Mrs Healey’s normally powder-dry face is sweating profusely now, the sweat glistening in the too-bright Portakabin.
‘She was too old to do the job. I already told the police that.’
Mrs Healey is kneeling on the floor, but has stopped putting the letters into envelopes – is it because she can’t multitask with lying?
‘She seemed competent to me,’ Sarah says.
‘We have a policy of retirement at sixty for all support staff.’
‘But you waited seven years to enforce it.’
‘I was being kind. But the school is not a charity.’
‘No, it’s a business, isn’t it?’
Sally Healey doesn’t reply.
‘Is Annette Jenks an improvement?’ Sarah asks, seemingly without irony.
‘The governors and I made an error of judgment when we hired Annette Jenks.’
‘The governors hire staff?’
‘They sit on the interview panel, yes.’
‘I noticed how meticulous all your fire precautions were,’ Sarah says, again abruptly switching tack. Maybe it’s deliberate, to unsettle the other person into spilling out more than they want.
‘As I told your colleague, safety of the children is my number-one priority.’
‘So you fulfilled all the legal requirements?’
‘More than the legal requirements.’
She wipes her sweaty face with her hand. ‘But with old buildings it’s impossible to prevent a fire spreading. We’ve all learnt that to our cost. And how can anyone plan for an individual’s act of destruction? When that person starts the fire in the worst possible place in the school with virtually no staff on hand to contain it? How can we possibly plan for that?’
‘When did this start?’ Sarah asks, unmoved. ‘This “more than” fulfilling of the legal requirements?’
‘We had a governors’ meeting just before half-term. At the end of May. One of the points on the agenda was to examine and update our fire safety. We all agreed it and I took charge of implementation.’
‘This meeting was after the prize-giving?’
‘Yes. But it’s not connected. Like all schools, we regularly look at ways to update and improve our safety systems.’
‘Just six weeks later there’s a catastrophic fire. It looks as if you expected it?’
‘We planned for it. Yes. We have to plan for terrible scenarios. We plan for what to do with the children if London comes under a terrorist attack or there’s a dirty bomb; we plan for a madman coming in with a gun and getting through our security. We plan for these things. We have to. But for God’s sake it doesn’t mean that we thought something would actually happen.’
‘There’s one thing I find a little surprising,’ Sarah says, again unmoved by her speech. ‘You made sure all the fire precautions were in place – correct signage and fire extinguishers and no combustible artworks hung in the corridors. You have all these sensible precautions?’
‘Yes.’
‘So why do you let children bring matches into the school?’
For a moment Mrs Healey doesn’t reply. Then she stands, trying to brush the dust off her skirt, but her hands are too sweaty and the dust leaves dark marks on the fine linen.
‘It’s just on a birthday. And the matches are handed directly over to the class teacher for safekeeping.’
‘Which they keep in a cupboard?’
‘Yes. Clearly on sports day a teacher should make some provision…’ She scowls at the dirty marks on her skirt. ‘Unfortunately, human errors do occur. His teacher should have made sure the matches were safely stored.’
I doubted Miss Madden was aware of this responsibility.
‘Presumably, the building is insured?’ Sarah asks.
‘Of course.’
‘And the insurance company will want to know that all the fire precautions have been met before they’ll pay out?’
‘I have already spoken to the insurers about the matches and fortunately it doesn’t invalidate our claim. It was one member of staff’s error of judgment, a human error. All our systems were in place. Besides, you’re telling me now that it wasn’t Adam Covey who started the fire. So presumably the matches are no longer significant.’
‘You said earlier that the stricter fire regulations were decided at a governors’ meeting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do the governors have a financial stake in the school?’
‘Yes, they own it.’
‘So the governors are also the shareholders?’
‘Yes.’
‘Unelected?’
‘Yes. It’s a completely different system to a state school. Or one with a charitable foundation.’
‘Do you have any shares?’
‘I was given a shareholding when I took the job of head teacher. A perk of starting with a new school. But my shareholding is relatively small. Only five per cent.’
‘In a business worth, presumably, several million, that is a sizeable amount.’
‘What are you insinuating? My God, people were hurt. Terribly hurt.’
‘But even so, you must be relieved that the insurance money can’t be contested because of your impeccable fire precautions.’
‘Yes, I am relieved, but only in as much as I can continue to run a school of excellence. A school that nurtures and educates children to the highest possible standard and instils a sense of self-worth alongside academic achievement.’
She sounds impassioned and I remember her as the ardent educationalist she’d been when Jenny joined the school. She gestures around the Portakabin.
‘This is clearly a temporary and unsatisfactory solution, but during the summer holidays I will find alternative accommodation and be ready to start on September the eighth for our new academic year. What was burnt down was a building, not a school. The teachers, the children, the ethos, the parents are what make a school and we will simply relocate and pick up from where we left off as best we can. And we will do it.’
‘Can I have the names of the governors?’
I see suspicion hardening Sally Healey’s face. ‘I already gave them to the police.’
It wasn’t in her transcript. Perhaps it had been during a phone call, someone tying up a few loose ends. The ice thins beneath Sarah but she affects not to notice.
‘Of course. I’ll confer with my colleagues,’ Sarah says.
‘And I’ve already been asked all about the shareholders as governors.’
‘Yes,’ Sarah says, going to the door. ‘Thank you for your time.’
She leaves the Portakabin.
Sally Healey watches her as she walks away; the ice creaking under her.
On the edge of the playing field, next to Sarah’s Polo, Mrs Healey’s black sports car gleams like a giant, lacquered cockroach. The woman I’d met all those years ago when Jenny started at Sidley House bicycled to school. ‘Can’t mess up the planet for the children, can we?’ she’d said with a bicycle clip around her trousers.
With only sixty children then, the school had been such a nurturing place. When Adam joined, nine years later, I hadn’t wanted to see the change. But Jenny had seen the school as a business. And you’d annually fumed about the ever-increasing fees and vowed that the children would go to a secondary school that wasn’t privately owned and which had a board of independent governors to complain to. At Sidley House we didn’t even know the governors’ names. Even if we had, as investors they were hardly likely to take the parents’ side and vote themselves a smaller profit.
As I see the ugly, boastful sports car I know my image of the school is as outdated as Sally Healey with a bicycle clip. That nurturing school solidified into rigid staff hierarchies and rules, concerned with the uniform rather than the child inside it, as the pupils turned into a living business prospectus.
I turn away from the polished sports car and all that it signals. The azalea bushes edging the playing field have wilted in the heat, their once-bright blossom lying brown on the ground.
I know that there’s a memory globe of that afternoon and inside I am still hugging Adam, his ‘I am 8!’ badge digging into me; still looking around for Jenny; still thinking she’ll be out to join us soon. The sky is summer-blue, the azalea bushes are bright as jewels.
Sarah drives away from the playing field and the school. She’s silent, probably thinking over her interview with Sally Healey. Jenny’s conversation pulls at me again.
She asked me, clearly, to see her as a grown-up. But how can I? When she didn’t tell us about the paint attack because she still wanted to go out in the evenings? Too young to realise that we wouldn’t have ‘grounded’ her but protected her. Not seeing the whole picture, not understanding.
And what about Ivo? She’d want me to see him as grown-up too. But he didn’t tell us when she’d been attacked with red paint or persuade her go to the police. So how can I see him as a man? As anything other than an immature and irresponsible boy? In every way the opposite of you.
And it’s not just the red paint, it’s the not finishing a History essay because she’d rather go to a party, and spending too long with her friends instead of revising for exams. It’s living so much in the present, not thinking of the future, and that is the joy of children, yes, because they haven’t yet grown up.
You don’t agree with me, I know. You take Jenny’s side, as I often take Adam’s, our family splitting down the familiar fault line.
‘You know what would really stop the world having wars?’ Adam asked. He’d just finished reading Give Peas A Chance but wasn’t convinced that a worldwide boycotting of vegetables by children would stop global warfare.
‘What?’ I asked, peeling potatoes, hopeful they would now be eaten.
‘An alien invasion from space. Then everyone in the world would band together.’
‘True,’ I said.
‘But drastic,’ you said, coming in.
‘Imaginative,’ I corrected.
Do I always correct you with Adam?
‘Like the testudo,’ you said to him.
Adam smiled at you, then saw my blank expression.
‘Roman soldiers held up their shields over their heads to make a shell around the whole group,’ he said. ‘So no one could get hurt.’
‘“Testudo” is Latin for tortoise,’ you said, enjoying – infuriatingly – that you were being erudite over me.
My flow of thought about testudos and aliens is brought to an abrupt halt as Sarah parks on a fast busy road in Hammersmith, her car half straddling the meagre pavement.
I follow her to a small terraced house, the bricks stained black by exhaust fumes.
Sarah rings the doorbell. A moment later Elizabeth Fisher calls through the door, without opening it.
‘If you’re from any religion or an energy company I’m already sorted out on both fronts.’
I’d forgotten how funny and stern she could be at the same time. But it strikes me that she’s also nervous, afraid even; not opening the door. She’s on her own in a rough neighbourhood. I’m struck, again, by the financial discrepancy between the staff and the parents at Sidley House.
‘It’s Sarah Covey. Grace’s sister-in-law. Can I come in?’
‘Wait one moment.’
From inside is the sound of her unbolting the door and the chain being taken off.
She opens the door, dressed in smart trousers and ironed shirt as she was every day at Sidley House; her posture rigorously straight. But her smart trousers are a little shiny on the knees where the cloth has worn.
‘Has anything happened?’ she asks, worried.
‘No change,’ Sarah replies. ‘Would it be OK if I asked you some questions?’
‘Of course. But as I said before, I really don’t think I can help.’
She leads Sarah into her tiny sitting room. Outside the traffic thunders past, shivering the walls.
‘Can you tell me what your duties were at the school?’
Mrs Fisher looks a little taken aback, but nods.
‘Certainly. I did all the basic secretarial ones, such as answer the phone and type up letters. I was also responsible for the registers. I was the first point of contact for potential new families, sending out prospectuses and organising invitations to open days; then getting the paperwork ready for all the new children. I was also the school nurse, the part of my job I enjoyed the most actually, really just putting on ice-packs and sometimes using an epi-pen. I’d tuck the child under a blanket on my sofa and then wait with them for Mum or a nanny to arrive. We only ever had one serious incident. The one I told you about.’
Her job had so many more responsibilities than Annette Jenks’s. And she did it well. So why did Mrs Healey really get rid of her?
If she’d still been there – still been school nurse – everything would have been different.
‘What about the gate?’ Sarah asks.
‘Yes, I’d buzz people in. There was an intercom and I always made sure they identified themselves first, by name.’
‘Did you have a screen monitor?’
‘Good God, no. I just spoke to them. It seemed quite adequate. You get to know voices as well as faces after a while. But in fact, it was pretty shoddy security. Half the children and most of the parents got to know the code. They weren’t meant to, of course.’
‘Do you have a copy of your job description?’ Sarah asks.
‘Yes. It’s in my contract.’
She rummages in a bureau and takes out a document, which has clearly been much thumbed, encased in a plastic wallet.
‘The part about retirement age is on page four,’ Elizabeth says, handing it to Sarah.
‘Thank you. Do you have a school calendar?’
Elizabeth sits down, clearly in her customary chair. She gestures to the wall opposite, the one she’d see most clearly. The Sidley House School calendar is hanging there.
‘All the staff are given them at the end of the Christmas term. I look at it quite frequently…’
I see how much she misses the children. She always put them first; making adults wait if a child was in her office needing a grazed knee tending, or with a piece of artwork or writing or Hama-bead creation to show her.
‘Do you know what the code on the gate is?’ Sarah asks.
‘It was seven-seven-two-three when I was there. They’ve probably changed it by now.’
But it was the same. I remember Sally Healey telling Sarah.
It dawns on me that Sarah might think Elizabeth Fisher is the culprit. But surely she can’t do? The idea is ridiculous. These must just be standard questions. Because Elizabeth may know the code to the gate and have a calendar with Adam’s birthday and sports day on it, and feel wronged by being sent packing, but there is no way on earth Elizabeth Fisher set fire to the school.
The pain took about an hour to kick in this time and I am now racing back to the hospital, the gravel tearing at my feet. Too late, I see Jenny watching me from inside – I must be grimacing in pain.
She hurries up to me, anxious.
‘Mum?’
‘I’m fine, really.’
And I am, because the moment I’m back here the whiteness of the walls again soothes my scorched skin and the cool shiny floor heals the cuts on the soles of my feet.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I shouldn’t have bossed you into going. It hurt you too, didn’t it?’
‘Not really.’
‘You’re a terrible liar.’
‘OK, a bit. Nothing more. And it’s gone now.’
‘Is it your way of trying to commit suicide?’
‘What?’ I am at a loss.
‘If you experience that amount of pain for long enough-’
I interrupt her. ‘No. Really not. Your body didn’t change a jot when you went outside that time with Granny G and Adam, did it?’
She nods in agreement.
‘Anyway, us cabbages are pretty tough.’
‘Mum!’ she says, shocked but smiling at me.
We follow Sarah as she makes her way to ICU.
‘So are you going to tell me what happened, then?’ Jenny asks. ‘No, don’t tell me. You’ve discovered it was Mrs Healey having the affair with Silas?’ She sees my expression. ‘It was a joke.’
But is it so comically ridiculous? Mrs Healey is only in her late forties. There’s no difference in the age gap between her and Silas Hyman than between Sarah and her beautiful gazelle policeman. But Jen’s right. It’s an absurd idea. It was Mrs Healey who fired Silas; Mrs Healey who brought his career crashing to the ground. And even if that hadn’t been the case, Mrs Healey is far too professional to have an affair with a junior colleague.
Yes, I’d once have thought that of Sarah.
I outline our meeting with Mrs Healey to Jen. Listen to me – ‘our meeting’, as if I was an active participant rather than eavesdropper. But, weird as this must sound, I do feel a little like Sarah’s silent partner.
‘The thing I find strangest,’ I say, ‘is Donald phoning Mrs Healey the night of the prize-giving, and countermanding Maisie. Why would he protect Silas Hyman like that?’
‘Maybe because he was there, Mum, like you were, and didn’t find Silas threatening at all. Just like you didn’t. Not until this happened and blame started being thrown around the place.’
I find her innocent certainty about Silas Hyman, a man more than a decade older than her, another reason to still see her as not yet an adult.
‘Maybe Mrs Healey wasn’t worried there was going to be a fire,’ Jenny continues. ‘But planned to start it herself and wanted to make sure the fire precautions were in place so the insurance paid out. She banged on about her bloody precautions on TV, the night of the fire. Even then she wanted to make sure everyone knew.’
I remember Mrs Healey’s pink linen shirt and assembly voice.
‘I can reassure you that we had
‘She knew the fire precautions wouldn’t make any difference,’ Jenny continues, ‘because the building was old and the fire was so intense.’
She must have been thinking about this; working it all out.
‘But Mrs Healey was at sports day,’ I say. ‘People would have noticed if she’d left.’
‘She’s a mini-dictator. Nearly all the teachers are on short-term contracts, which she can choose not to renew. And if they’re chucked out by her they’re still dependent on a reference from her to get another job. She could have blackmailed someone into it.’
Jenny is so keen for this to be the scenario; for her terrible injuries to have been an accident, not deliberate. Right from the beginning she’d thought – hoped – that it was something to do with the school as a business; an insurance fraud.
‘She’d choose sports day,’ Jenny continues, ‘because there’d be virtually no staff to try and put it out. I mean, Annette would be next to useless and I wouldn’t be much better, and that only leaves Tilly, who’d have her hands too full of young children to try and do anything to stop it spreading.’
I agree with her about sports day being a deliberate choice of date. It also meant there was hardly anyone there beforehand to see the arsonist open the windows; pour out the white spirit.
‘But what good would it do her?’ I say, gently.
‘She’s a part-owner, right? So she’d get her share of the insurance money.’
‘But why would she want to burn down a successful business? She’s already trying to find premises to get the school going again. There won’t be any financial benefit. She’ll just use the insurance money to rebuild.’
I can’t yet see Jenny as an adult, but I am trying to be more straightforward with her.
We move onto Elizabeth Fisher, who Jenny has always liked. Like me, she knows Elizabeth would have had nothing to do with it.
We still haven’t spoken about the three weeks, less a day, left to her. My grip on your optimism isn’t strong enough to confront the ticking clock, the speeding car, with spoken words. And I think Jenny is deliberately turning her back on it too. It’s as if looking at it properly, even peeking, would turns us to stone, terrorised and mute. But the fact is there, huge and monstrous. And we are playing grandmother’s footsteps with a gorgon.
As we arrive on ICU, you see Sarah. And you run. Literally run. I see the urgency in your body with big news to tell her. A heart must have been found! The monstrous fact smashed to pieces.
Then I see your face.