Jen smiles.
Maisie sits down on the side of my bed, rather than the visitor’s chair, and takes my hand. I now know that the confidant, exuberant, not-giving-a-hoot! Maisie doesn’t exist. But she did once. I’m sure of that. I don’t know when Maisie started imitating herself as she used to be; the person she still should be.
But her kindness and warmth are genuine.
‘You’re looking lots better,’ she says to me, smiling at me as if I can see her as well as hear her. ‘Roses in your cheeks! And you don’t even use blusher, do you? Not like me. I have to slap on the stuff, but you look that way naturally.’
Instead of a French salon, I imagine myself now in her Aga-warm kitchen.
When she came to see me last time, I was sure she was going to tell me something but was interrupted. Maybe she’ll confide in me now about Donald. I hope so. One of the things about all this I find so hard is that she didn’t, or couldn’t, turn to me.
She’s fumbling in the pocket of her cardigan. She takes out Jenny’s mobile, with the little charm on it that Adam gave her for Christmas.
‘Tilly, the reception teacher, gave it to me,’ Maisie says.
Jen is staring at her phone in silence. Inside are texts of parties and travel plans and everyday chat with her friends; a teenage life in eight centimetres of plastic. It is shiny and undamaged.
‘Tilly found it on the gravel outside the school,’ Maisie continues. ‘Gave it to me as I got in the ambulance with Rowena. Wanted to make sure I gave it to Jenny. Like it was important. I suppose she just wanted to be doing something to help. Well, we all did. Then I just forgot about it. I’m sorry.’
‘How could she just forget?’ Jenny asks.
‘There was a lot going on,’ I say, marvelling at my understatement.
‘Should have returned it before, sorry,’ Maisie says, as if she’s heard Jenny. ‘Complete scatterbrain.’
Maisie finds a space between the vases of flowers for the phone.
‘They’ve gone overboard with the air-conditioning in Ro’s room,’ she says. ‘So I put on my cardi. Found it in the pocket and wanted her to have it back. You know girls and their mobiles.’
‘But how could I have dropped it?’ Jenny asks. ‘Ivo and I were texting each other while I was up in the medical room. And then it was the fire and I was still inside. So how come she found this outside?’
‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’
‘Maybe the arsonist stole it from me and then dropped it by mistake?’
‘But why would he steal it?’
‘If it was the hate-mailer,’ Jenny says slowly, ‘perhaps he wanted some kind of trophy?’
The idea sickens me.
‘Or maybe you went outside for some reason,’ I say. ‘And then returned.’
‘But why would I do that?’
I have no idea. We’re both silent.
Maisie sits down on my bed again, chattering on in her sweet voice, trying to make this as normal as she can, as if she wants to pretend we’re in her kitchen together – and that it’s as cosy as it seems. A deception within a deception.
Until today I’d thought Maisie’s babbling way of speaking was from a surfeit of things to say, a friendly warm outpouring, but maybe it’s more of a nervous habit, a flow of chat to swirl over underlying jagged unhappiness.
Like the baggy, soft cardigan now covering her bruises.
‘They wouldn’t let Jenny have her phone in the intensive care unit,’ she continues. ‘In case it interfered with the machinery and what-have-you. I said it would be off, just by her for when she wakes up. But even if it’s switched off it’s still no good because they said it might carry bugs and of course we don’t want that!
‘So I’ll leave it next to you and tell Mike it’s here because maybe he’ll want to keep it safe for her at home.’
Jenny is staring at her phone.
‘I still can’t bloody remember. If I could…’
She trails off, furious with herself.
Maisie has turned slightly away from me.
‘There’s something I have to tell you, Gracie. I don’t want you to hate me for it. Please.’
The curtains are swirled open around my bed and two doctors come in to do their usual frequent checks. One of them turns to Maisie.
‘Please don’t pull the curtains round her bed. We have to be able to visually monitor her all the time.’
‘Oh yes, of course, I’m sorry.’
The doctors leave but the noise and urgency of the ward is all around us; not even a pretence at a salon or kitchen now.
‘Donald came to visit Rowena earlier,’ Maisie says. Finally, she’ll confide in me. And I want her to. Maybe it will unburden her a little.
‘He’s so proud of her.’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Jenny says – her frustration and anxiety so near the surface now. But I try to understand. Perhaps Maisie needs to keep that film of a happy family playing to someone who’s been watching it for years, maintaining the illusion, because the reality – Donald hurting her already injured child – is just too hard.
‘You know I’d do anything for Rowena,’ she says quietly. ‘Don’t you, Gracie?’
‘Except leave your husband so that he can’t hurt her any more,’ Jenny snaps.
‘It’s not that simple, Jen.’
‘Oh, I think it is.’
‘I didn’t finish telling you what happened,’ Maisie continues. ‘So you don’t know why he’s so proud.’
‘This is absurd,’ Jenny says, still snappy. I beckon her to be quiet so we can hear Maisie.
‘I told you that when you ran into the building, I ran away, to the bridge. I went up to the fire engines, told the firemen there were people inside the school and we all pushed cars out of the way. I told you that…’
I remember the sound of people shouting and horns going and the smell of diesel fumes and fire reaching the bridge as if Maisie’s sensory memory has somehow become mine too. No flimsy insubstantial film this time.
‘While I was there, on the bridge or maybe before, when I was still running to get there, Rowena went into the school.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Jenny says; neither do I.
‘She’d seen you run in too,’ continues Maisie. ‘Heard you screaming for Jenny. But she didn’t run away. She found a towel in the PE shed and she soaked it in water. She put it over her face. Then she went into the school to help you.’
Dear God. Rowena going into a burning building. For Jenny. For me.
‘They think she must have been overcome by fumes. She was unconscious when the firemen got to her. She’s not badly hurt, but they were worried she might have some kind of internal damage; they’re still keeping a look-out for that.’
I never guessed she had that kind of courage, or anything like it.
Her heroism is extraordinary.
I don’t think you’ll completely understand, but I know what it’s like to go in. Heat up the grill as high as you can then put your face inside the oven. Then your whole body. Add choking smoke and no oxygen. Shut the door.
Instinct and love made me run into that building and then pushed and shoved me onwards. I had the selfish desire to run away, yes, just as I told you. But I needed Jenny in my arms more than I’ve ever needed anything before. Ultimately more than I needed to save myself. And I discovered in that choking burning school that the reason self-preservation can’t win in a mother is because part of yourself is your child.
But Rowena went in without instinct. Without love. I’ve barely seen her since she went to secondary school and she’s never been friends with Jenny. But somehow she overcame that terror. Just her courage pushing her on. Like the knights in one of Adam’s Arthurian legends, heroically selfless.
Adam.
Rowena was comforting him as I ran into the building, not pausing to even speak to him. Was it Adam’s misery that prompted her?
‘I didn’t realise she was even missing,’ Maisie says. ‘When the fire engines got to the school there were so many people – parents and teachers and children and press people – and I thought she was there, among the crowd. I just assumed…’
‘I think she was trying to make her father proud, again,’ Jenny says.
‘And then a fireman brought her out and she was unconscious,’ Maisie continues. ‘When I told Donald-’
She breaks off, distressed. Then, with effort and emotion, continues. ‘You shouldn’t condemn someone, should you? If you love them, if they’re your family, you have to try and see the good. I mean, that’s what love is in some ways, isn’t it? Believing in someone’s goodness.’
‘Does she really believe that?’ Jenny asks.
‘Yes, I think she does.’
‘Jesus.’
Maisie holds my hand more tightly.
‘It’s funny, in one afternoon you know what you’re made of. And you also discover what your child’s made of. And you can feel such shame and such pride at the same time.’
But it’s her father, not her mother, who Rowena wants to be proud of her. It was for him she went into the burning school. And it was in vain.
I remember the ugly hatred in Donald’s voice. ‘Quite the little heroine, aren’t you?’ Her cry of pain as he grabbed hold of her burnt hands.