Afterwards

‘What about the domestic abuse?’ Mohsin asks.

‘God knows what’s been going on in that family,’ Sarah says.

‘Find Maisie White,’ DI Baker says to Penny. ‘And arrest her for the arson attack and attempted murder of Jennifer Covey.’

‘She’s in Rowena’s room,’ Sarah says. ‘I saw her there a few minutes ago.’

Sarah’s been keeping tabs on her, I realise.

Penny goes to arrest Maisie. I don’t go to watch, but instead follow Sarah back into the stifling office.

‘OK, Rowena, we’re waiting for a social worker. In the meantime-’

‘Will Mummy be taken away?’ Rowena asks.

‘I’m sorry, yes.’

Rowena says nothing, staring at the floor. Sarah waits.

‘She didn’t think I’d tell anyone,’ Rowena says, and she looks ashamed.

‘But she told you?’ Sarah says.

Rowena is silent.

‘You don’t have to say anything. This isn’t an interview. Just a chat. If you’d like it.’

I don’t think Sarah is seizing an opportunity. I think she’s just being kind to Rowena. Or perhaps she just needs to know right now, unable to wait.

‘Mummy feels terrible. Really guilty. It’s been awful for her,’ Rowena says. ‘She needed to tell someone. And maybe because I got hurt… maybe she felt she owed me something.’ She starts to weep. ‘She’ll hate me now.’

Sarah sits down next to her.

‘This is awful, but I was glad that she told me,’ Rowena continues. ‘I mean, that she confided in me. She doesn’t do that. Never has. Everyone thinks we’re close, but we’re not. I’m her “little disappointment”.’

But Maisie adores her.

‘When I was little I was pretty, you see,’ Rowena continues. ‘She was proud of me then. But as I got older, well, I stopped being pretty. And she stopped loving me.’

Argue with her, I urge Sarah. Tell her that mothers don’t do that. They don’t stop loving their children.

‘I know this sounds silly, but it was my teeth to begin with,’ Rowena says. ‘She made me go to an orthodontist because they were so crooked, but they were yellow too. Something to do with an antibiotic I’d had as a baby. Mummy tried everything, had me bleaching them at home every night, even though the dentist said it wouldn’t work with that kind of staining. And then it was the usual, you know, blonde hair goes mousey brown and my eyebrows got all big and my face got larger but my eyes didn’t. So I turned ugly. Cinderella in reverse, I suppose. I wasn’t the kind of daughter she wanted any more.’

And still Sarah says nothing. But surely to God, if there is one thing about Maisie that I am absolutely convinced of, it’s that she loves Rowena.

‘It’s hard, you know,’ Rowena says. ‘Not being pretty. I mean, at school the popular girls are the ones with the pretty faces and long hair who are good at music and English and Art. Not the clever girls with bad skin. Not me. A cliche really, isn’t it, for a clever girl to be ugly? And then you go home and it’s the same.’

‘You’re going to Oxford, aren’t you?’ Sarah asks.

‘To read Natural Sciences. She doesn’t tell people that bit. Pretends I’m off to May balls and parties and handsome undergraduates, not a Science lab and an all-girls’ college.

‘You know that Shakespeare sonnet, about love not being love which alters not when it alteration finds? I think it’s about a mother with her child growing up. But not mine.’

But all I can think is how proud Maisie is of Rowena’s reading: ‘Even Shakespeare, when she’s doing Science A levels. My little bookworm!’

Her pride in Rowena. Her love for her. How can these not be real? Her true colours. Because they are what make Maisie who she is.

‘I thought she’d be pleased about Silas,’ Rowena says, and I hear grief in her voice. ‘I mean, he’s handsome, isn’t he? I thought it was like proving to her that I could be like a pretty girl too.’

‘But he’s married for crying out loud,’ I say to her. ‘And he’s thirty. Of course your mother didn’t want him to be your boyfriend; of course she wanted something better for you.’

‘She went to see him,’ Rowena continues, her voice halting. ‘It was Valentine’s Day and he’d sent me a card. She went to his house. Told him he had to stop our relationship.’

The hate mail from Natalia stopped the day after Valentine’s Day. Maisie’s talk with Silas worked.

And I’d do the same for Jenny. If she was sixteen and was with Silas Hyman, I’d do the same. Because this is nothing like Jenny’s relationship with Ivo, nothing like it at all.

‘I loved him,’ Rowena says quietly. ‘I still do. I thought he’d fight for me. But he didn’t.

‘And then Mum got him fired. She phoned the newspaper, not thinking what would happen to the school, just wanting to get him out; punish him too. And she told me she sent him candles, eight blue ones, like the ones on Addie’s cake. She said she wanted him to know that if he ever started anything again with me, she’d make his life hell. That she has that power.’

The Maisie I’ve known for thirteen years is warm and vibrant and ran in the mums’ race every year and always came last by a mile and didn’t give a hoot! I’ve also learnt that she is fragile and vulnerable and bruised. Both these Maisies have been assimilated into my picture of her.

But not this.

A nurse knocks and comes in. It’s Belinda, the nice smiley nurse.

‘There’s a ward round and the doctors need to take a look at her. It’ll take about twenty minutes.’

Sarah stands up. ‘Of course.’

It’s cooler up here in my ward, the open windows and white linoleum at least visually lowering the temperature. A porter is wheeling a trolley, with my comatose body on it, back towards the bed. My scan must be finished.

You are waiting.

Dr Bailstrom’s shoes click across the linoleum towards you, black today but Louboutins, the red flashing on the underside like a warning.

She tells you that their scan shows I have no cognitive function. No brain activity beyond the basics of swallowing, gagging and breathing.

I wasn’t out on a grassy tennis court, warm under my toes, running for a ball, racket outstretched, and thwacking it over the net. I was with Sarah as she spoke to Rowena.

I have never been near my body when they’ve done their scans.

No wonder they think I’m not there.

You ask to be alone with me.

You take my hand in yours.

You say you understand.

And I am amazed by you.

You pull the curtain around my bed.

You lay your head down next to me, so that our faces are close, my hair falling across your cheek. United by almost twenty years of loving each other and seventeen years of loving our child.

The essence of our marriage is distilled in this moment.

Jenny is standing in the doorway.

‘Jen, come in.’

But she shakes her head. ‘I didn’t know,’ she says and leaves.

And I didn’t know either; that our tough-as-old-boots-strong married love contains this delicate intensity at its heart.

I think about speaking to each other every day for nineteen years. Nineteen years times three hundred and sixty five days times however many conversations per day – how many words does that make between us?

An uncountable number.

My hair is still falling across your cheek but I move away from you.

It will help you, my darling, if you think I’m not here. It will make this easier. And I want to make this easier for you.