I go outside with Jen, thinking the garden will be a gentle place to be.
The walls surrounding this garden have trapped the heat, funnelling it down. The water in the bird-bath has evaporated. The edges of the tissue-paper roses have curled and dried; the peony is dropping with the weighted humid air.
Summer boxed in.
‘At least it’s sort of outside,’ she says.
Through the glass wall, which abuts one side of the garden, you can see through to rooms and corridors. We watch people walking along. And I know why she likes it now, because even though it’s not outside proper, we are separate from the hospital.
As I sit with her, the lie I told digs into me like razor wire.
We carry on watching people through the glass wall. For a long time. Jen seems soothed by it and it is quite soporific, like watching tropical fish in a tank.
‘That’s Rowena’s dad, isn’t it?’ Jenny asks.
Amongst the melee of fish-people I spot Donald.
‘Yes.’
‘But why’s he here?’
‘Rowena’s in the hospital,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I saw her with Adam outside the school and she looked fine then.’
After Maisie’s visit, I’d again forgotten about Rowena; my anxiety for Jenny still making me too selfish to have room for her as well.
‘Maisie will be with her,’ Jenny says. ‘Shall we go and visit?’
It’s sweet of her to think I’d like to be with my old friend.
‘It gets kind of boring here after a while,’ she says.
We’re near the burns unit now and are catching up with Donald. A nurse is with him. As we follow him, I’m glad that for a little while at least Jenny and I have a focus that is not on her injuries or mine.
Donald is wearing a dark suit, jacket still on despite the hotly humid day, and is carrying a briefcase.
I can smell cigarettes on his clothes. I’ve never noticed that before, but my sense of smell has become so much more acute now, overpoweringly so.
We’re now close enough to hear the nurse talking to him. Her voice is briskly competent.
‘… and when someone has been in an enclosed space in a fire, we have to monitor them extremely carefully in case there have been any inhalation injuries. It can some-times take a little while before there are any symptoms, so it’s wise to be on the safe side.’
Donald’s face looks severe, barely recognisable from the smiling, avuncular man I last saw at the prize-giving. It’s probably these horrible, glaring striplights partitioning the corridor ceiling, which gouge out shadows in people’s faces, making them look harsher.
The nurse presses a keypad on the door to the burns unit and holds the door for him.
‘Your daughter’s bed is this way,’ she says.
But surely he’s been to see her before? He wouldn’t have waited a day before coming to her bedside. Maisie has told me how protective he is of his family countless times. ‘He’d kill crocodiles for us with his bare hands! Good job there aren’t that many crocs in Chiswick!’
Jenny and I reach Rowena’s side-room a little before Donald and look through the glass panel in the door. Rowena has a drip in her arm and her hands are bandaged. But her face is undamaged. How could I not have thought her face beautiful before? Next to her is Maisie.
I wait for Donald to arrive and take Rowena in his arms and for the three of them to be reunited.
I brace myself against the stinging contrast.
Donald goes into the room, passing Jenny in the doorway. I notice she’s very pale.
‘Jen?’
She turns to me, as if snapping out of a reverie.
‘I know it’s mad but for a moment, well, it was like I was back in the school, really back there, and -’ she pauses – ‘I heard the fire alarm going off. I heard it, Mum.’
I put my arm around her.
‘Has it gone now?’
‘Yeah.’ She smiles at me. ‘Maybe it’s mad person’s tinnitus.’
We look through the glass in the door to Rowena’s room.
Donald is going towards Rowena and I think she looks panicked. But that can’t be right, surely? His back is towards me, and I can’t see the expression on his face.
Maisie is hurriedly pulling down her sleeves to cover large livid bruises on her arms.
‘I told you he’d be here soon,’ she says to Rowena in a too-bright, nervy voice.
Donald has reached Rowena. He grabs hold of her bandaged burnt hands; she gives a sharp scream of pain.
‘Quite the little heroine, aren’t you?’
There’s hatred in his voice. Ugly and raw and shocking.
Maisie tries to pull him away. ‘You’re hurting her, Donald, please. Stop.’
I’m in the room now, wanting to help, but there’s nothing I can do but watch. Still he holds Rowena’s bandaged hands, and she’s trying not to cry out.
I think of Adam flinching from Donald’s lighter as he lit a cigarette after the prize-giving; his foot grinding the stub into the ground.
He lets go of Rowena’s hands and turns to leave.
Rowena is crying.
‘Daddy…’
She gets out of bed and walks shakily towards him. She looks fragile and slight in the cotton hospital gown, so much smaller than Donald in his hard dark suit.
‘You disgust me,’ he says as she reaches him.
Maisie puts her hand on him, trying to stop him from leaving.
‘Your bruises,’ he says to her. ‘Have you shown anyone?’
Maisie drops her head, not looking at him. Her FUN sleeves cover her bruises now; the same long-sleeved shirt she’d been wearing at sports day, despite the heat.
‘It was an accident,’ Maisie says to him. ‘Just an accident. Of course it was. And you can hardly see any more. Really.’
Donald abruptly leaves the room.
‘He didn’t mean it, sweetheart,’ Maisie says to Rowena.
Rowena is silent.
I turn away from them and leave the room too, as if they’re too naked for me to watch; the bones of the family exposed.
I reach Jenny who’s been watching through the glass in the door.
‘I never knew,’ she says to me, shocked.
‘No.’
But I think again about Maisie’s ‘bulimic hog’ comment, her bruised cheek, her cracked wrist, her lack of self-confidence. I again see the image I’d glimpsed as I looked into my dressing-table mirror the night of the prize-giving – that dense murky network of something sinister.
I’d dismissed it as an illusion at the time. But a little later, going to sleep that night when thoughts slip out from being censored, I’d wondered.
But I didn’t ask Maisie about Donald; didn’t even give her an opening to a conversation. Not just because in daylight it seemed an absurd suspicion, but because I thought it was a territory beyond our friendship. I didn’t want to – didn’t know how to – step outside our customary domestic landscape in which we were both so comfortable and sure-footed.
But she doesn’t constrain our friendship that way; isn’t cowardly that way. She thinks she should have gone into a burning building for me. And I didn’t even ask her if she was OK. If there was anything she’d like to tell me; talk about.
And Rowena.
Even if I’d managed not to see what was happening to Maisie, I should have seen what was happening to her. A child. Because when Donald grabbed hold of her burnt hands that surely wasn’t the first time he’d hurt her.
I remember her in reception and year one at Sidley House; that elfin beautiful child. Was it happening then? Later, perhaps; year three or four?
‘I thought she was a spoilt little princess,’ I say to Jenny, guilt making my words taste sour.
‘Me too.’
Maybe she’s also remembering the hand-embroidered pillow-cases, and hand-painted rocking chair and fairytale bed and princess party-dresses. I used to worry that when the little princess grew up her adult life could only be a disappointment to her.