London, 2023
We are a perfect family.
That’s what you might think, it’s what James would want you to think, one of those perfect families you see in an upmarket Sunday newspaper supplement. People want role models: it seems we fit the bill. A headmaster in his thirties and his lovely family, youth, brains, and beauty wrapped in a package. We were in GQ this week: Charlotte, my beautiful Lottie, fifteen years old, surfing in Cornwall, blonde hair flying; James, on the lawn with a Labrador, borrowed specially; me, in our Westminster kitchen, homemade focaccia on the island.
My husband has the important job and salary. I am the wife and mother, though not of his child. I am the cook for school events; chef sounds better but, all the same, a job that doesn’t threaten his. Never mind that I am the cleverer of us two, I needed the marriage and accepted the trade-off. You wouldn’t think that from the wedding photos of seven years ago. I look radiant, slim as a knife in backless ivory at the door of Chelsea Registry Office.
Father was dead by then. Mother was there, ravaged but making an effort. No one dreamt she’d outlast him. Lottie was eight, angelic in a white frock with her ringlets, it was impossible to tell how much she disliked James, even then.
Perfect lives you might say, looking at the magazine, perfect daughter, homes, clothes, hair, and teeth. You would have trusted in those images, they have power, which is what my story is really about: truth and power, how it’s traded and how lost.
A headmaster’s life is marked out in bells: assembly and lesson bells, lunchtime and prep time; they ring out across the narrow streets between the main school buildings and our house, louder and more insistent than the chimes from Big Ben, though we hear those too. Even if the bells didn’t echo in every room, I would still hear them. Even now I hear them in my sleep.
Back to the present, because this is a story that needs to be told as it unfolds.
Today is the first day of the autumn term. The London sky at dawn is clear, tinged tenderly with pink. It will be hot. In a couple of hours, the school children will dress in their thick winter uniforms, ties, and blazers. The doors of school will close behind them, shutting out the woods, the sandy beaches, and the sea.
James sits at the island in the kitchen, the lowest of the four storeys of our narrow terraced house which stands in a street of identical Georgian homes with dark brick walls and sash windows, three streets from the school. James is hungry after his work-out; he eats a mix of oats and seeds, yoghurt. Fruit. Two eggs. I eat almost nothing. Usually, nothing.
The kitchen looks over an enclosed and shady courtyard where the stems of a passionflower climb the walls, leaves yellowing, tendrils seeking the sun in vain. The plant is a long way from its sisters in Mexico, where we saw them on our honeymoon. It’s supposed to climb and sprawl in the heat, to throw up flowers and then fruit, but it’s struggling. I should root it out but it’s still alive.
It isn’t the first day of term for us. We’ve been back a month. A headmaster needs to set the course and steer the ship, never mind that it sails with a momentum of its own, piloted by others. With his hand barely resting on the wheel, James can focus on what he does best, charm. He charms the parents, especially future ones. He murmurs, with a self-deprecating smile, that he’s like a GP. He knows enough to diagnose and refer, though, here his voice dips in sincerity, the buck stops with him. You wouldn’t think that to look at him this morning: his face is calm. He knows the day ahead will be full of challenges, but he is confident others will meet them. Others, like me.
I sit opposite, reading his diary on my tablet, adjusting as I go, tapping in additions with comments for Libby, his PA. I keep abreast of the educational news, especially the current topics, sexualized bullying in private schools and paedophile teachers. We talked about it last night, but James is confident neither are problems here. James is always confident, it’s part of his charm.
He smiles when I pour coffee, but I doubt he sees me clearly, though he would if I wasn’t perfect: if my hair wasn’t shining with highlights and cut so it swings; if my body were not slim; if I didn’t smell of Chanel No. 5 or wear beautiful clothes. He pays for whatever I want, he’s generous like that. I represent the school and therefore him. Appearances are everything. Luckily, he can’t see inside. I hide my anxiety well. I make lists.
There are twenty items today. I’ve ticked off the first five already. The dawn run. Tick. James’s clothes laid out ready. Tick. The muffins with which to greet the staff preparing the food for the evening event. Emails sent to Libby. Diary updated. Tick. Tick. Tick.
The list frees my thoughts, which return to Lottie. She went back last night. Boarding was James’s idea, he thought it best she separate herself from us when she turned thirteen; after all he explained, he was her headmaster as well as stepfather; it could be tricky for her and in any case she needed independence. Anthony, her father, my first husband, was tracked down and consulted. He agreed as long as he didn’t have to pay the fees. Lottie was happy, she wanted to be with her friends and, I suspect, away from James, but I miss her. The boarding house is a mere six streets away; the kind of distance I could run in ten minutes, but all the same, I miss the late-night confidences, the random jokes and passing hugs, her sleepy freckled face at breakfast. I miss the stomping way she ran upstairs, the music, the scent of bubble bath. I even miss the mess, the games kit by the door, her scattered shoes. The toast crumbs and dropped butter knives, the empty biscuit packets in the cupboard. I’d wondered if moving out might make us closer still, but she’s more distant these days, she shares less. It’s her age, James says. He tells me not to worry but he can’t police my thoughts any more than I can. I can’t stop the background ache of missing her all the time.
James turns to the leaders, then skims the education pages. He has ten minutes left. He knows I’ll tell him when it’s time to slip on his jacket and walk the narrow streets that bring him to the school, through the stone archway and along the sides of the grassy square to his office. Libby will be waiting with a list of the day’s academic events, aligned with the social ones sent by me. I know the outline of his days before he does, and that today will end with the parents’ evening for future pupils.
You would think that the first parents’ evening would concern the current children, but you would be wrong. School life is about business: the next step, the cash flow. The first day of term is always about the future.
James is fine with that. James is fine with anything his team suggests, which is why everyone loves him. He trusts people, they trust him back. The mothers adore him. It doesn’t matter what the school children think of him, he is not someone they are expected to have opinions about, which makes him a little like God; they take him for granted as they do God. They feel safe, as I do. I doubt the pupils love him, though I did. I do. We are talking in the present tense, and in the present, I tell myself quite often we are deeply in love.
When we first compared notes, it was obvious my dreams had been brighter than his. I’d planned to set up a language school after university. I wanted to teach Arabic and Mandarin and link pupils across the world, but by the time I met James those dreams had faded. I was thirty-two, a single parent, teaching part-time, tutoring at night, clinging on by my fingertips. James’s dreams had never been dreams; they were ambitions. My dreams had won a student award but look where I am now and look where he is. Ambition wins every time.
The bell goes, the one that wakes the boarders. A few streets away, Lottie will be waking, wandering into the bathroom in her new pyjamas, yawning and greeting her friends. James stands up, tall, and broad-shouldered, his looks catch at my heart, still. I smile and hold out his jacket and he puts it on. He tells me I’m on edge today, and that’s not a good image to project, especially at parents’ evening. I need to be calm, and I promise to try. We kiss, my tongue in his mouth and his hand on my arse. I push my pelvis into his. I want him to remember this moment. I want him to remember the sex last night. I need him to think of that when he is with Libby or walking to lunch with a young student teacher. The equation balances: sex and cooking in exchange for a home and Lottie’s education. Money matters since I have so little of my own. It’s more than that of course, there’s his kindness, he’s always been a generous man. His looks count too. I want him to think of us standing in the hall, the bunch of dahlias to our right on the polished table. Our reflections in the large eighteenth-century mirror look like the cover of a book. Not a love story as it turns out, but you would have to be clever to guess that. The blood red dahlias would give you a clue.