Never once guessing at this.
‘She always had to be the best,’ Jenny says. ‘At everything. It used to freak me.’
She’s remembering her a little older, nine or ten maybe.
I’d wished Jenny had a little more ambition, yes, but I’d found Rowena’s need to excel repellent at times. It wasn’t just the scholarship to St Paul’s Girls, it was being two grades ahead of anyone else on the violin as well as captain of the swimming team and lead in any play or assembly.
‘She was trying to make him love her, wasn’t she?’ Jenny says.
Surely it can’t be so simple. Can a seventeen-year-old really be able to see through years of abuse to such a simple reason for a child’s behaviour?
But I think it is that brutally in-your-face obvious.
‘Yes,’ I say to Jenny.
And I’d condemned her for being overly competitive. Not once seeing an abused child trying to win her father’s love.
Was that why she worked so hard to get into Oxford? Was she still trying to make him love her?
‘You disgust me.’
Rowena is lying in bed again now, her face turned to the wall. Maisie has a hand on her, but Rowena doesn’t turn to her.
Maisie. My friend. Why didn’t she leave Donald? For Rowena’s sake if not her own. It must kill her to see Rowena being hurt. Why has she kept up this elaborate charade, protecting him?
Jenny and I walk away from Rowena’s room.
‘I used to avoid her,’ Jenny says. ‘When we were children. I mean, it was more than just not liking her. She gave me the creeps. God, in retrospect… I mean, I thought she was weird, but she was just different because of what was happening to her at home. And it’s hardly surprising if she was cruel.’
‘Was she cruel?’ I asked.
‘Cruel’s too strong. She was just… well, as I said, weird. There was this one time, she cut off Tania’s ponytail. For Tania it was like the main thing about her, having this long hair. We were all jealous of it, used to spend break-time plaiting it. So cutting it off, well, it’s like violence. When you’re nine.’
‘I’d forgotten that.’
‘I think she must have been lashing out at someone else for a change and that was as near physical violence as she could get.’
‘Yes.’
‘I avoided her after that. We all did. God, if I’d known.’
‘And recently? While you’ve been teaching assistants at Sidley House?’
I’m hoping that Rowena’s been one of the gang, happy and popular, that she’s breaking free of Donald.
‘I barely saw her. During lessons we were in separate classrooms and at lunch time she goes to the park.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Well, the pub has a really nice outside bit, most of us go there.’
Jenny waits outside ICU and I go in to join you.
You’re sitting at Jenny’s bedside. The other side of her is a uniformed policeman, who’s pretending not to be there as you talk quietly to her.
Your gentleness and loyalty and love are such a contrast to Donald.
Why didn’t I see through his disguise of overly indulgent father? And was it there, not just to throw outsiders off the scent, but also to confuse Rowena? Because how can a daddy who buys princess party-dresses and over-the-top birthday gifts and a hand-painted rocking chair with hearts on it also be cruel to you?
At Sidley House, I’d thought Maisie too soft on Rowena. Rowena talked back to her and her tongue could be sharp and she rarely did what Maisie gently asked of her. But how could Maisie discipline her for small instances of bad behaviour when Donald was abusing her? When his abuse was probably the reason for Rowena’s ‘bad behaviour’ in the first place?
When I was safely pregnant with Adam, Maisie had confided in me that she was desperate for another baby. She’d been putting it off for ‘various reasons’ but she was nearly forty so it was ‘now-or-never time!’ Six months later, not pregnant, she told me that Rowena had ‘absolutely forbidden!’ her to have another baby. I’d thought it another instance of spoilt-princess-Rowena bullying tender-hearted Maisie to get her own way. I thought it terrible that a child of nine could dictate to an adult in that way.
But I think now Rowena may have been trying to protect another child, not yet born.
The PC gets a hissing message on his radio. He tells you that Detective Inspector Baker wants a meeting with you and is waiting in the office on the ground floor. He’s barely more than a boy but he sees your anxiety plain as day.
‘It’s alright, sir. I’ll be here with her.’
Jenny and I go with you to your meeting with DI Baker (it no longer seems like following you).
‘Do you think they’ve found something?’ Jenny sounds anxious.
‘I don’t know, sweetheart. But there must be something.’
I’m anxious too – that at this meeting with DI Baker she’ll find out what the doctors have said about her heart.
I don’t think you’ll tell anyone because saying the words will make the facts more solid. I think you’ll justify this as waiting until you can tell everyone that a donor heart has been found; that everything will be alright. No need to worry. You always tell me of potential calamities after you’ve sorted out a solution. Calamities. As if walking out of an A-level exam early or pranging the car get any rating on a calamity scale.
But I still believe in your hope for her; I’m still clinging onto it.
As we reach the office on the ground floor, Jenny stops.
‘Do you think it could be Donald who started the fire?’ she asks.
‘No’, I say immediately.
‘Maisie and Rowena were almost the only people in the school at the time,’ she says. ‘Maybe it was aimed at them.’
‘He couldn’t possibly have known that,’ I counter.
I’m not arguing with logic but from emotion. I cannot bear to think a father and a husband can be that evil. And surely there’s a world of difference between bruises and trying to burn someone alive.
But I remember that figure I saw yesterday afternoon on the periphery of the playing field: an innocent bystander, most probably, but just conceivably Donald.
And earlier with the nurse. Could he have been pretending that this was the first time he’d been to the burns unit? Could he have come last night in a long dark coat? Though God knows why he’d want to hurt Jenny.
It was only eight weeks ago that I looked into my dressing-table mirror and saw connections between instances of possible abuse, connecting underground in a dense mass. Just eight weeks.
Would anything be different if I hadn’t turned away?
We go into the office, which is oppressively hot and airless. Like the family rooms and the doctors’ offices it has peeling institutional green paint and ugly carpet-tiles and a clock. Always a clock.
DI Baker doesn’t get up from his chair when you come in.
‘I know you don’t want to go far from your daughter and wife,’ he says to you. ‘Which is why we’re having our meeting here.’
You nod your thanks, surprised by his demonstration of thoughtfulness. Like me, you think we may have misjudged him.
‘A new witness came forward shortly after we met,’ he continues.
Sarah barges into the room, uncharacteristically flustered. No, flustered is wrong. She’s angry and she’s been running. Her blouse has dark patches under the arms, her forehead filmed with sweat.
‘I’ve just come from the station,’ she says to DI Baker. ‘They told me-’
‘No one should be telling you anything,’ he says curtly. ‘I’ve given you a week of compassionate leave, so take it.’
‘It’s a mistake,’ she says to DI Baker. ‘Or deliberate misinformation.’