Martin didn’t hide his impatience. ‘Clearly. What was it about?’
‘Rugby, sir.’
‘Rugby?’
‘Yes, sir. Freddie was angry that Dad – Mr Parry – made us change positions.’
‘Is that correct, Mr Parry?’
Geoffrey nodded. He wanted to justify himself, say how much better they had played in their new positions, but what was the point? His son was in trouble and it was his fault.
‘Well, I shall be speaking to Freddie Burton once Matron has finished with him, but I want you to understand that your behaviour was totally and completely unacceptable.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘As Christians we abhor violence,’ continued Martin sternly. ‘And frankly, Edward, I expect better of you.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I want you to think about the example you have set, and in the meantime, I will think about how you should be punished.’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’
Once they had been dismissed, the three of them stood in the corridor beyond Claire Heather’s desk, each waiting for the other to speak. Leo appeared to have nothing to add to Martin’s comments, so excused himself, leaving father and son alone.
Geoffrey was at a loss. Aggression and surliness were so out of character for Edward. A stark reminder that he was changing – getting to the age when hormones did strange things to a boy. There was a question that had been preying on Geoffrey’s mind and he needed to ask it, even though he was wary of the answer.
‘What is it with you and Freddie Burton?’
Edward looked at him from under his hank of damp curls and replied with an exaggerated shrug. He seemed to have slipped into the moody teenager phase without Geoffrey having noticed.
Geoffrey wished Edward would talk to him, tell him what was going on. And why hadn’t Olivia mentioned this bad blood between Edward and Freddie – given him the heads up before he steamed in and started changing the team around?
‘I have to get to class,’ said Edward.
That didn’t answer Geoffrey’s question. He watched Edward walk away, his shoulders hunched. They had always been so close – had so much in common. Weekends they would go hiking or fishing, maybe watch Bath play rugby at the Rec. And Geoffrey never missed Edward’s own rugby matches, home or away.
Geoffrey thought about trying to find Olivia for her take on it, but he had another coaching session to get to. His heart wasn’t in it now. As he trudged back over to the pitch, he wished he hadn’t taken the bloody job.
*
His mother gave him the silent treatment that evening, but Geoffrey wasn’t in the mood for chit-chat so her aloofness was something of a blessing. He had his dinner on a tray in front of the television and went to bed early, having polished off the last of his father’s Scotch.
Olivia sent a text saying she’d heard about Edward and Freddie and would try to phone tomorrow. Geoffrey had so looked forward to coaching the team, spending time at his old school. Spending time with his only son. Could nothing ever go right for him? His relationship with Edward was one of the few elements of his life that had survived intact when everything else was falling apart, and yet he felt something had shifted.
Freddie had called Edward ‘Goldilocks’, a stupid fag. Was it just a bit of name-calling or was it recognition? Children can be very intuitive. They have an uncanny knack of sniffing out the merest hint of difference in their peers. Did the other boys see something in Edward that Geoffrey didn’t?
Nine
Adversity doesn’t build character; it reveals it. Something Olivia had heard or read – she couldn’t remember where. Not important anyway. What was important was the truth of it.
Last week she had learned that her sweet, gentle boy had punched another boy with enough force to blacken both his eyes.
Freddie had been in a throng of top-formers – Edward conspicuous by his absence – that filed into assembly a few yards ahead of her. One of the boys said something that made Freddie turn his head, and Olivia’s stomach curdled. His left eye was puffy but the vicious purple swelling around the right had almost closed it. She covered her mouth.
When Geoffrey had explained what happened, she heard the words but couldn’t relate them to their son. Edward wouldn’t hurt anyone – he wasn’t capable. Then she had seen Freddie’s face.
Edward was banned from rugby for two weeks. He also had to write an essay on why violence was never the answer, and read it out at school assembly. His voice had begun to deepen. The faintest sheen of oil highlighted his nose and forehead. He spoke of shame and regret, things a boy his age should know nothing about. Olivia had listened, her heart a jagged stone in her chest.
A few days later Martin told her he was satisfied with the way Edward had accepted his punishment and once the rugby ban was spent, best if they put it all behind them. Fine in principle but how could they when it was written, quite literally, all over Freddie’s face?
It was difficult for Geoffrey too. He had to train the team without Edward, who spent those sessions confined to the library. Freddie had been made captain and Edward would have to win back his place when he rejoined the team. Geoffrey said Freddie treated him with contempt – had no respect whatsoever. Olivia reminded him of the Burtons’ domestic troubles and how difficult it must be for Freddie, caught between his warring parents. Geoffrey had little sympathy, adamant that Edward would only have acted under extreme provocation. Burton is a nasty little shit, was how Geoffrey put it.
When Olivia wasn’t worrying about her own child, she was worrying about other people’s. She had hoped that once Alice Rutherford got used to the boarding regime she would grow in confidence. Instead, she became more timid and withdrawn, inseparable from her one-eyed teddy bear. Alice spoke only when spoken to – never chatted or initiated conversation like the other girls did. Olivia mentioned it to Harriet but she didn’t seem unduly concerned. They’re not all bubbly little things, you know.
Maisie was the polar opposite: gregarious, always showing off, only happy when she was the centre of attention. That was wearing enough, but she had started picking on the quieter girls, taking pleasure in their distress. Alice was beside herself when Teddy mysteriously vanished. She ran round the dorm, eyes wide with unspoken terror, pulling back every duvet, searching under every bed, until after a demented ten minutes Maisie ‘found’ him behind a bookshelf.
A similar thing happened with Helena Hardy-Leach. She had spent hours completing a project on ‘The Meaning of Christmas’, painstakingly cutting out nativity scenes from old Christmas cards and sticking them in her folder, when it suddenly went missing from her bedside locker. Another search ensued, only this time when the folder was found (stuffed under Helena’s trunk), it had been ruined with what looked like orange squash. Helena sobbed for the best part of an hour, unable to understand how such a thing could have happened. She only calmed down when Olivia offered to help her make a new one and as they hunched over the table, cutting out figures of baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary, Maisie and her little gang sniggered in their sofa huddle, clearly delighted with themselves.
Olivia regretted having raised her concerns over dinner at the Rutherfords’. Ruth’s dismissive remarks had made her feelings on the subject abundantly clear. And anyway, given Edward’s recent behaviour, Olivia no longer felt in a position to comment. Easy to share your thoughts on parenthood when your own child was a paragon of goodness. Less so when they patently were not.
The person she longed to talk to was Lorna, to compare notes, find out if Josh had had any angry outbursts, shown any signs of aggression. She wanted Lorna to reassure her it was normal, a phase, something and nothing.
The half-term afternoon they spent together in Bath, Lorna had bemoaned Lily’s mood swings, the week of hell before her period arrived, her sudden interest in make-up and padded bras. Josh hardly got a mention. Olivia remembered Lorna’s throwaway comment about boys being so much easier. Naturally she had agreed.
She walked round the quad, eyes fixed on her phone, searching for that elusive signal. A diamond frost glinted under the pale mid-morning sun, rendering everything pristine and brittle. Five minutes until break, until she was surrounded by a swarm of noisy children. She squinted against the light, her perseverance rewarded with three whole bars. When Lorna answered it was in a hushed voice.
‘Can I call you back?’
Four minutes until break. ‘Not really. Is it a difficult time?’
‘I’m working – not supposed to take calls.’
‘Working? Where?’
Silence. Olivia checked the magic bars again – two now – and waited for Lorna’s reply.
‘Axbridge.’
‘Really? Doing what?’
Another silence.
‘Lorna?’
‘Cleaning.’
Lorna had taken a cleaning job? Clever, witty, acerbic Lorna, with an English degree and encyclopedic knowledge of the war poets. She had run the library in Cheddar until it closed down last year.
‘I didn’t realise things were that bad.’
Olivia couldn’t be sure, but she thought she heard an intake of breath. When Lorna spoke, her voice had an edge.
‘Sorry, Olivia, I have to go.’
*
When she was eight, Olivia fell off a garden swing. A sharp pain shot from her wrist to her elbow but she was frightened of hospitals, so nursed the pain in stoic silence, determined not to go to the Royal where her grandmother had shrivelled away in a bed with metal sides. At teatime, when Olivia couldn’t cut up her fish fingers and chips, her mum saw the swelling on her thin little wrist, ignored her tears and protests and took her straight to A & E. An X-ray revealed a greenstick fracture. ‘It’s a funny name, isn’t it?’ the doctor said to Olivia. To her mother he said, ‘It means the fracture is incomplete.’
That’s what Olivia thought about when she thought about Lorna and just like when she had fallen off the swing, she could pinpoint the exact moment the damage had been done.
A Friday afternoon in late July, the air syrupy and still. Geoffrey had taken Edward fly-fishing at Chew Valley Lake and Olivia had dropped by the Rectory to return a book Ronald had lent her. When she let herself in the back door she heard his voice and was already outside his study when she heard another voice, familiar yet unfamiliar and spitting with condemnation. You let him get away with it. Through the partially open door she recognised Johnny’s broad back. They hadn’t noticed her. If she had slipped away, she wouldn’t have heard that a young curate Ronald had taken under his wing had recently been exposed as a paedophile, that he had preyed on Johnny, that Ronald could keep his fucking apology because it was twenty-seven years too late.
She wished she had slipped away. When Johnny spun round and saw her, the pain and fury on his face turned into something else. Shame? Humiliation? Ronald’s face was the colour of bone. Johnny stormed out, slamming the front door so hard it made the whole house shake. Olivia left without a word, still clutching the book.
For over half an hour she had sat in the Land Rover, parked just along the lane from Johnny and Lorna’s cottage, unable to decide if she was doing the right thing. Johnny probably wouldn’t want to see her and certainly wouldn’t want to talk, but she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t heard.
He was in the kitchen, smears of blood in a fist-sized dent in the wall, a scatter of plaster on the floor. She had no idea what to say to him. He ran his grazed knuckles under the cold tap and let Olivia dab them with a few sheets of kitchen roll.
That was how Lorna had found them. They hadn’t heard her come in, a bulging Tesco bag in each hand. What’s going on? Johnny embarked upon some improbable tale about losing it for a mad five minutes – frustration at being out of work – and how Olivia happened to have dropped by and caught the worst of his meltdown. Lorna looked at Olivia, whose simple nod of the head corroborated his story.
The greenstick fracture of their friendship.
Geoffrey thought it was the chill between him and Johnny that had cooled things, but Olivia and Lorna had been fine until that moment in the cottage. Lorna filled the kettle and began to unpack the shopping. Olivia didn’t stay for tea.
Later that evening Johnny had called. He was taking Benji for a walk and could Olivia meet him on the track to Crooke Peak? She roused Rollo and Dice from their beds and told Geoffrey she wouldn’t be long. The air was a riot of flying insects: in her face, her hair, her mouth. Johnny was already there, the knuckles of his right hand scabby and raw. The second the dogs were off their leads they went their separate ways – sniffing tree trunks and patches of grass, marking their territory with indiscriminate pools of pee.
Johnny hadn’t looked at Olivia when he swore her to secrecy, but focused on some random point in the distance. At first she had misunderstood and was hurt by his inference. ‘I won’t breathe a word. How could you think that I would?’
Then he had been more explicit. ‘Not to Geoffrey, not to Lorna, not to anyone. Ever.’ Olivia had assumed – hoped – he’d told Lorna the truth that afternoon. Surely a man couldn’t keep something like that from his wife? But Johnny said he’d kept it from her for sixteen years and they’d been just fine.
‘She’s my best friend. I can’t lie to her.’
He had stopped walking and taken Olivia by the shoulders, a sharp urgency in his voice. ‘You have to forget about this afternoon. It didn’t happen, understand?’
She had shaken her head. ‘No, I don’t. I mean, I know it’s awful, but Lorna –’
An older couple had appeared with a pair of whippets and Johnny let go of her. They’d waited for the couple to pass before Johnny told her he would rather die than have anyone know what had happened to him. Subject closed.
The change in Olivia and Lorna’s relationship was subtle and incremental. Brief lulls in conversation were no longer companionable silences, but cracks that needed to be filled. Husbands had been an inexhaustible source of discussion but the topic vanished from their repertoire. Olivia knew something Lorna didn’t and it fatally skewed the order of things. No matter how natural and cheery they tried to be, it was clear that nothing sucked the lifeblood out of friendship like the imposition of taboos.
Still, optimism was Olivia’s default position. She never left the house without a pair of sunglasses, however inclement the weather, because there was always a chance the sun might battle its way through the gloom. And when she had fretted about the move to St Bede’s she told herself that with time and distance, her friendship with Lorna would reboot itself, like when you turn off a misbehaving computer and then turn it back on again. And it did for a bit. During half-term she convinced herself that the incomplete fracture was nicely on the mend. She really believed that.
And then she didn’t.
*
The first snow of winter fell, shyly to begin with, in light, almost ghostly flurries, then thicker, until the ground was rendered white and flawless. Great excitement gripped the school. The children stared longingly out of their classroom windows, fidgeting and eager for break time.
Olivia too. She pulled on her coat and took a walk round the grounds. The air was fresh and frigid, the sky a pale dove-grey. How lovely it would be to have Rollo and Dice there, tearing around in the snow, delirious with happiness.
With the approaching end of term loomed the endurance test of Christmas. The first without Ronald. It was hard to think about him without thinking about Johnny. Ronald had refused to talk about it too – a high wall of impenetrable silence. Olivia assumed that after more than forty-five years of marriage, he must surely have confided in Rowena. Olivia knew she should make a special effort with her this year, but it was hard not to dwell on memories of Christmas past and feel the familiar squirm of animosity towards her.
When Olivia and Geoffrey had hosted their first Christmas as a married couple (at her insistence – Geoffrey said she was mad), she’d worked tirelessly, determined everything would be perfect. She�
�d genuinely believed that once Rowena got to know her better, once she saw how hard Olivia tried, they would get on famously. Olivia had such high hopes for their relationship. No one had ever taken against her the way Rowena had, and Olivia had no strategy to deal with it. She was intuitive, not tactical. It was inconceivable that her mother-in-law derived satisfaction from undermining her, but the evidence was compelling.
That first Christmas, heavily pregnant with Edward, Olivia had cooked roast turkey with all the trimmings, only to have Rowena describe, in remarkable detail, the wonderful recipe she had found for goose. Determined to do better, Olivia cooked goose the following year. Rowena pushed the meat around her plate, declared it a little rich and expressed a preference for good old-fashioned turkey.
A young wife in need of reassurance – would it have killed Rowena to offer it? Those memories still smarted. What a pity something as beautiful as virgin snow stirred up the pain of being judged and found wanting. Rowena had never really forgiven Olivia for falling pregnant, diluting the pure Parry bloodline with less auspicious stock. And Olivia had never really forgiven Rowena for thinking that. They had learned to tolerate one another, to rub along with the minimum of friction, but there was no warmth or affection between them. And even though Olivia felt genuine compassion for Rowena at having lost Ronald, that didn’t mean she forgave her.
It started to snow again – a flurry of flakes like celestial confetti. From the main entrance, Martin beckoned. Olivia jogged over to him, leaving dainty footprints in her wake.
‘We need to talk,’ he said.
His tone alarmed her.
‘There’s been a development,’ he continued.
‘Oh?’
‘Are you free now?’
Her mind was blank. She gave her head a little shake to liven it up. ‘Reading,’ she said. ‘Pre-prep.’
Martin put his index finger to his lips. ‘I see. Well, come to my office after that, would you? I’ve asked Mrs Heather to call Geoffrey and see if he can join us.’
Olivia’s skin prickled. ‘Geoffrey. Why?’
An Unsuitable Marriage Page 14
