Afterwards

Posts. I imagine people reading the paper and then discarding it in their recycling box on Tuesday; Jenny’s laughing face looking up at the refuse collectors before they empty the boxes into the back of their truck.

‘It’s not fair that she can print this about Silas,’ Jenny says. ‘And there’s fuck all he can do about it. Sorry.’

I find it endearing that she still apologises for swearing. Maybe we should come clean now and tell her we do it behind her back all the time.

She met Mr Hyman when she was working at Sidley House last summer but didn’t get to know him well. After all, she was just a lowly teaching assistant. Her loyalty towards him is because of what he did for Addie. I think she flourishes ‘Silas’ as proof she crossed from the pupil to the teacher side of the school. Although us mothers, like our children, always call him Mr Hyman.

Is she naive to still be loyal to him? But I don’t want to taint her view of the world with my ugly universal suspicion. Not unless I have to.

I never told Jenny or you about confronting Tara in March when she printed her first ‘Playground Plunge!’ piece.

Tara just teased me for calling him Mr Hyman.

‘Jesus, where are you living, Grace? In a Jane Austen novel?’

‘Caught the TV adaptation then?’ I jibed back. In my head. Ten minutes later.

When I went to the editor, Tara dismissed my defence of Mr Hyman as being about me, rather than him. More specifically, me being jealous of her. I was thirty-nine years old, with a part-time job writing a review page. What wouldn’t I give to be a twenty-three-year-old Tara with her talent as a real journalist and her soon-to-be- meteoric career when mine had hit the bumpers so many years before?

Of course she didn’t say that directly; she didn’t need to. Like her prose, she could say what she wanted to, without ever being caught articulating it directly.

And her article was printed.

How could I tell Jenny – or you – that I was such a pushover? Sarah wouldn’t have stood for it for a second. It was around then that my nanny voice became particularly strident.

Because Tara did have a point, of sorts. I did fall into the job at the Richmond Post, and never climbed out again. I used to pretend to everyone, pretty much, apart from Maisie, that childcare costs meant it wasn’t worth me going for a full-time, career-style job. I’d tell myself, and you, that given it was an either/or choice, I chose to be with Jenny and Adam. But my nanny voice would butt in and tell me that it was me who was creating the either/or scenario. ‘Plenty of other women juggle careers and children and keep different plates spinning.’

‘My life isn’t a circus performance,’ I’d retort, admirably fast, to myself.

But the nanny voice always won by using the list attack. You lack, she told me:

Aspiration;

Ambition;

Focus;

Talent;

Energy.

It’s the energy one that clinched it. I’d hold my hands up. Yes! You’re right! Now I need to go and help Adam with his homework and check Jenny isn’t still on Facebook.

Tara is reading a text on her mobile. She sets off down the corridor, a sashay to her stride. Jenny and I follow her.

Jenny smiles. ‘Starsky and Hutch or Cagney and Lacey?’

But actually there is something a tiny bit thrilling about following someone.

In the cafeteria Tara meets a man at a table. Older than her, a little paunchy. I recognise him.

‘Paul Prezzner,’ I tell Jenny. ‘He’s a freelance journalist. Not a bad one actually. He mainly gets his stuff into the Telegraph, has done for years.’

‘She’s got a broadsheet onto this now?’

Both of us worry that it’s because you are a known face on TV; that your fame will attract more ‘press interest’.

I see him leer at Tara and feel relieved rather than repulsed. So that’s the reason he’s here.

We go closer to eavesdrop.

‘The fact it’s a school is irrelevant,’ Prezzner is saying. ‘The point is that it’s a business. A multi-million-pound business. And it’s gone up in smoke. That’s what you should be investigating. That’s the angle.’

Next to me, Jenny is listening intently.

‘The angle is that it’s a school,’ Tara says, taking a teaspoon of cappuccino froth into her rosy mouth. ‘OK, so no children got hurt, but a seventeen-year-old girl did. A pretty, popular, seventeen-year-old girl. And that’s what people want to read about, Paul. Human drama. So much more interesting than balance sheets.’

‘You’re being deliberately naive.’

‘I simply understand what readers want to know about. Even the ones who buy the Telegraph.’

He leans closer to her. ‘So you’re just supplying their need?’

She doesn’t back away from him.

‘It’ll be about the money in the end, Tara, it always is.’

‘Columbine? Texas High? Virginia Tech? No financial motive in any of those, was there? Do you know how many schools in the last decade have been subject to violent attacks?’

‘They were gun attacks, not arson.’

‘Same difference. It’s violence in our schools.’

‘Our schools? Pap. And totally inaccurate. Your examples are all in America.’

‘There have been attacks in Germany, Finland, Canada.’

‘But not here.’

‘Dunblane?’

‘A one-off. Fifteen years ago.’

‘Maybe school violence is a new import. An unwelcome immigrant into our leafy suburbs.’

‘Your next piece?’

‘It may be the start of a new trend.’

‘This guy you’re fingering, he’s not a deranged student or ex-student but a teacher.’

‘Fingering? You’ve been watching too many cop shows. And it’s ex- teacher. That’s the point.’

‘Well, you’ve got yourself a good story, I’ll say that for you. Fake, concocted and utterly libellous if you weren’t so sneaky with your layout, but a good story.’

He smiles at her. I can’t take much more of this sickening flirtation.

‘And I like the pics. Bronze statue of a child as foreground when you couldn’t get any real ones to pose for you, and a photo of Jennifer, all on the same page.’

‘Let’s go and find Dad?’ Jenny asks.

We leave the cafeteria and I remember DI Baker asking how the press knew to get to the school so quickly. Did Tara have something to do with it? But if so, what?

‘He’s right,’ Jenny says. ‘About the school being a business. I already told you that, didn’t I?’

For a moment I see the flash of silver cups at the prize-giving; remember again the uncomfortable feeling that we were part of a successful business model.

‘But even if it is a business,’ I say, ‘I don’t see why anyone would want to burn it down.’

‘Some kind of insurance fraud?’ she asks.

‘I don’t see why. The school is full. And they keep on putting up the fees. In business terms it must be doing really well. So there’d be no point burning it down.’

‘Perhaps there’s something we don’t know about,’ Jenny says, and I realise that she’s grabbing onto this as you