Afterwards

I can remember a group of parents from Adam’s class asking me if I’d go in for the mothers’ race.

‘Oh go on, Grace! You’re always a sport!’

‘Yeah, a slow sport,’ I replied.

I look again at their smiling faces. Did one of them, shortly afterwards, leave for the school? Perhaps he or she had left a container of white spirit in the boot of their car. A lighter slipped into a pocket. But surely their smiles were just too relaxed and genuine to be hiding some wicked intention?

A little while later, and Adam hurried up to tell me he was going to get his cake right now! Rowena had to collect the medals from school so she was going with him. And as he left with her, I thought how grown-up she looked now in her linen trousers and crisp white blouse; that it hardly seemed a minute since she was a little elfin girl with Jenny.

I’m sorry, not relevant at all. I have to look harder.

I turn away from Adam and Rowena, swinging my focus to the right then to the left, but memory can’t be replayed that way and nothing comes into focus.

But at the time I did check round the playing field, a broad sweep from one end to the other, looking for Jenny. Maybe if I concentrate on that memory I will see something significant.

She’ll be so bored, I was thinking as I scanned the playing field. Up in the sick-room on her own. Surely she’ll leave her shift early.

A figure at the edge of the playing field, half obscured by the border of chest-high azalea bushes.

The figure is still and its stillness has attracted my attention.

But I only looked long enough to know it wasn’t Jenny. Now I try to go closer, but I can’t get any more detail. Just a shadowy figure on the edge of the field; the memory yielding nothing more.

The figure haunts me. I imagine him going into classrooms at the top of the school and opening windows wide; I imagine the children’s drawings pegged onto strings across the classrooms flapping hard in the breeze.

Back on the playing field, Maisie came to find Rowena and I told her she was at school. I remember watching Maisie as she left the playing field. And something snags at my memory. Something else I saw on the outskirts of the playing field that I noted at the time; that means something. But it is slipping from my grasp and the harder I try and pull at it, the more it frays away.

But there’s no point tugging at it. Because by this point the arsonist had already opened the windows and poured out the white spirit and positioned the cans of spray mount. And soon the strong godsent breeze will be sucking the fire up to the third floor.

The PE teacher blows his whistle and in a minute, not quite yet, but soon, I will see the black smoke, thick black smoke like a bonfire.

Soon I will start running.

‘Mum?’

Jenny’s worried voice brings me back into the brightly lit hospital corridor.

‘I’ve been trying to remember,’ she says. ‘You know, if I saw someone or something, but when I try and think about the fire I can’t…’

She breaks off, shaking. I hold her hand.

‘It’s OK when I think about being in the medical room,’ she continues. ‘Ivo and I were texting each other. I told you that, didn’t I? The last one I sent was at two thirty. I know the time then, because it was nine thirty in the morning in Barbados and he said he was just getting up. But then… it’s like I can’t think any more, I can only feel. Just feel.’

A judder of fear or pain goes through her.

‘You don’t need to think back,’ I say to her. ‘Aunty Sarah’s crew will find out what happened.’

I don’t tell her about my shadowy figure half glimpsed on the edge of the playing field, because he really doesn’t amount to very much, does he?

‘I was worried you’d be bored up there,’ I say to her lightly. ‘I should have known you and Ivo would be texting.’

Put together, they must have texted the equivalent of War and Peace by now.

When I was her age, boys didn’t say much to girls, let alone write, but mobiles have upped their game. Some must find it pressurising, but I think it appeals to Ivo to send love sonnets and romantic haikus through the airwaves.

But it’s only me who thinks Ivo’s texted poetry a little bit effeminate; while you are – surprisingly to me – firmly on his side.

Jenny’s gone off to be with you, while I ‘pop to my ward to get an update on how I’m doing’ – as if I’m nipping down to Budgens for an Evening Standard.

Maisie is sitting by my bed, holding my hand, talking to me, and I’m moved that she thinks I can hear too.

‘And Jen-Jen’s going to be alright,’ she says. ‘Of course she is.’

Jen-Jen; that name we used for her when she was little, and sometimes slips out by accident even now.

‘She’s going to be just fine! You’ll see. And so are you. Look at you, Gracie. You don’t look too bad at all. You’re all going to be alright.’

I feel her comforting warmth and another vivid memory of sports day flashes into my mind. Not a detective one, but one that comforts me and I’ll allow myself to play it for a moment; a paracetamol for my aching mind.

Maisie was hurrying across the bright green grass, in her FUN shirt, stepping over the painted white lines, delphinium blue sky above.

‘Gracie…’ she said, giving me a hug, a proper bear-hug kind, none of this air-kissing.

‘I’ve come to give Rowena a lift home,’ she said, beaming. ‘She texted me a little while ago, said the tubes were up the spout. So Chauffeur-Mum to the fore!’

I told her that Rowena had gone to get the medals from school and that Addie was getting his cake; an M &S chocolate tray-bake we’d turned into a World War One trench scene.

‘Fantastic!’ she said, laughing.

Maisie, my surprising kindred spirit. Our daughters, those chalk-and-cheese little girls, never became friends but Maisie and I did. We’d meet on our own and share small details of our children’s lives: Rowena’s tears when she didn’t make the netball team and Maisie offering Mr Cobin new team outfits or sex if he’d make Rowena wing attack – and having to explain the second offer was a joke! Rowena’s horror when her big teeth came through and demanding the dentist give her small ones again; exchanged like a gift with my dentist story of Jenny refusing to eat or smile when she got a brace until we found a make that was bright blue.

And it was Maisie I turned to when I started my third miscarriage at Jenny’s seventh birthday party, when you were away filming.

‘Listen to me, kiddly-winks! Jenny’s mummy has to go and visit Father Christmas now – yes, it is three months early! – but he needs advance warning of REALLY GOOD children – and because you’ve all been so FANTASTIC this afternoon she wants to make sure you’ll all get an extra special present in your stocking.’

Aside to me. ‘Materialism and Father Christmas, usually works.

‘So it’ll be me now doing musical bumps, alright? Everyone ready?!’

And it was alright. And nobody knew. And she kept twenty children entertained while I went to hospital; had Jenny to stay that night.

Three years later, she waited for those twelve weeks with me till Adam was safely inside and likely to go to term. Like our family, she understood how deeply precious Adam is to us; our hard-won baby.

And now she’s sitting next to me, my old friend, crying. She cries all the time – ‘Stupidly soppy! ’ she’d say at carol services – but these are painful tears. She tightens her grip on my hand.

‘It’s my fault,’ she says. ‘I was inside, going to the loo, when the fire alarm went off. But I didn’t know Jenny was in the building. I didn’t know to call for her. I just went looking for Rowena and Adam. But they were fine, outside in no time.’

At sports day I’d told her Adam and Rowena were at the school. If I’d said, ‘And Jenny,’ she’d have called for her too, made sure she was out before the fire took hold.

Two words.

But instead I’d wittered on about Adam’s cake.

Her voice is a whisper. ‘Then I saw you running towards school. And I knew how relieved you were going to be