The Mistress - Jill Childs Page 0,29

‘Oh, Laura. I just want to see you. When can I see you?’

I shook my head. ‘Let’s talk tomorrow.’

After we hung up, I sat very still, too sad even to cry. A text pinged through from Number withheld.

Love you, Laura Dixon.

I felt something twist and loosen inside me and all of a sudden I was smiling, despite everything. My fingers typed a reply before I could stop them.

Love you too.

Twenty

The memorial service stifled the endless chatter in the staffroom. The speculation about Ralph Wilson seemed exhausted, at last. Life moved on.

Gradually, I stopped looking up quickly, heart racing, every time the staffroom door opened, in case it was a summons. I stopped stammering when John Bickers paused to chat to me in the corridor, stopped wondering what his motive was, whether the police had asked him to watch me, whether I was on their list of suspects.

There were days, wonderfully ordinary days, when I realised I was once again utterly absorbed in teaching for whole stretches of time; writing up lists of ideas on the whiteboard or helping the class make 3-D maps of Peru or hearing their high, insistent voices debate the question of the week: was it better to be rich or happy? If they could be an animal, which would they be? On those days, I dared to think that perhaps it was okay, after all.

Perhaps we really had got away with it.

It hadn’t entirely left me, though. Some nights, I still woke at 3 a.m., body sweating, and stared in panic at the dark ceiling. I still saw in the darkness, from time to time, Ralph’s crumpled body at the bottom of the steps or the all-knowing, all-seeing eyes of Detective Inspector Johns, boring into mine and reading my guilt there. I drank whisky and warm milk to chase away the ghosts and practised deep breathing.

I wondered about Helen. I imagined her lying awake, red-eyed, as haunted as I was. I saw her kicking off the bedclothes, hollowed out with guilt, and pacing round the house. The shadowy sitting room. The deserted hall. Standing at the closed door to the cellar, remembering.

I wondered how often she thought of me and, when she did, what feelings took her. We were bound together by what we’d done. We were the keepers of a terrible, unspoken secret, a secret that could destroy us both.

I thought a lot about what she’d done. I understood it, I decided at last. She had been in shock and, if she had to lose her husband, her daughter’s father, it was better to suffer a mysterious disappearance than to be the widow of an adulterer whose lover sent him tumbling down the cellar steps, naked, in a fight. She was right: the headlines, the trial, the endless gossip… it would be intolerable for her and for Anna too, as well as ruinous for me.

But I couldn’t help feeling that the business between us had been left unresolved. I owed her. What I didn’t know was what payment she might demand.

The more time passed, the more I wanted to know. The more I felt I had to know.

It was about that time that Sarah Baldini sent round a fresh memo about the annual whole school photograph. It had been postponed when Ralph went missing. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the school wouldn’t be shown to its best advantage if we were all arranged in rows, scrubbed up, while a police investigation continued just out of shot.

Now all that was over and it was being revived.

Emails went out to parents with a few days’ notice.

Freshly ironed uniform, please. No jewellery. Regulation hair accessories only. Clean, polished shoes.

The day of the photograph was blowy but dry. After morning assembly, Elaine took charge of organising the Lower School children to file up the hill, walking, one class after another, in an endless crocodile, to the Upper School. The photographic company had erected a tiered platform there, as they did every year. The Upper School, dominated by slouching, self-conscious adolescents, was already being ushered into place along the back section. The sixth formers, allowed to wear their own clothes at school, rather than school uniform which was mandatory for everyone else, painted a splash of colour down the last two rows, bounded only by the final row of teachers. Height wasn’t the only reason the sixth formers were hidden away from view at the back.

We set about threading the line of younger children into the