here to eat or not). The beef was cooked to perfection and every mouthful tasted of anger. Fury at their failure to support their father in his hour of greatest need; resentment at their refusal to eat the meal I’d spent the whole day cooking for them.
When I’d finished I went back through to the kitchen. They’d been talking, but they fell silent when I came in.
‘What about pudding?’ I said, as cheerily as I could manage. ‘I made a trifle, would you like some of that?’
Stephen stood up abruptly, his chair scraping noisily against the terracotta tiles. He pushed past without even looking at me and left the room.
‘What about you, Adrian? Could you manage some trifle?’
‘No, Mum,’ he said.
I sat down next to him and put my hand over his. There were tears running down his cheeks. The sight of my grown son in tears affected me more than any of it.
‘It’s alright,’ I said, moving my hand to his shoulder. ‘It’ll be alright, my darling! They’ll see that it’s all been a horrible mistake and then they’ll let him come home. And we can all get back to how we were.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Those pictures…’
‘I know, I know. They must have been dreadful for you to see. But they were hidden on his computer, and…’
‘He was in them, Mum. Dad was in some of the pictures.’
‘But they can do things with pictures now, can’t they? They can do airbrushing, or whatever it’s called. They can manipulate – ’
‘It was him, Mum. If you’d seen it…’
I still didn’t believe it.
They didn’t go back to the court after that. I was there on my own the next day, and for the remaining two days of the trial. I imagined the press were reporting on every aspect of the case, given Leonard’s position, but I deliberately avoided the newspapers; I didn’t turn on the television when I came home.
When he was convicted, I stood up in the court and shouted ‘NO!’ as loudly as I could. I was asked to leave. The next day he was sentenced.
The trial was very costly for me. It destroyed my marriage, because, even though I’d stood by him at every stage, once he was convicted Leonard refused to see me. He didn’t send me a visiting order and even when I applied directly to the prison I was told that the prisoner was under no obligation to see anyone he did not wish to.
Stephen didn’t come round any more. I spoke to Ina on the phone once or twice, but they never came round for Sunday dinner after that. I phoned up and asked if I could see the girls, if I could take them out somewhere. Ina made excuses. When I pressed her, she said that Stephen did not want the girls to see me until they were much older. I didn’t understand this at all. It was Leonard who was accused of those terrible things, not I. But Stephen said I must have known. That I had covered up for him.
I knew no such thing. I still didn’t believe it could be true. They had all denied him, all abandoned him.
Adrian took Diane and Joshy back to Australia and, although he phoned me once in a while, when I rang them there was never a reply. His calls grew less frequent as the months and years passed.
Things had also changed between Janet and me. I called her every so often for a chat, and it was an unspoken rule between us that we would not discuss Leonard. We talked about the children, about politics. But even those calls grew less frequent. She was cold towards me, as though my cheeriness disgusted her.
I went out, although less frequently. I found I could not trust my friends, after one of them gave an ‘exclusive’ interview with a daily newspaper and suddenly the whole thing was brought up again.
I went occasionally to the university to do a yoga class, but when the block of sessions I’d booked came to an end I didn’t renew. There was no point. I’d reached the end. And so I went back to the house, the wonderful house that had nurtured us, kept us all safe, seen my children grow into strong men and protected me in those lonely months when the wolves were at the door, and I shut myself in and closed my eyes, and I waited.