I know it’s ridiculous but my first thought was Georgie. She’s only fifteen, she hasn’t taken any exams yet, why would a Cambridge college be writing to me about her? And, while Georgie is undoubtedly clever, it’s clear that her intention is to glide through her school years on the minimum of work. I’ve already revised my expectations down from Oxbridge, through the Russell Group, to any good university with en-suite halls of residence. But I could read the words as if I’d already opened the envelope. ‘Come to our attention . . . supremely gifted student . . . open scholarship.’
But the letter isn’t offering Georgie an unconditional place at Girton. All the same, it is interesting.
Dear Ms Cassidy,
I understand that you are in the process of writing a book about the life and works of R.M. Holland. I have recently come into possession of some letters which I think might interest you. I would be happy to show them to you if you care to visit me. I have some free time in the week beginning 23rd October.
Yours sincerely,
Henry H. Hamilton
Senior Lecturer in English
I look at this missive for a long time. It’s as if I’ve received a letter from the nineteenth century, almost from Holland himself. There’s a Victorian feel to that prim middle initial. Where did this Henry Hamilton even find my postal address? My email address is easy enough, it’s on the school website and is, anyway, not hard to work out. Is that how this august-sounding personage found me? Please God, don’t let him have watched the TV programme. Has HHH been watching me on YouTube? And what could these letters be, too precious to post or even scan?
My phone buzzes. I hope that it’s Georgie but it’s Debra.
‘Are you home?’ she says.
‘Yes, got in about an hour ago.’
‘I’ve just rung Ella’s parents.’
I should do this too, but I’m dreading it. I met Nigel and Sarah Elphick once and they seemed a sweet, gentle couple. Ella was their only child.
‘It was awful,’ says Debra. ‘What can you say? There’s nothing you can say. Losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to someone.’
‘Yes, it is,’ I say.
‘I started to cry and her mum ended up consoling me. I felt terrible.’
‘It was still nice of you to phone.’
‘I don’t know,’ says Debra and I can hear her drawing on a cigarette. That must mean that she’s standing in the garden. Leo won’t let her smoke indoors. ‘But what can you do? Have you seen her Facebook page?’
‘No.’
‘It’s full of people posting stuff like “rest in paradise” and “another angel in heaven”. Most of them didn’t even know her. Jesus.’
I think of DS Kaur asking if any ex-boyfriends were stalking Ella on Facebook.
‘The police were here just now,’ I say.
‘The police? Why?’
‘They’re talking to all Ella’s friends apparently. You’ll probably be next.’
‘God. The boys will love that. Two policemen turning up at the door.’
‘One’s a woman. She’s the scary one too.’
‘Do they have any idea who could have done it?’
‘They were asking about ex-boyfriends.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said there was no one recent.’
‘You didn’t mention Rick?’
‘No.’
Another deep intake of breath. I steel myself for the next question but Debra only says, ‘I still can’t believe it. Ella dead. Murdered. It’s like a nightmare.’
‘Or a book,’ I say. ‘I keep thinking I’m in a book.’
‘You always think that,’ says Debra. ‘Do you want to come over?’
‘No. It’s OK. I’ve got a bottle of wine. And Herbert.’
‘Sounds perfect. I’ve got to collect the boys from Cubs in a minute, then make supper. Leo’s out playing five-a-side.’
‘Domesticity, eh?’
‘Yeah. It’s a trap all right. Maybe see you tomorrow?’
‘Georgie’s back tomorrow.’
‘Give me a ring. Maybe we can meet up for coffee.’
‘Ok,’ I say. ‘Bye. Take care. Drive carefully.’
I drink my glass of wine standing up and then pour another. Then I click on Ella’s Facebook page.
Chapter 4
Simon turns up the next day at four, about three hours after he was expected. Georgie texted me en-route so I wasn’t waiting by the window but it is, nevertheless, annoying. I saw Debra this morning and went to the shops, but there were lots of things I could have done in the afternoon if Simon didn’t have this curious belief that the drive from London to West Sussex takes twenty minutes.
‘I was expecting you at one.’ These are my first words to my ex-husband.
‘Georgie texted you,’ is his response.
‘Hi, darling.’ I hug my daughter. ‘Did you have a good time?’
She hugs me back but lets go to give Herbert a much more enthusiastic reception.
‘How’s my puppy? How is he? Oh, bless him. Look at his little face.’
She scoops him up and covers him with kisses. Simon and I watch them. It’s one of those moments where I know we’re thinking the same thing (why isn’t she that affectionate to us?) but I don’t want to acknowledge it.
‘Lucky Herbert,’ says Simon at last, getting Georgie’s bag out of the boot.
‘Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?’ I say.
He hesitates. He doesn’t really want to be trapped in the house with me but he probably needs the loo (he’s just the right age for prostate trouble).
‘Just a quick one,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’
How long does he think it will take? I’m hardly planning a Japanese tea-drinking ceremony. I follow him into the house, aware that my teeth are gritted.
He goes to the loo immediately but emerges to chat to me while I go about the laborious and time-consuming task of putting tea-bags in water. Georgie has disappeared upstairs with Herbert.
‘Kitchen looks nice,’ Simon says. I had a new kitchen put in when I moved here and it is nice — shiny doors, granite tops, skylight and a view into the garden. But Simon always mentions it partly, I’m sure, because he resents the fact that I have the kitchen I’ve always wanted. We sold the London house when we divorced but, because Simon married a relatively wealthy woman, he was able to buy another place in the city. I was exiled to the countryside so, in my opinion, granite worktops are the least I deserve.
‘How’s Fleur?’ I counter. I’ve nothing against Simon’s wife. In fact I often sympathise with her, married, as she is, to man who colour-codes his socks. She’s a lawyer, like Simon, but she’s currently at home with a three-year-old and a twenty-month-old. Can’t be much fun, especially since it would never occur to Simon — who thinks of himself as a new man — to take paternity leave.
‘She’s OK,’ he says. ‘A bit tired. Ocean still isn’t sleeping through the night.’ I don’t blame her. She’s probably traumatised by her ridiculous name.
‘That’s tough.’ I bet Simon has decamped to the spare room. He looks pretty well-rested to me.
Simon is fiddling with his keys, a sure sign that he’s nervous. ‘I’m sorry about your friend,’ he says at last. ‘Georgie showed me something about it online.’
Ella’s death is everywhere. In newspapers, on TV, online, floating through the ether. Apparently you can get your Facebook page ‘memorialised’ (Debra says we should suggest this to Ella’s parents) so the deceased can exist in cyberspace for ever.
‘It was a shock,’ I say.
‘Georgie says that she taught her, this Ellie.’
‘Ella. Yes, she taught her English in Year 10.’
‘It’s a shock for her too. She kept talking about it.’
‘It’s her first brush with death, I suppose.’ Simon looks hurt. ‘Apart from your dad,’ I say quickly. ‘I wasn’t forgetting that. But Georgie was only three when Derek died. Now she’s a hormonal teenager.’
‘Talking of hormones,’ says Simon. ‘She’s still in touch with that Ty.’
‘I know,’ I say.
There’s another of those serendipity moments, then Simon says, ‘I suppose we can’t stop her seeing him.’
‘I think that would do more harm than good,’ I say.
‘It’s been quite a long time, hasn’t it?’
‘Since the summer. That’s eons in teenage time.’
‘And you’ve met him, have you?’
I’ve told him this before but I say, as patiently as I can, ‘Yes. He was perfectly pleasant. Very polite and so on. It’s just that he’s twenty-one.’
‘Why can’t she go out with somebody at school? Somebody her age. That’s what’s meant to happen.’
‘I suppose Ty seems cool,’ I say. ‘He lives on his own, he’s got a car. Those things matter at fifteen.’ And he’s good-looking, in a muscle-bound, straining-out-of-his-shirt kind of way. But I don’t say this to Simon.
‘Well, try to keep them apart if you can.’
I resent Simon telling me this, as if it’s easy to keep apart two people who can communicate electronically every second of the day. But I think that I have the perfect retort.
‘I’m taking her to Cambridge on Friday,’ I say. ‘I’ve got a meeting about my book and I thought it would be a nice day out.’
Simon and I met at university. It wasn’t until a few months into our relationship that we shyly shared the fact that we were among the large group of students at Bristol known as ‘Oxbridge rejects’. I had been interviewed but didn’t get an offer, even though I did, in fact, achieve the required grades. Simon had an offer but didn’t get the grades. It’s hard to tell which is worse. I didn’t really mind, at first. I loved Bristol and parts of the university, especially the Wills Memorial Building, look quite Oxbridgey in the right light. It’s only recently, while I’ve been working on the book, that I’ve noticed how many people — writers, actors, academics — just happen to mention that they were at Oxford or Cambridge. R.M. Holland does it in the very first page of The Stranger. The rule is: if you went to Oxbridge, you have to say, otherwise it’s just ‘when I was at university’.
Simon was studying law so I ignored him for most of the first year. The lawyers went round in a pack, as did the medics. I was reading English and was caught up in the drama society, the debating club and an excitingly dysfunctional relationship with a philosophy student called Sebastian. I met Simon in the Christmas term of the second year. I was sharing a flat with Jen and Cathy. They were lovely people who became good friends but, in those days, they were what we would have called Sloanes, posh girls who wore their collars turned up and had pictures of their Labradors by their beds. My flatmates’ idea of fun was having dinner parties; Delia’s Spanish pork with olives, candles in Chianti bottles, spliffs circulating left to right. They were also very keen on having even numbers so I invited Sebastian even though our affair had cooled. Simon came with a girl from Modern Languages. He took one look at the elaborate place settings on our formica kitchen table and started to laugh. I caught his eye and that was it. During the port/spliff/truth-or-dare phase we sneaked out and ran through Bristol in the early hours of the morning, stopping to kiss by the Bordeaux Quay while the boats jangled in the harbour. We went back to Simon’s flat in Clifton and made love on his bed which had black sheets and a poster of Che Guevara over the headboard. We were inseparable for the rest of our time at university. We got married when we were twenty-three, after Simon had done his solicitor’s exams and I’d finished my teacher training. We were the first of our friends to get married and if you told me then that one day I would not be able to watch him drinking tea without becoming rigid with irritation, I would have laughed in your face.
The Cambridge thing intrigues him, as I had known it would.
‘Oh, are you still working on the book?’ is the best he can muster.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s going really well.’
‘That’s the one about the ghost story writer.’
‘R.M. Holland. Yes.’
‘The chap who murdered his wife?’ says Simon, clearly thinking that this is quite a wheeze.
‘No one knows if he murdered her,’ I say. ‘That might be one mystery I solve in the book. There’s the query about his daughter too.’
‘I didn’t know he had a daughter.’
‘No one knows for sure. There are mentions of an M in his diaries and I think she might be his illegitimate daughter. Yet she dies too, because there’s a poem, “For M. RIP”.’
Simon shivers in a theatrical way that I find irritating. ‘Bloody hell. He was a charmer, all right. I can’t believe all his stuff is still there in the school. In the attics. No wonder it’s such a weird place.’
When I first moved to Sussex and got the job at Talgarth High, Simon insisted that Georgie go to the private school nearby. Despite some ideological objections (which, by the way, Simon used to share), I agreed. I’d accepted the job at Talgarth but I knew that it was a school in crisis. Georgie had had a lot of upheaval that year, what with her parents divorcing and the move from London, so we’d thought that maybe St Faith’s, a small, select girls’ school, was the answer. Georgie hated it. She hated the girls — most of whom had been to the adjoining prep school — the uniform, the petty rules, everything. In just one term she became depressed and withdrawn and worryingly thin (competitive dieting was the one sport St Faith’s excelled in). I moved her to Talgarth in Year 8 and, by and large, she has thrived. She has lots of friends and does pretty well academically. Simon still secretly wishes that she wore a blazer and carried a flute case. Well, he’s welcome to go down that route with Tiger and Ocean (his tolerance of exotic names has also changed over the years, I imagine this is Fleur’s influence). But Simon can’t deny that Georgie is happy at school, so he confines himself to describing Talgarth as a ‘sink comprehensive’ and making remarks about its apparently unwholesome atmosphere.
‘The students aren’t allowed on the top floor,’ I say, ‘and the GCSE results were good this year. One of the best in the county.’
‘Georgia needs to work hard for her GCSEs,’ says Simon, ‘and stop spending her time going out with twenty-one-year-old layabouts.’
Although I agree with the sentiment, I find the fact that he has to say it annoying. Also, layabouts? Has Simon become a seventies sitcom character? I snatch away his cup and start washing it up.
‘Isn’t it time you were heading back?’ I say.
Later, when Georgie and I are watching a DVD of Grey’s Anatomy (our most intimate moments these days come to the accompaniment of cranial surgery and heart bypasses), I say, ‘Do you fancy going to Cambridge on Friday?’
Georgie doesn’t take her eyes from the screen where Meredith and Derek are emoting over a teenage leukaemia sufferer.
‘Why?’
‘I’ve got to see someone about my book, but we could have lunch and look around the town. It’s a beautiful place.’
‘Who do you have to see?’
‘Someone who has some letters from R.M. Holland.’ Georgie knows about Holland, all the students do, but she’s never shown the slightest interest in him.
She stares at the screen for another minute before saying, ‘You won’t go on at me about applying to Oxbridge?’
‘Have I ever done that?’
‘Subtly,’ says Georgie, typing into her phone without looking at it. ‘All about how so-and-so’s daughter went there and what a good time they’re having. May Balls and all that crap.’
I didn’t realise I did this although all my London friends do seem to have children at Oxford or Cambridge. Sometimes I wonder if the move to Sussex b
lighted both our futures.
‘I won’t mention it once,’ I say.
‘OK then. Can Ty come?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘This is mother and daughter time.’
‘Yuk,’ says Georgie but she doesn’t say no.
Clare’s diary
Wednesday 25th October 2017
I plucked up my courage to ring Ella’s parents this morning. I didn’t think I’d get through. Was rehearsing in my head, ‘Well, I tried. They’re probably not taking calls at the moment. Bit intrusive to ring, really. I think I’ll just send a card.’ But the phone was answered on the second ring. Ella’s mother, Sarah. As soon as I introduced myself, ‘Clare from school’, she started to cry. ‘Oh, Clare. How could this happen?’ It was awful. I tried to say the right thing, but what is the right thing in these circumstances? There’s no right thing. Ella is dead and her parents are left childless. Any hopes they might have had — of grandchildren, of growing old as a family — have been shattered. I just said how sorry I was and asked about the funeral. Sarah said she wanted to have it in the chapel at Talgarth, which threw me a bit. Of course I said I’d be there and asked if there was anything I could do, etc. But there’s nothing I can do. That’s the thing.
Had coffee in the village with Debra earlier. She’s very upset about Ella but also strangely fascinated, asking me about the autopsy and the criminal investigation, as if the whole thing is a TV series. I keep thinking about the two detectives who came here, Kaur and Winston. They weren’t hostile exactly, but they weren’t friendly either. ‘Most murder victims are killed by people they know,’ said Kaur, ‘and we have reason to believe that this is the case here.’
Who do they suspect?
‘Nothing in the world is hidden forever’ — Wilkie Collins, No Name.
Chapter 5
The Stranger Diaries Page 3
