Girl A(18)

My face was hot. I paused and swallowed, but Ethan didn’t notice. A stride ahead of me, now.

‘It’s a great platform to talk about education,’ he said.

‘And about yourself.’

‘Education in the context of ourselves. Do you even remember how happy we were to go back to school? I want all children to have that enthusiasm. To be able to rise above their circumstances. You should have seen the children I taught in my twenties, Lex. They were already shells. It’s our kind of enthusiasm that I’m promoting. I don’t know why you have a problem with that.’

‘Please, Ethan,’ I said. ‘Everybody knows you start with a slide of the mugshots.’

‘Sure. You have to get people’s attention.’

We had reached the river. Punts trundled past between the trees. I sat down in the grass.

‘With that in mind,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you about the house. Eleven Moor Woods Road.’

I closed my eyes. ‘Really,’ I said.

‘I think that this is a good opportunity for us. For all of us. A unique opportunity.’

‘Well, it’s certainly unique.’

‘Listen. It’s not so different from what you’re suggesting. With a few changes. A place for the community, yes. But we need to put our name on it. The Gracie Community Centre, Hollowfield. If you do that, you get the newspaper articles, the opening ceremony. You get access to more public funding. You help more people. Think about it. Shouldn’t part of that place be dedicated to our family? Whether that’s a speaker series, or some kind of memorial. We could – we could keep one room of the house as it was, so that people could understand what we went through. I don’t know. I haven’t finished thinking it through.’

‘A museum.’

‘That’s not what I said.’

‘Nobody in that community is going to want a shrine to yesterday’s news.’

‘They might do – if it brings other things with it. Attention. Investment.’

‘We didn’t exactly glorify Hollowfield the first time round,’ I said. ‘No, Ethan. It doesn’t need our name on it. Just a community place, with a decent purpose. What’s wrong with that?’

‘It’s a waste. I could do a lot with this, Lex. At least consider it.’

‘There’s no way.’

‘You need me to consent to your plan, too, remember. It works both ways. Who else have you even spoken to? Delilah? Gabriel?’

‘No. Just Evie.’

Ethan laughed. He waved his arm at me, as if dismissing a particularly frustrating schoolgirl, committed to failure whatever he might do. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

I told Ethan that I would walk back alone, and when he had gone I found a quiet patch of sunshine and called Bill. He didn’t answer. I expected that he was at a zoo or a barbeque, with children attached to his limbs. Still sweating. Ethan had left me savage, and I called again.

He answered on the third try. ‘I’ve given it some thought,’ I said, ‘and I accept.’

‘Alexandra? Is that you?’

His voice was surrounded by music, and he was walking, as if searching for a quiet corner. I felt a worm of embarrassment in my gut. The Gracie girl, he would mouth, to his extended family. Sorry.

‘I’m happy to hear from you,’ he said, catching up on his minor triumph. ‘And your mother – she’d have been happy, too.’

Mother’s happiness: threadbare, like wearing rope. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ I said. ‘Anyway. My sister and me – we have an idea—’

I walked him through the community centre, room by room. At the garden (daffodils, for the most part, and a patch of vegetables managed by children from the primary school), he laughed, and almost dropped the phone.

‘It’s perfect. Perfect, Lex. The other beneficiaries – do they agree?’

‘It’s a process,’ I said. And, when he didn’t respond: ‘It’s ongoing.’

‘Ongoing’ was a word from Devlin’s Temporal Dictionary for Clients, alongside ‘shortly’, and ‘as soon as possible’.

‘We’ll need to request funding, too,’ I said. ‘For the conversion. It’s a lot more than you could have expected, Bill. You don’t have to help with any of this.’

‘I know. I know that, Lex. But I’d like to.’

I was to secure the beneficiaries’ agreement. He would investigate the documentation. He mentioned planning applications, grants of probate, executor’s deeds. A whole new language of death and houses. We would have to think about the best way to pitch the application to the council, he said, bearing in mind where the money had come from. Perhaps – if I fancied an adventure – we would travel to Hollowfield, to deliver it in person.

‘The prodigal daughter returns,’ said Bill, who, for all of his time with Mother, had clearly never read the Gospels.

After dinner, Ethan went out. He had a late appointment with some of the Wesley governors at a hotel in the city centre, and we shouldn’t wait up for him. ‘They loathed me, at first,’ he said. ‘Too young. Too high profile. Too – what was it, Ana? – too revolutionary. Now they want me to sup with them at the fucking weekend.’ All dinner, he had been sullen, criticizing Ana’s cooking and pouring wine with deliberate zeal, so that it slithered down the stems of the glasses and stained the wooden table.