table, I rummaged through random scraps of paper bearing his handwriting, each one a memory, a torn-off shopping list for a champagne picnic, a cryptic, flirtatious poem he’d written for me soon after we’d met, a scribbled love note I’d come home to find on my pillow.
From the bottom drawer, I drew out the worn, leather-bound volume hidden under papers, an anthology of nineteenth-century poetry, and lifted it to my face. The musty smell of the pages took me straight back to our first days together. To the heady excitement and restlessness. It was one of his very first presents and the most precious. He’d had it for years, he’d said, turning the pages to show me his favourite. I shook my head and pushed it back into the drawer. That was one thing I couldn’t just throw away.
I ripped the other pieces of paper to shreds, then bundled everything into a bin bag and took it outside to the back of the flats. Silence. The only sounds were my footsteps and the pant of my own breath. I hid the bag deep in the piles of residents’ rubbish in the giant bins there. Another day and it would all go to the public waste dump to be incinerated.
Before I went to sleep, I sat up in bed with my phone and did the hardest job of all. I deleted every message from him, every email, every photograph and finally, deleted his number. By the time I switched off my bedside lamp and crawled down under the duvet, exhausted, I’d taken a step I could never have taken until now. I’d erased him from my life.
If Helen or any other piece of evidence led the police to my door, I was ready for them.
He’d probably done the same to me long ago. Tore up my little love notes and dumped them in some public bin. Deleted messages. Dropped the spare keys to my flat down some drain. If he hadn’t before, his wife certainly would now. I wondered what else she’d find once she started emptying his pockets and clearing his study. I wondered how much she already knew about her husband’s darkest secret which might now rise, blinking, to the light.
I barely left the flat that weekend. I hid, my curtains drawn, lying all day on the settee in pyjamas, tucked up in a blanket, watching TV. I couldn’t eat.
At night, I struggled to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, Ralph was there, waiting for me. Sometimes he hung in the sea, gently rocked by the current, limbs spread, hair floating. His eyes, open, fixed me with a look which was sometimes mournful, sometimes malevolent. I’m still here, it seemed to say. You won’t get away with it.
Ten
Ralph rescued me from myself. It was his doing, not mine. He pursued me. I was helpless to resist.
It began last September, not long after the start of term.
I’d stayed late at school, marking a pile of year three exercise books in the Lower School staffroom, writing positive exclamations illustrated with smiley faces and occasional sticky stars. A dirty cup, the coffee already finished, sat beside me. The staffroom was deserted. It was nearly five-thirty. Another half an hour and the school janitor would patrol the building on his rounds, switching off lights and closing doors.
I needed to go home. I just couldn’t face the empty flat, not quite yet.
I rarely walked up the slope to the Upper School buildings. It was foreign territory, for me, populated by strangers. Some Lower School teachers like Hilary Prior, who seemed to know everyone, popped up at lunchtimes now and then to sit in the larger, better equipped staffroom there but it intimidated me. Everyone knew the hierarchy within school. Upper School teachers had higher status than we did in the infant school, however valuable our work. There was an unspoken sense of snobbery as if we, mostly women and caring for four- to eleven-year olds, were only capable of wiping noses, reading picture books and decorating paper plates whilst they, tasked with teenagers as old as eighteen, were practically university lecturers.
The janitor’s heavy footsteps sounded down the corridor and I packed away the books I was reading and stowed them in my locker. A photocopied poster about the new teachers’ writing group was pinned on the corkboard above it. I looked at my watch. It was just starting.
My heart thudded. Maybe I could just have a quick look? I needn’t stay.
I hesitated, suddenly