“Hello, Sheena, I’m Miss Campbell. I don’t know if you remember me.”
She had been a feckless girl, easily led. Left to her own devices she would fidget with her biro, pull at her lank hair, decorate the name of whichever boyfriend she aspired to along the edges of her desk, across the front of her notebook, the back of her arm.
“Sheena, I’m sorry about your brother. I really am.” From her reaction, Hannah couldn’t tell if the girl remembered her or not, though she supposed she did. “I brought these flowers for your mum,” Hannah said.
Without speaking, Sheena pushed open the front door and waited for Hannah to step inside.
“Mrs. Snape?”
Hannah found them in the kitchen, Norma and Rosa, hunched over the small table, cigarettes and tea.
“Sheena let me in. I’m … I was Nicky’s teacher, one of Nicky’s teachers.” Neither woman looking at her, she stumbled on. “I wanted to say I was sorry. And to bring you these.” For a few moments longer she held onto the flowers, before laying them down on the table.
“These from the school then?” Rosa asked.
“Yes. I mean, no, not exactly. I brought them myself.”
“So there’s nothing from the school?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Bastards, not a sodding word.”
“Look,” Hannah said, “I think I’d better go. I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“Yes,” Rosa said. “I think you better had.”
She was at the door when she heard Norma’s voice. “You his special teacher, then? Class teacher, whatever it was.”
“No.” Hannah turned back into the kitchen. Norma’s eyes were raw and finding it difficult to focus. “Not really. I was his English teacher, that’s all.” Norma blinked and blinked again. “He was a nice lad, cheerful. I liked him.”
The room expanded to accept the lie, lifted it to the ceiling wreathed in smoke.
“I will go now,” Hannah said.
As she shut the front door behind her, Hannah leaned back against it and closed her eyes. The backs of her legs were shaking, her arms burned cold. All my pretty ones? All she could think of were Macduffs words when Malcolm told him that his children had been killed. And what, Hannah, she asked herself, what bloody good is that?
The rain that would saturate the flowers outside Norma’s house, mashing the decorated florists’ paper against the twisted stems, caught Resnick half a mile from home, no raincoat, plummeting down from a darkening spring sky. Like stair rods, his mother-in-law might have said, back when he had a mother-in-law. By the time he had slipped his key into the front-door lock, his hair was plastered flat against his head, water dripping from his nose and squirreling past his collar, down his back. As the door clicked open and swung back, Dizzy darted from the shelter of a neighbor’s shrub, one touch upon the wall, then in.
Careful, Resnick emptied the contents of his bag, paperwrapped packages nestling in puddles of water. He took off his coat and hung it over a chair, rubbed a towel briskly through his hair. The meeting with Hannah Campbell kept replaying, sporadically, in his mind.
“Are we having a row?”
“No, it’s a discussion.”
Automatically, he forked food into the cats’ bowls. Is that what it had truly been, a discussion? Academic? Impersonal? Certainly that wasn’t the way it had felt. But what did he know? Teachers, perhaps that was what they liked to do, take words and push them back and forth like dominoes, a game to exercise the mind.
He was building a sandwich, waiting for the kettle to boil. Four slices of fresh garlic salami overlapping across rye bread, a pickled cucumber sliced narrowly along its length, goat cheese that he crumbled between his fingers, a single, thinly cut shallot; finally, the second slice of bread he drizzled with extra virgin olive oil before setting it on top and pressing the sandwich closed, encouraging some of the oil to seep down before he sliced the whole thing in two.
Tinker, tailor, mother-in-law, wife. Slowly, he poured boiling water onto coffee grounds. He had not heard from his ex-wife Elaine since two Christmases ago, not seen her in twice as long. He knew that she had remarried, redivorced, seen the inside of more than one psychiatric ward. When he had seen her it had been like meeting a stranger, someone who had lived for a long time in another country and spoke a language he didn’t understand.
“Are we having a row?”
“No, it’s a discussion.”
Rather than wait until the lift doors closed across her face, he had walked away.
When the phone rang, it made him jump.
“Charles, I am surprised to find you in.” Marian Witczak’s voice, tinged with the accent of a homeland in which she had not been born, which she had not visited until her teens. “I was wondering, Charles, about the dance. This weekend, you remember? 1 wonder if you have made up your mind?”
“Marian, I’m not sure.”
He could feel her disappointment as eloquently as words.
“It’s difficult, Marian, you know that. To promise. I never know what’s going to crop up.”
“All work and no play, Charles, you know what they say?”
“Look, I’ll try, that’s all I can do.”
“You remember, Charles, that time we persuaded the accordion player to forsake his polkas for ‘Blue Suede Shoes’? Well, it is the same band again.”
“Marian, I’m sorry, I have to go. I’ll be in touch, all right? I’ll let you know.”
He ate one half of the sandwich standing near the stove, the other sitting in the front room, listening to Frank Morgan play “Mood Indigo,” the wind curling the rain against the tall panes.
Norma sat up suddenly and opened her eyes. Rosa had been home to sort out the youngest of her own kids and then returned. They had eaten Birds Eye lasagna and chips and drunk two cans of Kestrel, got through the Lord knew how many cigarettes. Norma had slept. “Nicky’s dad!” she shouted, waking. “Peter. How’m I ever going to get in touch with Nicky’s dad?”
Sheena had an address, written on a sheet of torn paper, in pencil that was beginning to smudge and fade.
“How long’ve you had this? How long?”
“On my birthday,” Sheena said, “when I was fourteen. It was tucked inside the card.”
Norma rubbed her eyes. Peterborough. “No saying he’s still there now, he could be anywhere.”
“You’ll let him know, my dad?”
“Here,” Norma pushed the paper back towards her. “You let him know. You’re the one he give his address to.”
Hannah sat in the chair near the upstairs window, a sweater round her shoulders to foil the draughts. Curtains still open, she could see the rain silvering past the street lights outside, before it was lost against the blackness of the small park facing where she lived. The mug which had held her peppermint tea lay cold in her lap. She was reading a collection of new poems she’d picked up in Mushroom, the soundtrack for The Piano playing in the background.
As though a man is no more than fear and fire for a woman to feed and carry like a torch. As though a woman is no more than light at the end of a long and hard tunnel. As though my sweet life needs it. As though ache could be enough to smooth the edges of a desperate day.
How different would her life be if she had married, had a child? The same issues, tugging at her beneath the tide of her life. She had her own house, a job-a good job, one most days she valued, and which she thought of as in some small way doing good. Her Visa bill was paid up at the end of each month, her mortgage was manageable, she went abroad three times a year, enjoyed the company of friends. If she saw a new book or CD she fancied she could buy it without too much thought. Aside from those children she taught, the only person she was feeding and caring for was herself.