissue type for Jenny. I’d hoped that he was.

  Then I’d seen his mother, her suffering. And I felt ashamed. Because I still hope that he’s the right match for Jenny—and that he’s dead. The hope is caustic inside me, corroding the person I once was.

  I think you feel the same.

  It’s not always good things that unite people, is it?

  Sarah pulls up outside Silas Hyman’s house. The pain still hasn’t kicked in. I’m building up greater stamina.

  Natalia opens the door, looking hot and flushed and furious.

  “Yes?”

  Her voice is aggressive, ambient rage surrounding her like a heat haze.

  “Detective Sergeant McBride,” Sarah says, her voice cool. “Can I come in?”

  “Like I get a choice?” she says, but there’s fear on her face.

  Sarah doesn’t answer her question, but follows her into the flat.

  “Is your husband home?”

  “No.”

  She volunteers nothing more.

  It’s sweltering in here. The walls of the flat probably ooze damp in the winter but now trap the heat. A toddler, grimy and hot, is screaming, his nappy sagging heavily.

  Natalia ignores him, going into a bathroom. Sarah follows.

  “Do you know where he is?” Sarah asks her.

  “A building site. Been there since first thing this morning.”

  He was in the hospital the last time he’d told her he was at a building site.

  Two little boys are in the bath fighting, one of them swishing the scummy water over the edge of the bath onto the chipped tiled floor. They have sunburned necks and faces.

  “Do you know which building site?” Sarah asks.

  “Maybe the same as yesterday’s. A big development in Paddington. But he didn’t know if they’d want him again. Get out of the bath, Jason. Now!”

  Building sites are a pretty good alibi.

  “Early for bath time?” Sarah says, and I think she means to be friendly but it comes out as a criticism.

  Natalia glares. “I’ll be too knackered to do it later.”

  The youngest one is still screaming, more desperately, his nappy almost at his knees with the weight of urine. Natalia sees Sarah looking at him.

  “You know how much they cost? Nappies? Do you know that?”

  Through her eyes I see Sarah for a moment. I used to think that she was judgmental too.

  “Do you know when he’ll be home?” Sarah asks.

  “No clue. He was out till past ten yesterday. Didn’t stop working till it got dark.”

  Natalia grabs one of the boys and pinions him in a towel as he struggles to get free. The red sunburn marks are livid red stripes.

  No wonder her exotic beauty is fading so fast. Three boys under four in a small flat with no patience to expand the walls.

  “On Wednesday afternoon, you said Silas was with you?”

  “Yeah. We went to Chiswick House Park for a picnic. Set off from here ’bout eleven, got back around five.”

  “A long picnic?”

  “Would you stay in here? The park’s free. Sunscreen isn’t. How are you meant to put it on as often as you’re supposed to? Silas played with them. Let them ride on his back, that kind of stuff. He could do it till the cows came home. Bores me mental.”

  “Does Silas know Donald White?”

  She wants to know why Donald phoned Mrs. Healey the night of the prize-giving, countermanding Maisie’s request for a restraining order. Why did Donald protect him?

  “Who?” Natalia says and looks genuinely blank, or maybe she’s a proficient actress.

  “Would it be all right if I wait for Silas in the sitting room?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Sarah leaves.

  I look back to the bathroom, the tension impregnating the steam and dampness. And it seems so sad that bath time is fraught and hostile.

  I remember Jenny at three hiding under a towel after the bath.

  “Magic rock, magic rock,” I had to say.

  “Yes!” From under the towel.

  “Will you give me a little girl of three with fair hair called Jenny, please?”

  Towel is thrown off. “Here!”

  I’d pick up her warm, still-damp body and put my arms around her.

  Magic.

  In the hallway Sarah passes the open doorway to the kitchen and goes in. She’s noticed the school calendar hanging on the wall: July 11—Adam’s birthday and sports day—ringed in red like a curse.

  She goes into the sitting room and quietly rummages through a pile of papers and post in an untidy heap on a table. I don’t know quite how illegal this is, what will happen to Sarah if she’s found out, but she continues, quickly and methodically with that quiet courage of hers that I’ve only just discovered.

  At the bottom of the heap, in an envelope, are birthday cake candles. Pastel blue. Eight of them.

  Natalia comes into the room behind Sarah, silently.

  Her movements, like her eyes, are feline. I shout a warning, loud as I can, but Sarah can’t hear me.

  “Silas said he found them on the mat yesterday morning,” Natalia says, and Sarah starts.

  “Weird thing to do, isn’t it? Why would someone post us fucking birthday cake candles?”

  I remember Jenny talking about the arsonist and her mobile phone. “Perhaps he wanted some kind of trophy.”

  Was that what Silas Hyman had done? And then pretended someone had sent them?

  Two of the little boys, trailing water, run into the room; one is screaming, the other hitting him, their commotion not filling the silence between the adults.

  Sarah goes towards the front door.

  “You’re not waiting for Silas, then?” Natalia asks.

  “No.”

  So we won’t, yet, find out where he was this afternoon.

  I think Sarah has been jolted by something. Perhaps it’s just hit her how many laws she’s breaking by coming to their house and going through their things.

  Perhaps it’s the candles.

  Natalia yells at the children to shut up. Then she blocks the door to Sarah. She looks hostile and sweaty and plain.

  “I didn’t used to be this way,” she says, as if seeing herself through Sarah’s eyes.

  No, I think, you were exotically beautiful and poised not that long ago, when Silas was still in work and when you only had one child.

  “You didn’t used to be this way?” Sarah asks, and there’s fury in her voice. “Jenny didn’t used to be this way either,” she continues. “And Grace used to be able to talk. Smile. Look after her children. Count yourself lucky your children are healthy and you can be a mother to them. Count yourself lucky.”

  Natalia stands aside as if Sarah’s blast of words has shoved her, and Sarah leaves.

  I hadn’t thought to envy Natalia Hyman. Now I realize there’s every reason in the world why I should.

  ——

  We drive towards the Richmond Post. I watch Sarah as she drives.

  “You’re being oversensitive, Grace,” you said; use of my proper name, bad sign. “Sarah likes you, how many more times?”

  “She tolerates me.”

  “Well, I don’t know how these women things work.”

  No, I thought, because men don’t spend time in the kitchen thinking that being in proximity to food or washing up means two people will bond. Even women with high-flying careers still do the “Can I give you a hand in the kitchen?” thing. Sarah and I had done that countless times over the years, but we had
remained like toddlers, parallel playing.

  And all this time we could have been friends.

  “You say that,” my nanny voice interjects, “but would she have wanted to be friends with you?”

  I wish she’d hang out with some positive nanny voices, the ones who’ve been made kind by years of cognitive therapy, but she continues relentlessly. “You don’t have anything in common, do you?”

  And I have to agree that, family aside, we have nothing in common.

  I’d hoped when Sarah had a baby, a year after Jenny was born, that we might bond in some way. Or, more accurately, that she would show a flaw or two. But she was brilliant at motherhood, just as she was brilliant at her career, with a baby who slept through the night and a toddler who smiled on his way to nursery and a child who could count to ten and read long before the end of reception, while Jenny as a baby screamed the house down at four every morning and clung to me at the playgroup gates and saw letters as impossible hieroglyphs.

  And Sarah was back at work and being promoted! Still on her fast-track career. I told you before I was jealous of her; well, sometimes I loathed her. There, said it. Terrible. I’m sorry.

  The truth is, loathing her was easier than not liking myself.

  I did the whole making muffins for bake sales and going on trips and being there to do homework and inviting friends round. All of that. But I didn’t know how to do what was important.

  “Magic rock, magic rock, give me a confident teenager with ambition and self-confidence and the A-level grades to get into university with a boyfriend who is worthy of her. Give me an eight-year-old boy who is happy at playtime and isn’t bullied and believes he’s not stupid.”

  I was meant to be their magic rock, but I failed.

  And I have no excuses.

  26

  We arrive at the offices of the Richmond Post.

  It’s been an age since I was here, preferring to send in my monthly page by e-mail. As we go in, I’m embarrassed that Sarah will discover that I’m not loved here as she is at her police station. Frankly, I’m probably no more valued than the out-of-date yucca plant in the corner of what passes for reception.

  Sarah must have phoned ahead because Tara arrives almost immediately, pink cheeks glowing. Sarah looks less than thrilled to see her.

  “I spoke to one of your colleagues,” Sarah says curtly. “Geoff Bagshot.”

  “Yes, I recognized the name, Detective Sergeant McBride,” she says. “You chucked me out of the hospital.”

  I remember Sarah’s uniform-and-truncheon voice as she virtually pushed Tara away from you. But Tara only knows her as a police officer, not as a member of our family.

  “Geoff’s left it for me to handle.”

  I see Sarah stiffen at Tara’s “handling” of her.

  “There’s an office we can use this way,” Tara says, her stride quick and determined; she enjoys a spat.

  “When I met you, you said you were friends with Grace?” Sarah says.

  “I was trying to gain access to her ward, so I stretched the truth a little. It’s what you have to do sometimes in journalism. Clearly I don’t have much in common with a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two.”

  “Nor she with you. Clearly.”

  Thank you, Sarah.

  Tara escorts her into Geoff’s office; she must have turfed him out. It looks like the set for a film about journalists—old mugs with the dregs of cold coffee in them and illegal ashtrays brimming with butts. I’ve only been here once or twice a year, and it’s been mineral water, no smoking, and a digestive biscuit if you’re lucky. Maybe Tara’s taken over décor.

  “What time did you arrive at Sidley House School on the day of the fire?” Sarah asks, wasting no time on preliminaries.

  “Three fifteen p.m. I already told your buddy.”

  “That was extremely fast?”

  “What is this? Interviews in duplicate?” She’s enjoying herself.

  “Who told you?” Sarah asks.

  Tara is silent.

  “You arrive barely fifteen minutes after a fire started that has left two people critically ill, and I need to know who told you.”

  “I can’t reveal my source.”

  “Your tip-off was hardly from Deep Throat. And this,” she says, gesturing around the crummy office, “isn’t exactly the Washington Post.”

  She must have heard me joking to Jenny about Tara, remembered it. Unlike me, she’s said it to her face.

  “Can we do a deal?” Tara asks.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ll tell you in return for information that you will only give to my paper.”

  Sarah is silent.

  “You don’t think the kid did it anymore?” Tara says. “You can’t do or you wouldn’t still be investigating.”

  Sarah says nothing, which Tara takes as an affirmative. She glows with satisfaction. The cat that got the cream with a side order of sardines.

  “So are you going to investigate Silas Hyman properly this time?” she says.

  Again, Sarah says nothing.

  “I need something back if I’m going to play ball here,” Tara continues.

  “Adam Covey isn’t responsible for the fire,” Sarah says. “And in a few minutes we’ll discuss Silas Hyman.”

  Tara almost purrs with self-satisfaction.

  “It was Annette Jenks,” she says, “the secretary at the school, who phoned us. At a minute or so past three. She had to shout above the sound of the fire alarm.”

  “Why did she call your paper?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. We did a photo and an article a few weeks back when the school raised money for a charity. You know the whole giant-check-and-smug-rich-kids-holding-it routine? Sidley House was keen to get publicity for it and we obliged. She’d have our number from that.”

  “Did she phone any other papers?”

  “I don’t know. But she did phone a TV station. Their reporters and cameramen arrived about half an hour after us.”

  I remember again the TV news playing while you were hurrying through the hospital to find Jenny.

  “She wanted us to take her picture,” Tara continues. “I think Dave, our photographer, took a few to keep her quiet. But once the TV mob arrived, she was all over them.”

  I remember Maisie talking to Sarah in the shadowy cafeteria. “… There was a lot of smoke by then but she was smiling, like she was enjoying it, or at least she was not at all upset and she had lipstick on.”

  The idea of someone getting a kick out of this—an ego-driven high—is horrible. But is it anything more than that? Could her need to take center stage be extreme enough to create the stage, making reality TV so that she could be in it? I remember Jenny talking about the hot-air balloon: “If Annette had a child, she’d put him in it.”

  “Going back to Silas Hyman,” Sarah says. “You published a story about him a few months ago. After the incident in the playground.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you find out about that?”

  “An anonymous text message was sent to the landline here. It was read out by one of those weird electronic voices.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “Like I just said, anonymous.”

  “Yes. But do you know who it was?”

  Irritation hardens Tara’s face.

  “No. Couldn’t trace it. It was from a pay phone. But it wasn’t Annette Jenks, if that’s what you’re thinking, because she wasn’t working there then. It was still that old cow of a secretary. Took me ten minutes before she’d let me speak to the head to confirm the story.”

  “So you published your article. Front page.”

  Tara tosses her silky hair as an answer.

  “You had quotes from outraged parents. Did you tell parents about the incident, or did they come to you?”

  “I really don’t remember.”

  “I am sure you do.”

  “All right, I phoned around a few families, got a couple of quo
tes in response to what I told them. So what do the police have on him then?”

  “Nothing.”

  Tara looks at Sarah, coldly furious. She turns off her iPhone, which has been covertly recording this, not wanting her humiliation on record.

  “You said you’d do a trade,” she says, petulantly. Her parents really should have made her play Monopoly and lose once in a while.

  “No,” Sarah says coolly. “That’s what you inferred.”

  As we walk to the car, I glance back at the Richmond Post offices and, in a fit of self-indulgence, think of my dreams being filed away in an ugly gray filing cabinet.

  Because following Sarah, seeing her talent and commitment, has made me see that any promise I once had hasn’t been kept. She’s made me remember what I so hoped for—longed for—once for myself. It wasn’t to review art and books, but to be the artist or the writer. It was absurd to think I could bash out Anna Karenina or a Hockney between school drop-off and pickup while still fitting in a trip to Sainsbury’s. Although people do. And a mediocre book or painting would be fine. Just something, to try to create something.

  I used to make excuses to myself: when I had more time; when Jenny was older; when Adam started school. But somehow, without realizing it or even really noticing, I stopped making excuses because I’d given up.

  In the car, Sarah phones Mohsin on hands-free. She turns off the air-conditioning so she can hear him.

  “Hi, Mohsin.”

  “Hey, baby, you hanging in there?”

  “Has Penny found anything on the hate-mailer?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Until she does, I’m going to work on the assumption that Jenny saw either the arsonist or someone connected to the arsonist, which is why he wants to kill her now.”

  Mohsin is silent.

  “You did hear about the attacker?”

  “Yes.”

  He doesn’t say anything more, and the sound of his silence fills the hot car.

  I see the effect on Sarah, a slight sagging of the shoulders, and I wish I could tell her I am with her, supporting her.

  “It was the secretary, Annette Jenks, who tipped off the Richmond Post about the fire,” Sarah says. “But there was another tip-off, four months ago, about Silas Hyman not supervising the playground. Someone wanted him out of the school.”