‘Will you give me a little girl of three with fair hair called Jenny, please?’
Towel is thrown off. ‘Here!’
I’d pick up her warm, still-damp body and put my arms around her.
Magic.
In the hallway Sarah passes the open doorway to the kitchen and goes in. She’s noticed the school calendar hanging on the walclass="underline" 11 July – Adam’s birthday and sports day – ringed in red like a curse.
She goes into the sitting room and quietly rummages through a pile of papers and post in an untidy heap on a table. I don’t know quite how illegal this is, what will happen to Sarah if she’s found out, but she continues, quickly and methodically with that quiet courage of hers that I’ve only just discovered.
At the bottom of the heap, in an envelope, are birthday cake candles. Pastel blue. Eight of them.
Natalia comes into the room behind Sarah, silently. Her movements, like her eyes, are feline. I shout a warning, loud as I can, but Sarah can’t hear me.
‘Silas said he found them on the mat yesterday morning,’ Natalia says and Sarah starts.
‘Weird thing to do, isn’t it? Why would someone post us fucking birthday cake candles?’
I remember Jenny talking about the arsonist and her mobile phone. ‘Perhaps he wanted some kind of trophy.’
Was that what Silas Hyman had done? And then pretended someone had sent them?
Two of the little boys, trailing water, run into the room; one is screaming, the other hitting him, their commotion not filling the silence between the adults.
Sarah goes towards the front door.
‘You’re not waiting for Silas, then?’ Natalia asks.
‘No.’
So we won’t, yet, find out where he was this afternoon.
I think Sarah has been jolted by something. Perhaps it’s just hit her how many laws she’s breaking by coming to their house and going through their things.
Perhaps it’s the candles.
Natalia yells at the children to shut up. Then she blocks the door to Sarah. She looks hostile and sweaty and plain.
‘I didn’t used to be this way,’ she says, as if seeing herself through Sarah’s eyes.
No, I think, you were exotically beautiful and poised not that long ago, when Silas was still in work and when you only had one child.
‘You didn’t used to be this way?’ Sarah asks, and there’s fury in her voice. ‘Jenny didn’t used to be this way either,’ she continues. ‘And Grace used to be able to talk. Smile. Look after her children. Count yourself lucky your children are healthy and you can be a mother to them. Count yourself lucky.’
Natalia stands aside as if Sarah’s blast of words have shoved her, and Sarah leaves.
I hadn’t thought to envy Natalia Hyman. Now I realise there’s every reason in the world why I should.
We drive towards the Richmond Post. I watch Sarah as she drives.
‘You’re being over-sensitive, Grace,’ you said; use of my proper name, bad sign. ‘Sarah likes you, how many more times?’
‘She
‘Well, I don’t know how these women-things work.’
No, I thought, because men don’t spend time in the kitchen thinking that being in proximity to food or washing up means two people will bond. Even women with high-flying careers still do the ‘Can I give you a hand in the kitchen?’ thing. Sarah and I had done that countless times over the years, but had remained like toddlers, parallel playing.
And all this time we could have been friends.
‘You say that,’ my nanny voice interjects, ‘but would she have wanted to be friends with you?’
I wish she’d hang out with some positive nanny voices, the ones who’ve been made kind by years of cognitive therapy, but she continues relentlessly. ‘You don’t have anything in common, do you?’
And I have to agree that, family aside, we have nothing in common.
I’d hoped when Sarah had a baby, a year after Jenny was born, that we might bond in some way. Or, more accurately, that she would show a flaw or two. But she was brilliant at motherhood, just as she was brilliant at her career, with a baby who slept through the night and a toddler who smiled on his way to nursery and a child who could count to ten and read long before the end of reception, while Jenny as a baby screamed the house down at four every morning and clung to me at the playgroup gates and saw letters as impossible hieroglyphs.
And Sarah was back at work and being promoted! Still on her fast-track career. I told you before I was jealous of her; well, sometimes I loathed her. There, said it. Terrible. I’m sorry.
The truth is, loathing her was easier than not liking myself.
I did the whole baking muffins for cake sales and going on trips and being there to do homework and inviting friends round. All of that. But I didn’t know how to do what was important.
‘Magic rock, magic rock, give me a confident teenager with ambition and self-confidence and the A-level grades to get into university with a boyfriend who is worthy of her. Give me an eight-year-old boy who is happy at playtime and isn’t bullied and believes he’s not stupid.’
I was meant to be their magic rock, but I failed.
And I have no excuses.
26
We arrive at the offices of the Richmond Post.
It’s been an age since I was here, preferring to send in my monthly page by email. As we go in, I’m embarrassed that Sarah will discover that I’m not loved here as she is at her police station. Frankly, I’m probably no more valued than the out-of-date yucca plant in the corner of what passes for reception.
Sarah must have phoned ahead because Tara arrives almost immediately, pink cheeks glowing. Sarah looks less than thrilled to see her.
‘I spoke to one of your colleagues,’ Sarah says curtly. ‘Geoff Bagshot.’
‘Yes, I recognised the name, Detective Sergeant McBride,’ she says. ‘You chucked me out of the hospital.’
I remember Sarah’s uniform-and-truncheon voice as she virtually pushed Tara away from you. But Tara only knows her as a police officer; not as a member of our family.
‘Geoff’s left it for me to handle.’
I see Sarah stiffen at Tara’s ‘handling’ of her.
‘There’s an office we can use this way,’ Tara says, her stride quick and determined; she’s always enjoyed a spat.
‘When I met you, you said you were friends with Grace?’ Sarah says.
‘I was trying to gain access to her ward, so I stretched the truth a little. It’s what you have to do sometimes in journalism. Clearly I don’t have much in common with a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two.’
‘Nor she with you. Clearly.’
Thank you, Sarah.
Tara escorts her into Geoff’s office; she must have turfed him out. It looks like the set for a film about journalists – old mugs with the dregs of cold coffee in them and illegal ashtrays brimming with butts. I’ve only been here once or twice a year, and it’s been mineral water, no smoking and a digestive biscuit if you’re lucky. Maybe Tara’s taken over décor.
‘What time did you arrive at Sidley House School on the day of the fire?’ Sarah asks, wasting no time on preliminaries.
‘Three fifteen p.m. I already told your buddy.’
‘That was extremely fast?’
‘What is this? Interviews in duplicate?’ She’s enjoying herself.
‘Who told you?’ Sarah asks.
Tara is silent.
‘You arrive barely fifteen minutes after a fire started which has left two people critically ill and I need to know who told you.’
‘I can’t reveal my source.’