Rosamund Lupton - Afterwards

The car starts to heat up, as if silence has its own temperature.

I remember Sarah telling a rapt dinner table that the best time ‘to get info out of a suspect’ is when you first arrest them, before they’ve reached the police station; before they’ve had time to think or take stock.

‘You love him, do you?’ Sarah asks, a note of sarcasm cutting through her words.

‘He’s a little shit. Weak. Useless. Fucked up my life.’

Her words seem to mix with the heat in the car, fugging it up with loathing.

‘So why bother with the hate mail then?’ asks Penny. ‘If you don’t even like him?’

‘Because the little shit belongs to me, right?’ Natalia snaps.

I remember her stressing my in ‘my husband’. Not loyalty but possessiveness.

I remember Jenny saying, ‘ She told him he was a loser. That she was embarrassed by him… But she won’t get divorced .’

Silas Hyman was telling her the truth.

‘The head teacher, Sally Healey, told me I should keep my husband on a tighter leash,’ Natalia continues.

‘Mrs Hyman-’

‘Tighter leash. Like he was a dog. A fucking cocker spaniel. She’d got his measure. I asked what she meant, pretended I didn’t know. I have some pride, right? She said flirting with teaching assistants wasn’t acceptable. Flirting, not fucking. She’s very refined, Mrs Healey. But clever. She delegated him to me to deal with. I admire her for that. Shows some spunk.’

‘But you punished Jennifer Covey, not your husband?’ Penny says.

‘The stupid bitch made me a fool.’

I lift my hands to cover my face as if her words are spit, but they get through.

‘I saw them, her all long legs and short skirt and long blonde hair, a tart; fuck knows why they let her dress like that. He was flirting his pants off at her. Mrs Healey didn’t need to tell me to get a leash.’

‘And the red paint?’ Penny asks.

‘The tart had to get her hair cut.’

‘Why send the condom? When you knew it would be traceable?’

‘I never thought…’ Natalia begins, and I hear her picking at the thread again. ‘I wanted her to know that we were still having sex. He was fucking her, but he was making love to me.’

We reach the police station. Penny takes Natalia to be questioned. Sarah is going straight back to the hospital. As she gets out to swap into the driver’s seat, Mohsin comes up.

Sarah meets his quizzical gaze. The question he didn’t ask earlier – that Penny didn’t ask – is now too large and loud to be ignored.

‘Jenny wasn’t having an affair with Silas Hyman,’ Sarah says. ‘She’d have told me.’

I am envious she has such faith in how well she knows Jenny, which I lost only a little while ago and now feel its absence terribly. Is there a moment for every parent when you realise that your child has outgrown your knowledge of them? A moment when you can’t keep up?

For some reason I think of her shoes.

Knitted bootees becoming tiny soft shoes, then small sandals with width fittings for summer and black school shoes for winter, all the time incrementally getting a little bigger until she was into small adult sizes and the decision in the shoe shop took longer – until one day she went on her own and came back with boots; but I didn’t see that she was starting to stride away from me with boots that didn’t come in width fittings on her long adult legs.

It’s not the fledgling birds that are thrown out of the nest by their parents and made to fly; it’s the parents who are made to get the hell out of the cosy family nest by their teenage offspring. It’s we who are made to be independent of them, crash-landing if we don’t manage it.

You and Sarah are in the corridor of ICU, Jenny listening.

I can’t hear what you’re saying, but can tell from your posture that you’re furious. I go closer.

‘For Christ’s sake, his wife made a mistake.’

‘I know that, Mike,’ Sarah says patiently. ‘I just wanted to tell you.’

‘It’s bloody ridiculous . The man’s thirty years old and married , for God’s sake!’

Jenny turns to me, bemused.

‘His wife thought I was having an affair with him?’

I nod. Then summon up my courage. ‘Were you?’

‘No. He flirted with me, he flirts with everyone, but nothing more.’

And I believe her; of course I do.

She smiles at me. ‘But thank you for asking.’

She means it.

I don’t ask her about Ivo, who I saw sitting in the corridor by the garden, a shoal of people separating briefly to pass him.

Guessing – hoping – that she wouldn’t have had an affair with Silas Hyman, and trusting her to tell the truth, doesn’t mean that I have full knowledge of our daughter again.

‘Dr Sandhu’s here,’ Jenny says.

I turn to see him, with Jenny’s cardiologist, the young Miss Logan.

‘We’ll be taking Jennifer for an MRI and CAT scan later today,’ Miss Logan says. ‘To check that she’s still a candidate for transplant.’

‘You think it’s likely then,’ you say, grabbing at her words.

‘The time frame is extremely narrow. We are simply following protocol.’

‘Remember we talked about the two kinds of burns?’ Dr Sandhu says. ‘We now know that Jenny’s burns are superficial second-degree partial thickness burns. Which means that the blood supply is intact and her skin will heal. There will be no scarring.’

But he sounds defeated rather than pleased.

‘That’s fantastic!’ you say, refusing to be defeated too.

They go into the ward, to Jenny’s bed.

Jenny stays in the corridor with me.

‘Dead but not scarred,’ Jenny says. ‘Well, that’s comforting.’

‘Jen…’

‘Yeah, well, sometimes only gallows humour cuts it.’

‘You’re not going to-’

‘So you keep saying.’

‘Because it’s the truth. You’re going to live.’

‘So why didn’t Dr Sandhu or Miss Logan say so? I need a walk.’

‘Jenny-’

She starts walking away from me.

‘They’ve found you a heart.’

She doesn’t turn.

‘I’m too old for fairy stories, Mum.’

Sarah is waiting in the cafeteria, fingers tapping as yours do when you are impatient. She has her owl notebook out and has been reading through it. I sense increased energy in her exhausted face. She stops tapping as she sees Mohsin and Penny arrive.

‘Natalia Hyman’s been charged under the malicious communications act and for assault,’ Penny says. ‘She’s admitted to all the incidents of hate mail and to the paint attack.’

Her sharp features are softened with satisfaction at a job well done.

‘Silas Hyman had nothing to do with his wife’s malicious hate-mail campaign,’ she continues. ‘He didn’t even know it was happening.’

‘And the tampering with Jenny’s oxygen?’ Sarah asks.

‘Natalia swears blind it wasn’t her,’ Penny says. ‘And I believe her. She’s our hate-mailer, but I really don’t think she’s the saboteur.’

‘And Donald White?’ Sarah asks Mohsin.

‘His alibi checks out,’ Mohsin replies. ‘He was on a BMI flight at three on Wednesday, halfway between Gatwick and Aberdeen. But we still think you were right about the arson for fraud. He must have had an accomplice.’

‘His smart lawyer is trying to spring him,’ Penny says. ‘But Baker’s not having it, not yet anyway.’

‘Or the arsonist was Silas Hyman,’ Sarah says.

Mohsin and Penny are taken aback.

‘I think my brother might have been right from the beginning,’ Sarah continues.

I want her to stop, right now. I don’t have the emotional capacity or the mental energy for this. We have it sorted out . Done and dusted. Donald White burnt the school down to get the insurance money. Possibly Jenny saw something that incriminated him, which is why he may be the person who tried to kill her. Natalia Hyman was getting misplaced revenge on Jenny. Maybe, just a possibility, it was Natalia who attacked her in the hospital. That’s it. These two people make sense of it all. Not a nice neat parcel of facts, but an ugly, vile dossier of the foulness in people. But known. Done.