I Thought I Knew You

by Penny Hancock

  An icy east wind was blowing up the platform, carrying with it a fine, sharp rain that whipped Jules’s face. The fields on the other side of the tracks were black and sodden. Bare black mud and bare shrubs. Bits of ragged bin bag flapped in stark branches. There was nothing beautiful about this landscape today. Suddenly, Jules yearned for the city. Busy stations with warm waiting rooms and coffee outlets and shops.

  There weren’t many people waiting for the train. A few sixth-formers on their way to college in Cambridge, and a couple of elderly people she didn’t recognize. She would give anything to be in a warm cafe with a flat white and the paper to distract her from the nagging fear about what had happened to Saul as a result of her blindness. Then she saw her.

  ‘Holly.’

  Holly, who was approaching with her head down, hadn’t seen Jules. She hadn’t time to pretend not to, and so she had no choice but to acknowledge her, even if her response couldn’t be described as a greeting. She nodded at Jules silently. They stood and stared at one another for a few seconds before Jules took a deep breath and let the words pour out. ‘Holly, I’m so sorry for what you’re going through.’

  ‘Are you?’

  Jules’s heart plummeted. Holly’s brown eyes were unforgiving.

  ‘I just saw Pete.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He said the body they found, it wasn’t Saul. I know it probably makes it no easier, because you’re left in the dark still. But please, Holly. We have to talk. There are things I need to say. Things I can explain.’

  Holly gave a short, sharp laugh. ‘What’s the point?’ she said. ‘What will it change?’

  ‘I do understand . . .’

  ‘I wish to God you had never persuaded me to move here.’

  Holly’s words stung. She’d persuaded Holly to move here for the best of motives. She’d wanted to get Holly over Archie. It would mean they’d be by each other’s sides forever. But there was no point in defending herself now.

  They fell silent, the only sound the whistle of the wind in the overhead wires, and Holly went on: ‘First the bullying. Then Saul’s school phobia. His isolation. Then the accusation. And now this. Saul has been missing for a week. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. If he’s out there, I have no idea where.’

  Jules remembered the way Holly was able to shut people out of her life when they wronged her. And yet the more she doubted Rowan, the more she wanted – and needed – Holly back. Their friendship felt like a shattered thing, and it would require intricate skills she wasn’t sure she had to put it back together again.

  ‘I am sorry the truth emerged too late,’ Jules tried.

  Holly gazed out over the wet fields and blinked tears from her eyes. ‘You’re right it’s too late.’

  This was not the Holly Jules knew and loved. This was a different Holly, bitter, broken.

  ‘It’s not too late to try and sort things out between us, is it?’ Jules said.

  Holly turned to look across the barren fields towards the church. She had lost weight. Not that she had much to lose. Now Jules looked closely, she could see there was a gash in the back of her head, the hair matted slightly around it. Holly put her hand up to it unconsciously.

  ‘You’ve hurt yourself, Holly.’

  Holly looked at Jules, her lower lip trembling.

  ‘Did you fall? It looks quite bad.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Look, I wish I could go back,’ Jules said, ‘and do things differently. I had to believe Saffie, even if in my gut it didn’t seem like Saul—’ She stopped. This was not the right thing to say. She changed tack. ‘I would like to do what I can to make amends.’

  Holly shivered. Stepped back so she was sheltered from the wind by the little Perspex excuse for a shelter on the platform.

  ‘I want to make amends,’ Jules repeated. ‘For the damage my family has done to yours.’

  ‘What’s the point, Jules? Now we know what was going on for her, I don’t hold her lie against Saffie. She was terrified of telling the truth. She could have chosen someone other than Saul to blame things on, and something less damning than rape, but I can see her logic.’

  ‘You hold it against me?’

  Jules’s question hung in the air as the level-crossing siren started up, with its rising and falling wail. The train could be seen approaching from across the flat landscape, and the barriers came down, shutting off access across the road to motorists.

  ‘The fact is, I’ve missed you,’ Jules said to Holly’s profile, no longer hoping for a response. She went on talking anyway. ‘It’s been awful. Not being able to talk to you. I can’t tell you how terrible things have got at home.’

  ‘I am sorry Saffie has gone through what she has,’ Holly said. ‘I really am. No thirteen-year-old should be put in that situation . . . but you haven’t lost your child. And you haven’t been vilified by a whole village.’

  ‘I need to talk to you. There’s no one else I can confide in. There never was.’

  The train was pulling into the station, the doors sliding open.

  ‘If you have time now?’ Jules decided to have one more try.

  Jules followed Holly onto the train.

  ‘I was going in to work to collect some books,’ Holly said, as the doors slid shut. ‘I haven’t been in since . . . since Saul disappeared. There’s only so much time you can sit at home going over and over where your child has gone. What might have happened to them. What he might have done to himself. I was going to get to London early so I can be back before Pete goes out. We try to be at home. One of us, in case . . .’

  ‘Have you time to stop in Cambridge, get a later train?’ Jules put a hand on Holly’s shoulder. ‘I’d appreciate it,’ she said. ‘I could buy you a coffee?’

  And at last Holly gave the tiniest inclination of her head.

  *

  Jules and Holly sat opposite one another, not speaking, as the train pulled away from the bleak little village platform and trundled across the Fens. Outside, the pale grey sky was huge above the dark fields. They passed the river as they approached Cambridge, rowers scudding along the glittering water beneath the yellow stone bridges. The willows on the banks had lost their leaves, and drooped sadly over the water.

  They got off in Cambridge and Jules led the way over the concourse to a cafe, relieved beyond measure to reach its warmth, its soft sofas, to smell coffee, to hear the hiss of the espresso machines. To be out of the wind and the Fens, which reminded her of the fact Saul was still missing, his body possibly still out there somewhere.

  They found a corner where they were out of earshot of the young customers who seemed to have commandeered every other table with their laptops and headphones. Jules went to get coffees.

  ‘It’s not a Unique Drinking Point, I’m afraid,’ she said, searching Holly’s face for a softening. ‘It’s a chain. But it’s a reasonable one, and the coffee ticks our box.’

  Holly didn’t respond.

  Jules sat down next to her anyway and began to speak. ‘When I heard the police had found a body, it was as devastating to me as it was for anyone, I want you to know that. I didn’t know how you could bear it. I couldn’t bear it either.’

  Holly frowned, and stirred her coffee. ‘It took them some time to identify the body parts,’ she said. ‘Longer than it should have done. Because of the state of them and the fact not many people go missing in the Fens. They knew it was a young adult male, so Saul was top of their list of possibilities.’

  ‘How terrible for you.’

  ‘Turns out the remains belong to a young man who’d been missing from Wisbech. He’d been in care. Then homeless. Had no parents. No one missed him. I was relieved when they told me, for about a second, until I realized what hell the boy must have gone through to want to set fire to himself like that. Anyway, it doesn’t bring Saul back. I still don’t know whether he’s alive. Knowing the body isn’t Saul throws me back into the uncertai
nty about what has happened to him. I’m plagued by what he must have felt when he’d been accused of rape. And the not knowing, the lack of closure is a different kind of hell.’

  ‘You know it was Harry Bell, do you, Holly? Who was actually behind Saffie’s pregnancy?’

  ‘They told me. It was Pete, in fact, who extracted the truth – or enough of the truth – from Freya. To give the police a lead. Pete’s way of trying to redeem himself.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For taking the girls to Deepa’s to “protect” them from Saul. Which was another betrayal. Of me, and of Saul. Pete didn’t want his daughters under the same roof anymore. After he heard about Saffie’s allegation.’

  Holly stopped, swallowed, and Jules wondered whether she should reply or stay silent. Then Holly spoke again. ‘I lost everyone. Saul. The girls. Pete. My memory of Archie. Even’ – Holly looked at Jules – ‘you.’

  Jules looked back. She wondered if this meant Holly wanted them to repair their friendship. That there was a ray of hope.

  ‘The way Bell manipulated Saffie was mindboggling,’ Jules said after a while. ‘I don’t know how much the police told you . . .’

  Holly looked down, stirred her coffee.

  ‘They told me enough. To assure me Saul was completely, utterly innocent. A victim himself.’

  She suddenly looked up at Jules. ‘What I don’t understand is why Saffie chose Saul. And why she said he raped her. If she wanted to cover up for that low-life scum Harry, she could just have said she was sleeping with someone else.’

  ‘Saul was the only boy she’d had contact with,’ Jules said. ‘The only boy who’d been in our house and who she could feasibly have slept with.’ Jules couldn’t think how to relay everything Saffie had said – about not fancying Saul, and him being considered a creep – without hurting Holly further. So she left out this detail.

  ‘Apparently, when Saffie told Harry she’d blamed the pregnancy on Saul, he said it would serve you right for trying to “emasculate” men with your articles in the paper. Saffie told me that last night.’

  ‘He read my article?’

  Jules shrugged. ‘It was all over the internet. And he’d have found it interesting as it was by the mother of one of his pupils.’

  Holly was silent, frowning for a few minutes before speaking.

  ‘Well. I’m used to that kind of bigoted opinion. I’ve had it for months on my Twitter feed. You put your head above the parapet for women’s rights and you get shot to pieces by insecure men who go on the defensive. I wish I’d never written the bloody article. I had no idea how it would backfire.’

  ‘You can’t let people like Harry shut you up,’ Jules said quietly. ‘If you do that, then he’s won!’

  Holly glanced at Jules and did at last give her a small smile.

  ‘These things have to be spoken about more, not less,’ Jules went on. ‘But let’s face it, Harry Bell wouldn’t have liked you arguing for better education on consent. He wouldn’t have liked that one bit. He relied on girls not understanding the meaning of consent. The police are following up allegations from ex-pupils of his. He has incredible power over teenage girls. They were all in love with him, Saffie said. Freya, and Gemma, Tess’s daughter, and all of them. It’s Saffie he targeted this time, but there were others before her and there would have been more after. And of course Samantha was only fourteen when she fell for him, and had only just turned sixteen when she fell pregnant and married him. He’d done the same to her at the time. The really scary thing for me is how manipulative he must have been, and how Saffie went along with it.’

  Jules wasn’t a hundred per cent certain Holly was listening anymore. She still had her head bowed, and her straight hair had fallen over her face.

  ‘I mean, what’s haunting me now is how I brought up a daughter who believed she was safe to go back to a teacher’s house after school. Because he’d told her she was beautiful, or hot or whatever, the kind of compliment she craved. When Bell first tried to have sex with her, she thought she couldn’t refuse. Because her friends were jealous, and he’d given her preferential treatment. Where had she got that idea from?’

  ‘There’s a lot more work to be done on all this,’ Holly said, sounding a tiny bit more like her old self.

  ‘There certainly is. The police are charging Bell for rape as well as sexual exploitation. Because of course Saffie didn’t consent to sleeping with him. She thought she had no choice.’

  ‘She couldn’t have consented anyway,’ Holly said, ‘because of her age.’

  And then Jules broke down. ‘Thirteen! Barely more than a child. She’d only just stopped playing with her cash register and still sleeps with that teddy bear Saul gave her. How can I have let her get so mixed up with a grown man? But Rowan was packing her off to extra “classes” – so he thought – and that’s where Bell groomed her.’

  After a while, Holly leaned over, put a tissue on the table in front of Jules and patted her on the shoulder. ‘This has all been shit for you, too,’ she said.

  Jules looked at Holly and marvelled at her ability to put herself in Jules’s shoes, while her own son was still missing. And partly because of her.

  23

  HOLLY

  We’ve been in the cafe for nearly an hour. I shift in my seat. I’d prefer to get up, get on a train to London, but Jules has more to say.

  ‘Holly, when I came to tell you about Saffie’s rape claim in your study, I wanted us to talk. I hoped, then, that we might talk to the kids. I thought we would get to the bottom of it by ourselves.’ She glances up at me. ‘Without all the repercussions it caused.’

  Jules takes a sip of her now-cold coffee, then pushes it away. I realize she’s changed over the last few days. She looks older. Her face is thinner, and she has shadows round her eyes.

  ‘I feel quite shaky. Low blood sugar. Or upset. Or talking to you at last.’

  ‘It’s emotional,’ I say quietly. ‘For me too.’

  ‘Why didn’t we?’ she says, looking up at me. ‘Why didn’t we manage to unravel the truth between us? What went wrong?’

  There seems no point in holding back, so I take a deep breath and just say it. Everything that’s been on my mind since that fateful meeting in my office. ‘It was like you’d decided to use the rape claim to vent other opinions about my parenting of Saul,’ I say.

  Jules frowns. Shakes her head.

  ‘You did. How I’d failed to notice he had social problems. How I’d done nothing to help him “fit in”. You even accused him of being a “misfit” – my worst fear, until then. Things you’d reassured me about before.’ I look at Jules and see she remembers, has gone pink. ‘I realized you must’ve thought those things, secretly, all along. The support you gave me over the years, the reassurance, all of a sudden I realized was a sham. You’d been thinking all along I’d done a shit job bringing him up without Archie.’

  ‘That’s not true . . .’

  ‘I was determined to prove you wrong. About Saul, of course, but also about my mothering. I thought . . . I thought suddenly, I don’t really know Jules at all. I never did. It was such a shock.’

  Jules gazes at me for a minute. ‘I just wanted you to agree we needed to share it. But then you called Saffie “devious” and said she was making trouble. The implication being I’d brought up a child who would be so manipulative or plain cruel as to make a rape allegation about Saul for no good reason. You were supposed to be Saffie’s champion. You always had been . . .’

  There’s something deeply unsettling about this heart-to-heart with Jules when Saul is still missing. I’m not ready for it. I really want to go now. I need to be alone with my thoughts. With my ambiguous grief. I want to take the next train to London, get to work, pick up my books, come home, to keep moving, keep running away from the pain that threatens to swamp me if I sit still for a moment longer. I reach for my bag.

  ‘It’s been good to air our grievances,’ Jules says. ‘The fact is, Holly, now I know
the truth, I realize you’re a far better mother than I am. I wish I’d been as attentive with Saff as you always were with Saul.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I say. ‘In fact, the other day I was thinking exactly the same about you. That I wished I’d been a more fun mother with Saul. But we all do our best. There’s no map, Jules. We’re all groping our way through the dark, bringing up our kids. Trying to find the right route. Sometimes we take the wrong turning, that’s all.’

  I can’t bring myself to hug her as I would once have done without thinking. I leave the cafe, knowing Jules is watching me, and that she will be feeling terrible that I am the one who, through everything that’s happened, has lost the most.

  *

  When I get home that evening, I pause. The lights are on, and the car is parked in our little driveway, so I know Pete must be home. As I put my key in the lock and open the door, I realize that Freya and Thea must be here too. Their coats are on the hook on the back of the door and new trainers have joined Saul’s – the ones I haven’t moved since he disappeared – by the door. Pete comes out into the hallway, pulling the sitting-room door shut behind him.

  ‘Pete, are Freya and Thea here?’ I feel my spirits lift, a tiny spark of joy in my dark heart at the thought of seeing them.

  ‘They wanted to come over,’ he says. ‘We thought we’d surprise you.’

  ‘That’s so sweet of you. Of them.’

  ‘I bought a couple of pizzas and some stuff to make a salad. And wine for you. Holly . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Before you say hello, I should warn you. Freya’s been really upset about her part in all this; she’s blaming herself for not saying something sooner. I told her you didn’t hold it against her, but she’s desperate to make amends and has got it into her head that the only way to do that is to somehow try to mend the rift between you and Saffie and Jules. She’s become quite obsessed about it.’