Afterwards

Maisie puts her hand on him, trying to stop him from leaving.

‘Your bruises,’ he says to her. ‘Have you shown anyone?’

Maisie drops her head, not looking at him. Her FUN sleeves cover her bruises now; the same long-sleeved shirt she’d been wearing at sports day, despite the heat.

‘It was an accident,’ Maisie says to him. ‘Just an accident. Of course it was. And you can hardly see any more. Really.’

Donald abruptly leaves the room.

‘He didn’t mean it, sweetheart,’ Maisie says to Rowena.

Rowena is silent.

I turn away from them and leave the room too, as if they’re too naked for me to watch; the bones of the family exposed.

I reach Jenny who’s been watching through the glass in the door.

‘I never knew,’ she says to me, shocked.

‘No.’

But I think again about Maisie’s ‘bulimic hog’ comment, her bruised cheek, her cracked wrist, her lack of self- confidence. I again see the image I’d glimpsed as I looked into my dressing-table mirror the night of the prize-giving – that dense murky network of something sinister.

I’d dismissed it as an illusion at the time. But a little later, going to sleep that night when thoughts slip out from being censored, I’d wondered.

But I didn’t ask Maisie about Donald; didn’t even give her an opening to a conversation. Not just because in daylight it seemed an absurd suspicion, but because I thought it was a territory beyond our friendship. I didn’t want to – didn’t know how to – step outside our customary domestic landscape in which we were both so comfortable and sure-footed.

But she doesn’t constrain our friendship that way; isn’t cowardly that way. She thinks she should have gone into a burning building for me. And I didn’t even ask her if she was OK. If there was anything she’d like to tell me; talk about.

And Rowena.

Even if I’d managed not to see what was happening to Maisie, I should have seen what was happening to her. A child. Because when Donald grabbed hold of her burnt hands that surely wasn’t the first time he’d hurt her.

I remember her in reception and year one at Sidley House; that elfin beautiful child. Was it happening then? Later, perhaps; year three or four?

‘I thought she was a spoilt little princess,’ I say to Jenny, guilt making my words taste sour.

‘Me too.’

Maybe she’s also remembering the hand-embroidered pillow-cases, and hand-painted rocking chair and fairytale bed and princess party-dresses. I used to worry that when the little princess grew up her adult life could only be a disappointment to her.

Never once guessing at this.

‘She always had to be the best,’ Jenny says. ‘At everything. It used to freak me.’

She’s remembering her a little older, nine or ten maybe.

I’d wished Jenny had a little more ambition, yes, but I’d found Rowena’s need to excel repellent at times. It wasn’t just the scholarship to St Paul’s Girls, it was being two grades ahead of anyone else on the violin as well as captain of the swimming team and lead in any play or assembly.

‘She was trying to make him love her, wasn’t she?’ Jenny says.

Surely it can’t be so simple. Can a seventeen-year-old really be able to see through years of abuse to such a simple reason for a child’s behaviour?

But I think it is that brutally in-your-face obvious.

‘Yes,’ I say to Jenny.

And I’d condemned her for being overly competitive. Not once seeing an abused child trying to win her father’s love.

Was that why she worked so hard to get into Oxford? Was she still trying to make him love her?

‘You disgust me.’

Rowena is lying in bed again now, her face turned to the wall. Maisie has a hand on her, but Rowena doesn’t turn to her.

Maisie. My friend. Why didn’t she leave Donald? For Rowena’s sake if not her own. It must kill her to see Rowena being hurt. Why has she kept up this elaborate charade, protecting him?

Jenny and I walk away from Rowena’s room.

‘I used to avoid her,’ Jenny says. ‘When we were children. I mean, it was more than just not liking her. She gave me the creeps. God, in retrospect… I mean, I thought she was weird, but she was just different because of what was happening to her at home. And it’s hardly surprising if she was cruel.’

‘Was she cruel?’ I asked.

‘Cruel’s too strong. She was just… well, as I said, weird. There was this one time, she cut off Tania’s ponytail. For Tania it was like the main thing about her, having this long hair. We were all jealous of it, used to spend break- time plaiting it. So cutting it off, well, it’s like violence. When you’re nine.’

‘I’d forgotten that.’

‘I think she must have been lashing out at someone else for a change and that was as near physical violence as she could get.’

‘Yes.’

‘I avoided her after that. We all did. God, if I’d known.’

‘And recently? While you’ve been teaching assistants at Sidley House?’

I’m hoping that Rowena’s been one of the gang, happy and popular, that she’s breaking free of Donald.

‘I barely saw her. During lessons we were in separate classrooms and at lunch time she goes to the park.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Well, the pub has a really nice outside bit, most of us go there.’

Jenny waits outside ICU and I go in to join you.

You’re sitting at Jenny’s bedside. The other side of her is a uniformed policeman, who’s pretending not to be there as you talk quietly to her.

Your gentleness and loyalty and love are such a contrast to Donald.

Why didn’t I see through his disguise of overly indulgent father? And was it there, not just to throw outsiders off the scent, but also to confuse Rowena? Because how can a daddy who buys princess party-dresses and over- the-top birthday gifts and a hand-painted rocking chair with hearts on it also be cruel to you?

At Sidley House, I’d thought Maisie too soft on Rowena. Rowena talked back to her and her tongue could be sharp and she rarely did what Maisie gently asked of her. But how could Maisie discipline her for small instances of bad behaviour when Donald was abusing her? When his abuse was probably the reason for Rowena’s ‘bad behaviour’ in the first place?

When I was safely pregnant with Adam, Maisie had confided in me that she was desperate for another baby. She’d been putting it off for ‘various reasons’ but she was nearly forty so it was ‘now-or-never time!’ Six months later, not pregnant, she told me that Rowena had ‘absolutely forbidden!’ her to have another baby. I’d thought it another instance of spoilt-princess-Rowena bullying tender-hearted Maisie to get her own way. I thought it terrible that a child of nine could dictate to an adult in that way.

But I think now Rowena may have been trying to protect another child, not yet born.

The PC gets a hissing message on his radio. He tells you that Detective Inspector Baker wants a meeting with you and is waiting in the office on the ground floor. He’s barely more than a boy but he sees your anxiety plain as day.

‘It’s alright, sir. I’ll be here with her.’

Jenny and I go with you to your meeting with DI Baker (it no longer seems like following you).

‘Do you think they’ve found something?’ Jenny sounds anxious.

‘I don’t know, sweetheart. But there must be something.’

I’m anxious too – that at this meeting with DI Baker she’ll find out what the doctors have said about her