Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  It’s not the fledgling birds that are thrown out of the nest by their parents and made to fly; it’s the parents who are made to get the hell out of the cozy family nest by their teenage offspring. It’s we who are made to be independent of them, crash-landing if we don’t manage it.

  You and Sarah are in the corridor of the ICU, Jenny listening. I can’t hear what you’re saying but can tell from your posture that you’re furious. I go closer.

  “For Christ’s sake, his wife made a mistake.”

  “I know that, Mike,” Sarah says patiently. “I just wanted to tell you.”

  “It’s bloody ridiculous. The man’s thirty years old and married, for God’s sake!”

  Jenny turns to me, bemused.

  “His wife thought I was having an affair with him?”

  I nod. Then summon up my courage. “Were you?”

  “No. He flirted with me—he flirts with everyone—but nothing more.”

  And I believe her; of course I do.

  She smiles at me. “But thank you for asking.”

  She means it.

  I don’t ask her about Ivo, who I saw sitting in the corridor by the garden, a shoal of people separating briefly to pass him.

  Guessing—hoping—that she wouldn’t have had an affair with Silas Hyman, and trusting her to tell the truth, doesn’t mean that I have full knowledge of our daughter again.

  “Dr. Sandhu’s here,” Jenny says.

  I turn to see him, with Jenny’s cardiologist, the young Miss Logan.

  “We’ll be taking Jennifer for an MRI and a CAT scan later today,” Miss Logan says. “To check that she’s still a candidate for transplant.”

  “You think it’s likely then,” you say, grabbing at her words.

  “The time frame is extremely narrow. We are simply following protocol.”

  “Remember we talked about the two kinds of burns?” Dr. Sandhu says. “We now know that Jenny’s burns are superficial, second-degree, partial-thickness burns. Which means that the blood supply is intact and her skin will heal. There will be no scarring.”

  But he sounds defeated rather than pleased.

  “That’s fantastic!” you say, refusing to be defeated too.

  They go into the ward, to Jenny’s bed.

  Jenny stays in the corridor with me.

  “Dead but not scarred,” Jenny says. “Well, that’s comforting.”

  “Jen …”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes only gallows humor cuts it.”

  “You’re not going to—”

  “So you keep saying.”

  “Because it’s the truth. You’re going to live.”

  “So why didn’t Dr. Sandhu or Miss Logan say so? I need a walk.”

  “Jenny—”

  She starts walking away from me.

  “They’ve found you a heart.”

  She doesn’t turn.

  “I’m too old for fairy stories, Mum.”

  31

  Sarah is waiting in the cafeteria, fingers tapping as yours do when you are impatient. She has her owl notebook out and has been reading through it. I sense increased energy in her exhausted face. She stops tapping as she sees Mohsin and Penny arrive.

  “Natalia Hyman’s been charged under the Malicious Communications Act and for assault,” Penny says. “She’s admitted to all the incidents of hate mail and to the paint attack.”

  Her sharp features are softened with satisfaction at a job well done.

  “Silas Hyman had nothing to do with his wife’s malicious hate-mail campaign,” she continues. “He didn’t even know it was happening.”

  “And the tampering with Jenny’s oxygen?” Sarah asks.

  “Natalia swears blind it wasn’t her,” Penny says. “And I believe her. She’s our hate-mailer, but I really don’t think she’s the saboteur.”

  “And Donald White?” Sarah asks Mohsin.

  “His alibi checks out,” Mohsin replies. “He was on a BMI flight at three on Wednesday, halfway between Gatwick and Aberdeen. But we still think you were right about the arson for fraud. He must have had an accomplice.”

  “His smart lawyer is trying to spring him,” Penny says. “But Baker’s not having it, not yet anyway.”

  “Or the arsonist was Silas Hyman,” Sarah says.

  Mohsin and Penny are taken aback.

  “I think my brother might have been right from the beginning,” Sarah continues.

  I want her to stop, right now. I don’t have the emotional capacity or the mental energy for this. We have it sorted out. Done and dusted. Donald White burnt the school down to get the insurance money. Possibly Jenny saw something that incriminated him, which is why he may be the person who tried to kill her. Natalia Hyman was getting misplaced revenge on Jenny. Maybe, just a possibility, it was Natalia who attacked her in the hospital. That’s it. These two people make sense of it all. Not a nice neat parcel of facts—instead a vile dossier of the foulness in people. But known. Done.

  “Don’t you want the truth?” nanny voice snaps at me. “Don’t you want Adam unequivocally cleared and Jenny safe? Isn’t that what you want?”

  Of course it is, I’m sorry.

  “But we’ve found out about the fraud,” Mohsin says to Sarah. “Rather, you found out.”

  Is he also frustrated and tired by this now?

  “I found a motive, yes,” Sarah says. “But I now think the arsonist could equally well be Silas Hyman.”

  “Taking revenge on the school?” Mohsin asks.

  “Yes.”

  “I never bought that Silas Hyman could be the arsonist,” Penny says sharply. “Even first time around.”

  “I think we were too quick to dismiss him,” Sarah says.

  “But what about his wife giving him an alibi?” Mohsin asks. “She clearly loathes him, so she’d hardly lie for him, would she?”

  “If he gets sent down, she’ll be a single mother with three children and no income,” Sarah says. “It’s in her own interests to lie for him. In any case, I think she still has feelings for him, in her own weird and perverted way.”

  I agree, because sitting next to Natalia in the car, beneath her spat-out furious words, her passionate viciousness, I glimpsed something fragile and wounded. “He was fucking her, but he was making love to me.”

  “Give me ten minutes?” Sarah asks, and before they can reply she leaves, holding her owl notebook. Mohsin looks perplexed, Penny irritated.

  “I’ll call the station,” Penny says, annoyed. She leaves. Mohsin goes to the counter to get another cup of tea.

  Alone, I think about Jenny. “I’m too old for fairy stories, Mum.”

  I remember you reading to her every night: your big hands, the knuckles with dark hair, rough and masculine, around a sparkly covered book. Her favorites were the old ones, the ones that begin “Once upon a time” and so, as convention dictates, must end “happily ever after.”

  But that happily ever after was hard won. Those beautiful, blameless princesses and virtuous girls and trusting children were pitted against vicious cruelty. A witch keeps children caged, fattening them up to eat; a stepmother abandons children in a forest to die; another demands a woodcutter kill her stepdaughter and bring her the heart for supper.

  Inside the sparkly covers was a world of good against evil, snow-white innocence against dark violence.

  But despite the wickedness, the pure princesses and guiltless girls and vulnerable children won through. They survived—always—into a happy-ever-after ending.

  And I believe in fairy stories now, did I tell you that? Because I’ve gone through the looking glass, stepped through the back of the wardrobe. The girl will get her prince, the children will be reunited with their loving father, and Jen will live.

  She will live.

  Mohsin finishes his cup of tea as Sarah comes back into the cafeteria, Penny just behind her. And I must think about dark wickedness again—the who and the why of our story. Unlike those fairy tales, the narrative isn’t neatly line
ar but looping back on itself to Silas Hyman.

  “OK, let’s run with your idea of Silas Hyman as arsonist then,” Penny says to Sarah, with a note of derision in her voice. “Let’s say he did want to torch the place. Even if he knew the code on the gate—let’s actually get him inside—how would he have walked through the school up to the second floor, unnoticed?”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Sarah responds calmly. “Although most of the staff was at sports day, there were still three members of staff in the building and it would have been risky.”

  “Exactly. So—”

  “So he had an accomplice. Someone who made sure the coast was clear for him.”

  Penny looks even more annoyed and impatient. I hope her children are intelligent and fast, or homework time will be a nightmare in her house.

  “What if it was Rowena White who was helping him?” Sarah asks. “What if she kept lookout? Possibly made sure the secretary was distracted while he got in?”

  “And why on earth would she do that?” Penny asks.

  “Because I think that Silas Hyman was having an affair with someone at the school. A teaching assistant. But it wasn’t Jenny. It was Rowena.”

  I am startled. Rowena?

  “That’s absurd,” Penny says. “I understand why you don’t want your niece to have been having an affair with him. But Natalia Hyman was clear it was Jenny. She saw them together.”

  “Saw her husband flirting with Jen, yes,” Sarah says. “But he flirted with every female at the school. Elizabeth Fisher called him a cockerel in the henhouse. I think he flirted with Rowena White too. That it went further.”

  They’ve reached Mohsin now, who’s listening intently.

  “What about the head teacher and the leash thing?” Penny asks. “Sally Healey knew it was Jennifer.”

  “She just said it was a teaching assistant,” Sarah replies. “It was Natalia who drew her own conclusions from that. And if you put the two girls side by side, it’s easy to see why you’d pick Jenny.”

  “OK, I need to get brutal here,” Penny says. “Jennifer—long legs, long blond hair, beautiful face. Jenny, I buy.”

  She sees Sarah react on “beautiful face,” and Mohsin glaring at her.

  “Sorry. But why ugly, dumpy Rowena White when he has Natalia at home?”

  “Because Natalia is the kind of woman who shoves shit through letter boxes?” hazards Mohsin.

  “And Rowena’s extremely intelligent,” Sarah says. “Reading science at Oxford. Maybe he’s attracted to that. Or maybe he knew he could seduce her because she’s vulnerable. Or she’s seventeen and that’s beauty enough. I don’t know his reason.”

  “Because there isn’t one,” Penny says.

  “There’s more,” Sarah said, rummaging in her bag. “I’ve got my notes here from when I spoke to Maisie White.”

  Penny watches her, alarmed.

  “Who the fuck didn’t you speak to? Does DI Baker know about this?”

  You arrive, interrupting.

  “Is Jenny on her own?” Sarah asks, her anxiety clear. Because if it’s Silas Hyman, as she thinks, he’s out there somewhere and a threat.

  “Ivo’s with her,” you say. “And a whole load of doctors. About Rowena White. After we spoke, I remembered something.”

  Penny and Mohsin both look awkward with you here. Penny even blushes a little. It’s affecting to be physically close to someone who is emotionally stripped raw.

  “When I spoke to Silas Hyman’s wife,” you say, “she accused me of getting her husband sacked. Of ‘wanting him out.’ ”

  I remember Natalia following you to the car, her hostility like a strong cheap perfume around her.

  “I thought she meant me as a parent,” you continue. “Just a generic parent at the school. But I think she meant me personally. She thought I’d gotten him fired—presumably because she thought he was having an affair with my daughter.”

  Sarah nods, and I see the allegiance between the two of you.

  “She got the wrong girl, so she blamed the wrong father,” you say.

  Penny is silent. Presumably it’s not good police practice to argue with a father whose daughter is in the ICU; nor cast aspersions about said daughter’s morals to her distraught dad. And now I realize why you’re here, why instead of waiting for Sarah to come to you, you’ve interrupted this meeting with her colleagues.

  You’d said the idea of Jenny and Silas Hyman having a relationship was “bloody ridiculous.” You don’t want lies being told about Jenny, something you’d see as a slur on her—an affair with a married older man.

  When you leave, there’s a pause before anyone speaks again.

  “I think Mike’s right about that interpretation,” Sarah says. “And it makes sense if the red-paint attack was to punish Jenny for getting Silas the sack. It would explain the escalation of violence. She just got the wrong girl.”

  “You said you spoke to Maisie White …?” Mohsin asks.

  “Yes.”

  She opens her owl notebook. As she does so, I remember the shadowy empty cafeteria and Sarah writing up her notes the moment that Maisie had left to join Rowena.

  “I spoke to Maisie White on Thursday, July the twelfth, the day after the fire, at nine p.m.”

  Sarah concentrates on her notebook, but must be aware of Penny’s disapproval.

  “She told me, ‘It’s wrong to make someone adore you, when they’re so much younger and can’t think for themselves.’ I thought she was talking about Adam. But I think now that she was referring to her teenage daughter.

  “She said that Silas got people to love him because no one realized he was a sham. She said that he ‘exploited’ people, and emphasized that word.”

  Penny is silent now; like Mohsin, she’s listening intently.

  “I asked her when she’d changed her mind about Silas Hyman. From my notes she didn’t answer immediately.”

  I remember Maisie fussing with a little pink packet of fake sugar, not answering for a while.

  “She then said it was at the prize-giving,” continues Sarah. “But I think it was before then—when she found out about Silas and her daughter.”

  I remember Maisie’s pale face at the prize-giving. How unlike her it was to hate someone. I remember her saying, “That man should never have been allowed near our children.”

  Silas Hyman wasn’t at the school when Rowena was a pupil there. But he was there last summer when Rowena was a sixteen-year-old teaching assistant. Why didn’t I realize she meant Rowena? And why hadn’t she told me—and later Sarah—the truth?

  I think it’s probably because, like you, she thinks it’s a slur on her daughter. She thinks Silas has already exploited Rowena, and she doesn’t want to damage her any further by making it public. Even to a friend.

  And she’s used to keeping secrets.

  “When I spoke to Rowena the next day,” Sarah says, “she told me that Silas was violent.”

  “You have your notes on that interview too?” Mohsin asks.

  Is he teasing her? No. It is standard procedure to write contemporaneous notes.

  She nods and gives him the notebook.

  I’ve never really understood the police’s obsession with procedure and note-taking and bureaucratic attention to detail, which Sarah excels at. Now I do.

  “The good angel and the devil thing, that’s interesting,” Mohsin says as he reads.

  “If she’d helped him with the arson attack,” Penny says, “it would explain why she ran back in. Maybe she hadn’t realized that people would get hurt.”

  “Let’s talk to her,” Mohsin says, getting up.

  “I’ll call the station,” Penny says. “Get them to find Silas Hyman urgently.”

  I follow Mohsin and Sarah, thinking about Ivo standing guard at Jenny’s bedside while you came to talk to Sarah and her colleagues. I’m glad you trust him enough to let him stand guard in your place, glad that you’re not as prejudiced against him as I was.

  We
arrive at the burns unit and I look through the glass wall into Rowena’s side room. As I said before, she doesn’t look plain or unattractive to me anymore—how can anyone with an undamaged face ever look even plain to me now—but I do understand Penny’s harsh honesty about her.

  But she was beautiful as a little girl. Like a fairy child, with her enormous eyes and elfin face and silky honey-blond hair. Remember that bronze statue that Mrs. Healey commissioned to mark the first year at Sidley House? We weren’t meant to know which child it had been modeled on, but we all guessed it was Rowena. But at six her tiny white perfect teeth had been replaced by uneven gappy ones that looked too big and discolored next to the remaining pearly milk teeth. Her eyes seemed to shrink as her face grew, and her shiny fair hair turned dull matte brown. You think it’s odd that I noticed these things? At school you watch children grow and change, and you can’t help but notice. I felt for her. It must have been so hard to have been so gloriously pretty and then to lose that. She’d cried at the dentist’s, Maisie told me, demanding her old teeth back, as if she knew, even while it was happening, that she was losing her little-girl beauty. I used to wonder if that was what made her so competitive, as if she was trying to prove herself in other ways.

  Jenny did the opposite: our gawky duckling grew into a beautiful teenager, while Rowena suffered the adolescent blight of acne. Growing up must have been fraught for Rowena, even without her father’s physical abuse. I doubt she’s had many romantic bids from boys her own age.

  Did all of this—feeling plain, ugly even, and being cruelly treated by her father—did this make her vulnerable to a man like Silas Hyman?

  Sarah and Mohsin go into her room.

  “Hello, Rowena,” Mohsin says. “I’d like to ask you a few more questions.”

  Rowena nods, but she’s looking at Sarah.