Afterwards

He still hasn’t gone to Jenny’s bedside.

I think he’s relieved for the opportunity to be away from her.

I find Jenny in the goldfish-bowl atrium, people swarming past her. Does she feel like she has a stronger handhold on life to be amongst so much of it? Or perhaps she’s waiting for Ivo, not knowing he’s already here and in ICU. ‘You should have told me. I had a right to know.’

‘Ivo’s here.’ I say. ‘He’s in ICU with Dad and Aunt Sarah.’

‘I don’t want to see him,’ she says, her voice quiet.

Yesterday she wasn’t excited about him coming. Perhaps she’s realised that their relationship is based on physical beauty. She’s so vulnerable and I’m glad she’s protecting herself from rejection and further hurt.

I don’t tell her that he stared at her through the glass and was tortured by what he saw.

I don’t tell her that he didn’t go any nearer.

‘He’s told Aunt Sarah about the red paint,’ I say instead. ‘He also said that he sent you a text at three, but it’s deleted.’

‘But I never delete his texts.’

‘Maybe someone did that after you dropped your phone.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know. He’s going to the police station to give a statement.’

‘So he’ll come through here?’ Her voice is panicked. She turns and hurries away from the atrium.

I go after her.

‘How many people know your mobile number, Jen?’

‘Loads.’

‘I don’t mean friends, I mean, well, people at the school, for example?’

‘Everyone. It was written up on a notice board in the staffroom for teachers to put into their own mobiles. They were meant to call me if they needed anything from the sick-room during sports day.’

She hurries on, fleeing from the possibility of seeing Ivo.

But I stand still a moment, feeling frustration as a physical force. I have to talk to Sarah.

She needs to know that Jenny was outside the school, but then went back in. Something or someone must have persuaded her; or made her. Could it have been a text? And could the person who sent it have deleted it, and deleted Ivo’s too in their haste?

28

I join you as you leave the hospital, desperate to see you and Addie together. The only time you’ve been with Addie since the fire, he pushed you away from Silas Hyman. But now, alone together, it will surely be different.

Our car has been too long in the shadeless car park and inside the air is heavy with heat; the metal clasp of the seat-belts stingingly hot. But you don’t open the windows or switch on the air-con.

As you drive, I don’t think of us going out to dinner with friends but feel as if we’re somewhere wild and lawless and blisteringly exposed; more akin to a lion pair in the Serengeti, protecting their cubs against poachers, than any neighbours in W4 with their safe, smooth lives.

Adam told me a few weeks ago that he and Jenny made you and me blood relatives, because in them we share the same blood. Is that why we’re pulled so viscerally and fiercely together now? To make sure Jenny lives. To prove our son is innocent.

You left Sarah at Jenny’s bedside with the illegal transcripts, her incongruous owl notebook and Elizabeth Fisher’s contract. Sarah must have read those transcripts a dozen times already and goodness knows what she’ll get from Elizabeth’s contract. Yes, I know. I’m hardly a trained detective and am in no position to comment. Besides, I trust Sarah. If she thinks something is worth doing then it must be.

As we near home, I think of the first journey we ever made from the hospital to home. Adam was four hours old; me on a cushion in the back, staring at him: so perfect and vulnerable. With Jenny nine years earlier, going home to our old tiny flat, my nanny voice had told me it was terrifying I was just allowed to take a baby home with absolutely no clue what I was doing. Something awful could happen. I was too young, too immature, too downright silly to be in charge of a baby. How would a knowledge of Florentine frescoes or the difference between Coleridge and Johnson as literary critics help me look after her? I’d felt more akin to animals in a wild and dangerous place then too, unequipped to prevent terrible things from happening to my baby.

But Jenny turned us into parents. With Adam we knew how to put in a backward-facing babyseat to avoid crushing by air bags; and sterilise bottles to avoid nasty bugs; and puree first food without salt that could collapse tiny kidneys; and when to apply eye ointment and nappy cream and Calpol; and immunisations against terrible diseases were routine. I put nine years of experience, the NHS and John Lewis’s nursery department between my baby and the dangerous wilds of the Serengeti.

You carried our blanket-wrapped boy, asleep in his car seat, up the front doorsteps. Safe.

* * *

You park the car and you don’t get out straight away. But I hurry inside.

In Addie’s bedroom, Mum is drawing the curtains against the too-bright sun. He’s in bed and she’s got the portable air-conditioner going, the white noise soporifically calming.

‘You’re exhausted, poppet,’ she’s saying to him. ‘And it’ll just be a nap. I’ll sit with you.’

He believes, from her, that I’ll never wake up; that I’m the same as dead.

It wasn’t only Jenny’s dying that I’d seen as drowning, but also Adam’s grief. I still do.

A small boy out in a dark angry ocean where I can’t reach him.

I long to go to him, but I know he won’t feel me and I don’t think I can bear that now; so instead I watch Mum.

She sits down next to him in the darkened room. She takes his hand and I see his face relax a little. She used to sit with me when I was a child, and it was so comforting – Mum there with me and the curtains drawn while it was still light outside.

As I look at them I can imagine what will happen to him if I never wake up again. It’s just for a moment, but enough time to punch a window out of my dread into a vista of new thoughts. His armbands can be puffed full of my mother’s breath and Sarah’s and Jenny’s. And yours – most of all yours. Maybe other people’s love will keep him afloat.

I hear the front door closing and your footsteps in the hall. And I almost hear you yell, ‘I’m home!’ up the stairs and feel Adam leaping out of bed and away from the book I’m reading and yelling, ‘Daddy!’

‘A Railway Children moment every day,’ you said once, not even trying for an ironic tone.

But then you’d had to go away more frequently and for longer; and even when you were working in London, got home later. Your Railway Children moments with Addie had become few and far between.

Adam sits upright, his whole body tensed.

Mum goes downstairs to find you. Away from Addie, her face looks terrified.

‘Has anything happened?’ she asks.

‘All the same.’

‘Addie’s in bed, but he’s awake.’

She doesn’t say that she’s told him I’ll never wake up. Is that an oversight, or deliberate? One hell of an oversight, but then everything is out of whack and disproportionate now. And she looks so sad, so vulnerable without her mask for Addie in place.

Your footsteps sound heavy on the stairs, weighted down.

You knock on Addie’s door. He doesn’t answer.