Diane Jeffrey - The Guilty Mother

I knew that must be an understatement. Jenny wasn’t the sort of person to seek attention for herself and she wouldn’t have wanted me to feel sorry for her. I hugged her.

In the end, Jenny didn’t find a nanny; she found an au pair . With hindsight, of course, it was a mistake letting Clémentine into our home. But we couldn’t have foreseen how she would change our lives. Especially mine.

Just as I’m undocking my laptop to leave the office for the day, my phone beeps with a text. It’s from Nina, my childminder. I read it, swearing under my breath.

‘What’s up?’ Kelly says, turning to face me.

‘I was supposed to go to see The Cherry Orchard this evening,’ I say absent-mindedly, my finger typing out a short reply on the keyboard of my phone, ‘but Nina has let me down.’

I hit the arrow to send the text and look up to see the blank expression on Kelly’s face as she ponders this.

‘It’s a play,’ I add, ‘by Chekhov.’

‘I know,’ Kelly says. She doesn’t sound at all indignant, but I feel slightly guilty for underestimating her. ‘I haven’t seen that one,’ she continues, ‘but I’ve seen The Seagull and read Three Sisters . More of an Ibsen fan myself.’

There’s an awkward pause and I don’t know how to fill it. I can’t stand Ibsen or Chekhov, personally. I’m not a keen theatregoer at all, except for the Christmas pantomime, but that doesn’t seem like the right thing to say.

In the end, Kelly puts a stop to the pause, but adds to the awkwardness. ‘Is it for a review for The Mag ?’ She doesn’t pause for me to answer. ‘I’ll go with you if you don’t want to go by yourself.’

‘What? Oh, no. Nina was supposed to look after my kids. She’s not my date.’

Holly, my girlfriend, is my date. Holly is pretty and intelligent – she’s a pathologist – and I’ve been seeing her for about eighteen months now. My heart sinks at having to cancel my plans with her this evening, although part of me is thrilled at not having to sit through the play. But I still need to fake a review somehow.

‘Oh.’ Kelly actually sounds disappointed and I realise the play is probably more her bag than mine. ‘Well, I can babysit if you like,’ she says, ‘to thank you for your help earlier.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Kelly, but it’s part of my job description to oversee your work, and I couldn’t possibly accept your kind offer. I’ve got two tickets, though. It’s on at Bristol Old Vic. Is there someone you could go with?’ Her angelic face brightens up and she nods.

‘Yeah. My mum’s quite arty. I’m sure she’d love to go with me!’

I open my desk drawer and pull out the envelope containing the tickets. ‘I’ll need some feedback I can use for my write-up,’ I say. Kelly nods again. ‘I’ll give you a hand with your feature on the homeless if you like.’

On my way home, I call Holly to cancel.

‘Oh, never mind. That’s OK,’ she says, although I can tell from the sound of her voice that it’s not. ‘If you like, I could …’

She doesn’t finish her sentence, but I can guess what she was about to say. Even though we’ve been dating for a year and a half, I still haven’t told anyone about her, least of all my boys. Holly is desperate to come round and meet them. It’s a topic she has been bringing up a lot lately and that I’ve been circumventing. I’m sure Holly thinks I’m commitment-phobic, but it’s not that. I think I’m doing a good job of moving on, and it’s what Mel would have wanted; it’s just that at the moment I’m happy with the way things are.

‘I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’

As I make pizza and watch Paddington 2 with my sons that evening, I’ve all but forgotten about Melissa Slade. I can feel her crouching at the back of my mind, ready to jump out at me, but I’m doing a good job of shutting her out for the moment.

But once I’ve turned off the TV and put the boys to bed, there’s no distraction and no buffer against my thoughts, and I can’t seem to get Melissa Slade out of my head.

I can’t be bothered to boot up my laptop this evening, but on my phone I skim through some more of the online articles from the trial and her first appeal.

Mel was obsessed with the case. She dreamt of having a baby girl – we were trying for another baby at the time – and she didn’t believe that this woman could have killed hers. But that was Mel. She was a good person and she only ever saw the good in other people. ‘Innocent until proven guilty, Jon,’ I remember her saying when we discussed Melissa Slade’s trial in the evenings when I got home from the courtroom.

We didn’t discuss the appeal that followed in November 2014. Mel had died two months earlier.

I feel a tear snake its way down my cheek. I wish Mel were here now. I’d like to ask her for advice. I don’t know what to do. What would you do, Mel? But as soon as the question enters my head, the answer comes to me.

You can do this, Jon. The voice in my head is Mel’s. The voice of reason. It has nothing to do with us. Nothing to do with what happened to our family.

‘Innocent until proven guilty, huh?’ I say aloud. ‘But she was found guilty as charged.’

Leaning back on the sofa, I doze off for a while, but it’s a fitful sleep. I wake up with a start and a crick in my neck. I get up and check on Noah and Alfie before making my way to bed.

The following day, after covering Sports Day at the local school, I write a review from Kelly’s enthusiastic comments about the play and the programme, which she has brought with her to show me. She has also taken a few photos with her smartphone and I choose one of the better ones. I add Kelly’s name to mine at the top of the article.

At lunchtime, I honour my promise to Kelly. At first she’s confused when I buy three sandwiches, but she gives her trademark grin when she gets it. There seem to be roadworks all over the city at the moment, so instead of taking my car, we walk to Temple Way and then get on the bus for Cabot Circus. With my mouth full of BLT sub, I brief Kelly before we get off at the shopping centre.

‘You need originality. You wrote that the number of Bristol’s homeless is twice the national average, which is shocking, and you mention that a local charity has made shipping containers into homes to get people off the streets, which is fantastic, but this is old news. We need the faces behind the facts and figures. You have to add something new.’

Kelly bobs her head vigorously then bites into her sandwich. When she’s not grinning, she’s nodding, I think unfairly.

As we wander up and down the pedestrianised streets around the shopping centre, I start to think we should have come after work, in the evening. But then we see a woman sitting in the doorway of a shop, hugging her knees to her chest, her sleeping bag rolled up beside her. The shop has “clearance sale” stickers across its windows and has evidently now closed down.

‘There’s your angle,’ I say to Kelly, pointing.

‘What? Oh, I see. The irony. Someone sleeping rough in front of an empty building when the council promised to open up empty buildings to house them.’

‘No. That’s not what I meant. Although, that could work, too. I was thinking more—’

‘Bristol’s Homeless Women ,’ Kelly finishes my sentence.

‘Exactly,’ I say. Handing Kelly a bacon sub and a ten-pound note, I tell her I’ll be waiting for her in Costa Coffee a few doors up the road. ‘Don’t forget to take her photo,’ I remind her.