Woman with a Secret (3 page)

Since when? I’ve been into both Sophie’s and Ethan’s classrooms many times. No one’s ever complained.

“It’s emotionally disruptive for the children if a parent suddenly pops up during lesson time,” she explains. “Some of them think, ‘Oh look, Mum or Dad’s here—they can take me home,’ and get very upset when Mum or Dad disappears again, leaving them behind.”

“I promise you Ethan won’t be upset.” I smile hopefully at her. “He’ll just be pleased and relieved to have his gym bag.”
And, obviously, since he wants it for gym this afternoon, he won’t, on having it handed to him, expect to leave school immediately and miss the PE
lesson that he needs it for, you stupid cow
. “There’s really no downside to letting me take it to him myself, honestly,” I add in what I hope is a wholly positive tone of voice. “It’ll save you a job too.”

“Nicki!” a high-pitched female voice calls out, one that would be better suited to a cheerleader than a head teacher.
Correction: headmistress
.

I sag with relief, knowing that everything is about to be all right. Kate Zilber is here: five foot short, petite as a ten-year-old, the most indiscreet person in professional employment that I’ve ever met. Kate refuses to be referred to as “principal” or “head”; “headmistress” is her title, prominently engraved on the sign on her office door, and she insists that people use it. She once described herself to me as a megalomaniac; I soon discovered that she wasn’t exaggerating.

“Is that Ethan’s PE bag?” she says. “It’s OK, Izzie, we can bend the rules on this occasion. Actually, I can bend them whenever it suits me, since I run the place—perk of the job. We don’t want Nicki worrying about whether the bag was safely delivered, do we?”

Izzie shrugs ungraciously and returns to her desk.

Kate pulls me out of the office and into an empty corridor. Once we’re alone, she says, “And the chances of it being safely delivered by Izzie are slim. She’s a lobotomy on legs.”

“Really?” I must stop questioning everything she says. I keep assuming she’s joking, but she never is. I’m not used to people who work in primary schools speaking their minds in the way Kate Zilber does. Still, Freeth Lane is well known to be the best independent school in the Culver Valley, and Kate’s the person responsible for that. She could probably pelt the parents and governors with rotten eggs and get away with it.

“Quick pep talk for you.” She gives me a stern look. “If you want to take Ethan his gym bag because you trust no one else to do the job properly, fine. But if there’s an element of wanting to get a quick glimpse of him to reassure yourself that he’s OK . . . not so fine.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“If you indulge your own anxiety, you’ll make Ethan’s worse. He needs his gym bag; you’ve brought it in—problem solved.” She squeezes my arm. “There’s no need for you to see him, Nicki. You’ll only read unhappiness into his expression, whether it’s there or not, and work yourself up into a state. If he smiles at you, you’ll worry he’s putting on a brave face in front of his new friends. If he doesn’t smile, you’ll imagine he’s in the grip of a powerful inner torment. Am I right?”

I sigh. “Probably.”

“How about I take him his gym bag instead?” she suggests. “I’m the most reliable person on the planet. You know that, right? I’m even more efficient than you.”

“All right.” I smile and hand her the bag. For some reason, this tiny, shrewd, girly-voiced woman I barely know has a talent for very quickly making me feel ten times better. Every time she does, I can’t help thinking of Melissa, who has the opposite effect and is my closest friend.

“Thank you.” Kate turns to walk away, then turns back. “Ethan really will be fine, you know. He’ll be as happy here as Sophie—you wait and see. Some children take longer than others to form emotional attachments and adapt to a new environment, that’s all. The other kids are really rallying around, looking after him—this term even more than last. It’s sweet. He’s made so many new friends.”

“Ethan’s always been more sensitive than Sophie,” I say. “He doesn’t handle change well.”
And his mother, knowing this, took him away from the school where he was happy. Two terms later, he still tells me at least once a week that he’ll never love this school as much as his old one—that however many friends he makes, Oliver-who-he-left-behind-in-London will always be his true best friend, even if he never sees him again
.

“Nicki.” Another stern look. “Ethan’s
fine
. He occasionally gets anxious about things. Lots of kids do. It’s really nothing serious. Your anxiety, on the other hand . . . You should take yourself to a head doctor, lady,” she concludes affectionately.

“Kate, I—” I break off. What am I thinking? I can’t tell her anything. I can’t tell anyone, ever.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Bugger ‘nothing.’ You can’t start and not finish. Tell me or I’ll expel your children.”

“I’ve . . . been under a lot of pressure recently, that’s all. I’m not normally so twitchy.”

Kate raises a plucked eyebrow. “Don’t fob me off, Nicki. That wasn’t what you were going to say.”

The urge to tell her—something, anything—is overwhelming.

“I lied to you.”

“Ooh! This sounds promising.” She moves closer, rubbing her hands together. No one else I know would react so enthusiastically to hearing they’d been deceived.
If only they would
. “Lied to me about what?”

“First time I came in to look around,” I say, “you asked me why we wanted to leave London and move to Spilling.”

“And you said what so many people who have moved from London say: better schools, bigger garden, cleaner air, perfect rural childhood, yada yada. Whenever parents tell me that, I think, ‘Ha, just wait till your fourteen-year-old’s roaming those big green fields you prize so highly, off his tits on illegal substances because there’s no subway to take him anywhere worth going, and absolutely nothing to do in his local idyll.’”

I laugh. “Are you this frank with all the parents?”

Kate considers my question, then says, “I tone it down a bit for the squeamish ones. So, come on—the lie?”

“My real reason for moving here was entirely selfish, nothing to do with fresher air and bigger gardens. I wasn’t thinking about my children, or my husband. Only myself.”

“Well . . . good,” says Kate.

“Good?”

“Absolutely. It’s when we imagine we know how others feel and presume to know what’s best for them that mistakes are made. Whereas no one knows our own needs better than us.” She glances at her watch. “Looking after number one’s not as daft a policy as it sounds: make the only person happy that you can, let everyone else do the same and take care of themselves. So why did
you
want to move to Spilling?”

I shake my head, look away. “It doesn’t matter. It stopped being relevant shortly after we got here anyway. Sod’s Law. I just wanted you to know: that’s the reason I get anxious about Ethan.”

“I get it,” says Kate. “His suffering is your punishment. You don’t believe you can avoid retribution for being as selfish as you’ve been, therefore Ethan must be suffering horribly?”

“Something like that,” I mutter.

“I wouldn’t think that way if I were you. Women need to be ruthlessly selfish. You know why? Because men are, and so are children. Both will turn you into their slave unless you give back as good as you get on the selfish front.” I find myself looking at her left hand to see if she’s wearing a wedding band; I’ve never noticed, and her name gives nothing away: she’s Dr. Zilber, not Miss or Mrs.

She is wearing a wedding ring. A thin one—either white gold or platinum. The skin around it is pink, chapped and flaky, as if she’s allergic to it.

“Listen, Nicki—much as I’d love to pry further into your secret reason for moving here, I’d better get on. There are people still on my staff who belong on the welfare line.” She nods toward Izzie. “I can’t rest until that’s rectified. But first stop: Ethan’s bag.”

I thank her, and return to my car feeling more optimistic than I have for a while.

Maybe nothing all that terrible has happened to me. Maybe I’m not the guiltiest woman in the world. If I told Kate, she might laugh and say, “God, what a story!” in an appreciative way. I’m so used to Melissa’s harsh glare and pursed lips and, more recently, her refusal to listen,
but she is only one person.
The wrong person to try and share a secret with, if the secret’s anything more controversial than “This is what I’ve bought so-and-so for their birthday—don’t tell them.”

The conclusion I’ve been strenuously trying to avoid reaching glows in neon in my brain: I need to give up on Melissa and find myself a new best friend. I can’t get away from her—she’s managed to tie us together forever, even if that wasn’t her intention—but I can demote her in my mind to “acquaintance”; she’ll never know I’ve done it, if I’m still friendly on the surface.

Is there a website, I wonder: newbestfriend.com? If there is, it’s probably full of people trying to turn it nonplatonic, looking for “fuck buddies” or “friends with benefits.”

Kate Zilber wouldn’t have let a run-in with a policeman stop her from doing what she wanted and needed to do. She wouldn’t have been doing it in the first place unless she’d decided it was OK, and she wouldn’t have been terrified and ashamed if caught. I doubt she’d have disappeared from Gavin’s life with no word or explanation, as I did.

The fairest thing to do, for his sake and my family’s—that’s what I told myself.

Liar. Coward
.

I owe him an explanation. For whatever reason, however stupid and crazy it was, he was significant to me for a while. He mattered. I think I mattered to him too.

I drive along the Silsford Road with the window open, thinking about the possibility of contacting him now. Could I extend my definition of being good to include emailing him just once more, to tell him that my disappearance wasn’t his fault, that he did nothing wrong?

No. It wouldn’t be only once. He’d hook you again
.

Cutting off from Gavin took all my willpower; I might not have the strength to do it a second time.

I decide to allow myself the luxury of not deciding immediately. I want to cling to the possibility—not of going back to how it was,
but of one last communication, to end things in a proper way. I know better than anyone that sometimes a possibility is enough to keep a person going, even if it never becomes a reality.

Will Gavin still be checking, three weeks and four days after he last heard from me, or will he have given up by now? If it had been the other way around and he’d suddenly stopped emailing me, how soon would I have stopped looking to see if he’d written?

The phone’s ringing as I pull up outside my house. I grab my bag, lock the car door and fumble with the front-door key, knowing the call will be about Ethan. Something’s happened: he’s sobbing, locked in a bathroom stall. Or there’s a problem with his gym bag—something’s missing. How sure am I that I put all the right things in?

Let him be OK and I swear I won’t email Gavin, or even think about it any more
.

I run into the living room and grab the phone, wondering why I persist in offering God these phony deals. If He exists, He must be reasonably intelligent—maybe not academic-intellectual clever, but powerfully intuitive, and with a deep understanding of people. He must have spotted the pattern by now: I never stick to my side of the bargains I make with Him. Time and time again, He goes easy on me and I think,
Phew
, and forget about what I promised I’d do in return, or invent a loophole to let myself off the hook.

I pick up the phone. “Hello?”

“Is that Mrs. Clements?”

“Yes, speaking.”

“It’s Izzie here, from Freeth Lane. We just met, when you came in before?”

“Is Ethan OK?” I resent the time it takes me to ask: endless stretched-out seconds of not knowing.

“Oh.” Izzie sounds surprised. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I snap.

“I assume he’s all right. I haven’t heard that he isn’t.”

“So you’re not phoning about Ethan?”

“No.”

I exhale slowly as I fall into a chair. “Right. So what can I do for you?”

“It’s Sophie.”

Sophie, who’s never problematic in any way, who I don’t need to worry about. I take her well-being for granted. I feel as if my heart has been lobbed at the wall of my gut, feel it sliding slowly downward, flattened by dread.

The children of guilty mothers, hostages to karma, always in imaginary peril that feels so real, so asked for
. . .

“She’s been sick,” says Izzie. “She seems fine now, and she says she wants to stay for the rest of the day, but it’s policy to let parents know.”

“I’m coming in now to see her,” I say. “Tell her I’m on my way.” I’m not taking the word of Lobotomy Izzie when it comes to the health of my daughter; I want to see for myself if Sophie’s well enough to stay at school. Which means driving the round trip, yet again. And then again at the end of the day, either to pick up both children or, if I bring Sophie back with me early, to pick up Ethan. Fleetingly, I consider collecting them both now to save me having to drive back to school later for the fourth time in one day, but then I realize I can’t make Ethan miss gym, not after I’ve taken in his bag; he’ll be looking forward to playing football or cricket or whatever it is, expecting the rest of his day to unfold predictably and without incident.

I decide that I’ll be brave and try the Elmhirst Road route again. Getting to Sophie as quickly as possible matters more than my fear. If the sand-haired policeman is still there, I’ll stay calm and pretend not to recognize him. Or maybe I’ll wink at him. I can imagine Kate Zilber doing that. Winking isn’t illegal. He wouldn’t be able to warn me or threaten me. A wink proves nothing, and in any case, there has been nothing to prove since I turned good.

THE ROUTINE WHEN SOPHIE
and Ethan get in from school at the end of the day is always the same. Panting and groaning, they shrug and wriggle their way out of their coats and shoes in the hall, as if divesting themselves of chains that have bound them for decades, before making a dash for the living room and slamming the door. They have an urgent appointment with the television that nothing would induce them to miss.