Miraculously, Poppy was in bed and asleep when the front doorbell rang. I opened the door and found myself looking at someone different from what I’d expected. Haydon was a woman of about my own age, in jeans with a brown suede jacket. Her hair was short with a parting on the right, neatly combed, almost boyish. She wore thin wire-rimmed spectacles and her face was smooth. Everything about her seemed clean and neat and organised.
As she stepped inside, she looked at me and then around at the flat with obvious curiosity.
‘And you are?’ she said.
‘Tess Moreau.’
‘Yes, I know that. I mean who are you?’
‘Can I get you a coffee? A glass of wine?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘I’m fine.’
‘A glass of water?’
‘I just want to say something and then I’ll go.’
I gestured her towards the sofa and when she sat, she remained perched on the edge. She made no move to take her jacket off. It was like she wanted to make it clear to me that she could leave at any moment.
‘Why did you get in touch with me?’ she asked. ‘What do you want?’
As briefly as I could, I told her of my relationship with Jason, how it had broken up, how we had certain ongoing problems. I didn’t specify them. I felt I needed to be careful, to take one thing at a time. As I talked, I saw her face change, flickers of different emotions passing across it. She had probably heard all about me, but not my name: Jason’s version of our break-up; the story he told to women he wanted to captivate.
‘And you,’ I said, when I had finished. ‘You had an affair with him.’
‘How do you know that? I never told anyone. I thought nobody knew apart from the two of us.’
I explained how I’d had a false view about my relationship with Jason and that I’d learned a lot about him in recent days. I didn’t say I’d hacked into his computer.
‘You didn’t answer my question.’
I thought for a moment of those words you hear in films: anything you say may be used against you. I needed to be careful what I admitted to. I didn’t want to tell Inga Haydon anything more than I absolutely had to.
‘I just know,’ I said. ‘Let’s leave it at that. But I’m surprised you’re here. I wrote to you asking if you knew anything about a woman called Skye Nolan. You said you didn’t. So why are you here?’
Inga looked down at the floor and when she looked back up, I noticed that her cheeks were flushed.
‘You know you have an idea of yourself and you do something and it’s not who you are?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not someone, you know, who has…’ She hesitated, like she was having difficulty actually saying the words. ‘Casual sex. I don’t. I’ve never been comfortable with that. And I’m not someone who would have an affair with a married man. And I don’t think you should get involved in that way with colleagues. I think it’s just wrong.’
I tried to make sense of what she was saying. ‘So you’re a colleague of Jason’s?’
‘I’m a teacher at his school. I’ve only been there since September.’
‘And you had an affair with him.’
She took several quick, deep breaths. She looked like she was suddenly feeling faint.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘I was lied to,’ she said. ‘Humiliated.’
‘I thought you said nobody knew.’
‘You can feel humiliated by yourself.’ She looked at me more directly. ‘When I got your first email I felt like I was suddenly being punched on a bruise, over and over again.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
‘You weren’t to know.’
I thought of myself entering Jason’s house, breaking into his computer, reading his private mail. I thought that maybe I was to know.
‘At first, I wanted to have nothing to do with it. I wanted to pretend to myself. Then I decided I had to see you. I had two reasons. The first was that I wondered if you had been through what I had been through and, if you had, I wanted to sit opposite you and look at you.’
I did indeed feel her looking at me and I didn’t enjoy the experience. I had felt shamed by what I’d learned, but that didn’t make me want to be part of some kind of sisterhood of shame.
‘You said there were two reasons. What was the other one?’
‘You know the expression to “get someone into bed”?’
‘Well, yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose so.’
‘Jason got me into bed. He made me feel things and believe things and then once he had got me into bed, he made it clear that it was nothing to him. Just a bit of excitement.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Was that the second thing?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve got information about him.’
‘What kind of information?’
‘Emails.’
‘To you?’
‘To another colleague.’
‘What about?’
Now her voice sounded calmer, harder. ‘You know, sexual ones. Harassing ones.’
I thought for a moment. ‘How did you get them?’
‘Someone gave them to me.’
‘And you think if they were made public, they would be damaging to his career?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Very.’
‘Why don’t you do something with them yourself?’
‘I am. I’m offering them to you.’
‘I mean, do it yourself, make them public yourself.’
‘I don’t think it would look good coming from me.’
Before I could answer, she looked round sharply. I followed her gaze, and saw Poppy standing in the doorway. I expected her to say something about not sleeping or being thirsty or wanting a story but she was staring at Inga, her eyes wide, her mouth open, immobile.
‘Poppy,’ I said and she ran across to me and almost jumped at me. I held her in my arms and she clung to me, her face buried in my sweater, her hands gripping me so tightly that they felt like claws and almost made me cry out. I murmured consoling words into the top of her head and carried her back to her bed.
As I laid her back down, she started to sob and then almost to howl like an animal that had been cornered. I tried to soothe her but she cried and wouldn’t let me go. Finally I told her that I would just say goodbye to Inga and then I would come back and lie down with her and hold her and sing to her.
I returned to the living room and found Inga standing up, apparently ready to leave.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s got into Poppy but I need to go back and comfort her. I’ll get back in touch with you about all of this.’
‘We’ve met before,’ she said.
‘What? When did we meet?’
‘Not me and you. Me and your daughter. We didn’t exactly meet.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was once outside the house with Jason. Saying goodbye, kissing a bit. I looked up and she was in the window, looking down. She looked like a sort of ghost.’
I stared at Inga and felt nauseated by the thought of it, of Poppy noticing everything, the three-year-old girl, trying to make sense of her world, taking everything in. Was this woman trying to help me or was she getting me to do her revenge for her so she could pretend to herself it wasn’t her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have to see you out.’
‘Of course.’
‘One thing, though. The really important thing is Skye Nolan. We haven’t talked about her, but really she’s the reason I got in touch in the first place. Do you know anything about her? Anything, however trivial?’
Inga didn’t hesitate.
‘I told you in the email. I’ve never even heard the name before.’