Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  “You think he was trying to hurt his daughter?” Mohsin asks, clearly thinking along the same lines as Jenny had earlier.

  “It’s possible,” Sarah replies. “Maybe he believed Rowena was still the school nurse. Maybe no one told him about the substitution. Can you find Maisie and Rowena White’s medical notes at other hospitals? See if there was anything we’ve missed?”

  He nods.

  “What about the investors at Sidley House?” she asks.

  “There are a couple of small fry. Venture capitalists who invested in a number of similar projects, legit businesspeople. Another investor, the largest one, is the Whitehall Park Road Trust Company.”

  “Do you know who that’s owned by?”

  He shakes his head. “It could be one case of nasty domestic violence,” he says, carefully. “And another case of malicious mail. And another of arson. All three completely separate.”

  “There’s a connection. I’m sure there is.”

  “Go into any institution—including a school—and you’d probably find an instance of domestic violence. And another of bullying, not to the malicious-mail level like Jenny had, but you’d find something cruel going on in the classroom or staffroom or cyberbullying.”

  “And Jenny being attacked?”

  Mohsin turns fractionally away.

  “You still don’t believe it?” Sarah asks.

  Mohsin is silent. Sarah studies him.

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think I need to set your mind at rest.”

  “Well, that’s more than anyone else is doing, so thank you.”

  They are not used to this awkwardness.

  He takes her hand, gives it a squeeze.

  “Poor Tim’s grieving for you.”

  “It wasn’t—” She hesitates. “Appropriate, anymore. I should get back to Mike.”

  Almost before they’ve gone the cleaner sprays the table with something pungent.

  Can you be homesick for a table? Because I’m overwhelmed with yearning for our old wooden table in the kitchen at home, with Adam’s knight figures at one end, yesterday’s newspaper at the other, someone’s jacket or jumper draped over a chair. I know, I used to get irritated by “the mess!” and demand people “tidy up after themselves!” Now I long for a messy life, not one devastated and transferred to an overly organized world of slick shiny surfaces.

  I see that Jenny’s eyes are closed, that she’s very still.

  The cleaning fluid is still pungent on the Formica table.

  “I went into the school kitchen,” she says. “They’d cleaned it all up. And it was steamy because the dishwashers had been running.”

  In here there’s steam from newly washed cups and saucers being placed on a rack by the coffee machine.

  “I was feeling kind of excited,” Jenny continues, “about going outside.”

  I’m monitoring this closely, and I won’t let her get too far along the memory corridor, won’t let her go through the last set of doors—or anywhere near them.

  “I took two bottles of water out of the kitchen,” Jenny continues. “The really big heavy bottles with the carry handles? It was my job to bring out extra water at the end of sports day in case they didn’t have enough. The plastic handles are too narrow and they dig into my hands. I take them up those narrow steps, you know, the exit by the kitchen?”

  Then she stops and shakes her head.

  “That’s it. I was going out of the school, definitely out. But I don’t know what happened then.”

  I remember Tilly’s statement to the police about Rowena soaking a PE towel in water.

  “Tilly said there were two large water bottles on the gravel at the side of the school, by the kitchen entrance.”

  Jenny had been outside.

  “But why did I go back in again?” Jenny asks.

  “Maybe to help?”

  “But the reception children all got out fine, didn’t they? And Tilly? Everyone got out.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “Maybe that’s when I lost my phone,” she says. “When I bent to put the water down. It was in that little pocket at the top of my red skirt. It’s fallen out before.”

  “Yes.”

  ——

  You should go and see what Aunt Sarah’s up to,” she says. “I’ll stay here if that’s OK. It’s the only place that’s halfway normal.”

  “You won’t try to remember any more, will you?”

  “Mum …”

  “Not without me. Please.”

  “OK.”

  I leave Jenny in the cafeteria and go to the ICU.

  Ivo is standing in the corridor. Just seeing his narrow back-view and trendy haircut brings vivid memories of Jenny, a whole dimension of her that has been left behind since the fire—the exuberant, energetic teenager with joie de vivre and passionate good humor; Jenny walking on air. And a kind of helplessness as she fell in love, so trusting of Ivo to catch her.

  He hasn’t gone to her bedside, but neither has he run away.

  I go closer. His face is white as he looks at her through the glass wall; tremors are coursing through his body, and I see a boy lying on a pavement being beaten and kicked and punched.

  I feel overwhelming pity for him.

  Sarah is with him.

  “I spoke to her on Wednesday,” he says. “And she sounded just like usual. Happy. And then we texted each other. The last one, from me, she must have gotten at just after three, her time.”

  He turns away from looking at Jenny. “Will you tell me what’s happening?”

  “She’s very badly injured. Her heart failed yesterday. She needs a transplant to stay alive. Without one, she’ll only live for a few more weeks.”

  Sarah’s words kick him over and over again.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah says.

  I think he’ll ask if she’ll be disfigured, wonder if Sarah will tell him that we don’t know yet. He’s silent.

  “It was arson,” she says. “We don’t know if someone deliberately targeted Jenny. Possibly it’s connected to the malicious mail. Do you know anything?”

  “No. She hadn’t any idea who it was.”

  His voice is quiet and shaken.

  I see you leaving Jenny’s bedside and coming out into the corridor, but they haven’t yet seen you.

  “Someone threw red paint at her,” Ivo says. “She phoned me. Said she’d had to get a friend to cut her hair. The paint wouldn’t come out. She was crying.”

  Sarah jumps on this. “Did she see who it was?”

  “No. It was from behind.”

  “Any description at all?”

  “No.”

  “When was this, Ivo?”

  “About eight weeks ago.”

  “Do you know where it happened?”

  “In Hammersmith shopping arcade, just by Primark. She thought he must have run into a shop or a side exit to the street straight afterwards. She said a woman was screaming because she thought it was blood on her.”

  I see you grappling with the information, no corner of your mind free to store anything else, but it’s forcing its way inside.

  “I should have made her go to the police,” Ivo says. “If I had—”

  “I’m the police, Ivo,” Sarah says. “No, look at me. Please. She should have felt that she could come to me. I’m her aunt and I love her. But she didn’t. And that’s my responsibility. Not yours.”

  “She said her parents would be so upset if they found out. She didn’t want to worry them. Maybe that was true for you too.”

  “Yes. I’d like you to give a statement at the police station to a colleague of mine. I’ll get a car to pick you up and drop you back again, so it should be as quick as possible.”

  Ivo nods.

  Sarah gives him Jenny’s mobile. “Can you look through this, see if there are any contacts you don’t recognize? Or messages that seem strange to you? I’ve looked, but I can’t see anything odd.”

  He takes it, f
ingers tightening around it.

  “Shall I look at the phone now?” Ivo asks. “While I wait?”

  Like you, he wants to be doing something.

  “Yes.”

  Sarah sees you. “There was red paint, Mike—”

  “I heard.”

  Maybe she expects you to be angry with Ivo. But you aren’t. Is it because you hadn’t gone to the police about the hate mail for two weeks? Your whole body seems caved in and your face gaunt.

  “Why don’t you go and see Adam?” Sarah says. “I can stay here with Jenny for a while now.”

  I think Sarah’s realized how much you need Adam, as well as him needing you.

  “Ivo has to give his statement,” she continues. “And I’ve got a few things to read through, which I can do here. I’ll call you immediately if there’s anything.”

  Ivo comes up, interrupting.

  “I’m not sure if it means anything, but the last text I sent her on Wednesday afternoon has been deleted.”

  “She could have done that,” Sarah suggests.

  “It was a poem. Not that bad. Even if it was, she wouldn’t have deleted it.”

  “Jenny’s phone was found on the gravel outside the school,” Sarah says. “Anyone could have tampered with it.”

  “But why would someone want to delete my message?” Ivo asks.

  “I don’t know,” Sarah says.

  “Have you found out yet why it was outside?” you ask.

  “No. Not yet. And we couldn’t get prints because it’s been handled by the reception teacher and Maisie.”

  “Should I wait here for the ride to the police station, or down in the foyer bit?” Ivo asks.

  He still hasn’t gone to Jenny’s bedside.

  I think he’s relieved for the opportunity to be away from her.

  I leave and find Jenny in the goldfish-bowl atrium, people swarming past her. Does she feel like she has a stronger handhold on life to be among so much of it? Or perhaps she’s waiting for Ivo, not knowing he’s already here and in the ICU. “You should have told me. I had a right to know.”

  “Ivo’s here,” I say. “He’s in the ICU with Dad and Aunt Sarah.”

  “I don’t want to see him,” she says, her voice quiet.

  Yesterday she wasn’t excited about him coming. Perhaps she’s realized that their relationship is based on physical beauty. She’s so vulnerable, and I’m glad she’s protecting herself from rejection and further hurt.

  I don’t tell her that he stared at her through the glass and was tortured by what he saw.

  I don’t tell her that he didn’t go any nearer.

  “He’s told Aunt Sarah about the red paint,” I say instead. “He also said that he sent you a text at three, but it’s deleted.”

  “I never delete his texts.”

  “Maybe someone did that after you dropped your phone.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. He’s going to the police station to give a statement.”

  “So he’ll come through here?” Her voice is panicked. She turns and hurries away from the atrium.

  I go after her.

  “How many people know your mobile number, Jen?”

  “Loads.”

  “I don’t mean friends, I mean, well, people at the school, for example?”

  “Everyone. It was written up on a notice board in the staff room for teachers to put into their own mobiles. They were meant to call me if they needed anything from the sickroom during sports day.”

  She hurries on, fleeing from the possibility of seeing Ivo.

  But I stand still a moment, feeling frustration as a physical force. I have to talk to Sarah.

  She needs to know that Jenny was outside the school, but then went back in. Something or someone must have persuaded her—or made her. Could it have been a text? And could the person who sent it have deleted it, and deleted Ivo’s too in their haste?

  28

  I join you as you leave the hospital, desperate to see you and Addie together. The only time you’ve been with Addie since the fire, he pushed you away from Silas Hyman. But now, alone together, it will surely be different.

  Our car has been too long in the shadeless car park and inside the air is heavy with heat, the metal clasp of the seat belts stingingly hot. But you don’t open the windows or switch on the air-con.

  As you drive, I don’t think of us going out to dinner with friends but feel as if we’re somewhere wild and lawless and blisteringly exposed, more akin to a lion pair in the Serengeti, protecting their cubs against poachers, than any of our neighbors with their safe, smooth lives.

  Adam told me a few weeks ago that he and Jenny made you and me blood relatives, because in them we share the same blood. Is that why we’re pulled so viscerally and fiercely together now? To make sure Jenny lives. To prove our son is innocent.

  You left Sarah at Jenny’s bedside with the illegal transcripts, her incongruous owl notebook, and Elizabeth Fisher’s contract. Sarah must have read those transcripts a dozen times already, and goodness knows what she’ll get from Elizabeth’s contract. Yes, I know. I’m hardly a trained detective and am in no position to comment. Besides, I trust Sarah. If she thinks something is worth doing, then it must be.

  As we near home, I think of the first journey we ever made from the hospital to home. Adam was four hours old; me on a cushion in the back, staring at him: so perfect and vulnerable. With Jenny nine years earlier, going home to our old tiny flat, my nanny voice had told me it was terrifying I was just allowed to take a baby home with absolutely no clue what I was doing. Something awful could happen. I was too young, too immature, too downright silly to be in charge of a baby. How would a knowledge of Florentine frescoes or the difference between Coleridge and Johnson as literary critics help me look after her? I’d felt more akin to animals in a wild and dangerous place then too, unequipped to prevent terrible things from happening to my baby.

  But Jenny turned us into parents. With Adam we knew how to put in a backward-facing baby seat to avoid crushing by air bags, and sterilize bottles to avoid nasty bugs, and purée first food without salt that could collapse tiny kidneys, and when to apply eye ointment and nappy cream; and immunizations against killer diseases were routine. I put nine years of experience, the NHS, and John Lewis’s nursery department between my baby and the dangerous wilds of the Serengeti.

  You carried our blanket-wrapped boy, asleep in his car seat, up the front door steps. Safe.

  You park the car and you don’t get out straightaway. But I hurry inside.

  In Addie’s bedroom, Mum is drawing the curtains against the too-bright sun. He’s in bed and she’s got the portable air conditioner going, the white noise soporifically calming.

  “You’re exhausted, poppet,” she’s saying to him. “And it’ll just be a nap. I’ll sit with you.”

  He believes, from her, that I’ll never wake up, that I’m the same as dead.

  It wasn’t only Jenny’s dying that I’d seen as drowning, but also Adam’s grief. I still do.

  A small boy out in a dark angry ocean where I can’t reach him.

  I long to go to him, but I know he won’t feel me; and I don’t think I can bear that now, so instead I watch Mum.

  She sits down next to him in the darkened room. She takes his hand and I see his face relax a little. She used to sit with me when I was a child, and it was so comforting—Mum there with me and the curtains drawn while it was still light outside.

  As I look at them I can imagine what will happen to him if I never wake up again. It’s just for a moment, but enough time to punch a window out of my dread into a vista of new thoughts. His armbands can be puffed full of my mother’s breath and Sarah’s and Jenny’s. And yours—most of all yours. Maybe other people’s love will keep him afloat.

  I hear the front door closing and your footsteps in the hall. And I almost hear you yell, “I’m home!” up the stairs and feel Adam leaping out of bed and away from the book I’m reading and
yelling, “Daddy!”

  “A Railway Children moment every day,” you said once, not even trying for an ironic tone.

  But then you’d had to go away more frequently and for longer; and even when you were working in London, you got home later. Your Railway Children moments with Addie had become few and far between.

  Adam sits upright, his whole body tensed.

  Mum goes downstairs to find you. Away from Addie, her face looks terrified.

  “Has anything happened?” she asks.

  “All the same.”

  “Addie’s in bed, but he’s awake.”

  She doesn’t say that she’s told him I’ll never wake up. Is that an oversight, or deliberate? One hell of an oversight, but then everything is out of whack and disproportionate now. And she looks so sad, so vulnerable without her mask for Addie in place.

  Your footsteps sound heavy on the stairs, weighted down.

  You knock on Addie’s door. He doesn’t answer.

  “Ads?” you say.

  No response.

  “Addie, open the door, please.”

  Silence.

  I see your hurt.

  “He hates me,” you say quietly, and I think Mum must be there, but it’s just me. Did you really say it? Or do I just know you so well that I know what you are thinking?

  It’s not just the thing with Silas Hyman, is it?

  It’s the fire.

  You think that as a father you should have stopped it from happening. A father doesn’t let your mother and sister be horrifically injured. A father protects your family.

  Do you think this is why he hates you?

  Why he’s not opening his door to you?

  The other side of the closed door, Adam is curled up on top of his bed, as if unable to move as well as speak.

  For God’s sake, Mike, just go in there right now and tell him you know he didn’t start the fire.

  But you say nothing.

  You think he already knows.

  The closed door between you, with its scuffed white paint on one side and Peter Pan cutout on the other, shuts off my vista of hope.

  We drive back to the hospital and I don’t think about bringing Adam home, but the journey ten hours earlier, with each contraction pushing me beyond the perimeter of normal and imaginable and bearable.