OH GOD. IT’S not even an hour into the evening and I’m not sure I can do this any more.
I am sitting on the toilet, my head in my hands, trying to get a hold of myself. I have been drinking from nerves, letting my glass get topped up by passing waiters, not counting my units. It feels like a dream, one of those where you’re back at school, but everything is subtly different, more technicolour, everything has shifted up a gear. There was a slightly nightmarish quality to the wall of faces and voices that greeted us as we entered the hall, a mix of total strangers, and of half-remembered faces changed by age, the features sharpened as puppy fat fell away, or alternatively thickened and flattened, the skin loosening imperceptibly like a latex mask that has slightly slipped.
And the worst is, everyone knows us, even the girls who arrived at the school after we left. I hadn’t anticipated that. The way we left, slipping out between one term and the next, our departure unannounced … it felt low-key. It was one of the things the headmistress said to my father at the time, ‘If Isa leaves of her own volition, we can keep this very quiet.’
But I had forgotten the echo chamber we left behind, where the space left by our absence must have been filled over and over again by rumour and speculation until an edifice of lies and half-truths had built up, fuelled by the meagre facts of Ambrose’s disappearance. And now – enough old girls live locally to have seen the Salten Observer. They have read the headlines. And they’re not stupid – they have put two and two together. Sometimes they’ve made five.
The worst of it is their eyes, which are avid. People are pleasant enough to our faces, though their conversation feels a little forced, and I sense, though maybe I’m imagining it, a kind of wariness behind their smiles. But every time we turn away, I can hear the whispers behind our back start up. Is it true? Weren’t they expelled? Did you hear …?
The memories are no longer gentle little ‘do you remember?’ taps on my shoulder, they are slaps, each one an assault. Even away from the crowd they keep coming. I remember sitting crying in this very stall because a girl, a harmless little first year, had seen me and Fatima coming back from Kate’s one night, and I had completely overreacted. I had threatened her, told her that if she told anyone what she’d seen I would ensure she was sent to Coventry for the rest of her days at Salten. I could do that, I told her. I could make her life a misery.
It was a lie of course. Both parts. I couldn’t have isolated her like that even if I’d wanted to. We were too isolated ourselves, by that point. Seats were mysteriously saved in the buttery when we tried to sit in them. If one of us suggested a particular film in the common room of an evening, the vote somehow always went the other way. And besides – I would never really have done it. I only wanted to scare her a little, keep her quiet.
I don’t know what she did or said, but Miss Weatherby called me into her office that evening and gave me a long talk, about community spirit, and my responsibility to the younger girls.
‘I’m beginning to wonder,’ she said, her voice full of disappointment, ‘whether you truly have it in you to be a Salten girl, Isa. I know that things at home are very hard, but that doesn’t excuse your snapping at others, particularly those younger than yourself. Please don’t make me talk to your father, I am sure he has enough on his plate right now.’
My throat had seemed to close up with a combination of shame and fury. Fury at her, at Miss Weatherby, yes. But mostly at myself, for what I’d done, for what I’d allowed myself to become. I thought of Thea, that first night, her account of how the Lying Game had started. I won’t pick on the new girls, the ones who can’t defend themselves, she’d said. I’ll do it to the ones in charge – the teachers, the popular girls. The ones who think they’re above it all.
What had I become, threatening eleven-year-olds?
I thought of what my father would say if Miss Weatherby called him, between trips to the hospital. I thought of how his face, already grey with worry, would tighten more in lines of disappointment.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, forcing the words out. Not because I didn’t want to say them, but because of the constriction in my throat. ‘I really am. Please – it was a mistake. I’ll apologise. And I’ll try harder, I promise.’
‘Do,’ Miss Weatherby said. There was something worried in her eyes. ‘And, Isa, I know I’ve spoken to you about this before, but please do consider mixing more. Tight-knit friendships are all very well and good, but they can close us off from other chances. They can cost us a great deal, in the end.’
‘Isa?’ The knock on the cubicle door is low but decisive, and my head comes up. ‘Isa, are you there?’
I stand, flush, and leave the safety of the toilet cubicle to wash my hands at the row of sinks. Thea is standing by the dryer, her arms folded.
‘We were worried,’ she says flatly. I grimace. How long had I been in there? Ten minutes? Twenty?
‘I’m sorry, it just … it was all too much, you know?’
The water is cool on my hands and wrists, and I suppress an urge to splash it over my face.
‘Look, I understand,’ Thea says. Her face is gaunt, her thinness making her look almost haggard in the unforgiving lights of the school toilets – the guest facilities have been updated too and now feature soft towels and scented hand cream, but the lighting is just the same as it was, harsh and fluorescent. ‘I want to get out too. But you can’t hide all night, they’re about to sit down for dinner and you’ll be missed. Let’s get through the meal and then we can get out.’
‘OK,’ I say. But I can’t make myself move. I’m holding on to the basin, feeling my nails against the porcelain. Shit. I think about Freya back at Kate’s, wonder if she’s OK. I am almost overcome by the urge to duck out of here and run back to my soft, warm, home-smelling baby. ‘Why the hell did Kate think this was a good idea?’
‘Look.’ Thea glances over her shoulder at the empty cubicles, and lowers her voice. ‘We discussed this. You were the one who voted to come.’
I nod grimly. She’s right. And the thing is, I understand Kate’s panicked reaction, scrabbling around for a reason to explain all her friends coming down here after so many years’ absence, the weekend that a body just happened to turn up in the Reach. The reunion must have seemed like a heaven-sent coincidence. But I wish, I wish she hadn’t done it.
Shit, I think again, and I feel the swear words bubbling up inside me, a poison I can’t contain. I have a sudden vision of myself sitting down at the white-clothed dining table and letting them spew out – Shut your fucking faces, you rumour-mongering bitches. You know nothing. Nothing!
I breathe, slow and quiet, try to steady myself.
‘OK?’ Thea says, more gently. I nod.
‘I’m OK. I can do this.’ Then I correct myself. ‘We can do this, right? I mean, God knows, if Kate can, I can. Is she holding up?’
‘Just,’ Thea says. She holds open the toilet door and I make my way out into the echoing hallway, empty now except for a few teachers milling about, and a large easel at one end, holding the table plans.
‘Ooh, be quick!’ a teacher says, seeing us emerge. She is young, too young to have been there when we were. ‘They’re sitting down for the speeches. What table are you on?’
‘Pankhurst, according to the woman who was here before,’ Thea says, and the teacher looks at the list, runs her finger down the names. ‘Thea West,’ Thea supplements.
‘Oh, that’s right, you’re here. And you are …?’ She looks at me. ‘Sorry, as you can probably tell, I’m a recent arrival so all of you old girls are new faces to me!’
‘Isa Wilde,’ I say quietly, and to my relief her face, as she turns to check the list, registers neither recognition nor shock, just concentration as she scans the tables.
‘Oh yes, Pankhurst too, with a few others from your year by the looks of it. It’s a table of ten on the far side of the hallway, by the buttery hatch. Best way round is to slip in this door and edge round underneath the gallery.’
I know, I think. I know this place off by heart. But Thea and I just nod, and we follow her direction, sliding through the half-opened door under cover of the sound of clapping. The speeches are already under way, a woman at the podium smiling, and waiting politely for the applause to die down.
I had prepared myself for seeing Miss Armitage, the headmistress in our day, up there, but it’s not her on the dais, and I’m not surprised – she must have been in her fifties when I started at the school. She’s probably retired by now.
But the reality is, in a way, more shocking.
It’s Miss Weatherby, our former housemistress.
‘Fuck,’ Thea whispers under her breath as we make our way around the tables of well-to-do old girls and their husbands, and I can see from her pallor that this is just as much of a shock to her as it is to me.
As we tiptoe around chairs and over handbags, past gilt-lettered plaques listing hockey captains and girls who died in the war, and unflattering oil portraits of former heads, Miss Weatherby’s well-bred tones echo around the panelled hall, but the words pass over my head, unheard. All I can hear is her voice that final day, ‘Isa, this is best for everyone, I’m very sorry your time here at Salten didn’t work out, but we all think – your father included – that a fresh start is the best thing.’
A fresh start. Another one.
And all of a sudden I became one of them, a girl like Thea with a string of schools behind her that she had been asked to leave, with the threat of expulsion over my head.
I remembered my father’s stony face in the car. He asked no questions, I told no lies. But the reproach that hung in the air, as we sped back to a London filled with the smell of hospitals and the beep of monitors, was How could you? How could you when I have all this to deal with already?
Fatima’s parents were still abroad, but a grim-faced aunt and uncle came down from London in their Audi and took her away in the middle of the night as I watched from an upstairs window – I never even got to say goodbye.
Thea’s father was the worst – loud and brash, laughing as if bravado could make the scandal go away, making suggestive cracks as he slung Thea’s case into the back of the car, the smell of brandy on his breath though it was only noon.
Only Kate had no one to take her away. Because Ambrose … Ambrose was already gone. ‘Disappeared before they could sack him,’ said the whispers in the corridor.
All this is fresh in my mind as we make our way, with whispered apologies, to the table marked ‘Pankhurst’ where Fatima and Kate are waiting, their faces full of anxious relief as we slide into our seats, and a final burst of clapping breaks out. Miss Weatherby is finished, and I can’t recall a word she said.
I open up my phone and text Liz under cover of the table. All ok?
‘Vegetarian or meat, madam?’ says a voice behind me, and I jerk round to see a white-coated waiter standing there.
‘Sorry?’
‘Your meal choice, madam, did you tick the meat option or the vegetarian option?’
‘Oh –’ I look across at Kate who is deep in conversation with Fatima, their heads bent over their plates. ‘Um, meat, I guess?’
The waiter bows and places a plate of something swimming in a thick brown sauce, accompanied by bronzed piped potato shapes and a vegetable that I identify, after some thought, as a roasted artichoke. The effect is fifty shades of beige.
Kate and Fatima both have the vegetarian option, which looks nicer by far – some kind of tartlet with the inevitable goat’s cheese, I think.
‘Ah,’ says a man’s voice from my right, ‘this must be a dish in tribute to Picasso’s lesser-known brown stage.’
I look, nervously, to see if he is talking to me, and somewhat to my dismay he is. I manage a smile.
‘It is rather that way, isn’t it?’ I poke at the artichoke with my fork. ‘What do you think the meat is?’
‘I haven’t checked, but I would lay you favourable odds that it’s chicken – it always is at these things, in my experience. No one objects to chicken.’
I slice a piece off the end of the amorphous brown-clad lump and put it cautiously into my mouth and yes, it is indeed chicken.
‘So, what brings you here?’ I say, after swallowing. ‘Clearly you’re not an old girl.’
It’s a thin enough joke, but he has the grace to laugh as if it were not entirely predictable.
‘No, indeed. My name’s Marc, Marc Hopgood. I’m married to one of your contemporaries, Lucy Etheridge, she was back then.’
The name means nothing to me, and for a moment I hesitate, unsure whether to pretend a knowledge that I don’t have, but I realise quickly that it will be pointless – one or two questions will reveal my ignorance.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say honestly, ‘I don’t remember her. I wasn’t at Salten House for very long.’
‘No?’
I should stop there, but I can’t. I’ve said too much and too little, both at the same time, and I can’t stop myself filling in at least some of the blanks.
‘I only came at the start of the fifth, but I left before the sixth form.’
He’s too polite to ask why, but the question is there in his eyes, unspoken, in his eyes as he refills my glass, like the nicely brought up public-school boy he almost certainly is.
My phone beeps, and I look down briefly to see all ok :) :) :) flash up from Liz, and at the same time a voice from Marc’s other side says, ‘Isa?’
I look up, and Marc edges his chair back a few inches to allow his wife to lean across him, her hand extended.
‘Isa Wilde? It is you, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I say, thankful that Marc has already mentioned her name. I push the phone hastily into my bag and shake. ‘Lucy, isn’t it?’
‘Yes!’ Her cheeks are pink and white as a baby’s and she looks jolly and delighted to be here, in her husband’s company. ‘Isn’t this fun! So many memories …’
I nod, but I don’t say what I’m thinking – that the memories I have from Salten House are not all fun.
‘So,’ Lucy says after a moment, picking up her knife and fork again. ‘Tell me all about yourself, what have you been up to since you left?’
‘Oh … you know … this and that. I studied History at Oxford, then I went into law, and now I’m at the Civil Service.’
‘Oh, really? So’s Marc. What department are you in?’
‘Home Office, currently,’ I say. ‘But you know what it’s like.’ I shoot Marc a sideways smile. ‘You tend to rattle around a bit. I’ve worked across a few departments.’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ Lucy says, hacking busily at her chicken, ‘but I always assumed you’d go into something creative. What with your family history.’
For a minute I’m puzzled. My mother was a solicitor before she gave up work to have children, and my father has always worked in financial compliance. There is no hint of creativity in either of them. Has she got me mixed up with Kate?
‘Family history …?’ I say slowly. And then, before Lucy can answer, I remember and I open my mouth, trying to head her off, but it’s too late.
‘Isa’s related to Oscar Wilde,’ she says proudly to her husband. ‘Isn’t he your great-grandfather or something?’
‘Lucy,’ I manage, my throat tight with shame and my face hot, but Marc is already looking at me quizzically, and I know what he’s thinking. Oscar Wilde’s children all changed their name after the trial. He had no great-granddaughters – let alone any called Wilde. As I know perfectly well. There is only one thing for it. I have to confess.
‘Lucy, I’m so sorry.’ I put down my fork. ‘I … it was a joke. I’m not related to Oscar Wilde.’
I want the ground to swallow me up. Why, why were we so vile? Didn’t we understand what we were doing, when we pitted ourselves against these nice, credulous, well-brought-up girls?
‘I’m sorry,’ I say again. I can’t meet Marc’s eyes, and I look past him to Lucy, knowing that my voice is pleading. ‘It was … I don’t know why we said those things.’
‘Oh.’ Lucy’s face has gone even pinker, and I am not sure if she is cross at her own credulity or at me, for landing her in it. ‘Of course. I should have realised.’ She pushes at the food on her plate, but she is no longer eating. ‘How silly of me. Isa and her friends used to have this … game,’ she adds to Marc. ‘What was it you called it?’
‘The Lying Game,’ I say. My stomach is twisting, and I see Kate shoot a questioning look from across the table. I shake my head very slightly and she turns back to her neighbour.
‘I should have known,’ Lucy says. She is shaking her head, her expression rueful. ‘You could never believe a word any of them said. What was that one about your father being on the run, Isa, and that was why he never visited? I fell for that one hook, line and sinker. You must have thought me very stupid.’
I try to smile and shake my head, but it feels like a rictus grin, stretched across my cheekbones. And I don’t blame her when she turns away from me, quite deliberately, and begins to talk to the guest on her other side.
Some hour and a half later, and the meal is winding to a close. Across the table from me Kate has been eating grimly and determinedly, as if only by demolishing her meal will she be able to leave. Fatima has picked, and more than once I see her shake her head irritatedly at yet another waiter trying to serve her wine.
Thea has sent away plate after plate untouched, but she’s made up for it with drink.
At last, though, it’s the final speeches, and I feel a rush of relief as I realise this is it – the final furlong. We drink bad coffee, while we listen to a woman I vaguely remember from two or three years above us, called Mary Hardwick. She, it seems, has written a novel, and this apparently qualifies her to make a long, digressive speech about the narrative of the human life, during which I see Kate rise from her seat. As she passes mine she whispers, ‘I’m going to the cloakroom to get our bags and shoes before the rush starts.’
I nod, and she slips around the edges of the tables, taking the route Thea and I used at the beginning of the evening. She has almost reached the main doors when there is a burst of clapping and I realise the speech is over, everyone is standing up, gathering belongings.
‘Goodbye,’ Marc Hopgood says, as he slings his jacket back on and hands his wife her handbag. ‘Nice meeting you.’
‘Nice meeting you too,’ I say, ‘Goodbye, Lucy.’ But Lucy Hopgood is already walking off, looking away from me determinedly, as if she’s seen something very important on the other side of the room.
Marc gives a little shrug and a wave, and then follows. When they are gone I feel in my pocket for my phone, checking for messages, although I didn’t feel it buzz.
I’m still staring down at the screen, when I feel a tap on my shoulder and I see Jess Hamilton standing behind me, her face flushed with wine and the heat of the room.
‘Off so soon?’ she asks, and when I nod she says, ‘Come for a nightcap in the village. We’re staying at a B&B on the seafront and I think a few old girls are planning to meet up in the Salten Arms for a quick one before bed.’
‘No, thanks,’ I say awkwardly. ‘It’s kind of you, but we’re walking back across the marsh to Kate’s, the pub would be miles out of our way. And plus, you know, I left Freya there with a sitter, so I don’t want to be too late.’
I don’t say what I am really thinking, which is that I would rather chew off my own foot than spend another minute with these cheerful, laughing women, who have such happy memories of their schooldays, and will want to talk and endlessly reminisce about times that are much less happy for Kate, Thea, Fatima and me.
‘Shame,’ Jess says lightly. ‘But listen, don’t let it be another fifteen years before you come to one of these things, OK? They run a dinner most years, admittedly not as big as this one. But I should think the twentieth will be something pretty special.’
‘Of course,’ I say meaninglessly, and I make a move to go, but as I do, she catches my shoulder. When I turn, her eyes are bright, and she is swaying, ever so slightly, and I see that she is very, very drunk. Much drunker than I had realised.
‘Oh, sod it,’ she says, ‘I can’t let you go without asking. We’ve been speculating all night on our table and I have to ask this. I hope it’s not – well, I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but when you all left, the four of you – was it for the reason everyone said?’
The bottom seems to drop out of my stomach, and I feel hollow, as if the food and drink I have consumed tonight have been nothing but sea mist.
‘I don’t know,’ I say trying to keep my voice light and even. ‘What reason did everyone give?’
‘Oh, you must have heard the rumours,’ Jess says. She lowers her voice, glances behind her, and I realise, she is looking for Kate, making sure she’s not in earshot. ‘That … you know … Ambrose …’
She trails off meaningfully and I swallow against a hard, painful lump that suddenly constricts my throat. I should turn away, pretend to see Fatima or someone calling me, but I can’t, I don’t want to. I want to make her say it, this vile thing she’s circling around, prodding at, poking.
‘What about him?’ I say, and I even manage a smile. ‘I haven’t a clue what you mean.’
That’s a lie.
‘Oh God,’ Jess says with a groan, and I don’t know whether her sudden compunction is real or feigned – I can’t tell any more, I’ve spent so long steeped in deceit. ‘Isa, I didn’t … You really don’t know?’
‘Say it,’ I say, and there’s no smile in my voice now. ‘Say it.’
‘Shit.’ Jess looks unhappy now, the alcohol wearing off in the face of my fierce disgust. ‘Isa, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stir up –’
‘You’ve been speculating about it all night, apparently. So at least have the guts to say it to our faces. What’s the rumour?’
‘That Ambrose …’ Jess gulps; she looks over my shoulder, looking for a way out, but the hall is emptying fast, none of her friends are in sight. ‘That Ambrose … that he … he did … drawings, of you all. The four of you.’
‘Oh, but not just drawings, right?’ My voice is very cold. ‘Right, Jess? What sort of drawings, exactly?’
‘N-naked drawings,’ she says, almost whispering now.
‘And?’
‘And … the school found out … and that’s why Ambrose … he …’
‘He what?’
She is silent, and I grab her wrist, watching her wince as she feels the pressure of my grip on the fine bones.
‘He what?’ I say, loudly this time, and my voice echoes round the almost empty hall, so that the heads of the few girls and staff remaining turn to look at us.
‘That’s why he committed suicide,’ Jess whispers. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.’ And she pulls her wrist out of mine, and, hitching her handbag up her shoulder she half walks, half stumbles across the emptying hall to the exit, leaving me gasping, holding myself as if against an imaginary blow, trying not to cry.