winter; the trees have lost their leaves – though a few linger, gripping on for dear life – and I’m wrapped up warmly in the maroon puffer and the black scarf. Perfume clings to it now: lily and pomegranate. It smells of her. The bench is damp; even though I wiped it with my gloves, I can feel it begin to penetrate my trousers.
I won’t stay long. I’m a few minutes early, that’s all, for meeting Max off the train. He’s had Magic Club today – the one I found for him in Streatham. He’ll be practising some little rope trick when he gets out, head down; but I’m already looking forward to the moment he’ll notice me and Maudie waiting at the top of the steps, and he’ll grin and run up to meet us. How much happier he is these days.
With good behaviour, Standling thinks Ailsa should be out in ten years. It seems about right. It gives me long enough. We visit her often, Max and me – enough to keep the relationship going, not enough for anyone to feel dependent. I’m enjoying the sense of control. I’m allowed in these days. I’ve got my own photo ID. A provisional licence. When – if! – I pass, I might even drive us down. (I’ve got use of the little Fiat now.) She’s in quite good spirits. She is learning Italian, she told us last time, and her work in the garden is earning her an RHS qualification, ‘so Delilah can stuff it up her arse’. She is grateful to me, has no idea that in the end I betrayed her. Every time we leave, she tells me she’s glad it’s her and not him, and thanks me again for giving him such a wonderful home. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ she says. ‘You’ve literally saved my life.’ And these days she actually means it. I’m family, she says, and at last it feels true.
Sometimes Max and I bump into Cecily Tilson and the girls. There’s a cafe down the road from the prison that we like to retreat to. Cecily, ‘Tom’s bitch of a mother’, is a poppet when you get to know her. I mean, grand and a terrible intellectual snob, but she and I get on pretty well now we’ve discovered shared interests – crosswords, Italian Renaissance art, the novels of Ann Patchett. She lets Melissa and Bea sleep at mine when they’re up to see friends, though she insisted on inspecting ‘the gaff’, as Bea calls it, first. An excuse for one last massive clear-out. Sue and Maeve, even Bob, came to help. Cecily’s standards are higher than mine, and she sent a man in to mend the staircase and the roof, but she appreciated I’d made an effort, that I was putting the children first. She approved of everything I had done in the back sitting room, now ‘Max’s den’ – even the Xbox. The table tennis table was particularly clever find. Someone had left it outside a house in Ritherdon Road. I persuaded the coaches at Max’s football team to lug it back.
I worked out early on Max had killed Tom. I paid attention to him, you see, unlike anyone else. I knew how much he hated his father. Ailsa was too busy with her own dramas – her little dalliances. It took me a while to think what was best, to keep one chess move ahead. The priority was to keep the focus off Max. One word from me and they’d have released Ailsa. I only had to give them the gloves. I thought the case would be dismissed, that a jury, if not the police, would accept it was a simple mistake. But when the daubings began to appear on my front fence, when I realised how readily her friends would turn against her, I changed tack. There’s been so much in the press about that woman who killed her husband and belatedly got out, I had hopes for a defence of domestic abuse. But it wasn’t a goer. The silly stunt with the scarf – I regret that. He could be a bastard, Tom – I wouldn’t have wanted to have been married to him myself – but she was difficult too. The more I thought about it, the more guilty she seemed. The restlessness, the greed – how jealous she was of Rose’s seaside house – the self-aggrandising self-pity. I know I have my own