The Mistress - Jill Childs Page 0,55

my eyes from closing.

Ahead, the darkness shifted again.

‘Ralph. Is it you?’ My voice was desperate now.

A figure, still there, silhouetted against the stones.

Why won’t he come to me? My legs were so leaden, I could barely throw myself forward anymore. Every step was such an effort. My feet seemed disconnected from the rest of my body, thickened and numb.

The figure stepped forward. I started to scream, my hands lifted now not to embrace him but to ward him off, to protect myself.

Whoever it was, he wasn’t alive. A man stood before me, soaking wet, his arms limp at his sides. His ragged clothes, streaming seawater into pools at his feet, hung from his body. His saturated hair was plastered to his head, dripping tendrils of seawater across his face. His skin gleamed deathly white.

I blinked, struggling to focus, and my vision blurred. Ralph… Could those blue lips be the same ones I’d once kissed, once parted with the tip of my tongue? The eyes, wide and staring, fixed on mine, rimmed with blood.

I staggered, losing strength in my legs and crashed onto the stones before I could reach him. I writhed there, almost paralysed. The beach spun. The scream stuck in my throat.

It was over. My eyes closed. Blackness.

Part 2

Helen

Thirty-Seven

I thought the teachers would assume that, this year, after all that had happened, I wouldn’t have the gall to go along. That was all the more reason I was determined to be there.

I knew what they were like, those end-of-year Lower School socials. They thrived on gossip. And this year, I knew the gossip would be about Miss Dixon and what happened to Ralph and, indirectly, that meant it was also about me.

Besides, it was a matter of pride. I always turned up at school events. I was an involved parent, someone who could be relied on. A volunteer reader.

Bea, who usually hated these things, agreed to come too, just for an hour. Moral support. We’d agreed a strategy: go late, leave early.

We met up in the car park and pushed open the door of the pub together, Bea sticking close by my side as we made our way past the bar, through the crowd of regular drinkers to the long, narrow function room at the back.

‘You okay?’ Bea asked, for about the hundredth time.

I managed a smile. ‘Fine.’

‘One drink,’ she whispered, steeling herself. ‘And we’re done.’

I hesitated on the threshold, reading the room. Already, it had divided into groups. I recognised several knots of year two parents who’d congregated at the far end, close to the tables where trays of cheap sandwiches, crisps and sausage rolls had been set out. I could guess the conversation. Job chit-chat. Summer holiday plans.

The teachers, having done their duty and endured small talk with the parents, had settled together at the other end, closer to the bar.

I patted Bea’s arm as she headed off to join the parents, waved in by a mum she seemed to know, then I turned to join the nearest teachers. I made a point of socialising with them, when I could, for Anna’s sake. That was why I’d started volunteering in the first place. And I suppose I was feeling bloody-minded. If anyone thought I was embarrassed about being there, humiliated by the unspoken connections between Miss Dixon and my husband, I was determined to show them I was not.

They smiled and made space for me as I picked up a glass of orange juice from the bar and joined a few of the teachers I knew.

‘I still can’t believe it,’ Mrs Prior was saying. Her face was flushed. ‘She’d been acting strangely for a while, though, hadn’t she? On edge. I said so, didn’t I?’ She turned to Miss Abbott. ‘Didn’t you go and have a word with her?’

I sighed to myself. They were talking about Miss Dixon, already. I wondered how much I could stand.

Miss Abbott nodded. ‘She was a very private person.’ She stared into her glass of white wine. ‘I did try to ask her once, well, ask if everything was okay. I got the sense she didn’t want to talk about it.’

‘Apparently, she’d been taking sleeping pills for weeks,’ Miss Fry put in. ‘You’d think she’d know to keep off alcohol. That’s what did the real damage, apparently. Mixing them.’

‘She was lucky to survive.’ Miss Abbott shook her head, doleful. ‘I heard it was touch and go.’

Mrs Prior lowered her voice. ‘Jayne said they had to pump her stomach. Not nice.’

I said, ‘How