by Camilla Way
From outside on the street, Clara heard the jingling crash of crates of beers being delivered to the bar on the corner. They sat and listened to it, a sound she associated with summer, with sitting outside pubs on sunlit pavements with Luke, with being happy.
“Clara? Are you okay? I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
She looked at his anxious face and suddenly felt so tired she could barely stand. She sank back onto the sofa. “Just go, Mac,” she said quietly. “Just go the fuck home now, will you?”
SEVEN
CAMBRIDGESHIRE, 1988
There was a local woman, a childminder named Kathy Philips, who occasionally took care of Hannah for me when I needed a break. She was, in hindsight, a bit slack; her home was haphazard, as she had four children of her own, plus at least one other mindee whenever I dropped Hannah off. But she was a kind, no-nonsense sort, and most important, she was willing—by then Hannah’s reputation had spread throughout our village; there weren’t a lot of people willing to look after her. I was desperate, I’ll admit.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that Hannah did what she did. She had told me that morning she didn’t want to go: “They’re stupid and boring and their house smells of wee,” was I think how she put it. So this, I expect, was her way of punishing me.
I’ll never forget the fury in Kathy’s voice when she called. “Come and pick your daughter up right now,” she spat, before slamming the phone back down. As I drove over there, I mentally ran through the possibilities. Attacked one of the other kids? Stolen something? But no, it was far worse than either of those things. Kathy was waiting for me at her door when I pulled up, and the expression on her face made my blood run cold. “She set fire to my son’s bedroom,” she told me through gritted teeth.
There was no coming back from that. There was no sweeping that under the carpet—no pretending she’d grow out of it, that it was merely some dreadful phase. Hannah had taken some matches from Kathy’s handbag, sneaked upstairs, and made a pile of Callum’s books, then set fire to them. Kathy, luckily, had smelled the smoke before it had spread too far—but not before Hannah had burned a large brown hole in the carpet. I hate to think what would have happened if it had been allowed to take hold.
“Callum was being annoying,” Hannah said, shrugging, when I asked her why she’d done it. By this time she was seven years old.
It was a small village. She had already bullied half the school by then and Kathy wasn’t the type to keep anything to herself. Soon everyone would know. Long ago, in my naive, pre-children days when I used to dream about my future family, I believed I would make friends with all the other local mothers. Our kids would play happily together in one another’s gardens; lasting friendships would be formed. Of course back then, I believed we’d still be living in our old village, the one I myself had grown up in. But it wasn’t to be. Still, I’d hoped very much to be a part of this new community. It was to be a fresh start for us all. Yet here we were: my child was a pariah. She had no friends, was never invited anywhere to play. The other school mums would meet up regularly but never include me. And now this. I didn’t know how I’d be able to face going out in public again.
* * *
—
The next day, after dropping Hannah off at school, I drove to Peterborough library. I headed to the psychology section and began to search. I scarcely knew what I was looking for until I found it, and when finally I did, I barely noticed my tears as they fell.
When Doug got home from work that night, I was sitting on the sofa waiting for him. He’d got back late the night before, so we hadn’t had a chance to talk properly about what Hannah had done, and he looked at me warily as he came in.
“I just want you to listen to me, okay?” I said.
When he nodded and sat down next to me, I handed him the wedge of photocopies I’d made that afternoon. He glanced at me, brow furrowed, before flicking through them. I held my breath.
Finally he looked up, his eyes wide. “‘Personality Disorders in Childhood’?” he said. “‘Early Warning Signs of Sociopathy’? Are you serious?”
I leaned toward him. “Doug, it’s time we faced facts. We can’t continue like this. Hannah set fire to Callum’s room; she hurt my eye so badly I had to go to A and E. She killed Lucy. . . . Then there’s the lying, the stealing, the bullying. . . .” I could hear my voice rising and I made myself stop and take a breath. “There’s something called antisocial personality disorder and the books say there are certain red flags to look out for.” Eagerly I took the printouts from him and flicked through until I found the one I wanted, reading aloud, “‘Antisocial personality disorder and sociopathy can be traced back to childhood: desire to torture or kill animals; predilection for arson, manipulation of others. Lack of remorse, apparent absence of emotion . . .’” I looked up at him. “Doug, there might as well be a picture of Hannah right next to this!”
“Beth,” he said, shaking his head, “come on, now. . . .”
“Why are you denying it?” I asked. “We could get her help. We could get us help.”
“So, what—you want her committed?” he replied, his distress adding a harsh, angry edge to his voice. “Locked up? Are you saying she’s—what?—some sort of future serial killer? Is that it?”
“No! No, of course I’m not saying that. I’m as scared as you are. I love Hannah! But I know there’s something badly wrong with our little girl, and we need to get her help as soon as possible. I know you’re frightened, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t love her. And what—what if she hurts Toby?”
He looked away. “That shrink we took her to before, he said there was nothing wrong with her.”
“He said she was too young to make a diagnosis.”
“Christ.” He got up and paced around the room, coming to a stop by the window, where he stood looking out in silence. When he finally spoke, his voice was tight and strange. “If this is true, if you’re right . . . what if they take her away from us, Beth? What if they say we can’t look after her properly, that it’s our fault she’s the way she is?”
“She’s getting worse, Doug,” I said gently. “She needs help. We all do.”
He nodded, and I held my breath while he continued to stare out the window. “Okay,” he said at last. “Okay. Let’s try to get her another referral.” He glanced at me. “As long as it’s not with that jerk in Peterborough.”
He smiled sadly at me then, something he hadn’t done, it seemed to me, for a long time, and I could have cried with relief. And I think it was that rare moment of closeness that moved me to say what I said next, to bring up something from years before that we’d both promised never to mention again. “I want to talk about what happened, Doug,” I blurted. “About what we did.”
He knew instantly what I meant, and he became very still. My words hung in the air between us. “Look, Beth,” he said at last, “I can’t deal with this now. . . .”
“Please, Doug,” I begged. “Just let me talk about it. I need to. I think about it all the time, don’t you? I wake up with it on my mind—the lies we told, that girl’s poor family. . . .”
His voice was sharp. “Beth, that’s all in the past. We agreed—”
“But what we did was wrong. It was so wrong, we should never have—”
He glanced at me and the sudden coldness in his eyes stopped me in my tracks. “You wanted to do it. And we have to live with that now.”
I gaped at him. “Me? I wanted? Doug, we both did.” He shook his head and got to his feet. “Please, Doug, please don’t go.” I started to cry.
He stopped, his back to me, he was very still and quiet, and then with a sudden movement, he went quickly from the room. Seconds later I heard the front door slam shut. He didn’t come back until many hours later, drunk and silent and still too furious to even look at me.
* * *
—
We barely spoke in the following days. I made the appointment with the GP, who referred me to a child psychologist in Cambridge who had a waiting list of several weeks. The loneliness in the days after my talk with Doug was unbearable. I sank deeper and deeper inside myself, brooding over things that should have been left firmly in the past. I knew there was only one person who could help me—the same person who’d provided all the answers once before; who knew our secret, as we knew theirs. It would be such a relief to talk about it, like lancing a wound that had been allowed to fester too long. Of course, I knew Doug would never agree, would be horrified at the very idea of us being in contact again—yet the more I fantasized about making the phone call, the more desperate I became to do it.
EIGHT
LONDON, 2017
After Mac had left, his revelation ringing in her ears, Clara sat motionless on the sofa, her shock so absolute that, for now at least, she felt nothing, the world stripped of sound and sensation, as in the aftermath of an explosion. But she knew the pain was coming, could sense the tsunami swelling on the horizon, gathering strength, waiting to break.
Her gaze fell to the photograph of her and Luke on Hampstead Heath, her face turned so lovingly toward his, her eyes shining with happiness. Idiot. She thought now of all the hundreds of times when he’d appeared to love her. Which of those had been a lie? When had he started to be dissatisfied with her, to begin to draw away, look elsewhere?
She remembered their first date. A hazy summer’s evening on the South Bank when suddenly he’d taken her hand and led her away from the crowds, the street performers, the bookstalls, the bars and restaurants, down mossy stone steps to the river’s bank. There small groups huddled on the silty sand, smoke rising from a small campfire, music from a busker’s guitar, the lights of the embankment trailing across the river’s surface, the last of the sun falling behind the city’s skyline. And when he’d kissed her, she’d never felt so deliriously, stupidly happy. Not an expert in these things, she had fallen too deeply, too quickly, entirely forgetting to keep a part of herself back, to put a life jacket on in case of emergency.
Sadie. Sadie fucking Banks. Did everyone know? Their colleagues, their friends? At that moment she remembered the card DS Anderson had left for her, and she pulled it out now, staring down at it until with sudden decisiveness she picked up her phone and dialed the number before she could change her mind, before the tsunami broke and pulled her under.
“DS Anderson.”
She swallowed. “It’s Clara Haynes. I—you—”
“Yes. Hello, Clara. How can I help?”
She forced herself to speak. “Luke was having an affair,” she said, in the unrecognizable, matter-of-fact voice of a stranger’s. “Her name’s Sadie Banks; she works at Brindle too. Maybe you should speak to her. She might have a better idea of where he is.” Her voice cracked on the last word and when she hung up, the pain crashed over her at last, dragging her down in its vicious undertow, filling her lungs with grief.
A long time later she sat, head in hands, her face raw from crying. What should she do now? Pack her bags and move out? Had Luke simply left her for someone else? Was that all this was? Merely a gutless way of telling her she was dumped, that he hadn’t loved her after all?
* * *
—
When she arrived at work the next morning—the thought of staying at home alone in their silent, waiting flat had been unbearable—she hurried toward her magazine’s office, keeping her head down, unable to contemplate how she could begin to answer even the most innocent question about where she’d been. Perhaps the police hadn’t called there yet, she thought hopefully; perhaps no one had an inkling of the bomb that had detonated in the middle of her life. Making eye contact with no one, she hurried to her seat.
When she looked up from her computer thirty seconds later, however, it was to a ring of her colleagues gathered around her desk, staring down at her.
“Shit, Clara, are you okay?” asked the features editor.
“We had the police here yesterday,” breathed one of the subs.
“Is there any news of Luke? Where do you think he is?” asked someone else.
“I don’t know,” she stammered. “They don’t—the police, I mean—they don’t know either.” She wondered, as she spoke, how many of them knew about Sadie, and felt the heat climb in her cheeks.
For the rest of the morning she tried to distract herself with work, ignoring her colleagues’ sympathetic glances, but by eleven she found herself gazing blankly at her computer screen, unable to concentrate on anything except the thought of Sadie sitting a couple of floors below. At last, before she could change her mind, she clicked open her e-mails and began to type. Can you meet me at lunch?
She waited, heart thumping, for a response, and a few seconds later it came: a one-word reply that read simply, Okay.
* * *
—
She’d chosen a café on the far side of Leicester Square, one where they were unlikely to be spotted by any of their colleagues. It was a tacky, overpriced ice cream parlor cum souvenir shop, crammed with tourists buying Union Jack rubbish and clogging the aisle while they confusedly counted out their change. She had made sure she’d arrived early and taken a table at the back out of the way, staring hard at the can of Coke in front of her, her fingers nervously shredding a napkin.
For a second, when Sadie appeared in front of Clara, she almost laughed; she was so ridiculously beautiful. Long honey-colored hair and wide blue eyes, the proverbial traffic-stopping figure. And then she had a sudden image of her and Luke in bed together and felt as though she’d been punched, the pain like a physical blow to the solar plexus. How must she have compared with this goddess? Had he secretly been laughing at her, comparing Clara’s short legs and unimpressive chest with this perfection? She found it difficult to comprehend now that she could have been so naive, so self-deceiving as to have believed Luke when he’d dismissed girls like Sadie as too young and too silly to really find attractive—that he found her intelligence and wit preferable to such beauty. What a total fool she’d been.
Wordlessly Sadie sat down opposite her. They stared at each other warily for a moment, each of them waiting for the other to speak. It was Sadie who looked away first. She began fiddling with a bowl of sugar cubes, and Clara noticed with a flicker of surprise that her hands were trembling.
“Have the police spoken to you yet?” Clara asked at last, amazed when her voice came out sure and strong, rather than the tearful stutter she’d been expecting.
Sadie nodded.
She swallowed. “Well? Have you seen Luke? Do you know where he is?”
At this she shook her head vehemently. “No! I haven’t seen him since Tuesday, at work, I swear to God, Clara!”
“Were you still . . . seeing him?”
She shook her head again.
“How long?” Clara’s voice caught and she winced at the indignity of it all. She cleared her throat and tried again. “How long were you fucking my boyfriend?”
Sadie colored, a delicate dusky rose staining her flawless skin. “It only happened once.”
Clara gave a snort of disbelief. That wasn’t what Mac had said. For the first time her hurt was replaced by an icy disdain for Luke. Beautiful or not, was this lying child what he’d in fact wanted? Really? “I know that’s not true,” she said. “Didn’t you even care he had a girlfriend?”
Sadie’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry, Clara. We never meant it to happen.”
We. The irony was Clara had always liked Sadie; they’d often chatted at work dos, laughed together in the pub about Sadie’s crazy boss. She’d been too sweet, too eager to please, to be considered a threat, not that Clara was in the habit of thinking of other women in those terms. Perhaps she should have been, she reflected bitterly now. “Why did it end?” she asked.
“He wouldn’t . .
. He didn’t want to leave you. He said he loved you, wanted to marry you”—she began to cry—“that I . . . was a mistake.”
When Clara didn’t say anything, Sadie blurted, “You must hate me. I know you do. But I’m not a horrible person, Clara. I’m really not. I just . . . Where do you think he is? Do you think he’s okay?”
Clara stood up. “How would I know, Sadie?” she said tiredly. “I have absolutely no fucking idea about anything anymore.”
* * *
—
Rose called her as she was walking to the tube later that evening. She hesitated, weariness rolling over her, her finger hovering on the ACCEPT CALL button, unsure whether she could face going through DS Anderson’s visit with her once again. Eventually she picked up, knowing that Luke’s disappearance must surely be even worse for Rose than it was for her. “Hello,” she said, “how are you feeling today?”
“Oh, Clara. I can’t bear it. I just keep going over and over where he could be, whether he’s hurt, whether he knows how much we all love him. . . .” Her voice gave way to stifled sobs.
“I know,” she murmured. “I know how awful this is for you.” She hesitated. “How’s Oliver taking it?”
“Very badly. He’s dreadfully upset. This all brings back some extremely painful memories, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I’m worried about him, Clara. He hardly eats or sleeps, just locks himself away in his study, barely speaking to me.”
Clara’s heart ached for her. She knew how much Rose loved Oliver; her devotion to him had always touched her, how proud she was of him despite her own considerable achievements. The strength of the Lawsons’ marriage was something she’d always aspired to, its generosity and inclusiveness being so unlike the insular, unwelcoming one between her own parents.
