Rosamund Lupton - Afterwards

‘Of course we will get better,’ I say to her.

Further along the corridor, we spot Tara coming towards you. I remember seeing her earlier, in the melee of press. Now she’s tracked you here. Jenny has also noticed her.

‘Isn’t she the one who thinks the Richmond Post is the Washington Post ?’ Jenny asks, remembering our joke.

‘That’s the one.’

She reaches you, and you look at her, perplexed.

‘Michael…?’ she says, using her purring voice.

Men are usually hoodwinked by Tara’s girlish rosy face, slender body and pretty glossy hair, but not a man whose wife is unconscious and daughter critically ill. You shy away from her, trying to place her. Sarah joins you.

‘She was asking me about Silas Hyman earlier,’ you tell Sarah.

‘Do you know her?’

‘No.’

‘I’m a friend of Grace’s,’ Tara calmly butts in.

‘I doubt it,’ you snap.

‘Well, more a colleague. I work with Grace at the Richmond Post .’

‘So a journalist,’ Sarah says. ‘Time to go.’

Tara’s not going to budge. Sarah flashes her warrant card.

‘ Detective Sergeant McBride,’ Tara reads, looking smug. ‘So the police are involved. I presume that this teacher, Silas Hyman, is a line of enquiry you’ll be taking?’

‘Out. Now,’ Sarah says in her uniform-and-truncheon voice.

Jenny and I watch as she virtually manhandles Tara towards the lifts.

‘She’s fantastic, isn’t she?’ Jenny says and I nod, not graciously.

‘She was wrong though earlier,’ Jenny says. ‘Or at least Mrs Healey was when she told her about the code on the gate. You know, that people don’t know it? Some of the parents do. I’ve seen them letting themselves in when Annette takes too long answering the buzzer. And a few of the children know it too, though they’re not meant to.’

I don’t know the code, but then I’m not pally with the in-the-know kind of mothers.

‘So a parent could have come in,’ I say.

‘All the parents were at sports day.’

‘Perhaps someone left.’

I try to think back to this afternoon. Did I see something and not realise?

The first thing I remember is cheering on Adam in the opening sprint, his face anxious and intent, his spindly legs going as fast as he could make them, desperate not to let down the Green Team. I was worrying about him coming last and you not being there and Jen’s retakes; not seeing the huge truth that we were all alive and healthy and undamaged. Because if I had, I’d have been sprinting around that field, cheering till my voice was hoarse at how fantastic and miraculous our lives were. A blue-skies and green-grass and white-lines life; expansive and ordered and complete.

But I must focus. Focus .

I can remember a group of parents from Adam’s class asking me if I’d go in for the mothers’ race.

‘Oh go on, Grace! You’re always a sport!’

‘Yeah, a slow sport,’ I replied.

I look again at their smiling faces. Did one of them, shortly afterwards, leave for the school? Perhaps he or she had left a container of white spirit in the boot of their car. A lighter slipped into a pocket. But surely their smiles were just too relaxed and genuine to be hiding some wicked intention?

A little while later, and Adam hurried up to tell me he was going to get his cake right now! Rowena had to collect the medals from school so she was going with him. And as he left with her, I thought how grown-up she looked now in her linen trousers and crisp white blouse; that it hardly seemed a minute since she was a little elfin girl with Jenny.

I’m sorry, not relevant at all. I have to look harder.

I turn away from Adam and Rowena, swinging my focus to the right then to the left, but memory can’t be replayed that way and nothing comes into focus.

But at the time I did check round the playing field, a broad sweep from one end to the other, looking for Jenny. Maybe if I concentrate on that memory I will see something significant.

She’ll be so bored, I was thinking as I scanned the playing field. Up in the sick-room on her own. Surely she’ll leave her shift early.

A figure at the edge of the playing field, half obscured by the border of chest-high azalea bushes.

The figure is still and its stillness has attracted my attention.

But I only looked long enough to know it wasn’t Jenny. Now I try to go closer, but I can’t get any more detail. Just a shadowy figure on the edge of the field; the memory yielding nothing more.

The figure haunts me. I imagine him going into classrooms at the top of the school and opening windows wide; I imagine the children’s drawings pegged onto strings across the classrooms flapping hard in the breeze.

Back on the playing field, Maisie came to find Rowena and I told her she was at school. I remember watching Maisie as she left the playing field. And something snags at my memory. Something else I saw on the outskirts of the playing field that I noted at the time; that means something. But it is slipping from my grasp and the harder I try and pull at it, the more it frays away.

But there’s no point tugging at it. Because by this point the arsonist had already opened the windows and poured out the white spirit and positioned the cans of spray mount. And soon the strong godsent breeze will be sucking the fire up to the third floor.

The PE teacher blows his whistle and in a minute, not quite yet, but soon, I will see the black smoke, thick black smoke like a bonfire.

Soon I will start running.

‘Mum?’

Jenny’s worried voice brings me back into the brightly lit hospital corridor.

‘I’ve been trying to remember,’ she says. ‘You know, if I saw someone or something, but when I try and think about the fire I can’t…’

She breaks off, shaking. I hold her hand.

‘It’s OK when I think about being in the medical room,’ she continues. ‘Ivo and I were texting each other. I told you that, didn’t I? The last one I sent was at two thirty. I know the time then, because it was nine thirty in the morning in Barbados and he said he was just getting up. But then… it’s like I can’t think any more, I can only feel. Just feel.’

A judder of fear or pain goes through her.

‘You don’t need to think back,’ I say to her. ‘Aunty Sarah’s crew will find out what happened.’

I don’t tell her about my shadowy figure half glimpsed on the edge of the playing field, because he really doesn’t amount to very much, does he?

‘I was worried you’d be bored up there,’ I say to her lightly. ‘I should have known you and Ivo would be texting.’

Put together, they must have texted the equivalent of War and Peace by now.

When I was her age, boys didn’t say much to girls, let alone write, but mobiles have upped their game. Some must find it pressurising, but I think it appeals to Ivo to send love sonnets and romantic haikus through the airwaves.

But it’s only me who thinks Ivo’s texted poetry a little bit effeminate; while you are – surprisingly to me – firmly on his side.

Jenny’s gone off to be with you, while I ‘ pop to my ward to get an update on how I’m doing ’ – as if I’m nipping down to Budgens for an Evening Standard .

Maisie is sitting by my bed, holding my hand, talking to me, and I’m moved that she thinks I can hear too.

‘And Jen-Jen’s going to be alright,’ she says. ‘Of course she is.’

Jen-Jen; that name we used for her when she was little, and sometimes slips out by accident even now.

‘She’s going to be just fine! You’ll see. And so are you. Look at you, Gracie. You don’t look too bad at all. You’re all going to be alright .’