II.

Tipworth Police Station, 2.40 p.m.

I REACH ACROSS THE TABLE FOR MY COOLING TEA. My throat is dry from all the talking. My eyes, too, feel scratchy. I wonder if I could ask for some Optrex drops but one look at Grey Suit’s downturned mouth suggests the request wouldn’t be met in a generous spirit.

He still hasn’t spoken. While Beige Hair has been looking at me in a frank, friendly fashion and interjecting with the odd murmur as I recount the evening’s events, Grey Suit has been sitting impassively in his chair, arms folded across his stomach. No paunch. A hint of hard muscle beneath the gentle stretching of the shirt buttons.

I’m guessing you have to keep fit if you’re in the police. There are probably regular tests where they have to run measured distances as a beeper goes off at shorter and shorter intervals. I can imagine Grey Suit in shorts and a loose T-shirt, perhaps bearing the faded crest of an American university he never attended, sprinting with all his might, his face as void of thought as it is now.

I knew people like him at school: boys who excelled at physicality and who never needed to try with anything else. Big, slab-faced boys with no personalities and an understanding of the world wholly predicated on who would win in any given contest. The kind of boy who would always initiate an arm wrestle in a pub. They were popular, these boys. I wonder if it’s because we all have an innate need to be protected. So we seek out the bigger, brawnier specimens and we want to be around them because they will shield us one day when we most need shielding. They will man the lifeboats when we hit the iceberg. And for this, we are willing to overlook their complete lack of conversational guile or intellect.

‘So,’ Beige Hair is saying, ‘you weren’t staying at the big house. At Tipworth Priory, I mean?’

I can’t work out whether this is a tactic or whether she really hasn’t been paying attention.

‘No. As I think I already said.’

Beige Hair nods. ‘Of course you did, Martin. Of course you did.’

Grey Suit shifts in his chair.

‘That didn’t bother you, then?’ he asks.

‘What?’

‘Not staying at the Priory? With Ben and Serena?’

‘Not at all.’

In my account of the build-up to the party, I omitted a few of the more trivial details. There was simply no need for the police to know Lucy had been offended. Beige Hair keeps looking at me.

‘They had lots of family members staying,’ I say to fill the silence. ‘It was just a logistics thing.’

‘Right.’

I exhale more loudly than I intended, not realising I’ve been holding my breath. It’s ridiculous, really, how nervous they make you feel. Even when you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s like those customs officials at American airports, scowling and rude and suspicious of anything you say.

Beige Hair is looking at me expectantly.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t quite catch that?’

‘Well, Martin, I was only saying that they seem to have a lot of bedrooms at the Priory. It wouldn’t have been too hard for them to find space, would it? And you’re such close friends, it just seems odd …’

‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask Ben and Serena. Besides, there were security issues.’

‘Of course. The VIP.’

‘Exactly.’

I glance upwards to the ceiling, hoping to find something of interest there. In one corner, there is a hairline crack. A childhood memory comes to me unbidden: my mother washing my hair in the bath as I, hating every second, fixed my gaze on a crack in the yellowing ceiling, willing it to be over.

‘Are you all right?’ asks Beige Hair.

‘Perfectly.’

‘You look a bit upset.’

‘Not at all,’ I repeat. ‘Just wondering how much longer this will take.’

She turns one sheet of paper over, shifting it to the other side of her folder and revealing another page of foolscap beneath, covered with scrawled black handwriting.

‘So you and your wife arrived at the party before the other guests to have a drink with Ben and Serena,’ she recaps. ‘Did you think Mr Fitzmaurice was acting normally?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, did anything strike you as out of character?’

I shrug.

‘Anything on his mind, perhaps?’

‘It was three weeks ago. I don’t understand why you’re raking it all up now …’

‘You must know it takes time to gather together the relevant facts,’ she says. ‘As a journalist, I mean.’

I don’t say anything.

She tries a different tack.

‘How did Lucy think Mr Fitzmaurice seemed?’

‘You’d have to ask her.’

‘Oh, she’s been very helpful with our enquiries,’ Beige Hair says. ‘But I wondered what you thought, Martin.’

She waits.

‘Tell you what,’ I say. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’d like me to think was on his mind and I’ll tell you whether you’re right or not?’

For the first time, her expression hardens.

‘We don’t have time for guessing games, Mr Gilmour. In case it had escaped your notice, we’ve got a person lying in a critical condition in hospital.’

Mr Gilmour, now. No longer Martin. She stops. A note of irascibility is creeping into her tone and I can see her struggle internally to keep it in check.

‘We just want to establish the facts,’ she says, more gently. ‘So that we can work out exactly what happened and then we can all go home.’ She smiles. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’

Grey Suit sniffs his assent, but otherwise stays immobile.

I place the tea back on the table. They have given it to me without a spoon or a stirrer and the sugar has sunk to the bottom like sediment.

‘I thought he seemed entirely himself,’ I say.

Obviously, I am lying.

2 May

Kitchen, Tipworth Priory, 7.30 p.m.

WE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING as we walked back through to the kitchen. Our champagne flutes were empty. There was a distance between us, solid as concrete. I regretted my comment about not staying over. Stupid of me to say it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

‘So here, LS, we need your advice,’ Ben said, pointing towards a blank wall at the bottom of a narrow staircase in the back of the house. It must have once been used by servants, I thought, staring at the stripped wooden steps. Although did monks have servants? I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem a particularly monkish thing to have.

‘Oh. How so?’

‘We want a big piece of art. To lift it a bit, y’know.’

A few years ago, Ben started saying y’know, eliding the two words to form a seamless whole. It was around the time certain politicians started eschewing the glottal stop in order to demonstrate their man-of-the-people credentials. I suppose it was intended to denote a certain informality, a lightness of touch, a sense that, in spite of Ben’s enormous pile of inherited wealth and his aggressively successful hedge fund, he was in truth just an easy-going guy. Someone you could talk to. Someone you could kick a ball around with. Someone of whom one could say, ‘Oh Ben, he’s great. One of us. No airs and graces.’

This reputation was important to Ben. At school, it came to him naturally. Later in life, it was one he cultivated, and I found it less convincing. As a teenager, he had been touchingly sincere. These days, he saw sincerity as a valuable asset and it wasn’t quite the same thing. Admittedly, people who didn’t know him as well as I did gobbled it up. Ben acquired friends with ease. He had never liked being alone. And now, in this vast house, surrounded by sound engineers and gardeners and waiting staff, anticipating the arrival of some three hundred and fifty guests to celebrate his fortieth birthday, he should have been in his element.

‘What kind of thing were you thinking?’ I asked, knowing Ben wouldn’t have a clue.

‘Oh, fuck knows. Something … modern. And big.’ He laughed, rubbing his nose. ‘What’s the name of that guy Serena likes so much? The guy who does the graffiti?’

So fucking predictable.

‘Banksy.’

‘Yeah. Him.’

‘Mmm. Possibly a bit passé now.’

‘Ha! I knew you’d know.’

‘I’ll have a think,’ I said, knowing that I would do no such thing. It was clear no one would ever see this part of the house. Serena wouldn’t dream of asking for my advice anywhere that actually counted.

‘Thanks, mate.’ He squeezed my arm. ‘Let’s get back to the girls.’

Always ‘girls’, never ‘women’. It drove Lucy mad.

In the kitchen, Serena and my wife were perched awkwardly on high stools on opposite sides of a free-standing unit. The unit’s surface appeared to be constructed out of four-inch-thick white marble but as I approached, I realised it was a sort of galvanised rubber. When I touched it, it had a texture like a fireman’s hose. A lemon squeezer constructed out of chrome and resembling a rocket launcher stood ostentatiously in the centre.

‘… nightmare, you can’t imagine,’ Serena was saying. She raised her head at the sound of our footsteps, giving a short smile that quickly dissolved.

‘What are you two gossiping about?’ Ben bent and started rubbing Serena’s shoulders. She made a show of stretching her neck, moving her head from side to side.

‘I’m soooo knotted up,’ she said.

‘I know, sweetie. You’ve been working too hard.’

‘Has there been a lot to do?’ Lucy asked. I caught her eye. We shared a flash of amusement. Neither of us can take Serena seriously when she talks about being busy.

‘Don’t get me started,’ she replied. ‘You just cannot rely on people doing what they’re meant to do. And then there’s all the added security we’ve had to—’ She broke off. A warning look from Ben.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it’s only … well, we weren’t really meant to say anything …’

‘No, darling. We were sworn to secrecy.’

‘Oh come on, babe, it’s only Martin and Lucy.’

I noted the ‘only’.

‘What security?’ Lucy asked.

‘There’s a notion,’ Ben started, ‘but I can’t stress enough, it really is only a notion, that we might be expecting a very important guest.’

He paused, full of self-importance. I refused to encourage him and turned to look out of the window at the kitchen garden, filled with terracotta pots of herbs and flowering jasmine.

‘The Prime Minister,’ Serena squealed, unable to contain herself.

‘Darling.’ His hand came to a stop on her shoulder, the fingers pressing down next to her collarbone so that the crescent moons of his nails turned white. ‘We don’t know whether—’

‘No, no, I know. But he said he’d make every effort.’

‘Wow,’ Lucy said, with no enthusiasm.

‘She didn’t vote for him,’ I explained.

‘Did you?’ Ben asked me. ‘Or are you still pretending to be left-wing?’

‘I’d say that was none of your business, Ben,’ Lucy said, sharply.

He laughed.

‘Sorry, Luce, sorry. You’re right. No more political talk.’

The Prime Minister was an old family friend of Ben’s. His name was Edward but as soon as he’d been elected leader, he had started asking everyone to call him Ed in the vain hope that everyone would forget about his Etonian background. His and Ben’s mothers had known each other way back when. I had met him twice at Ben’s dinner parties, long before he became smooth and polished and airbrushed, one of those public men incapable of shaking a hand without clasping it. I didn’t have much time for him, truth be told. But Serena had always been pathetically impressed. She enjoyed proximity to power. I sipped my champagne. ‘It’ll be nice to see Ed again.’

‘Oh, have you met him?’

‘Yes, several times. At yours. For dinner.’

He nodded vaguely.

‘Of course, of course. I’d forgotten.’ Ben poured us all another glass of Veuve. ‘A lot’s changed since then.’

There seemed to be nothing to say in response. I took the stool next to Lucy, resting the soles of my shoes on a ledge that was too close to the seat to be comfortable. Ben stayed standing.

‘Yes, there’ll be plenty of people you know. Mark, Bufty, Fliss, obviously; Arpad and Seb. Oh, and you remember Andrew Jarvis, don’t you, LS?’

I stiffen.

‘From school. And Cambridge.’

‘Oh,’ I said, feigning nonchalance. ‘Jarvis.’ His name redolent of a smirk of thick muscle beneath a tightly buttoned school shirt. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘He’s an MP now. One of Ed’s lot. Junior energy minister. He and his wife have just bought a place down the road.’

‘He found someone willing to marry him, did he? Wonders will never cease.’

‘Oh come on, he wasn’t that bad.’

‘His wife’s a sweetie,’ Serena added.

‘She is,’ Ben agreed. ‘She really is.’

I let it go. Ben has a bottomless capacity to reinvent the past. I think it’s a calculated tactic. He rewrites a narrative to suit his needs at any given time and he’s so casual about it, no one seems to care. It’s an admirable skill, really, when one thinks about it.

Ben raised his glass.

‘To us,’ he said, one hand still resting on his wife’s neck.

‘To our dear friends,’ I added. ‘Ben and Serena.’

Ben, more at ease now in a familiar pose of bonhomie, gave an expansive grin. His top three shirt buttons were undone, revealing a sprouting of dark hairs. He was tanned. He was always tanned from a recent holiday or golf game or simple genetic good fortune. He smelled of oak and leather – the same aftershave he’d been wearing for years, ever since his father gave him a bottle when he turned sixteen. He was handsome in an unexpected way. His mouth was perhaps too large, a little loose around the lips. His nose was arguably a bit flat. There were wrinkles across his brow. But when you put it all together, it worked. There was a ruggedness to his looks, a worn-in quality that suited the encroaching years. I had to admit: I’d never seen him look so good.

‘Yes,’ Serena said. ‘Friends.’

Lucy tipped the glass back to a forty-five-degree angle and sank most of the champagne in one gulp. I laid my hand on hers. Her skin felt hot. She placed the flute back on the counter, fingers shaking.

There was a noisy clatter from the far end of the room and then the sound of childish squawking.

‘Mama!’

A small, rotund shape bowled across the floor and launched himself at Serena’s legs. This was Hector who, at three years old, was the most obstreperous of the Fitzmaurice children.

‘My love,’ Serena cooed. She bent to pick him up, straining the sinews of her yoga-toned arms as she did so. Hector was a barrel-shaped child with a square head and un-charming features. His brow loomed over the sockets of his eyes, giving him the appearance of an elderly ape.

‘Hello, Hector,’ I said.

This unprepossessing lump was, I’m sad to say, my godson. To be frank, I was offended they had waited till their third progeny to ask and I’ve never wholly got over the slight. I am, however, punctilious in the observation of all my duties. He got an engraved silver tankard for his christening and has had a bottle of fine wine put aside for him every year since then at Berry Bros. Heaven knows what he will ever do to deserve it. He has none of Cosima’s grace or Cressida’s impishness. (The youngest, Bear, is still at the baby stage, so it’s hard to tell how he’ll turn out.)

‘Gah,’ the child responded.

Tucked cosily on his mother’s lap, he looked glumly out at the rest of us, clearly wishing us all to be gone. He started pawing at Serena’s blouse.

‘Mee-ma,’ he said. ‘Mee-ma, mee-ma.’ His voice rose to an un-ignorable pitch.

‘No, darling, not now. Mee-ma for later.’

She removed his chunky, dimpled hand from her breasts. Serena believes in attachment parenting. She breastfed Cosima until she was four and had a full set of teeth.

‘Could I have a top-up, Ben?’ Lucy was reaching out with her empty glass.

‘Sorry, darling. Should have noticed.’

He poured the champagne too quickly so that it bubbled up, almost to the rim, and he had to wait for the foam to slide back down. When her glass was full, Lucy took it and swallowed almost half of it in one go. I had noticed her drinking more over preceding months and I didn’t want her to be drunk tonight. It would be embarrassing and, apart from anything else, I needed an ally.

I cocked my head towards hers.

‘Don’t you think—’

‘No, Martin. No I don’t,’ she said, too loudly. Hector, startled by the sound of her voice, started crying.

‘Oh baby, oh no, oh baby, don’t cry,’ Serena cooed. She stroked his hair with her hand. ‘They didn’t mean to shout, did they? No they didn’t.’

Lucy glared at me. Then she leaned over and tapped the child’s podgy leg with one hand.

‘Hey, Hector.’ Tap tap tap. ‘Hey, hey. I’m sorry. Don’t be a baby.’ Tap tap tap. ‘You’re a big boy now, aren’t you? No need to cry.’ Tap tap tap.

When Lucy removed her hand, I could see a red mark on his thigh.

Serena turned her back to us, shielding Hector from our sight.

‘Shall I take him?’ Ben offered.

Serena stood without answering and walked out of the room with the screaming Hector. The sound of her rubber-soled espadrilles on the tiled floor as she left seemed designed to express her unvoiced fury.

Ben exhaled. He shrugged apologetically.

‘Don’t worry about it, Luce.’

‘I wasn’t,’ she said.

Ben laughed. ‘Good. That’s OK then.’

He walked to the fridge, which loomed in one corner of the kitchen, emitting a low-frequency hum.

‘Snacks,’ he announced to no one in particular, sliding out a platter covered in cling film and bringing it over to the table. He took the film off with a flourish. There was a selection of soggy-looking salmon blinis, a few slices of hard cheese that looked like Manchego and some mini-sandwiches cut into triangles. A smear of brown in the centre suggested leftover chutney that someone else had already eaten. Leftovers, I thought. So that’s all we’re worth.

‘You guys want some water?’

I reached for a blini. ‘Yes, please.’

He came back with a bottle in a familiar shade of light blue. I immediately recognised the label: the cursive green writing, the line drawing of those hills I used to see every day when I walked to lessons. It was Burtonbury mineral water, said to be the finest in Britain and drunk by no lesser person than the Queen.

Ben twisted the cap, releasing a fizzing jet of air. As he poured, the splash of liquid against glass cracked the ice cubes.

Martin

Burtonbury, 1989

BURTONBURY WAS SITUATED ON THE OUTSKIRTS of a picturesque Midlands town which had flourished in the late Victorian era thanks to an abundance of natural spring water. The school building had once been a hotel for gentlemen afflicted with rattling coughs or dyspeptic stomachs, and pale-faced women in black lace suffering from attacks of the vapours who travelled up from London with their valises and their maids in order to ‘take the cure’. It was the most fashionable place to be seen: the rehab centre of its day, where faded personalities would disappear for weeks on end in order to drink from the wells and soak in tepid baths with hot flannel compresses strapped to their fevered brows.

For a time, a handsome young doctor from Adelboden in Switzerland – called, rather wonderfully, Dr Schnitzel – took up residence as the medical director. When I arrived, there was a sepia photograph of him still hanging in the school’s entrance hall: a bearded man with curlicues of hair framing each ear, his eyes hooded, like a lugubrious Russian novelist.

But the water cure, just like the cabbage soup diet, was a transient fad and, after a while, Dr Schnitzel returned to Adelboden, the custom dried up and the red-brick, high Gothic Empire Hotel fell into a state of disrepair. It was requisitioned during the two world wars. In the 1950s, it was bought up by a couple from Birmingham who made it into a care home for the elderly, ripping out all the marble-floored bathrooms and hand-painted cornices and replacing the luscious carpets with a thin, hard-wearing material in institutional green.

It became Burtonbury in 1960, a boys’ boarding school designed initially to cater for the children of diplomats posted abroad. Through the years, it cultivated a reputation for middle-ranking academic rigour and some modest sporting success. It was a decent school, but it didn’t belong to the higher echelons of private education. It tried very hard to be Eton or Harrow and yet, like a newly minted millionaire who buys a bright blue Rolls-Royce without realising it should have been a petrol-black Bentley, it never quite outgrew its arriviste status. Burtonbury always languished just outside the top twenty in the annual league tables. The Tatler Good Schools Guide was lukewarm about it on a perennial basis.

By the time I turned up – heaving my suitcase off the train, the cheese sandwiches swiftly disposed of in a platform wastebin – Burtonbury was undergoing something of a crisis of confidence. The paint was chipping off the skirting boards. The AstroTurf was peeling at the edges. The desks were still the old-fashioned kind, with swing tops and varnished ink splodges left over from an era when the Cuban Missile Crisis seemed as if it might genuinely explode the world. The teachers roamed the corridors with a look of resigned acceptance, like passengers on a ship they knew was about to hit an iceberg and sink, with agonising slowness, over the course of several years.

Into this, I arrived: a silent, sullen little boy relieved to be rid of the suffocating small-mindedness of his suburban upbringing; a boy who saw Burtonbury as an expansive academic canvas on which to make his mark. I was invigorated by the idea of reinventing myself. In my naivety, I imagined the school would be a modern-day version of the Platonic Academy, where like-minded young intellects could discuss profound philosophical ideas with each other. We would retire, at the end of each day, to pore over bookcases containing dusty, leather-bound tomes of Romantic poetry before gathering in the evenings for another energetic, yet respectful, discussion, perhaps in our pyjamas and flannel dressing gowns, eating hot buttered toast washed down with cups of cocoa and followed by a good night’s sleep. That was my notion of boarding school.

Needless to say, I was wrong.

The first glimmer of realisation dawned as I was shown to my dormitory room by the matron, a sallow-faced little woman wearing spectacles sticky with dust. I remember being hypnotised by those glasses – by the notion that someone could either be so lazy or simply not care enough to wipe them. They depressed me. My mother failed in many respects, but she was an excellent housekeeper and the cupboard beneath the sink at home was always filled with plentiful stocks of Jif and Flash and J-cloths and those all-purpose surface sprays which had labels illustrated with gleaming tiles in blue and yellow. To this day, I have a horror of the taint of teacup rings on Formica.

The dormitory was a long, carpeted room lined on either side with two beds, four in total. The double window at one end was framed by curtains patterned with footballs and cricket bats. The walls were painted a mild, sunny colour. It was clear that an effort had been made to make it look homely and yet, paradoxically, this only served to emphasise its institutional strangeness.

When I was shown in, there were already three other boys in the room, unpacking their trunks. I mumbled a hello but no one acknowledged my presence. They were chatting loudly to each other about their holidays and I caught snatches of their conversation here and there as I shuffled to claim the bed in the corner closest to the window.

‘Mate, she was gagging for it …’

‘No she fucking wasn’t.’

‘I swear.’

‘She told me—’

‘Her sister was at the fucking Feathers. I’m telling you. She’s a right slag.’

‘Yeah, and there was that time at the Admiral Codrington and you were bladdered, geezer, bladdered …’

‘Such a loser.’

They seemed to be talking in code, a conversational shorthand filled with names I could make no sense of. And although what they were saying was delivered in aggressive, foul-mouthed terms, they were laughing as they spoke, one of them occasionally breaking off to punch another one in the arm or slap him lightly on the back. The boys were taller than I expected and seemed older than me. They looked almost interchangeable: the same floppy-fringed hair, the same brown deck shoes, the same open-necked, deliberately un-ironed shirts and V-neck jumpers with threads coming loose at the cuffs.

My own clothes appeared outdated by comparison: neatly pressed suit trousers, polished school shoes and a plain white shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck. My assurance started to slip. My cheeks grew hot. The edges of my mind curled with uncertainty and I began to wonder whether my determination to get out of one life had led me to leap blindly into a worse situation. I knew, as I unzipped my suitcase (another thing I had got wrong – the other boys’ trunks were brass-buckled affairs with stencilled initials underneath the handles), that I would have to learn a whole new set of rules if I were to survive.

I unpacked rapidly, largely ignored by my room-mates: jumpers and T-shirts in a chest of drawers, shirts and blazer in a rickety wardrobe with initials carved into the soft wood all the way down one side. I stuffed my boxer shorts into a canvas bag and bundled them under the bed. At the bottom of the suitcase I noticed, to my shame, that my mother had packed a small brown teddy bear without my knowledge. The bear was called Howard and had been given to me at birth by an elderly aunt I had never met. Howard had been my constant companion for many years, his checked waistcoat fraying slightly more at the seams each time my mother put him in the washing machine. He slept in my bed, propped up next to the pillow. I didn’t pay him much attention and, indeed, had forgotten all about him in the exciting hubbub leading up to my departure for Burtonbury, but I suppose my mother, in a moment of uncharacteristic tenderness, had been concerned I might have noticed if he hadn’t been there.

Seeing him squashed in the corner of my case, his arm out of kilter with the rest of him, elicited a series of complicated feelings. There was a surge of nausea, a clutching at my stomach which I think must have been homesickness, followed by a stab of embarrassment superseded by horror.

I wonder now, looking back, whether she did it on purpose. Whether she knew that putting it in there would make me squirm. Whether she wanted to remind me that however much I tried to escape her and the suburban house with the double-glazed windows and the stuffy sense of not belonging, I would never entirely manage it.

I tried to zip the case back up with Howard still in it, looking at me reproachfully, but one of the boys chose just that moment to come across.

‘What’s this then?’ he said, leaning over and grabbing the bear roughly. ‘Your ickle-wickle teddy bear?’

He lifted Howard up and moved the bear’s arms with his fingers, in a parody of a puppet show. The other two boys snickered obligingly.

‘Have you come to help your ickle-wickle master settle in to his big new school, hmmm?’

‘Stop it,’ I said, quietly. ‘Please.’

The boy glared at me. His eyes were cold. He had a spot just below his left nostril which flared red from having recently been squeezed.

‘Give him back,’ I said.

‘Him?’ The boy sneered. ‘Him?! Hear that, lads? The bear’s a him. What? Does he get up in the middle of the fucking night and hang out with all the other toys for a fucking midnight feast?’

‘A teddy bears’ picnic,’ one of the others suggested, guffawing.

‘Yeah, exactly. A fucking picnic.’

The boy drew back his arm and, before I could stop him, lobbed Howard across the room. The bear hit the wall and slid to the ground, flopping face down onto the carpet. The other two boys picked him up, taking an arm each and subjecting Howard to a brief tug-of-war until one of them grabbed possession, ripping the bear’s arm in the process. I glimpsed a plume of white stuffing unravelling from the loosened joint. Howard went sailing over my head again, pitched like a rugby ball from one end of the room to the other.

And although I should have just left them to it and walked out of the room and gone to find something better to do, my upset and humiliation rapidly calcified into something more stubborn. I began to feel enraged. Howard might be a stupid, childish teddy bear. But he was my stupid, childish teddy bear and I think, now, I must have objected to my possessions being treated with such arrogance. I was always so careful with my own things, you see. Never liked to share. I believe it’s a trait of only children but, really, when you look at how callously people treat things, how they fail to discern their real value until it’s far too late, how they knock over priceless Ming vases in museums with their oversized backpacks, it seems to me to be the only sensible way to behave. Protect your possessions. And, by extension, yourself.

I attempted to intervene, jumping up to try and intercept the looping arc of Howard’s trajectory. The harder I tried, the faster the throws became. I was shorter than the other three and they knew they had the advantage. I could feel the pressing clamminess of tears. My vision blurred, then tightened, as if a sheet of cling film were being stretched across my brain, and I could feel the rage coagulating – a hard nugget of a thing, chipped and coal-black at the base of my spine, sprouting and twisting into fury which climbed up each vertebra, all the way to my heart and throat, sticking in my chest like a pool of warm tar. I could hear the snap and crack of the bird’s bones underneath the crush of that rock and before I knew it, I was clenching my fist in readiness to smack their stupid faces and punch each one of those boys to the floor.

A draught. The dormitory door opening. Confident steps across the carpet. And then a voice: ‘What the fuck are you doing, Dom?’

The boys stopped immediately. Howard the bear dangled from one of their hands. I raised my gaze from the floor and turned. There, standing in the square of the doorframe, was a curly-haired boy with a smattering of facial hair across his lower jaw. His voice had broken and when he spoke it was with absolute certainty that what he was saying was the most important thing anyone could be listening to at that given moment.

‘Oh piss off, Ben,’ said the boy with the spot by his nostril.

‘Give it a rest, Dom. Leave him alone,’ he said, talking as if I weren’t there. ‘Matron’ll hear. I’ve got a bottle of vodka for later and I don’t want her finding it, OK?’

The mention of vodka seemed to pacify Dom. He pushed a hand through his hair. The other two busied themselves with their unpacking. One of them started Blu Tacking a poster of a girl in a tennis skirt to the wall.

‘Yeah, sure,’ Dom said, the spot by his nose seeming to get redder with each word. ‘Sorry.’

‘Cool,’ Ben said, turning to leave. Just before he did, he looked over his shoulder directly at me. His eyes, caught in the light, looked silver. ‘You don’t need a fucking teddy bear, OK?’

He walked out of the room. I snatched Howard back, wanting now to rip his stupid head off, and I stuffed him under the bed, behind the bag with my underpants. He would stay there, ignored, for the rest of term. I forgot about the bear until it came to packing up my possessions to go home for the Christmas holidays and then he emerged, cobwebbed in dust and flakes of dry skin, glass eyes hardened by resentment at his abandonment, and I threw him in the bin without a second thought.

Notebook of Lucy Gilmour

KEITH SAYS IT’S OK NOT TO DO THIS CHRONOLOGICALLY. He says the order in which things come back to me is ‘in and of itself very interesting’.

It was Keith who suggested I jot things down as a way of processing what happened. To my surprise, I found it helped. My notebook has now become the outlet for all my most private thoughts. (To everyone else, of course, I offer up a more palatable version – and I include both the police and Keith in that.)

‘The mind has a way of organising itself,’ he said in our session earlier today. ‘Sometimes the most important things will remain buried for a long time and we remember them only on a cellular level.’

‘Muscle memory?’ I said.

‘If you like.’ Keith was sitting as he always did on the leather armchair on the opposite side of the room. The bay window was behind him, the bottom half obscured by plantation shutters painted pigeon-feather grey. The sun had shifted during the course of our conversation and now his head was backlit so that I couldn’t make out his features and I wondered, not for the first time, whether he sat this way deliberately, so that his responses remained forever unreadable.

‘Muscle memory,’ I repeated, the alliteration pleasing me as it tripped off the tongue. ‘Muscle Memory: A Memoir,’ I said. ‘By Lucy Gilmour.’

‘Interesting,’ said Keith. ‘Why do you say that?’

I thought of the miscarriage, of the way it had come back to me a year later, almost to the day, and I had found myself crying at the steering wheel of the car wondering why and it was only later, when I worked out the dates, that I realised what it was.

Strange. When I was in hospital, the nurses were so sympathetic and I didn’t think I deserved their attention. I didn’t feel sad. I was shrouded by a kind of intellectual numbness. I processed what was happening to me on a logical level and this seemed to me to be very important: to remove the emotion from it. Of course your body isn’t capable of holding on to a baby, the inner voice said; how self-indulgent of you to think it could.

I dealt with everything on a purely practical level. The cardboard tray they gave me for the discharge. The blood. The specks of something else, not yet formed, in the fluid. The sanitary pads, so thick they were comical. The pain, which came in waves that surged and then withdrew. Bent over double in the early hours of the morning, unwilling to press my buzzer because what I was going through wasn’t real. It wasn’t an illness. The pain wasn’t unmanageable. You’re making a fuss, the inner voice said; you’re embarrassing yourself.

Martin wasn’t there. I told myself it didn’t matter, that there was no point in both of us having a sleepless night. And besides, wouldn’t it be an extra thing to worry about? I’d have to handle him along with everything else. I’d have to worry about what his expression meant, about why he wasn’t talking, about why he wouldn’t hold my hand. I would have to explain his curtness to the nurses, to the doctors. I would have to neutralise his unintentional rudeness by over-friendly small talk.

The thing is – the thing to remember is – that he was capable of great charm. The first time I took him home to meet my parents, he was so brilliant at engaging them in conversation. He sat at the homely kitchen table, the wood of it knotted and stained over the years, and he asked solicitous questions of my mother, who was convinced no one ever wanted to talk to her and who blossomed under the attention. They were simple questions, obvious ones that normally no one bothered with – where did you grow up, what did your parents do, any siblings – and my mother, who too easily tended to think she wasn’t clever enough, answered fluently because she could.

He was drinking tea, I remember, and I was worried it wouldn’t pass muster, given his disdain for the builders’ on offer at the office. I knew my mother made pots of tea with a combination of PG Tips and Twinings Earl Grey and I tensed myself for Martin’s mouth to crumple with distaste when he sipped it. But when there was a lull in conversation he said with complete sincerity: ‘Mrs Hillhurst, this tea is delicious.’

‘Oh please,’ said my mother, flapping. ‘You must call me Pat.’

‘Pat then.’ He ran a hand through his hair, pushing back the front section that kept flopping forward. It was a gesture I had seen somewhere before and it took me a moment to realise what it reminded me of. Then it came to me: Ben had exactly the same habit. His best friend Ben.

My father was similarly taken. Martin, who never usually watched sport, sat through an entire rugby match on the sofa next to my dad and asked politely about what was happening and when and who the best players were and my father seemed pleased to be considered an authority. I watched them from the corner of the living room and felt content. Martin looked at me. I blew him a kiss. He smiled. I knew he was pleased.

‘Thank you,’ I said in the car on the way home.

‘What for?’

‘Making such an effort with my folks.’

He shrugged.

‘They really liked you.’ Martin didn’t reply. He kept looking at the road, his eyes obscured by tinted Ray-Bans. And then, because secretly I wanted him to respond with some warm words of his own, I added, ‘I mean, they liked you a lot.’

He flicked on the indicator. Tick tick tick.

‘I’m good with parents who aren’t my own.’

It didn’t strike me until years afterwards that it was an unusual thing to say.

The miscarriage wasn’t his fault. He had never wanted children. He had been open about this from the beginning, so I can’t claim I didn’t know. This had been one of his non-negotiables and I had agreed, too readily, too keen as ever to fence off his love, to rope it down and keep it safe.

We had the conversation in the cafe at the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea. An exchange over a bowl of sticky nuts and two Old Fashioneds (he liked to drink Old Fashioneds and complained if the ice cube was square rather than spherical). We congratulated ourselves on our rational ability to talk about difficult things without resorting to sentimentality.

‘Why don’t you want children?’ I asked and then, worrying I hadn’t struck the right tone, I added: ‘Out of interest.’

Martin prised a shiny cashew nut out of the solidifying honeyed mass on the table between us.

‘I’d be a disastrous father.’

‘No you wouldn’t.’

I reached across, tracing the shape of his knuckles with my fingers. He let his hand stay there, smooth and pink-brown as a bar of Imperial Leather soap. At that stage, I knew the barest outlines of his unhappy childhood. He had given the impression of neglect – a dead father, a distant mother, a boarding school adolescence cut off from parental affection – but without ever defining it beyond vague generalities. I read into the gaps, I interpreted the absence of detail as evidence of childhood trauma. It moved me. I could see why someone whose own childhood had been so tough wouldn’t want to inflict that on their own flesh and blood.

‘Besides, there are too many people on the planet,’ he said, removing his hand to wipe it on a napkin. ‘Not enough resources, and still we procreate. I rather like it just being us,’ he said and I had that fluttery feeling in my stomach. Only Martin could make me feel like this. A compliment from him was like warm sunshine on my back. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Yes.’ I raised my tumbler and said ‘Cheers’ and waited for him to clink his against it, which he did, laughing in that way he had which always made it seem he was astonished to be laughing, as if he was laughing in spite of himself and his facial muscles were temporarily beyond his control. I lived for that laughter.

Two years into our marriage, I got pregnant. By then, I knew I wanted a child and that I had been too hasty, too ignorant in accepting Martin’s conditions. My friends had their babies and I was enamoured by their rosy dimpled knees and thin, soft tendrils of hair. I liked their smell of fresh laundry and buttercups. I liked holding them, my arms providing the necessary shell to their fragility. It was such a cliché. The biological clock. But it kicked in, despite my determination to avoid it. And soon I was looking wistfully at toddlers in the street, imagining how I would dress my own and wondering what it must feel like to be loved by a small person with unquestioning entirety, at least for a while. At least until they grew older and discovered you were a disappointment.

The pregnancy was an accident. Martin didn’t like to wear condoms and I thought I’d taken the pill that morning, but I hadn’t, not for a couple of days. I didn’t think it mattered given how infrequently we had sex. It wasn’t the first time we’d been careless. Each time, I subconsciously hoped it would end in pregnancy. Each time, I got my period and felt a pain I chose to ignore. This time, miraculously, my period was late. Martin didn’t believe me when I told him.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

He didn’t raise his voice. He sat at the kitchen table, legs crossed. He unbuttoned his jacket and then said, calmly: ‘Lucy. We agreed.’

‘I know.’

‘And – what? You just decided without consulting me you’d go ahead and do this massive fucking thing neither of us wanted.’

‘You didn’t want,’ I muttered.

‘Oh no. No. I’m not having that. I said before we got married. I said I—’

‘I know what you said. But Martin, look, it was an accident. It’s happened. And maybe … well …’

‘Maybe what?’

‘Maybe we should be happy about it?’

He got up, went to the fridge and poured himself a glass of water from the filter jug. Need to change the filter, I thought automatically. Must get one tomorrow.

I waited for Martin to come back to the table, but instead he walked out of the room. After a few seconds, I could hear the muffled headlines of the News at Ten.

Give him time, I told myself. It’s a shock, of course it is. He’ll come round.

I spent the rest of that night making excuses for him.