He keeps very still thinking about it. It genuinely feels like it all happened to a different person. He closes his eyes and it’s a while before he can bring himself to creep from rafter to rafter to reach the box, carefully placed in a corner near the water tank.
The photos, taken out of their frames, are now tucked into a fat copy of the works of Shakespeare – a prize given to him in the sixth form, just before he left boarding school. The head teacher had let him stay on after his parents’ death, awarding a scholarship of some sort to discount the fees. He forgets the name of the ‘award’ but always suspected it was a kindness rather than something he earned. Decent of the school really.
Ed turns the pages to find the photos right in the middle. It’s a shock. They both look so young. Is that what Rachel wants to see? How young he was? What Laura was like? He frowns, again wondering how on earth Rachel guessed the hair colour.
He takes a picture of the photos with his phone but there’s no signal, not even one bar. He’s promised to forward one to Rachel straight away and will need to go back downstairs so the phone can link to the Wi-Fi. The phone signal in their village is poor at the best of times but the Wi-Fi’s good.
He’s careful as he twists himself back on to the ladder, climbing down and pulling the hatch back into place. He moves into his study to send the picture, adding a simple message. I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you. Why did you need this, Rachel? Please tell me.
He walks down the stairs, a pull in his stomach as he sits for a moment to stare at the phone, surprised at the ping of an immediate response.
A text from Rachel. I’m calling the police. Come straight back to hospital. Will explain.
He tries to ring her, desperate for an explanation, but her phone switches through to the answer service. No surprise and he can’t think what to say by way of message, so he hangs up. Rachel struggles with tough stuff face to face, never mind on the phone. He sighs, reflecting that up until now this has suited him. All those times he’s watched her descend these stairs to retreat into the kitchen to bake when things got tricky with Gemma in her early teens. Just leave your mum be. Let it go, Gemma.
He needs to hurry back to the hospital. Make her explain. Make it right and make her forgive him.
He stands, puts his phone back in his pocket and then frowns again as his mind seems to acknowledge something out of place. At first he can’t figure out what it is. He glances around and then notices there’s now a new letter on the doormat in a buff envelope. But he put everything on the side table, didn’t he?
He assumes a circular of some kind but when he picks it up, he’s surprised to find it’s addressed to him. There’s a stamp but oddly no postmark. The address is written out on a large white label, the writing childlike. Lower-case letters. He doesn’t understand. There’s no post at this hour. Much too late. He looks up at the frosted windowpane in the upper part of the door, wondering if this was somehow hand delivered, but there’s no shadow. No sign of anyone outside.
He tears open the letter and feels a rush of adrenaline at the contents.
There’s a single postcard tucked inside. No message.
Just a postcard of Wells Cathedral.
CHAPTER 30
THE DAUGHTER – BEFORE
Explore the relationship between fiction and metaphysics and/or ethics in any work by D. H. Lawrence.
Today has been just awful. The worst.
When I woke up and set off, I really was clinging to the hope there’s an explanation; that ‘S’ has been telling me the truth and there’s a reason he’s not been in touch.
Over the last couple of days, after the second （and third） pregnancy test came back positive, I tried again and again to arrange to meet him, but he just didn’t answer my texts. We keep messages to a minimum, obviously, and always delete them straight away, but he’s normally pretty quick to reply so this really threw me.
These days we meet off campus – a small, low-key hotel somewhere. It’s become too risky to meet up in his office as most students don’t see their tutors very often – if at all – so ‘S’ has been worried someone would notice me coming and going. I’ve finished the module he was teaching so technically I have no call to see him, except in that ‘tutor’ capacity, and he says it would arouse suspicion to use that card too frequently.
He normally texts the name of a hotel, different each time, and I meet him in the room. Not in the bar, in case we get unlucky and anyone sees us. To be perfectly honest, I’ve hated this because it feels sort of dirty and seedy and underhand. And yeah – I get that an affair with a married man is, in theory, dirty and seedy and underhand but I’ve always told myself it’s not like that with us because his marriage is over anyway.