Afterwards

Through her eyes I see Sarah for a moment. I used to think that she was judgmental too.

‘Do you know when he’ll be home?’ Sarah asks.

‘No clue. He was out till past ten yesterday. Didn’t stop working till it got dark.’

Natalia grabs one of the boys and pinions him in a towel as he struggles to get free. The red sunburnt marks are livid red stripes.

No wonder her exotic beauty is fading so fast. Three boys under four in a small flat with no patience to expand the walls.

‘On Wednesday afternoon, you said Silas was with you?’

‘Yeah. We went to Chiswick House Park for a picnic. Set off from here ’bout eleven, got back around five.’

‘A long picnic?’

‘Would you stay in here? The park’s free. Suncream isn’t. How are you meant to put it on as often as you’re supposed to? Silas played with them. Let him ride on his back, that kind of stuff. He could do it till the cows came home. Bores me mental.’

‘Does Silas know Donald White?’

She wants to know why Donald phoned Mrs Healey the night of the prize-giving, countermanding Maisie’s request for a restraining order. Why did Donald protect him?

‘Who?’ Natalia says and looks genuinely blank; or maybe she’s a proficient actress.

‘Would it be alright if I wait for Silas in the sitting room?’

‘Suit yourself.’

Sarah leaves.

I look back to the bathroom, the tension impregnating the steam and dampness. And it seems so sad that bath-time is fraught and hostile.

I remember Jenny at three hiding under a towel after the bath.

‘Magic rock, magic rock,’ I had to say.

‘Yes!’ From under the towel.

‘Will you give me a little girl of three with fair hair called Jenny, please?’

Towel is thrown off. ‘Here!’

I’d pick up her warm, still-damp body and put my arms around her.

Magic.

In the hallway Sarah passes the open doorway to the kitchen and goes in. She’s noticed the school calendar hanging on the wall: 11 July – Adam’s birthday and sports day – ringed in red like a curse.

She goes into the sitting room and quietly rummages through a pile of papers and post in an untidy heap on a table. I don’t know quite how illegal this is, what will happen to Sarah if she’s found out, but she continues, quickly and methodically with that quiet courage of hers that I’ve only just discovered.

At the bottom of the heap, in an envelope, are birthday cake candles. Pastel blue. Eight of them.

Natalia comes into the room behind Sarah, silently. Her movements, like her eyes, are feline. I shout a warning, loud as I can, but Sarah can’t hear me.

‘Silas said he found them on the mat yesterday morning,’ Natalia says and Sarah starts.

‘Weird thing to do, isn’t it? Why would someone post us fucking birthday cake candles?’

I remember Jenny talking about the arsonist and her mobile phone. ‘Perhaps he wanted some kind of trophy.’

Was that what Silas Hyman had done? And then pretended someone had sent them?

Two of the little boys, trailing water, run into the room; one is screaming, the other hitting him, their commotion not filling the silence between the adults.

Sarah goes towards the front door.

‘You’re not waiting for Silas, then?’ Natalia asks.

‘No.’

So we won’t, yet, find out where he was this afternoon.

I think Sarah has been jolted by something. Perhaps it’s just hit her how many laws she’s breaking by coming to their house and going through their things.

Perhaps it’s the candles.

Natalia yells at the children to shut up. Then she blocks the door to Sarah. She looks hostile and sweaty and plain.

‘I didn’t used to be this way,’ she says, as if seeing herself through Sarah’s eyes.

No, I think, you were exotically beautiful and poised not that long ago, when Silas was still in work and when you only had one child.

‘You didn’t used to be this way?’ Sarah asks, and there’s fury in her voice. ‘Jenny didn’t used to be this way either,’ she continues. ‘And Grace used to be able to talk. Smile. Look after her children. Count yourself lucky your children are healthy and you can be a mother to them. Count yourself lucky.’

Natalia stands aside as if Sarah’s blast of words have shoved her, and Sarah leaves.

I hadn’t thought to envy Natalia Hyman. Now I realise there’s every reason in the world why I should.

We drive towards the Richmond Post. I watch Sarah as she drives.

‘You’re being over-sensitive, Grace,’ you said; use of my proper name, bad sign. ‘Sarah likes you, how many more times?’

‘She tolerates me.’

‘Well, I don’t know how these women-things work.’

No, I thought, because men don’t spend time in the kitchen thinking that being in proximity to food or washing up means two people will bond. Even women with high-flying careers still do the ‘Can I give you a hand in the kitchen?’ thing. Sarah and I had done that countless times over the years, but had remained like toddlers, parallel playing.

And all this time we could have been friends.

‘You say that,’ my nanny voice interjects, ‘but would she have wanted to be friends with you?’

I wish she’d hang out with some positive nanny voices, the ones who’ve been made kind by years of cognitive therapy, but she continues relentlessly. ‘You don’t have anything in common, do you?’

And I have to agree that, family aside, we have nothing in common.

I’d hoped when Sarah had a baby, a year after Jenny was born, that we might bond in some way. Or, more accurately, that she would show a flaw or two. But she was brilliant at motherhood, just as she was brilliant at her career, with a baby who slept through the night and a toddler who smiled on his way to nursery and a child who could count to ten and read long before the end of reception, while Jenny as a baby screamed the house down at four every morning and clung to me at the playgroup gates and saw letters as impossible hieroglyphs.

And Sarah was back at work and being promoted! Still on her fast-track career. I told you before I was jealous of her; well, sometimes I loathed her. There, said it. Terrible. I’m sorry.

The truth is, loathing her was easier than not liking myself.

I did the whole baking muffins for cake sales and going on trips and being there to do homework and inviting friends round. All of that. But I didn’t know how to do what was important.

‘Magic rock, magic rock, give me a confident teenager with ambition and self-confidence and the A-level grades to get into university with a boyfriend who is worthy of her. Give me an eight-year-old boy who is happy at playtime and isn’t bullied and believes he’s not stupid.’

I was meant to be their magic rock, but I failed.

And I have no excuses.

26

We arrive at the offices of the Richmond Post.