The Mistress - Jill Childs Page 0,37

‘They haven’t replaced him yet. Not permanently.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Hilary scoffed. ‘You know what they’re like. Sarah’s probably trying to save money.’

‘Anyway, we’re going to give Mrs Wilson a nice card. She’s coming in this afternoon. It’s a gesture, isn’t it?’ Elaine said brightly.

It was a gesture, we all agreed.

Twenty-Six

I saw Helen take up her place on one of the settees in the school library. She settled the basket of reading books and diaries on the table at the side, then rifled through with neat, precise movements and drew one out as the first child, a girl with floppy bunches, ran in from a classroom to join her.

I was standing at the photocopier, hidden away in an alcove at a distance from the library. I’d been in the middle of running off some worksheets and I paused when I realised it was her and stood there, peering round the wall.

Helen’s head craned forward, her finger bobbing along the page, guiding the girl as she started, hesitantly, to read aloud. I watched for a while. She was calm and patient, murmuring now and then, offering encouragement. When the girl finished reading and closed her book, she looked up at Helen expectantly.

Helen handed her a sheet of stickers and the girl spent time choosing one, while Helen wrote a line or two in the reading diary, then folded the reading book inside and filed them back in the basket.

The girl, attaching the sticker with care to her school cardigan, jumped up and headed back to the classroom to fetch the next reader. And so it went on.

Helen sat, waiting. She shuffled a little on the cushioned seat and crossed her legs at the knee, tapped the free foot in the air. Her hair was sharply cut as if she’d been recently to the hairdresser’s.

It was hard to believe that it was the same woman who’d zipped her husband’s body into a surfboard cover nearly three months earlier and headed out onto a dark sea in a dinghy to tip it overboard.

The next child, a stout boy, came sauntering out to join her, one hand in his trouser pocket and the other clutching his reading diary and book. Helen greeted him by name – she seemed to know all the children – patted the empty stretch of settee beside her and he perched there, opened his book and, prompted by her finger, he began, haltingly, to read.

I turned back to the photocopier and focussed on my work. When I was finished, the papers stacked and clipped into bundles, I glanced over towards the library settee. The boy was leaving, pressing down the sticker on his school jumper as he ran off.

‘Mummy!’

Anna came dashing out, hurtling towards her mother, all excitement. Helen smiled and opened her arms wide and Anna threw herself into them, bouncing beside her on the settee. I bit my lip. I had no business, looking. There was something so intense, so intimate in that fierce embrace. I blinked. Their arms were tight around each other, Helen slightly rocking the girl as she held her against her body. Helen’s face was tilted into Anna’s hair as if she were inhaling its smell. Her eyes closed. There was serenity, a softness in her face that I’d never seen before.

I felt as if a veil had been lifted back and I’d seen for the first time something precious, something which, until then, I hadn’t wanted to admit, even to myself. Selflessness of a kind I would never know. I gathered up the papers and turned quickly away, the floor blurring. It had been there all this time, this love at the centre of their family, I saw that now. This family I’d been instrumental in breaking apart.

Twenty-Seven

I tried my best to keep an eye on Anna from afar. Ralph had adored her. I owed it to him to look out for her, at least at school, whatever her mother thought of me.

I wanted Anna to like me, to realise she was precious to me because she was my last link to him. Those gorgeous brown eyes. That defiant tilt of the chin. The passing dreaminess in her face that mirrored his.

I’d been disappointed that she’d clearly gone straight home after our little chat in the school library and repeated to her mother exactly what I’d said. That ‘secret friend’ jibe of Helen’s told me everything. It was hurtful. My attempt to reach out to that girl had been kindly meant. It was