‘Do you think I’ll win a prize, Mum?’ Adam said. ‘For anything?’
It was the morning of the prize-giving. Adam, still seven then, was eating Coco Pops and watching Tom and Jerry.
Mr Hyman had been fired three and a half weeks before and already he hated going to school, so I was trying to compensate. You were away filming and I’d allowed myself to spoil him a little. Your man-to-man talk could come later. My excitement about your homecoming was cloaked by anxiety for him.
‘You should win a prize,’ I said to him, fairly certain that he wouldn’t. ‘But if you don’t, you mustn’t be disappointed. Remember what Mrs Healey said at assembly? Everyone will get a prize in the end, even if it’s not your turn this year.’
‘That’s such bollocks,’ Jenny said, still in her dressing-gown although we were meant to leave in ten minutes. ‘I mean, think about the maths,’ she continued. ‘Number of children, number of prizes, number of prize-givings. It doesn’t compute, does it?’
‘And the same people always win them,’ Adam said.
‘I’m sure that’s not-’
Adam interrupted me, hotly frustrated. ‘It is true.’
‘He’s right,’ Jenny said. ‘I know they say every child is equally valued, blah blah blah, but it’s rubbish.’
‘Jen, you’re not helping.’
‘She is, actually,’ Adam said.
‘The school has to get a few of its pupils into a top secondary school like Westminster for boys or St Paul’s Girls,’ Jenny continued, pouring out cereal. ‘Otherwise new parents aren’t going to truck up with their four-year-olds next year. So it’s the brightest kids that get the prizes, so it’ll help them get into the top secondary schools.’
‘Antony’s already won it for best in the class,’ Adam said, miserably. ‘And for Maths and for leadership.’
‘He’s eight. Who’s he meant to be leading, exactly?’ Jenny asked with derision, making Adam smile. Thank you, Jen.
‘It was Rowena White when I was at school,’ Jenny continued. ‘She cleaned up.’ She stood up, her movements languid. ‘Is it still at St Swithun’s church?’ she asked.
‘Yup.’
‘Nightmare. I always got stuck behind a pillar. Why can’t they use that perfectly good modern church right next to the school?’
Adam saw the clock and panicked. ‘We’re going to be late!’ He raced to get his bookbag, his fear of being late temporarily outweighing his fear of school.
‘I’ll be super-quick,’ Jenny said. ‘I’ll eat my Shreddies in the car, if Mum can drive a little more smoothly than last time.’ She paused as she left the room. ‘Oh, and you know all those silver cups and shields? They make the school seem older and more established than it really is. So the current parents are kept happy too.’
‘I think you’re being a little cynical,’ I said.
‘I’ve worked there, remember,’ Jenny said. ‘So I know to be cynical. It’s a business. And prize-giving is a part of that.’
‘You were only there for three weeks. And there’s a prize for improvement,’ I said a little lamely.
Adam glanced up from fastening his bookbag. His look identical to Jenny’s. ‘That doesn’t mean anything, Mum. Everyone knows that.’
‘But you’d like to win it anyway?’ Jenny asked him.
He nodded, a little embarrassed. ‘But I won’t. I never win anything.’
She smiled at him. ‘Me neither.’
Eight minutes later, we were in the car. Adam is the only person Jenny will hurry for.
We were going to arrive at school early, as we did every morning. I know you think we shouldn’t buy into his anxiety but arriving five minutes earlier than necessary is something you have to factor in when you’re looking after him. It just is.
‘How long till you’re working at school again?’ Adam asked Jenny as we neared Sidley House.
He’d been so proud of her being a teaching assistant there last summer, even though she wasn’t in his class.
‘After A levels,’ Jenny replied. ‘So just a couple more months.’
‘That’s really soon,’ I said, panicked by the proximity of A levels. ‘You must get that revision timetable sorted out this evening.’
‘I’m going to Daphne’s.’
‘But Dad’s coming home,’ Adam said.
‘He’ll be at the prize-giving evening with you, won’t he?’ Jenny replied.
‘S’pose so,’ Adam agreed, not fully trusting that you’ll turn up. That’s not a criticism; he worries about anyone actually turning up.
‘You should cancel,’ I said to Jenny. ‘At least do the timetable this evening, even if not any actual revision.’
‘Mum…’
She was putting on mascara in the sun-visor mirror.
‘Working hard now means you’ll have so many more choices in the future.’
‘I’d rather live my life now than revise for a future one, alright?’
No, I thought, it’s not alright. And if only she could put the mental agility used in that rejoinder into her A-level work.
We walked the last bit, as we always do, along the oak-lined driveway. Adam was gripping my hand.
‘OK, Ads?’
Tears were starting, and he was trying not to let them out.
‘Does he really have to go?’ Jenny asked. I was thinking the same. But Adam stoically let go of my hand and went to the gate. He pressed the buzzer on the gate and the secretary let him in.
You’d been away filming since the day after Mr Hyman was fired, so you hadn’t been there to see the consequences. In our brief, badly-connected phone calls you’d been more worried about Jenny, checking up that no more hate mail had arrived – which it hadn’t, thank God – but it didn’t leave much space for Adam. And I hadn’t told you; perhaps fearful of igniting a flashpoint between us. So you still didn’t know that for Adam it was almost like a grief. Not only had he lost a teacher he adored, but the adult world had proved itself cruel and unjust and nothing like the stories he read. Beast Quest books and Harry Potter and Arthurian legends and Percy Jackson – his whole literary culture up to this point – didn’t end like this. He was prepared for unhappy endings, but not unjust ones. His teacher was sacked. For something he didn’t do.
And school was already mutating back into the hostile place it had been before Mr Hyman was his teacher.
At quarter to six, after a ‘lightning-quick supper, Ads!’ and a change into clean uniform, we arrived early at the prize-giving with his shoes polished and his blazer brushed so he wouldn’t get into trouble. I was in faded jeans with a genuine rip as a protest, which he liked. ‘Cool, Mum!’ There’s a subversive streak lurking in Adam somewhere.
Other mothers would be in their designer Net-a-Porter uniforms and expensive sleek boots.
We were fifteen minutes early, partly because Adam is in the choir so had to get there in good time, but also because of his anxiety about being late, which had got so much worse in the last three weeks.
I spotted Maisie waving to me from a pew near the front, even earlier than us. Adam went to the side-room to wait for the rest of choir and I joined her.
‘Bagged you and Mike a good spot,’ she said, budging up to make a space for me. ‘Rowena was sorry not to be here, but it’s just too close to their exams now, isn’t it?’
So Rowena was revising, even though she’d already been offered a conditional-but-virtually-guaranteed place at Oxford to read Science. While Jenny, who most definitely hadn’t been offered a place by anyone, was at a friend’s house. As small girls, Jenny used to gripe about Rowena being too competitive and needing to be the best at everything. I’d wished she shared a little of those traits. I still did.
‘Is Addie in the choir again this year?’ Maisie asked. ‘I do love hearing him sing.’
She’s so tactfully sensitive, never asking, ‘So do you think Adam will win a prize?’ but instead celebrating his small contribution.
I saw Maisie smoothing her brown cotton dress over her tummy, trying to tug it flat, and tears starting in her eyes.
‘Do you think I look like a bulimic hog in this?’ she asked me quietly, almost furtively. It was such un-Maisie language that for a moment I didn’t think I’d heard her properly.
‘Of course not, my honey!’ I said. ‘You look gorgeous. Sex-on-a-stick lollipop-gorgeous.’
She giggled. ‘Like a Shiny-Mum?’
The name we have for the mothers in the shiny slinky boots and expensive silky clothes and shiny hair professionally salon-blow-dried this afternoon.
‘Shinier,’ I said.
I stuck out my scruffy jeans and indicated the rip. Should I ask her about the bulimic hog?
‘You are the kindest woman in the world, Gracie.’
Then Donald arrived, holding the cup that he’d give out later.
‘Just polishing up the silverware,’ he said, his avuncular face beaming.
When Jenny first went to the school we were both left of centre, embarrassed our child went to a private school, and thinking ‘Donald-and-his-cup’ absurd and funny. But less critical and hypocritical now, I find it touching that he still wants this link to the school. I never got to know Donald well, Maisie and I usually meet in the daytime when he’s at work and Rowena’s at school, but I know from Maisie how much he adores his wife and daughter.
I watched Donald take Maisie’s hand, sit a little closer to her than he needed to, and felt jealous that you weren’t there.
In the small, sweaty office, DI Baker has finally stopped his hissing radio conversation.
‘The prize-giving was held in St Swithun’s, a mile or so from the school,’ you say. ‘My flight was delayed so I arrived late, at about six fifteen. They didn’t even have someone on the door. I just walked straight in. The school’s policy on security was negligently bad.’
You don’t say anything about lightning-quick suppers and brushed clothes; nothing domestic in your memory.
‘I noticed that the headmistress seemed tense,’ you continue. ‘Even before Hyman came into the church.’
I agree with you. Mrs Healey did seem more than usually uptight, but surely it was because the school was on parade that evening and she wanted it all to go like clockwork?
‘It was as though she was expecting something to happen,’ you say.
DI Baker’s radio hisses again and he answers it. You’re outraged, but what can you do?
I saw you standing at the back with a group of fathers, who’d also got there late. You caught my eye but the bustle of an airport and a busy important career was still hanging about you and your smile wasn’t yet fully engaged with me.
Mrs Healey was about halfway through handing out the cups, interspersed with short musical performances. The school was meant to be ‘Fostering Self-Confidence in
Perhaps Jenny was right after all. Perhaps the cups were there to add a silver gleam to future eleven-plus papers and help the top students into the top schools. An investment of silver, which would be paid off in new children joining the school. I didn’t like to think that we were part of a business model rather than a prize-giving that spring evening.
I searched for Adam amidst the rows of identically dressed children, trying to work out what I’d say to him later, at bedtime, when he again felt a failure. I spotted other mothers like me – Sebastian’s mother, Greg’s – sitting a little too upright, hands tight around their programmes, also wondering how they’d persuade their child that prizes don’t matter; that they matter. But the mothers of the school heroes – the children who are in the top sets, and captain the teams and already own the sports-player-of-the-week shield and the musician-of-the-week trophy – met each other’s eyes over the pews, beaming faces locating other beaming faces, never guessing at the thoughts in our upright-seated brigade.
The fathers of those children were always there on time.
No, that wasn’t a dig. Your plane was late. I’m sorry.
DI Baker has finally stopped his hissing radio conversation.
‘At about six forty,’ you say, ‘Silas Hyman barged through the door. He shoved his way past the parents.’
The church door clanged behind him, silencing a wobbly solo clarinet. We all turned and stared as he pushed his way through the parents at the back. I saw that his suit was pressed, his shoes were polished, his boyish face cleanshaven. But he was unsteady as he walked up the aisle and was sweating profusely.
The silence around him sounded so lonely.
‘He went up to the headmistress at the front,’ you continue. ‘And he yelled at her. Called her a “bitch”. He said she’d made him a “fucking scapegoat”.
‘And then he said, and I remember it very clearly, he said, “You can’t do this to someone, you hear me? Out there?” and he was jabbing with his hand, gesticulating around all the pews. “All of you, at the back? Have you got this? You won’t fucking well get away with it.”’
He sounded desperate, I’d thought, on the edge of despair; choosing to rage instead of weep.
‘Two fathers went and grabbed him,’ you continue. ‘And pulled him away from the headmistress.’
All you could hear was the scuffle as they tried to get him out of the church. Even the children – all two hundred and eighty of them – were silent.
Then, in the silence, I heard a child’s voice. ‘Let go of him.’
Adam’s voice.
I turned to see Adam – Adam of all people! – standing up, amongst the sea of seated pupils and teachers. His voice was louder now.
‘Leave him alone!’
The whole church was quiet, all staring at Adam. He was terrified, I could see that, but he continued, looking all the time at Mr Hyman.
‘It’s not fair! He didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not fair to fire him. It wasn’t Mr Hyman’s fault.’
It was extraordinary. Heroic. A shy little boy, standing up in front of the dark-suited fathers at the back, all the teachers, the headmistress who terrifies him; in front of all of them. The boy who’s afraid of getting into trouble if his homework isn’t done, scared of being five minutes late, this boy was – literally – standing up for his beloved teacher. I’d always known he was good – not a goody-goody but good – but it still astounded me.
And then it was as if Adam connected to something in Mr Hyman. As if he made Mr Hyman aware for the first time of what he was doing. Mr Hyman shrugged off the two fathers and started walking towards the door. As he passed Adam he smiled at him tenderly, and it was a signal to sit down.
I couldn’t see Adam any more, but I knew that the enormity of what he’d done would be hitting him like a steam train. But nearly all his classmates loved Mr Hyman too, so surely they’d support him?
At the door Mr Hyman turned. ‘I didn’t hurt anyone.’
On the pew beside me I saw that Maisie’s face was pale with an expression I’d never seen before.
‘That man should never have been allowed near our children,’ she said vehemently. And I saw that she loathed him, hated him even – gentle Maisie who’s usually so quick to be kind.
‘It was a clear threat,’ you say to DI Baker. ‘A violent one. You could see how much he hated the headmistress. All of us.’
‘But at the time you didn’t think it worrying enough to report it?’ asks DI Baker, his tone blandly scornful.
‘At the time I underestimated his capacity for violence. We all did. Otherwise this never would have happened. So you’ll arrest him?’
More a statement than a question.
‘We already spoke to Mr Hyman, last night,’ DI Baker retorts, sounding irritated.
‘So you were suspicious enough to question him already?’ you ask.
‘We would have spoken to anyone who may have had a grudge against the school straight away,’ Sarah says. ‘As a matter of course.’
DI Baker glares at her, not wanting her to give away state secrets. But Sarah continues, ‘The headmistress or a governor would have given us the information that he’d been fired, straight off the bat.’
‘Mr Hyman didn’t ask for a lawyer to be present. And he was happy to volunteer a sample of his DNA,’ DI Baker says. ‘In my experience, that is not the response of a guilty man.’
‘But surely-’
DI Baker interrupts you. ‘There is no reason to think Mr Hyman had anything to do with the fire. A scurrilous piece of inaccurate journalism doesn’t change that. And your account of his behaviour at prize-giving is interpretative rather than fact.
‘However, I do appreciate your anxiety, Mr Covey. And given what you are going through, and to put your mind at rest, I will get an update on our enquiry from one of my officers.’
He ostentatiously gets out his radio again, suggesting, without saying so, that you are putting him to unnecessary trouble.
‘I’ll be with my daughter,’ you say, standing up. ‘You can “update” me there.’
You leave the office, the cheap thin door banging shut behind you.
I follow you along the corridor. As I look at your broad back, I long for you to hold me; and I remember how excited I’d been about seeing you that evening at prize-giving – how long those three and a half weeks had felt.
When you first came into the church, and didn’t properly meet my eye, I’d hurriedly tried to remember if there were any of those bright, attractive BBC girls on your filming trip. I’d done that before, over the weeks you’d been gone. But I was pretty sure it was an all-male crew.
No, I didn’t suspect you. I just felt a little insecure, that’s all. I’d never have asked you or even articulated the niggling little concern. ‘Back in your box and stay there!’ bossy Nanny Voice said. Sometimes she has her uses.
When I came out of the church, I scanned the large group of parents, trying to find you. The father-crowd at the back had been first out of the church, most of them on their mobiles now, but in the dusk I couldn’t see you. The children weren’t out yet.
I was worried Adam had got into trouble, and how much he’d mind. I wanted to tell him how proud I was of him; that what he did took great courage. All around me was the hiss of gossip as the incident turned into anecdote.
Donald and Maisie were a few feet away. I thought for a moment that they were arguing, but their voices were low and quiet, so I realised I must be mistaken. Besides, Maisie says they never argue. ‘Sometimes I think we need a jolly good row, blow some cobwebs away, but Donald’s just too good-natured.’
Donald had a cigarette, dragging hard on it, making a fiery tip in the gloomy light. Maisie had never told me he smoked. He dropped the butt onto the ground, stubbing it out with his shoe, grinding it down.
I saw Adam coming towards me. His small face looked zoned out, trying to disconnect from the world around him. As he got closer, he passed Donald lighting another cigarette and flinched from the lighter’s flame.
‘It’s OK, young sir,’ Donald said. He clicked his lighter shut.
‘Are you alright, Ads?’ Maisie asked him.
He nodded and I put my arm around him. ‘Let’s find Dad.’
I was no longer looking for my husband but Adam’s father – our identity as parents always usurping the one of husband or wife.
I finally saw you standing away from the main group of parents. You took my hand and your other arm gave Adam a hug. ‘Hello, young cub.’
No mention of what he’d done. You saw that facial signal between parents over the head of their child when one isn’t doing something right.
‘You two go on home,’ you said, ignoring my sign. ‘I’ll catch up with you later.’
We hadn’t even kissed hello and our disagreement about Adam exacerbated my frisson of insecurity at your homecoming.
‘I’ll be home as soon as I can,’ you said in a masculine, commanding way. I was glad you hadn’t had any pretty-bright-young-women filming with you, but the downside was that you’d been too long in an all-male environment; it usually takes you about the same amount of time to recover from sexism as jet-lag.
I was cooking a late supper when you arrived home. Adam had fallen asleep half an hour before.
You came up behind me and kissed me and I smelt beer on your breath. For a moment we met as a couple.
‘Jenny not here?’ you asked.
‘Daphne’s dad is driving her home now. He just called.’
‘Decent of him.’
You put your arms around me. ‘Sorry that took a while, but I wanted to do some damage limitation. Been in that wine bar by the church, schmoozing the teachers. Mrs Healey especially. I really could have done without that this evening.’
You didn’t see my face.
‘I asked her not to discipline him, but to let us handle it and she agreed.’
I turned and then we argued.
You thought Adam standing up for Mr Hyman wasn’t from loyalty and courage, but because of ‘some kind of brainwashing by
Then Jenny came into the kitchen, ending our row. We’ve never argued in front of the children, have we? Not when it matters. They are our cease-fire treaty.
‘Scrap the UN,’ you’d said once. ‘Warring countries should just get a teenage daughter in the room.’
We’ve arrived at the burns unit and you’re scrupulously washing your hands, following the diagrammed instructions to the letter. Sarah does the same. Then a nurse lets you in through the locked door.
As we reach Jenny’s side-ward I brace myself. You turn to Sarah.
‘It’s not the hate-mailer who did this to her.’
Your voice is furious and it startles her.
A nurse is taking the last of the dressings off Jenny’s face.
Her face is blistered beyond recognition, far worse than in A &E. I quickly turn away. Because I can’t bear to look at her. And because I’ll have to tell Jenny what I’ve seen, rather than just glimpsed, because surely you can withhold your knowledge of something if you’ve only just glimpsed it? And not made sure of it by looking again?
But you don’t look away.
The nurse sees your distress.
‘Blistering the day afterwards is quite normal,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t mean that her burns have got any worse.’
You lean towards Jenny, your face close to hers, and then you kiss the air above her as if it will float down on top of her.
And in that kiss I know why you’re adamant that it can’t be the hate-mailer.
Because if it is the hate-mailer, you haven’t protected Jenny. You haven’t stopped him from doing this. And that would mean it’s your fault. You’d be responsible for her eyes and mouth needing to be sluiced, for her blistered face; for her limbs wrapped up in God-knows-what; for her decimated airways.
For her possible death.
A burden you can’t pick up.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I say, going to you, putting my arms around you. ‘Really, my darling, whoever did this, it’s not your fault.’
I understand now why you haven’t just been suspicious of Mr Hyman but grabbed onto him, certain that it’s him. Anyone but the hate-mailer.
And maybe you are right.
I remember again Maisie saying, ‘That man should never have been allowed near our children,’ and seeing that she hated him. Maisie, who always thinks the best of everyone and is kind to a fault.
Maisie must have seen something bad in him too.
‘You’ve always been naïve,’ Nanny Voice says.
Perhaps I’ve just been blind.