You and Ivo are standing next to each other in the corridor. You’re looking at Jenny through the glass, but Ivo isn’t. Have you noticed that?
No, that isn’t a criticism of him, because none of us can bear to look at her; but we are her parents, so we have no choice.
‘I’m pretty sure it was fraud, Mike,’ Sarah says to you.
You stare at Jenny, not turning to Sarah.
‘Do you know who?’
‘Not yet. We’re checking it all out, making sure the paper trail’s there.’
She doesn’t tell you about her disciplinary meeting with Baker; that the ice has given way beneath her now.
‘Does it matter?’ Ivo says, speaking for the first time. ‘Who did this or why?’
I understand why to him it doesn’t matter. Will the who or the why mend her body, heal her face? How can anything matter compared with that?
No one’s yet told him that Adam’s been accused, that he’s the reason it matters.
Ivo turns away and leaves. The doors of ICU bang shut behind him.
I go after him, calling out, ‘No. Don’t go. Please.’
He hurries on, me at his side.
‘She doesn’t mean it, saying she doesn’t want to see you. She’s just trying to feel that way, to protect herself, but it won’t last. She wants to see you desperately. I know her so well, you see. And she adores you.’
He’s reached the escalator.
‘She’ll come to find you. Soon. Because she won’t be able to keep this up much longer. And she’ll need you to be at her side.’
He walks quickly along the ground-floor corridor towards the exit, not hearing me.
‘
He doesn’t turn.
I yell at him, ‘
He gets to the glass wall that abuts the garden. He stops.
In the garden, Jenny is sitting on the wrought-iron seat.
He looks at her through the glass, totally still now. People swarming past him.
He looks for the door and finds it.
As he’s about to go out, a security guard comes up to him.
‘That garden’s not for use. It’s just for looking at.’
‘I have to go out there.’
From the security guard’s point of view Ivo must look a little mad – shaky, his face white but with eyes oddly glowing.
‘If it’s outside you’re after, go out of our main exit, sir, walk along the road and follow the signs to the park.’
Ivo doesn’t move.
The security guard waits a moment, decides he can’t be bothered to do much about this and walks away. I wonder if he’ll call Psychiatry and check that all their in-patients are accounted for.
I think things like this so I won’t feel Ivo’s emotion that seems to shatter the glass between them. Not a hormonal tide, as I’d once patronisingly assumed, made of an overflow of teenage glands, but something finer and lighter and purer – love that is young.
I was wrong about him too. Horribly so. I distrusted him because he was so different to you. And because I’d rather feel itchy distrust and scepticism than flesh-wounding jealousy.
When Jenny told me about her and Ivo staring at each other’s faces in Chiswick Park, I tried to bury missing the way you once looked at me: ‘
But at some point – how long ago? Was it sudden or gradual? – the double string turned into a washing line of domesticity.
Who’s going to stare at my thirty-nine-year-old face for an entire afternoon?
Deep down, I must have always known that this was about me not him.
That looking at Ivo, with Jenny, was looking at what I’d lost.
‘Oh grow up!’ says my nanny voice. ‘Stop whining! For goodness sake, you’re a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two, what do you expect?’ She’s right. I’m sorry.
Ivo goes into the forbidden garden.
He goes towards Jenny.
But she hurriedly leaves.
‘Jenny…?’ I say.
‘I want him to leave me alone.’
I look at her, not understanding.
‘I don’t want to see him! I told you that!’
She walks quickly away from the garden and Ivo.
He looks around, as if searching for her. Then he leaves too, confused and hurt. As if he knows he’s lost her.
And perhaps I have too, in a small way.
Because I don’t understand her, Mike.
I don’t know her and I thought I did.
Ivo waits by the garden, hoping she’ll return. And I wait too. But there’s no sign of her.
I’m not sure how long we’ve been here now, and still no sign of Jenny, but I’ve just spotted Mohsin hurrying along an upper walkway.
When I catch up with him, he’s meeting Sarah.
‘I tried to get you on your mobile, but it’s switched off,’ he says.
‘Not allowed near ICU.’
‘The fraud line plays out. The head teacher is giving a statement backing up what you said and Davies has been looking more closely at the investors. The Whitehall Park Road Trust Company put two million pounds into Sidley House School thirteen years ago.’ He pauses a moment. ‘It’s owned by Donald White.’
The fraud has a face now; one that had seemed warmly avuncular and then became harsh under the hospital lights and closer scrutiny.
‘It fits with what you suspect,’ Mohsin continues. ‘If he’s capable of domestic violence then I think he’d be capable of arson.’
He puts his arm around Sarah.
‘Baker’s “reassessing” the witness report against Adam. Which is code for he fucked up. He now thinks – we all do – that this was fraud. And that Adam played no part in the arson attack.’
Relief feels like a cool wind; a balm. And I see that Sarah feels it too. I long for her to run to you, right now, and tell you.
‘Donald White could have attacked Jenny that first night,’ Sarah says. ‘When her oxygen was tampered with. His daughter was in the burns unit too. If he’d been discovered no one would have questioned him being there.’
‘Baker’s brought him in for questioning,’ Mohsin says. ‘I’m going to talk to Rowena and Maisie White now. See if they can shed any light on what Dad’s been up to.’
Sarah kisses Mohsin lightly on the cheek. ‘I’ll tell Mike.’
I go with Mohsin into the burns unit and towards Rowena’s room.
Maisie is with her, unpacking some toiletries from a floral washbag.
‘… and I’ve brought your Clinique soap as well as the nice bath one-’ She sees Mohsin and stops talking. I think she seems afraid.
‘Maisie White?’ He holds out his hand and she takes it. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Farouk.’ He turns to Rowena.
