Girl Unknown(43)

At the end of the committee meeting one night, while the others were tidying away the coffee cups, Mrs Campbell made a neat stack of her paperwork and said: ‘Caroline, Aidan, a word, please?’

She hid it well – I’ll give her that much. Throughout the meeting she had behaved as if she was entirely without suspicion that two of her committee members might secretly be fucking. It was only when we went into her office and Aidan closed the door behind us that she addressed us in a tone of icy fury, her eyes bright with disgust. ‘I think one of you had better tell me just what is going on.’

At first, we feigned ignorance, even hilarity at the suggestion, followed by indignation when she would not be put off.

‘You were seen!’ she told us, and I felt a twang of fear.

Aidan refused to go gently, challenging her assertions, demanding to know the details behind the allegation – where had we supposedly been seen (Conways on Parnell Street), when (three nights ago), by whom (she refused to say).

‘You have children!’ she said, with exasperation. ‘How could you be so reckless with their happiness? So selfish and stupid?’

I couldn’t look at him afterwards. We both knew it was over.

Still I thought I could keep it secret, hide it from David, from my children.

At the school gates, in the days that followed, I began to notice the nudging and staring, the whispered conversations I was not party to. Then a phone call from another parent on the committee.

‘You’ve heard the news? Aidan’s left. He’s taking his son out of the school.’

It took a moment for it to sink in, my mind spinning off in all directions.

‘What about you?’ she asked then.

‘Me?’

‘Do you still want to be on the committee?’

‘What do you mean, Olivia?’

All that time, she had been speaking in her usual brisk manner. Now her voice dropped, taking on a confidential tone. ‘I think you know what I mean, Caroline.’

Just like that, I knew I would have to tell David.

And when I did tell him, later that night, it was like watching a coldness come over him, like a thin sheet of ice forming over his skin. I had expected anger, indignation, some kind of volatile reaction. Instead he just sat there, his breathing heavier as I gave my sorry account, made my shameful confession. Then, in a quiet voice, he had said, as if addressing his words to the table and not to me: ‘The children must never know.’

Robbie refused to speak the whole way home. I tried various methods of coaxing information out of him but he wouldn’t answer and after a while I gave up. The journey took longer than usual, traffic from a rugby match clogging the streets. As the wheels of the car crunched over the gravel in our driveway, I felt exhausted and troubled. Every single book or magazine article I had read about the adolescent male had warned of sudden fits of aggression, yet still I hadn’t believed it. Not my Robbie. Not my gentle boy. Had arrogance led me to think like that? The blindness of a mother’s love? He had always been softer than other boys, easily hurt. I had worried that he might be the object of bullying. To learn he was the perpetrator of violence had thrown me completely. I turned off the engine.

‘Robbie,’ I began carefully. ‘I know things have been strange lately. I haven’t been around as much now that I’m working again. If I haven’t been there for you, then I’m sorry. Perhaps you feel that I’ve let you down, but –’

‘I don’t. I think it’s good you have a job.’

‘Then what is it, love?’

He shook his head then pressed it back against the headrest, unhappiness filling his face.

‘What you did to that teacher … It’s so unlike you. What’s the matter? Has something happened?’

He didn’t answer.

A thought crossed my mind. All those evenings, the two of them up in his room, talking, whispering. ‘Does this have something to do with Zo??’

He put a finger to his mouth, biting at the corner of a nail.

‘I know you two get on well, Robbie. But I think it best if you spend less time with her. She’s older than you are. The long chats you have in your room – I don’t think they’re a good idea.’

He gave a small exasperated sigh and shot me a look of disgust. ‘Miss Murphy was the one who saw you together – you and Jack’s dad. The one who ratted on you.’

Something hard caught in my throat, like a cold stone wedged there. The shock of his admission and all the realizations that flowed from it. He knew what I had done. He knew. I felt it, like a fist around my heart.

‘Oh, Robbie …’ I wanted to explain it, to make it better. I knew, though, that nothing would, just as I knew he had lived with the knowledge all this time. David and I had secretly been congratulating ourselves on shielding the children from what I had done, and all the time he’d known.

He opened the car door and clambered out, and I sat there, watching him march to the front door, put his key in the lock and disappear inside. I thought of all the small triumphs of motherhood – teaching him to read before he started school, recognizing his musical ability before anyone else did, finding the instrument that best suited his temperament, remembering the flush of pride when the librarian remarked on how many books he got through each week for such a small boy. I thought of all these things and felt how flimsy they were, how paltry in the face of the pain I had caused.