You would think I was past shame by now, but you would be wrong.
As I slid into the passenger seat beside him, I could bear it no longer. I turned to him and opened my mouth to speak.
‘Margot, I’m so, so sorry about that,’ he said, his arms crossed on the top of the steering wheel, his forehead resting against them. ‘I thought she might poke around you a little, but to be honest, I wasn’t expecting anything like… well, what we got.’
I stared at him. ‘You knew? You knew about me?’
He nodded wearily, not looking at me. ‘Yeah. I mean, I did tell you I’d checked you out before I met you…’
‘You said you’d looked at the school website.’
His mouth thinned. ‘Yeah. I may have done a little more.’ His fingers danced a nervous tattoo on the steering wheel. ‘Personally, I don’t see the big deal myself. You’re someone who went through a tough time and bounced back. I’m not sure it justifies all of this drama but, you know, Robert and Greta are coppers, and they think like coppers…’ He shrugged again, and his hands fell to his thighs with a soft slap. ‘They’re just being cautious.’
I looked away. ‘You know, Martin… there are things they don’t know about me at my work. About the…’
‘Suicide attempts?’
‘There was no suicide attempt,’ I said quickly, suddenly very alarmed. ‘The Narrowbourne thing was an accidental overdose of my anxiety medication. All they know at work is the one, isolated breakdown that happened years ago when I graduated and was living in London.’
They can’t actually fire you for having a history of mental illness – it counts as illegal discrimination under law. Thus, it doesn’t appear in your DBS check, which is what they call the old Criminal Records Bureau or CRB check that all teachers have to pass before they are allowed access to children or vulnerable adults.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you were hospitalized twice… once in London and once here, in Narrowbourne hospital.’
‘The second time was hardly anything,’ I said, and I could feel my cheeks heating up again. ‘They were over-cautious. I was actually fine. Not that it even matters, because if they find out about the second forced admittance at Narrowbourne, I’m done at that school.’
‘But it would be discrimination if they fired you.’
I shook my head, annoyed at his denseness. ‘You don’t understand. The first one was years ago, in the distant past, but the second was relatively recent, while I was working at the school, in fact. They never found out the full extent of it.
‘They couldn’t fire me. But if they found out about it, they could make my life very awkward until I quit.’
‘Would they?’ he asked.
I paused, thinking about Ben. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you sure that’s all?’
‘What do you mean?’
He rubbed his face. ‘I get the impression there’s more. You can’t seriously think they would fire you just for the things you describe.’
I raised my hands to my temples. I was trembling.
‘Margot?’
I put my hands in my lap, faced him. I had no choice.
I had to trust him.
‘I… Martin, before the nuns took me in, I’d run away from home. I did a lot of things. I got hooked on heroin – I was injecting it by the end. The nuns got me off it, but I’ve still got an affray arrest from when I was a minor.’ I ran my hands through my hair, frantic. ‘The school can’t find out about that.’
The arrest had resulted in a caution because I’d been under seventeen at the time, and it had never turned up in a background check. I understand they’ve relaxed the rules since and my caution is less likely to turn up than ever before – but again, if the board of governors found out about my scandalous past, it wouldn’t matter. They couldn’t fire me, but I would be well on my way to some sort of constructive dismissal. After all, we couldn’t have all the little darlings at school exposed to my depraved and debauching influence. And just because they couldn’t boot me out directly didn’t mean they couldn’t make my life a misery until I left.
No, no, no. This can’t happen.
When I took my hands away from my eyes Martin was looking at me.
‘I don’t know what you’re panicking about, Margot,’ he said. ‘Who’s going to tell your employers about this? You haven’t done anything wrong. You passed the background check, so it’s not like you’ll fail it now.’
I took a deep breath. I wanted to shake him.
‘I’m panicking because information always wants to escape.’ I sighed. ‘That’s the way of the world. My past, Bethan Avery’s fate – it all wants to escape. That’s why this is happening, after all.’
His reply was a sympathetic half-smile. He knew it was true.
‘I just… if that cow… sorry,’ I say, stopping myself. ‘I realize she’s a friend of yours.’
‘She is a friend of mine,’ he said mildly. ‘But you’re right, she was a bit of a cow today.’
‘If she or anyone else starts poking around in my life asking questions…’ I closed my eyes, let my head sink back. ‘I just need to publish this damned appeal, and Bethan Avery will either come forward or we’ll never hear from her again. Right?’
‘Right.’ He sat back in the driver’s seat, regarding me. ‘Unless you don’t want to do this any more.’
‘What do you mean? You think that I should just drop it?’
‘You’ve done your best, I’m not sure anyone would blame you.’
‘No.’ I took a deep breath, steadied myself. ‘I would blame me.’ I met his gaze. ‘Katie’s still missing, isn’t she? I would blame me.’
He didn’t reply for a long moment.
‘Come on,’ he said, turning the key in the engine. ‘You look like a woman that could use a drink.’
11
I cannot remember how I came across the nuns. I only know that I fell into their eccentric orbit, somehow. They used to send a plain-clothes nun or one of the lay volunteers to hand out cards at coach stations, in an attempt to rescue the young flotsam and jetsam of the provinces as they washed up in London, and I must have taken one.
But I remember my little bunk in the upper dorm of St Felicity’s, with its thin but rigorously boiled sheets, and the wailing sirens and roars of night buses that came in through the sliver of open window.
St Felicity’s, or Flicks as it was more commonly known, was run by the Sisters of St Mary of Good Counsel. In those days they wore habits – pale grey knee-length dresses, with short white wimples and veils, ugly taupe stockings (I asked about this and was told black was considered too racy) and sturdy brown shoes. They smelled of clean sweat and plain soap. Even after years of living with them, they never lost that aura of consecrated otherness, which I could admire but never had any desire to emulate.
They were managed by a woman called Mother Cecilia, who was from a little town in Fife called Lochgelly, and spoke with a soft accent. She seemed ancient to me, and was grey and ivory and paper-thin, and rustled wherever she walked – she made me think of spun lace, or fabric so worn that the sun shone through it. That said, it would be wrong to imply that she was in any way infirm or weak; she ruled St Felicity’s, and the nuns, with a kind of strident ferocity and energy, like a female Gandalf.
There were two parts to St Felicity’s – one was a pair of large, rambling Victorian semis that had been knocked through and into which homeless women were buzzed via the triple-locked door on the left side of the building. The front door on the other side, peeling and weather-stained, was never used and the bolt had rusted shut. (‘That’s the Golden Gate, child,’ Mother Cecilia replied one day to my puzzled question. ‘Like the one in Jerusalem. It won’t open until the Messiah knocks.’)