Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  “You know that Shakespeare sonnet, about love not being love which alters when it alteration finds? I think it’s about a mother with her child growing up. But not mine.”

  But all I can think is how proud Maisie is of Rowena’s reading: “Even Shakespeare, when she’s doing Science A levels. My little bookworm!”

  Her pride in Rowena. Her love for her. How can these not be real? Her true colors. Because they are what make Maisie who she is.

  “I thought she’d be pleased about Silas,” Rowena says, and I hear grief in her voice. “I mean, he’s handsome, isn’t he? I thought it was like proving to her that I could be like a pretty girl too.”

  “But he’s married, for crying out loud,” I say to her. “And he’s thirty. Of course your mother didn’t want him to be your boyfriend; of course she wanted something better for you.”

  “She went to see him,” Rowena continues, her voice halting. “It was Valentine’s Day and he’d sent me a card. She went to his house. Told him he had to stop our relationship.”

  The hate mail from Natalia stopped the day after Valentine’s Day. Maisie’s talk with Silas worked.

  And I’d do the same for Jenny. If she was sixteen and was with Silas Hyman, I’d do the same. Because this is nothing like Jenny’s relationship with Ivo, nothing like it at all.

  “I loved him,” Rowena says quietly. “I still do. I thought he’d fight for me. But he didn’t.

  “And then Mum got him fired. She phoned the newspaper, not thinking what would happen to the school, just wanting to get him out; punish him too. And she told me she sent him candles, eight blue ones, like the ones on Addie’s cake. She said she wanted him to know that if he ever started anything again with me, she’d make his life hell. That she has that power.”

  The Maisie I’ve known for thirteen years is warm and vibrant and ran in the mums’ race every year and came in last by a mile and didn’t give a hoot! I’ve also learned that she is fragile and vulnerable and bruised. Both these Maisies have been assimilated into my picture of her.

  But not this.

  A nurse knocks and comes in. It’s Belinda, the nice smiley nurse.

  “There’s a ward round and the doctors need to take a look at her. It’ll take about twenty minutes.”

  Sarah stands up. “Of course.”

  ——

  It’s cooler up here in my ward, the open windows and white linoleum at least visually lowering the temperature. A porter is wheeling a trolley, with my comatose body on it, back towards the bed. My scan must be finished.

  You are waiting.

  Dr. Bailstrom’s shoes click across the linoleum towards you, black today but Louboutins, the red flashing on the underside like a warning.

  She tells you that their scan shows I have no cognitive function. No brain activity beyond the basics of swallowing, gagging, and breathing.

  I wasn’t out on a grassy tennis court, warm under my toes, running for a ball, racket outstretched, and thwacking it over the net. I was with Sarah as she spoke to Rowena.

  I have never been near my body when they’ve done their scans.

  No wonder they think I’m not there.

  You ask to be alone with me.

  You take my hand in yours.

  You say you understand.

  And I am amazed by you.

  You pull the curtain around my bed.

  You lay your head down next to me, so that our faces are close, my hair falling across your cheek. United by almost twenty years of loving each other and seventeen years of loving our child.

  The essence of our marriage is distilled in this moment.

  Jenny is standing in the doorway.

  “Jen, come in.”

  But she shakes her head. “I didn’t know,” she says and leaves.

  And I didn’t know either, that our tough-as-old-boots strong married love contains this delicate intensity at its heart.

  I think about speaking to each other every day for nineteen years. Nineteen years times three hundred and sixty-five days times however many conversations per day—how many words does that make between us?

  An uncountable number.

  My hair is still falling across your cheek, but I move away from you.

  It will help you, my darling, if you think I’m not here. It will make this easier. And I want to make this easier for you.

  I leave the room.

  Outside the office on the ground floor, everyone is gathering for another interview with Rowena. The social worker is already in there, and now people start filing into the office. The corridor has got hotter; faces are sweating. DI Baker’s shirt is untucked, and his hands leave clammy marks around the file he’s holding.

  I’m thinking of you.

  Of when you’ll realize I’m no longer there with you.

  Only Penny and Sarah now remain out in the corridor.

  “There’s something you should know,” Penny says, not meeting Sarah’s eye. “You probably should have been told before.”

  “Yes?”

  “Maisie White was the witness who said she saw Adam coming out of the art room, holding matches.”

  I have never known her.

  34

  I never thought Maisie White was involved in the fire directly,” Penny tells Sarah. She’s keeping everyone waiting in the office, but she has to tell Sarah; she owes her this.

  “She seemed genuinely distressed by what had happened to Jenny and Grace,” Penny continues. “And was reluctant to tell me it was Adam. I thought I was having to force it out of her.”

  “If I’d known—” Sarah begins.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. Since we found out about the fraud—you found out—we’ve been questioning the validity of her witness statement, but have been working under the assumption that she was protecting her husband. In retrospect she was playing us. I’m sorry.”

  “I told Maisie that a witness had seen Adam,” Sarah says. “And she was surprised. I thought it meant she had no idea.”

  “A good actress?” suggests Penny.

  Sarah thinks a moment, then shakes her head. “It’s because I’m a police officer. She thought I would already know it was her who was the witness. She’d have assumed I’d been told. It was my ignorance that surprised her.” No wonder Maisie had initially seemed so nervous with Sarah that evening in the cafeteria.

  Penny goes into the office.

  There are so many people in here, making Rowena seem smaller. She is staring at the shiny carpet tiles, not looking up.

  “You told one of my officers earlier that your mother knew you were going to go bankrupt?” Baker says.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did your mother say she saw Adam coming out of the art room?” Penny asks, and DI Baker looks irritated.

  “She wanted a child to be blamed,” Rowena says quietly. “So that no one would suspect fraud. It was just chance that it was Adam’s birthday that day.”

  “Sports day?”

  “Yes. She didn’t want anyone hurt.”

  “And there’d be no staff to put it out?”

  Rowena is silent.

  “So who actually started the fire?”

  Rowena is silent.

  “Was it you?” Mohsin asks. “Did your mother ask you to do that?”

  She doesn’t reply.

  “You said that you need to tell the truth?” Mohsin reminds her.

  “I didn’t know what she was going to do. Not till too late. And it’s only been in here that she’s told me everything. She thought she could trust me. Oh God.”

  “So it was your mother?” DI Baker asks.

  She shakes her head.

  “She made Adam do it.”

  But no one could make Adam do that. He’s too good, too thoughtful.

  “She told Adam that Mr. Hyman had left him a birthday present in the art room,” Rowena continues. “She told him it was a volcano. They’d done that in year three—you know, with the vinegar and the baking soda, making an eruption?
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  “She told Adam it was a different kind of volcano and he needed to light it. She said he could use the matches from his birthday cake, which she’d fetched for him.

  “She said the pathetic little wimp didn’t want anything to do with the matches.”

  There’s a vocabulary that goes with this person I don’t know. Thinking about her words, not what she’s done. Because I can’t, yet, think about what she’s done.

  “She said she had to lay it on thick then,” Rowena continues. “Told him Mr. Hyman had brought the volcano present to the school himself, even though he’d get into terrible trouble if he was found there.”

  It’s making a ghastly kind of sense now: a volcano, not a fire, for Mr. Hyman, his beloved teacher.

  “She told Addie that Mr. Hyman was waiting to say happy birthday to him. That he’d be back any minute. And that he’d be really disappointed if Addie wasn’t playing with the birthday surprise.”

  So Silas Hyman is directly linked to the fire—but as a phantom presence, a motivating force, blameless of what was being done in his name.

  “And Adam lit the volcano,” Rowena says, her voice quiet.

  “What was in this volcano?” Penny asks.

  “She said it was white spirit and another accelerant. She’d also put cans of spray mount around it. She told me Adam must have been chicken and thrown the match from a distance away; otherwise it would have blown up in his face.”

  “Did she intend to kill him?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “You just said it would have blown up in his face, if he’d gotten closer, as he was clearly meant to have done.”

  “She can’t have meant to kill him.” But her voice shakes, no scaffolding of conviction to sustain it.

  “Is there anything else?”

  Rowena nods, unable to look at another person’s face, her own cloaked in misery and shame. “She came up to Addie, when his mother had run in to find Jenny. She said, ‘You weren’t meant to actually do it, for goodness’ sake, Addie!’ ”

  Rowena mimicked her mother’s voice with unnerving accuracy. I flinch from her, and Rowena herself seems disturbed. She continues, quietly now. “She told him it was a knight’s test, and he’d failed it. That it was all his fault.”

  And Adam believed her.

  Because Adam believes in quests and tests of courage and honor.

  Because in his eight-year-old imagination he was Sir Gawain.

  Because at eight you really can think you’re a knight who’s been found wanting.

  But instead of the giant nicking the side of your neck, your mother and sister are trapped in a burning building in front of you while you’re told that you are to blame.

  I have to run to him now and tell him it isn’t his fault.

  It isn’t!

  But my vocal cords no longer make sounds.

  And Adam, too, is mute. The one thing that DI Baker got right is that Adam’s guilt silenced him.

  “That’s why I went in,” Rowena says quietly. “After what she’d said to Addie.”

  She pauses a moment, upset.

  “I’d really like to see him, tell him it wasn’t his fault at all,” Rowena says. “I mean, he probably won’t want to see me, but I’d really like to.”

  Her voice peters out for a moment.

  “It was partly my fault,” she continues. “I told Mummy about the volcano experiment. I was in Adam’s class as a teaching assistant, last summer term. And I told her how good Adam is. I thought it was so sweet the way he liked books about knights, how he almost saw himself as one—or at least wanted to be like one—and I told her.”

  But I’d already told Maisie that, countless times—and that his goodness makes me worried for him. That I wished, for his sake, he was good at football instead.

  Rowena is miserably silent. I want one of them to tell her it wasn’t her fault either, but they are police officers in that room, with a job. The “touchy-feely” stuff, as Sarah called it once, would come later. I used to think it meant that she didn’t value empathy.

  “Do you know why your mother wanted to harm Jenny?” Penny asks.

  “She didn’t mean to. It wasn’t till Grace ran in, shouting for her, that I knew she was in there. And Mum was the same, I’m sure. She wouldn’t have hurt Grace or Jenny. I know she wouldn’t. It was a terrible mistake.”

  She’s shaking violently now. Mohsin looks at her with concern.

  “I don’t think she’s up to any more,” he says to DI Baker.

  “Do you think your father knew what your mother intended?” DI Baker asks.

  “No.” She pauses a moment. “But he blames me for not stopping her in time. I mean, I was there. I should have stopped her.”

  Penny escorts Rowena out of the room and back to the burns unit.

  I go to my ward. The curtains are drawn around my bed.

  Inside, you’re lying with me, pressing yourself against me, sobbing so hard that your body judders the bed.

  Crying because you know I’m not there.

  I long to go to you, but it will make this harder.

  Then Sarah comes in and runs to you and puts her arms around you, and I’m so grateful to her.

  She tells you about Maisie, but you hardly listen.

  Then she tells you that Adam was tricked into lighting the fire, that he was told it was his fault.

  For the first time you turn from me.

  “Oh Christ, poor Ads.”

  “You’ll go and see him?” Sarah asks.

  You nod. “As soon as I’ve seen Grace’s doctors.”

  You’ve asked for the meeting with my doctors to be at my bedside, as if you need to see my comatose body right here in front of you to do this.

  I am at the far side of the ward. Any closer and I’m afraid you’ll sense me and this will be too hard for you.

  A nurse is wheeling a drugs trolley from bed to bed, and the noise she makes as she unloads her cargo disguises the lower, subtler sounds of your conversation.

  You’ve asked Dr. Sandhu to be here too, and it’s his kind face I look at, not yours. I can’t bear to look at yours. I was wrong about him a couple of days ago. He didn’t arrive where he is now through a series of coincidence and chances; this was a vocational straight-as-the-crow-flies journey to a family like ours.

  The nurse with the drugs trolley has stopped at a bed for longer, and in the silence your voice carries across the ward to me.

  You tell them that you know now that I won’t wake up.

  That I am not “in there” anymore.

  You tell them that Dad had Kahler’s disease and that Jenny and I were tested to see if we were suitable donors for bone marrow.

  You tell them that Jenny and I are a tissue match.

  You ask them to donate my heart.

  I love you.

  The squeaky trolley starts up again, and the nurse is chatting to someone and I can’t hear the rest of your conversation. But I know what it will be because I have already been down this seemingly logical path with Jenny.

  Across the ward, I strain to listen, catching at words that make the sentences I expect.

  Dr. Bailstrom’s high voice carries farthest. She tells you I am breathing unaided. It will be at least a year, probably longer, before they’ll even contemplate getting a court order to withdraw food and fluid.

  You faced my living-death out of love for Jenny, and you think nothing has come of it. Now you’re only left with the brutal fact.

  Dr. Sandhu suggests a “Do Not Resuscitate” document. I imagine that it’s pretty standard procedure in these circumstances. But, as Dr. Bailstrom points out, standard procedure or not, there is no reason why I should collapse and need resuscitating. My body, ironically, is healthy.

  I think Dr. Sandhu is trying to give you a little kindness, a little hope. Because if my body does collapse, instead of being resuscitated, it would be kept oxygenated until my organs could be transplanted.

  In Dr. Sandhu’s of
fice you sign the DNR form. Jenny comes in and watches.

  “You can’t do this, Mum.”

  “Of course I can and you—”

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “It’s too late to change your mind, sweetie.”

  “This isn’t custard instead of cream on my pudding, for fuck’s sake!”

  I laugh. She’s furious.

  “I shouldn’t have said yes. I can’t believe I did. You got me at a really bad—”

  “I am never going to wake up again, Jen, but you can get better. So logically—”

  “Logically what? You’re turning into Jeremy Bentham now?”

  “You’ve read him?”

  “Mum!”

  “I’m impressed, that’s all.”

  “No, you’re changing the subject. And you can’t. It’s too big to change. If you go ahead with this, I refuse to get back into my body. Ever.”

  “Jenny, you want to live. You—”

  “But not by killing you.”

  “Jen—”

  “I refuse!”

  She means it.

  And yet she longs overwhelmingly to live.

  You’re going home to see Adam, and I go with you. As we walk down the corridor, you lean a little towards me, as if you know I’m with you. Maybe now that you no longer think I’m in my body, you can sense me with you in other places.

  As we pass the garden, the shadows lengthening into evening, Jenny is joining Ivo. Before, I’d marveled at his knowing where she was, amazed at the connection between them, which I saw as an almost spiritual thing. But looking at them now, I just want her to be in his world, the real world—for him to be able to physically touch her.

  As I long to touch you.

  In our car, I fantasize once more, just for a minute or so, that we’re back in our old life and we’re going out to dinner with a bottle of wine in the boot. I wish, absurdly, that it could be me driving. (That’s a decent burgundy in the trunk, Gracie! So go gently on the bends!)

  I even fantasize a row; let’s make this a bit more realistic.

  “You were heavy on the indicator there,” you say.

  “Heavy on an indicator? How can you be heavy on an indicator?”