A little while later Mum arrives at my bedside. Unlike you and Sarah, she didn’t argue with the doctors, and I’d seen each medical fact – supposed medical fact – hitting her face like flying glass, cutting new lines.
‘A nurse is with Addie,’ she says. ‘Just for a little while. I can’t leave him long. But I had to talk to you on my own.’ She pauses a moment. ‘Someone’s going to have to tell him that you’re not going to wake up.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Mum, you can’t do that!’
I have never, ever, said fuck to my mother before.
‘I just want what’s best for him,’ Mum says quietly.
‘How can this be best for Ads? Jesus!’
It’s been years since we argued, and even then it was more of a disagreement. Of all times and places we shouldn’t start now, here.
‘I know that you can hear me, Gracie, angel. Wherever you are.’
‘I’m right here, Mum. Right here. And soon their tests will pick it up. I’m going to be Roger fucking Federer, smashing the ball at a hundred miles an hour over the net for a “YES I CAN UNDERSTAND YOU!” And once they know that I can still think, then they’ll try and find a way of getting me well again.’
‘I’d better get back to Addie.’
She pulls the curtain back. Jenny is outside and has clearly overheard; the curtains obey the laws of science after all.
She looks so anxious.
‘Granny G is wrong,’ I say to her. ‘And so are the doctors. I can think and feel, can’t I? Talk to you now? Their scans aren’t sophisticated enough, that’s all. So one day, hopefully soon, I’ll give them a great big surprise.’
‘Roger fucking Federer?’ she says.
‘Absolutely. Venus Williams, if I don’t fancy a sex change. Honestly, sweetheart, once they give me the right scans, they’ll know I’m OK.’
But she’s still anxious; her head bent down and her narrow shoulders hunched together.
‘You were so brave. Going into the school for me.’
‘Dad said that too, and it’s really nice of you both, but it’s not in the least accurate and makes me feel a fraud.’
She half smiles. ‘Oh right. So what does qualify as brave? If you’re not allowed running into a burning building to rescue someone?’
‘It was just instinct, that’s all. Really. Something any mother would do for their child.’
But I’m not being totally honest. Most mothers – maybe all apart from me – would instinctively risk her life to rescue her child. And to start with I ran without thinking too. I just saw the school on fire and knew Jenny was inside and ran. But once I was inside.
Inside.
Every moment in that heat and choking smoke, my love for Jenny had to fight against my overwhelming urge to run away. A riptide of selfishness, which was trying to pull me out of the building. I was ashamed to tell you before.
‘You said you could get back into your body?’ she asks.
‘Yes. That’s right.’
‘I think that if you can get back into your body,’ she continues, ‘it means you’re not going to die. When my heart stopped, and I was technically dead, I suppose, it was warmth and light leaving my body and coming into me, not the other way around. I think it’s living that’s the other way around.’
‘Absolutely.’
Because surely she is right.
We are interrupted by Sarah arriving, with a ramrod-straight woman with steel-grey hair in her late sixties, who I know but can’t quite place.
‘Mrs Fisher,’ Jenny says, surprised.
The old secretary at Sidley House.
She’s brought me a fat bunch of sweet-peas wrapped in newspaper and the scent is glorious, temporarily overpowering the sanitised smell of the ward.
Sarah looks along my vases of flowers, then deftly bins Silas Hyman’s ugly yellow roses. She smiles at Mrs Fisher.
‘I think in the race for space here, yours win,’ she says lightly, but I see her notice Mr Hyman’s card and pocket it.
‘I didn’t think I’d actually see her,’ Mrs Fisher says to Sarah. ‘I just wanted to bring her flowers. We used to talk about gardening sometimes. But I hardly know her.’
I remember now that Mrs Fisher is the only person on her stretch of allotments to grow sweet-peas rather than their edible cousins. She told me about it on Jenny’s first day at school, distracting me with flowers, and by the end of our horticultural conversation Jenny had stopped crying and was on the reading rug.
‘Would you mind having a chat with me?’ Sarah asks. ‘I’m a police officer and Grace’s sister-in-law.’
Sisters-in-law. I’ve never before properly considered that we have our own separate and connecting thread in the matrix of the family.
‘Of course,’ Mrs Fisher replies. ‘But I really don’t think I’ll be of any help.’
Sarah escorts her into the relatives’ room.
‘Before you ask me anything,’ Mrs Fisher says, ‘I have a police record.’
Jenny and I are both startled. Mrs Fisher?
‘I was an activist for CND and Greenpeace. I still am, but I don’t tend to get arrested nowadays.’
Sarah looks a little judgmental, but I know not to misinterpret that now.
‘You said you were the secretary at Sidley House?’
‘For almost thirteen years. I had to leave in April.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Apparently I was too old to do the job. The head teacher told me that if I looked at my contract I’d see that there was “a policy of non-voluntary retirement for all support staff at sixty”. I’m sixty-seven. She’d waited seven years before enforcing the clause.’
‘And were you too old for the job?’
‘No. I was still bloody good at it. Everyone knew it, including Sally Healey.’
‘So do you know why she got rid of you?’
‘You don’t mince your words. No. I’ve no idea.’
Sarah took out a notebook, an incongruous Paperchase one with little owls on it, and wrote something down.
‘Can I have your details?’ Sarah asks. ‘Your full name is Mrs…?’
‘Elizabeth Fisher. And it’s Ms, however you pronounce it. My husband left me six months ago and I think it’s customary to drop the “Mrs” at that point. The ring won’t come off. I have to get it cut, apparently. The symbolism is a little brutal for me at the moment.’
Sarah looks sympathetic but I feel cold. Mrs Healey sent all the parents a letter saying Mrs Fisher’s husband was terminally ill and that was the reason she’d had to leave the school. I’d organised a card and Maisie had traipsed off to some super-snazzy flower place in Richmond for a bouquet for her and, at my suggestion, bulbs.
‘Can you write down your address?’
As Elizabeth writes down her details, I want to tell Sarah about the lie Mrs Healey told the parents. Why did she do that?
‘Do you know Silas Hyman?’ Sarah asks her – a logical question but not the one I hoped for.
‘Yes. He was a teacher at Sidley House. He was fired for something he didn’t do. A month before me. We’ve spoken on the phone once or twice since then. Kindred spirits and all that.’
‘Why he was fired?’
‘In a nutshell? An eight-year-old boy called Robert Fleming wanted him out.’
‘And the longer version?’
‘Robert Fleming loathed Silas because he was the first teacher to stand up to him. Silas called Fleming’s parents in, during the first week he had him in his class, and used the word “wicked” about their son; not suffering from some attention deficit disorder or a problem with socialisation. Wicked. But unfortunately that’s not the form with fee-paying parents.
‘In March, when Silas was on playground duty, Fleming told him that an eleven-year-old boy had locked himself in the toilets with a five-year-old little girl, and she was screaming. Fleming said he couldn’t find any other teacher. So Silas went to the little girl’s aid. For all his faults, he’s very kind like that. And Robert Fleming knew that.
‘When he’d got Silas out of the playground, Fleming forced a boy called Daniel up the fire escape and then managed to get him over the edge. God knows what he must have said to the little chap to have got him to climb over. Then Fleming pushed him. He was badly injured. Broke both his legs. It was lucky it wasn’t his neck.
‘Part of my job was school nurse. I looked after him until the ambulance arrived. Poor little mite was in such terrible pain.’
I’d had only Adam’s version of events, and adult rumours, distorted as time went by. It became a terrible accident, not deliberate, and the blame was targeted on Mr Hyman for not supervising the playground rather than Robert Fleming. Because who wants to believe an eight-year-old child can be that disturbingly manipulative, that vicious, that malevolent?
But we already knew that he was from Adam, who lived in physical fear of him. We knew this wasn’t like regular teasing and bullying. I think it was when he pulled Adam’s tie around his neck, leaving a red welt for a week afterwards, saying he’d kill him if he didn’t ‘kiss his butt’. Or the skipping rope that he wound around Adam, tying him up, while he drew swastikas on his body.
Jenny called him psycho-child and you agreed.
‘Those aren’t things that a boy should be doing,’ you said. ‘If it was an adult, we’d say he was sociopathic. Psychopathic, even.’
It was after the swastika incident, just before this last half-term, that you demanded a meeting and got a guarantee from Mrs Healey that Robert Fleming wouldn’t be coming back to Sidley House in September.
‘Mrs Healey knew that a playground accident like that should never have happened in a primary school,’ Mrs Fisher continues. ‘She needed someone to blame, so she blamed Silas Hyman. I don’t think she wanted to fire him for it. She’s not stupid. She could recognise a gifted teacher, as a business asset if nothing else. But then there was that scurrilous article in the Richmond Post and the phone didn’t stop ringing with parents wanting action. So she had no choice as she saw it. Parents have a great deal of power in a private school, especially a new one.
‘The really appalling thing is if that wicked boy had been blamed and hauled over the coals, there might have been a fighting chance of stopping him before it was too late.’
He wasn’t hauled over the coals, was he? Mrs Healey gave him a quiet exit.
‘You think he’ll do something again?’ Sarah asks.
‘Of course he will. If he can plan and execute at eight breaking a boy’s legs, what will he do at eighteen?’
Did Robert Fleming leave the playing field during sports day? No. I can’t believe that. I know we were told that almost all school-time fires are started by children, but not fires which injure people so badly. Not fires like this one. I refuse to be like DI Baker and think a child capable of that.
‘You said that after the Richmond Post article the phone didn’t stop ringing?’ Sarah asks.
‘That’s right. And Sally Healey was forced to fire Silas.’
‘Do you know who told the press?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Does Silas Hyman have any enemies?’
‘None that I know of.’
‘You said earlier, “for all his faults”. What do you mean by that?’
‘I shouldn’t have said it.’
‘But there is a reason?’
‘I just mean that he was arrogant. Male teachers in a primary school are a rare species. He was a cockerel in the hen-house.’
She pauses a moment and I can see she’s fighting off tears.
‘How are they,’ she asks. ‘Jenny and Mrs Covey?’
‘Both of them are critically injured.’
Elizabeth Fisher’s ramrod-straight posture bends a little and she turns her face from Sarah, as if embarrassed by her emotion.
‘I was there at the start, and so was Jenny. Reception children would come to my office to show me the work they’d done. Jenny Covey would come in and give me a hug and then walk out again. That was what she’d come to show me. In year one she got into Hama-beads. Other children would do meticulous geometric patterns and she’d do something completely random, no design or maths to it – and it was wonderful. All those coloured beads just put together any old how. Just so… energetic and unworried.’
Sarah smiles. Does she remember Jenny’s Hama-bead phase? She probably got an anarchic mat for a Christmas present.
‘And Adam’s a lovely little boy,’ she continues. ‘A credit to Mrs Covey. I wish I’d told her that, but I didn’t. Not that it would have made any difference, what I thought, but I wish I’d said it anyway.’
Sarah looks moved by her, and Elizabeth Fisher has the encouragement she needs to continue.
‘Some of them, they hardly bother to say hello to their mothers at the end of the day, and the mothers are too busy gossiping to each other to really focus on their child. But Adam runs out there like a plane coming in to land, with his arms out to Mrs Covey, and she looks like there’s no one else in the entire place but him. I used to watch them out of my office window.’
She hasn’t got anyone to talk to about us, I realise, not with her husband gone. And she can hardly contact anyone at school after the excruciatingly embarrassing flowers-for-a-dying-husband.
‘Do you have any idea who might have set fire to the school?’ Sarah asks.
‘No. But if I were you, I’d look for someone like Robert Fleming as an adult – because no one intervened early enough.’
As Jenny and I return to my ward, I remember that meeting you had with Mrs Healey about Robert Fleming. I’d been annoyed she’d listened to you when she hadn’t listened to me all those times I’d gone into school and complained. I’d thought it was because you’re a man and I was just another mum with Kit Kat crumbs in my pocket and spare PE socks in my handbag. You said it was because of your celebrity status: ‘I can kick up a smellier stink.’
Maisie is arriving next to my bed. She pulls the ugly flimsy curtains around it.
‘Another visitor,’ I say to Jen. ‘It’s like a seventeenth-century salon in here this evening, isn’t it?’
‘A salon was in France, Mum.’ She gestures to the brown geometric curtains around my bed. ‘And it had walls. With oil paintings and ornate mirrors.’
We’d spoken about salons a few months ago. I’m touched she listened.
‘Nit-picky. It had a bed, didn’t it? And there was a woman at the centre of the attention. N’est-ce pas?’ Alright, so she was meant to be a glittering witty intellectual…
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.