Jenny is waiting for me as I come out of ICU.
‘Well?’ she asks.
‘You’re going to be alright,’ I say. A brazen, bare-faced lie. A deceit. A shawl woven of untruths in which a mother wraps her child.
She looks so relieved.
‘But they can’t be totally sure?’ she asks me.
‘Not totally.’
As close as I will get to the truth.
We see you coming out of ICU and going towards my ward. Sarah must be with Jenny.
You sit next to my comatose body and you tell me what the doctors have said. You tell me that she will get a transplant. She will be alright. Of course she will!
I press against you and I can feel your courageous hope for Jenny.
I hold onto it as I hold onto you.
For now, at least, I can believe in your hope for her and the ghastly ticking down of Jenny’s life is paused.
Jenny is in the corridor.
‘Shall we go to the garden?’ she suggests. She must see my surprise because she smiles with a note of triumph. ‘I found one.’
She takes me to a corridor with a glass wall. Still holding tightly to your hope, I look through the glass to see a courtyard garden. It’s in the heart of the hospital, walls rising up on all four sides. It must have been designed to be seen from the many overlooking windows, rather than be used. The entrance on the ground floor is a nondescript, unmarked door, presumably only used by whoever looks after it.
Through the glass, the garden looks so pretty with its profusion of English flowers: tissue-paper pink roses and frilly white jasmine and velvet peonies. There’s a wrought-iron seat and a fountain; a stone bird-bath.
I go outside with Jen, thinking the garden will be a gentle place to be.
The walls surrounding this garden have trapped the heat, funnelling it down. The water in the bird-bath has evaporated. The edges of the tissue-paper roses have curled and dried; the peony is dropping with the weighted humid air.
Summer boxed in.
‘At least it’s sort of outside,’ she says.
Through the glass wall, which abuts one side of the garden, you can see through to rooms and corridors. We watch people walking along. And I know why she likes it now, because even though it’s not outside proper, we are separate from the hospital.
As I sit with her, the lie I told digs into me like razor wire.
We carry on watching people through the glass wall. For a long time. Jen seems soothed by it and it is quite soporific, like watching tropical fish in a tank.
‘That’s Rowena’s dad, isn’t it?’ Jenny asks.
Amongst the melee of fish-people I spot Donald.
‘Yes.’
‘But why’s he here?’
‘Rowena’s in the hospital,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I saw her with Adam outside the school and she looked fine then.’
After Maisie’s visit, I’d again forgotten about Rowena; my anxiety for Jenny still making me too selfish to have room for her as well.
‘Maisie will be with her,’ Jenny says. ‘Shall we go and visit?’
It’s sweet of her to think I’d like to be with my old friend.
‘It gets kind of boring here after a while,’ she says.
We’re near the burns unit now and are catching up with Donald. A nurse is with him. As we follow him, I’m glad that for a little while at least Jenny and I have a focus that is not on her injuries or mine.
Donald is wearing a dark suit, jacket still on despite the hotly humid day, and is carrying a briefcase.
I can smell cigarettes on his clothes. I’ve never noticed that before, but my sense of smell has become so much more acute now, overpoweringly so.
We’re now close enough to hear the nurse talking to him. Her voice is briskly competent.
‘… and when someone has been in an enclosed space in a fire, we have to monitor them extremely carefully in case there have been any inhalation injuries. It can some-times take a little while before there are any symptoms, so it’s wise to be on the safe side.’
Donald’s face looks severe, barely recognisable from the smiling, avuncular man I last saw at the prize-giving. It’s probably these horrible, glaring striplights partitioning the corridor ceiling, which gouge out shadows in people’s faces, making them look harsher.
The nurse presses a keypad on the door to the burns unit and holds the door for him.
‘Your daughter’s bed is this way,’ she says.
But surely he’s been to see her before? He wouldn’t have waited a day before coming to her bedside. Maisie has told me how protective he is of his family countless times. ‘He’d kill crocodiles for us with his bare hands! Good job there aren’t that many crocs in Chiswick!’
Jenny and I reach Rowena’s side-room a little before Donald and look through the glass panel in the door. Rowena has a drip in her arm and her hands are bandaged. But her face is undamaged. How could I not have thought her face beautiful before? Next to her is Maisie.
I wait for Donald to arrive and take Rowena in his arms and for the three of them to be reunited.
I brace myself against the stinging contrast.
Donald goes into the room, passing Jenny in the doorway. I notice she’s very pale.
‘Jen?’
She turns to me, as if snapping out of a reverie.
‘I know it’s mad but for a moment, well, it was like I was back in the school, really back there, and -’ she pauses – ‘I heard the fire alarm going off. I heard it, Mum.’
I put my arm around her.
‘Has it gone now?’
‘Yeah.’ She smiles at me. ‘Maybe it’s mad person’s tinnitus.’
We look through the glass in the door to Rowena’s room.
Donald is going towards Rowena and I think she looks panicked. But that can’t be right, surely? His back is towards me, and I can’t see the expression on his face.
Maisie is hurriedly pulling down her sleeves to cover large livid bruises on her arms.
‘I told you he’d be here soon,’ she says to Rowena in a too-bright, nervy voice.
Donald has reached Rowena. He grabs hold of her bandaged burnt hands; she gives a sharp scream of pain.
‘Quite the little heroine, aren’t you?’
There’s hatred in his voice. Ugly and raw and shocking.
Maisie tries to pull him away. ‘You’re hurting her, Donald, please. Stop.’
I’m in the room now, wanting to help, but there’s nothing I can do but watch. Still he holds Rowena’s bandaged hands, and she’s trying not to cry out.
I think of Adam flinching from Donald’s lighter as he lit a cigarette after the prize-giving; his foot grinding the stub into the ground.
He lets go of Rowena’s hands and turns to leave.
Rowena is crying.
‘Daddy…’
She gets out of bed and walks shakily towards him. She looks fragile and slight in the cotton hospital gown, so much smaller than Donald in his hard dark suit.
‘You disgust me,’ he says as she reaches him.
Maisie puts her hand on him, trying to stop him from leaving.
‘Your bruises,’ he says to her. ‘Have you shown anyone?’
Maisie drops her head, not looking at him. Her FUN sleeves cover her bruises now; the same long-sleeved shirt she’d been wearing at sports day, despite the heat.
‘It was an accident,’ Maisie says to him. ‘Just an accident. Of course it was. And you can hardly see any more. Really.’
Donald abruptly leaves the room.
‘He didn’t mean it, sweetheart,’ Maisie says to Rowena.
Rowena is silent.
I turn away from them and leave the room too, as if they’re too naked for me to watch; the bones of the family exposed.
I reach Jenny who’s been watching through the glass in the door.
‘I never knew,’ she says to me, shocked.
‘No.’
But I think again about Maisie’s ‘bulimic hog’ comment, her bruised cheek, her cracked wrist, her lack of self-confidence. I again see the image I’d glimpsed as I looked into my dressing-table mirror the night of the prize-giving – that dense murky network of something sinister.
I’d dismissed it as an illusion at the time. But a little later, going to sleep that night when thoughts slip out from being censored, I’d wondered.
But I didn’t ask Maisie about Donald; didn’t even give her an opening to a conversation. Not just because in daylight it seemed an absurd suspicion, but because I thought it was a territory beyond our friendship. I didn’t want to – didn’t know how to – step outside our customary domestic landscape in which we were both so comfortable and sure-footed.
But she doesn’t constrain our friendship that way; isn’t cowardly that way. She thinks she should have gone into a burning building for me. And I didn’t even ask her if she was OK. If there was anything she’d like to tell me; talk about.
And Rowena.
Even if I’d managed not to see what was happening to Maisie, I should have seen what was happening to her. A child. Because when Donald grabbed hold of her burnt hands that surely wasn’t the first time he’d hurt her.
I remember her in reception and year one at Sidley House; that elfin beautiful child. Was it happening then? Later, perhaps; year three or four?
‘I thought she was a spoilt little princess,’ I say to Jenny, guilt making my words taste sour.
‘Me too.’
Maybe she’s also remembering the hand-embroidered pillow-cases, and hand-painted rocking chair and fairytale bed and princess party-dresses. I used to worry that when the little princess grew up her adult life could only be a disappointment to her.
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.’
‘The witness is entirely credible.’
‘So why wait till now to report it?’ she asks.
‘Because this person knows how much the Covey family are dealing with and didn’t want to add to their distress. But with the press accusations felt it was their duty to come forward.’
Sarah is more emotional than I’ve ever seen her.
‘Who is “this person”?’ she asks.
He looks at her with silent rebuke, and then he continues.
‘They have asked for their identity not to be revealed, which is a request I granted. There will be no trial so no need for identification. Neither we nor the school will be pressing charges.’
You look stunned. But also, I think, relieved. As I am. This wasn’t done maliciously. It can’t be, if there aren’t going to be any charges. It’s no longer necessary to have this ghastly hostile suspicion to the world. It isn’t the hate-mailer or Silas Hyman or Donald. Thank God.
But why is Sarah so upset?
DI Baker’s face shows no emotion. He pauses a moment, before he speaks to you.
‘Your son was seen leaving the school Art room moments before the automatic smoke detector went off. He was holding matches. There is no doubt in our mind that it was Adam who started the fire.’
Adam? For God’s sake, how can he say that? How?
‘Is this some kind of sick joke?’ you ask.
‘Whoever told you that is lying,’ Sarah says. ‘I’ve known Adam all his life and he’s the most gentle, kind child imaginable. There’s not an iota of violence in him.’
DI Baker looks irritated. ‘Sarah…’
‘He likes reading,’ Sarah continues. ‘He plays with his knights and he has two guinea pigs. They are the parameters of Adam’s world. He doesn’t play truant, he doesn’t graffiti, he doesn’t get into trouble. Reading, knights, two guinea pigs. Have you got that?’
Our gentle boy accused of this.
Madness.
‘It was Hyman, not a child,’ you say.
‘Mr Covey-’
‘How the hell did he persuade you?’
‘The witness is nothing to do with Mr Hyman.’
‘You’re saying that a child took white spirit into the Art room?’
‘I think we were too hasty to see certain occurrences as significant. The Art teacher may well have been mistaken about the quantity of white spirit kept in the Art room. After all, if she wasn’t following the regulations to the letter she was hardly going to tell us that, was she? I had a brief talk with her earlier and she admitted it was possible she’d been mistaken. She’s not one hundred per cent certain at all.’
I think of Miss Pearcy, sensitive, artistic Miss Pearcy, who’d be so easily intimidated by DI Baker.
‘Of course she’s not one hundred per cent certain,’ Sarah says. ‘Are you one hundred per cent certain when you go on holiday that you didn’t leave the oven on? Or when there’s a crash are you one hundred per cent certain you checked your mirror first before turning? It just means that this Art teacher has a conscience and the courage to admit to her fallibility. Especially when a policeman tells her she might have done something wrong.’
‘I understand your loyalty to your nephew but-’
She interrupts, sparks flying off her words.
‘You can’t think a child had the knowledge of fires and the premeditation to open the windows at the top of the school?’
‘It was a hot day,’ DI Baker replies. ‘A teacher or child could easily have opened the windows to let in the breeze, despite it being against the rules.’
You have been stunned into silence and stillness, but now you move towards DI Baker and I think you’re going to hit him.
‘Have you ever seen Adam?’ you ask, then gesture to beneath DI Baker’s breast pocket. ‘He’d come up to about here on you. He’s eight, for fuck’s sake, just eight. His birthday was yesterday. A little boy.’
‘Yes, we’re aware of his birthday.’
His words sounded menacing, but why?
‘Hyman’s lied about him,’ you say.
Sarah turns to you. ‘Silas Hyman can’t be the witness, Mike. It would look too strange if he was in the school at the time.’
‘So he must have had an accomplice and-’
‘I appreciate it’s hard to believe an eight-year-old child could do this,’ DI Baker interrupts. ‘But according to fire-brigade records, children were responsible for ninety-three per cent of all intentionally started school-time school fires. Just over a quarter were started by children younger than seven years old.’
But what have statistics to do with Adam?
‘We think it was most likely a prank, a bit of fooling around that went wrong,’ DI Baker says, as if this will appease you.
‘But Adam knows lighting a fire is wrong,’ Sarah says. ‘He’d think about the terrible consequences that may happen. For a child that age he’s extremely mature and thoughtful.’
I didn’t realise how well Sarah knows Adam. I’ve always thought she was critical of him, seeing him as wet, not like her tall, athletic sons.
‘And he knew Jenny was in the school,’ Sarah continues, desperately trying to convince him. ‘His own sister was in there, for God’s sake.’
‘Is there any animosity between the siblings?’ DI Baker asks.
‘What are you suggesting?’ you ask and there’s violence in your voice.
‘I’m sure he didn’t intend the fire to do the terrible damage-’
‘He didn’t do it.’ Yours and Sarah’s voices overlap with the same certainty.
‘What about the intruder?’ you ask. ‘The one who tampered with Jenny’s oxygen. You think that was a little boy too, do you?’
‘There is absolutely no evidence that there ever was an intruder,’ DI Baker responds impassively. ‘We have talked to the medical director and connections sometimes become faulty. It’s not significant.’
‘There was an intruder! I saw him!’ I shout, but no one hears me.
‘Jenny must have seen Hyman at the school,’ you say. ‘Maybe his accomplice. Something that implicated him. That’s why he came here, to-’
DI Baker interrupts you. ‘It really isn’t helpful to indulge in unsubstantiated theories.’
‘Adam wouldn’t do it,’ Sarah says again, with controlled fury. ‘Which means that someone else did.’
‘So you believe your brother’s theory now too?’ His tone is mocking her.
‘I think we should look at every possibility.’
His face shows contempt.
‘You told us Silas Hyman voluntarily gave a sample of his DNA?’ Sarah says and Baker looks irritated. ‘But have we actually got any DNA evidence from the scene of the fire?’
‘It’s really not productive to-’
‘I thought not. And now we won’t be looking for it, will we?’
‘Sarah-’
‘If it was Hyman behind this, he’d happily volunteer his DNA if he knew that within twenty-four hours his accomplice would nail a child for it, and the forensic search would stop. He could well have banked on nothing being found for the first twenty-four hours.’
DI Baker looks at her with doughy immovability.
‘The truth of the matter is that we have a reliable witness who saw Adam Covey coming out of the Art room, where we know the fire was started, holding matches. Just moments later the automatic heat detector and smoke detectors went off.
‘But as I said we won’t be pursuing it any further. We are satisfied that he didn’t intend the terrible consequences of his actions and that he’s been punished enough as it is. So we’ll just interview him and-’
‘No,’ you say vehemently.
They are not going to interview Adam. They can’t do that to him.
‘You can’t accuse him of this,’ Sarah says. ‘He can’t know people thought him capable of this.’
‘He doesn’t need to go to the police station to be interviewed. We can do it here. So that his father can be present. You too, if you want. But I do need to interview him. You know that, Sarah.’
‘What I know is that a totally innocent and vulnerable child has been set up.’
‘I have asked a police constable to bring Adam and his grandmother to the hospital. They should be here in half an hour. I suggest we reconvene then.’
Baker leaves the room and I hurry after him.
‘You don’t know Adam,’ I say to him. ‘Haven’t met him. So it’s not your fault that you don’t understand why he couldn’t have done this. He’s good, you see. Not in a goody-goody way but a moral way.’
‘Mum, please, he can’t hear you,’ Jenny says.
‘He likes reading Arthurian legends,’ I continue. ‘His favourite is “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. And that’s what he wants to be. Not a pop star or a footballer or whatever it is other boys want to be, but a knight like Sir Gawain, and he’s trying to find a modern equivalent. And you might think that quaint or funny, but it’s not for him; it’s a moral code that he wants to live by.’
‘Even if he could hear you,’ Jenny says, ‘I don’t think he knows about Gawain.’
She’s right, this man wouldn’t have a clue.
‘He also likes history programmes,’ I continue. ‘And asks not only why people are wicked and do wicked things, but why people allow themselves to be led by such people. He thinks about these things.’
How can you make someone understand a boy like Adam?
DI Baker seems to be hurrying now, speeding his pace; I keep up.
‘You probably think that all mothers say these things about their sons, but they don’t. Really. They boast about how fantastic their boy is at sport and doing outdoorsy things and being fearless – breaking an arm as he was determined to climb it! That kind of thing. Not being good and kind. Not being like Adam.
‘You might think it’s me boasting now, but it isn’t. Because we don’t live in an age of chivalry, do we? We don’t live in a time when Adam’s virtues are valuable.
‘And all I really want is for him to be happy. Just happy. And if it would make him happy I’d swap his kindness for being in the football team in a blink and trade decency for popular. But he doesn’t have the choice and so I don’t either. Because that’s how he is.
‘And even though it makes him unhappy and I want him to have less lonely characteristics, I am so proud of him.’
‘He’s afraid of fire,’ Jenny says to DI Baker, joining me. ‘He won’t even hold a sparkler,’ she continues to his back. ‘He got burnt by a spark from the fire when he was a toddler, and ever since he’s been afraid.’
If she could make herself heard she’d give DI Baker logical reasons for why Adam couldn’t have started the fire.
And she’s right. He is afraid of fire. I remember, again, him flinching from Donald’s lighter.
DI Baker reaches the exit of the hospital and I yell at him.
‘Don’t do this to him! Please! Don’t do this to him!’
And for a moment he feels my presence. For a second I am a draught on his back, a tingling in his scalp, something touching his thoughts. A mother. A guardian angel. A ghost.