Afterwards

digging into me; still looking around for Jenny; still thinking she’ll be out to join us soon. The sky is summer-blue, the azalea bushes are bright as jewels.

Sarah drives away from the playing field and the school. She’s silent, probably thinking over her interview with Sally Healey. Jenny’s conversation pulls at me again.

She asked me, clearly, to see her as a grown-up. But how can I? When she didn’t tell us about the paint attack because she still wanted to go out in the evenings? Too young to realise that we wouldn’t have ‘grounded’ her but protected her. Not seeing the whole picture, not understanding.

And what about Ivo? She’d want me to see him as grown-up too. But he didn’t tell us when she’d been attacked with red paint or persuade her go to the police. So how can I see him as a man? As anything other than an immature and irresponsible boy? In every way the opposite of you.

And it’s not just the red paint, it’s the not finishing a History essay because she’d rather go to a party, and spending too long with her friends instead of revising for exams. It’s living so much in the present, not thinking of the future, and that is the joy of children, yes, because they haven’t yet grown up.

You don’t agree with me, I know. You take Jenny’s side, as I often take Adam’s, our family splitting down the familiar fault line.

‘You know what would really stop the world having wars?’ Adam asked. He’d just finished reading Give Peas A Chance but wasn’t convinced that a worldwide boycotting of vegetables by children would stop global warfare.

‘What?’ I asked, peeling potatoes, hopeful they would now be eaten.

‘An alien invasion from space. Then everyone in the world would band together.’

‘True,’ I said.

‘But drastic,’ you said, coming in.

‘Imaginative,’ I corrected.

Do I always correct you with Adam?

‘Like the testudo,’ you said to him.

Adam smiled at you, then saw my blank expression.

‘Roman soldiers held up their shields over their heads to make a shell around the whole group,’ he said. ‘So no one could get hurt.’

‘“Testudo” is Latin for tortoise,’ you said, enjoying – infuriatingly – that you were being erudite over me.

My flow of thought about testudos and aliens is brought to an abrupt halt as Sarah parks on a fast busy road in Hammersmith, her car half straddling the meagre pavement.

I follow her to a small terraced house, the bricks stained black by exhaust fumes.

Sarah rings the doorbell. A moment later Elizabeth Fisher calls through the door, without opening it.

‘If you’re from any religion or an energy company I’m already sorted out on both fronts.’

I’d forgotten how funny and stern she could be at the same time. But it strikes me that she’s also nervous, afraid even; not opening the door. She’s on her own in a rough neighbourhood. I’m struck, again, by the financial discrepancy between the staff and the parents at Sidley House.

‘It’s Sarah Covey. Grace’s sister-in-law. Can I come in?’

‘Wait one moment.’

From inside is the sound of her unbolting the door and the chain being taken off.

She opens the door, dressed in smart trousers and ironed shirt as she was every day at Sidley House; her posture rigorously straight. But her smart trousers are a little shiny on the knees where the cloth has worn.

‘Has anything happened?’ she asks, worried.

‘No change,’ Sarah replies. ‘Would it be OK if I asked you some questions?’

‘Of course. But as I said before, I really don’t think I can help.’

She leads Sarah into her tiny sitting room. Outside the traffic thunders past, shivering the walls.

‘Can you tell me what your duties were at the school?’

Mrs Fisher looks a little taken aback, but nods.

‘Certainly. I did all the basic secretarial ones, such as answer the phone and type up letters. I was also responsible for the registers. I was the first point of contact for potential new families, sending out prospectuses and organising invitations to open days; then getting the paperwork ready for all the new children. I was also the school nurse, the part of my job I enjoyed the most actually, really just putting on ice-packs and sometimes using an epi-pen. I’d tuck the child under a blanket on my sofa and then wait with them for Mum or a nanny to arrive. We only ever had one serious incident. The one I told you about.’

Her job had so many more responsibilities than Annette Jenks’s. And she did it well. So why did Mrs Healey really get rid of her?

If she’d still been there – still been school nurse – everything would have been different.

‘What about the gate?’ Sarah asks.

‘Yes, I’d buzz people in. There was an intercom and I always made sure they identified themselves first, by name.’

‘Did you have a screen monitor?’

‘Good God, no. I just spoke to them. It seemed quite adequate. You get to know voices as well as faces after a while. But in fact, it was pretty shoddy security. Half the children and most of the parents got to know the code. They weren’t meant to, of course.’

‘Do you have a copy of your job description?’ Sarah asks.

‘Yes. It’s in my contract.’

She rummages in a bureau and takes out a document, which has clearly been much thumbed, encased in a plastic wallet.

‘The part about retirement age is on page four,’ Elizabeth says, handing it to Sarah.

‘Thank you. Do you have a school calendar?’

Elizabeth sits down, clearly in her customary chair. She gestures to the wall opposite, the one she’d see most clearly. The Sidley House School calendar is hanging there.

‘All the staff are given them at the end of the Christmas term. I look at it quite frequently…’

I see how much she misses the children. She always put them first; making adults wait if a child was in her office needing a grazed knee tending, or with a piece of artwork or writing or Hama-bead creation to show her.

‘Do you know what the code on the gate is?’ Sarah asks.

‘It was seven-seven-two-three when I was there. They’ve probably changed it by now.’

But it was the same. I remember Sally Healey telling Sarah.

It dawns on me that Sarah might think Elizabeth Fisher is the culprit. But surely she can’t do? The idea is ridiculous. These must just be standard questions. Because Elizabeth may know the code to the gate and have a calendar with Adam’s birthday and sports day on it, and feel wronged by being sent packing, but there is no way on earth Elizabeth Fisher set fire to the school.

The pain took about an hour to kick in this time and I am now racing back to the hospital, the gravel tearing at my feet. Too late, I see Jenny watching me from inside – I must be grimacing in pain.

She hurries up to me, anxious.

‘Mum?’

‘I’m fine, really.’

And I am, because the moment I’m back here the whiteness of the walls again soothes my scorched skin and the cool shiny floor heals the cuts on the soles of my feet.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I shouldn’t have bossed you into going. It hurt you too, didn’t it?’

‘Not really.’

‘You’re a terrible liar.’

‘OK, a bit. Nothing more. And it’s gone now.’

‘Is it your way of trying to commit suicide?’

‘What?’ I am at a loss.

‘If you experience that amount of pain for long enough-’

I interrupt her. ‘No. Really not. Your body didn’t change a jot when you went outside that time with Granny G