Haven't They Grown(26)
‘No messing about, no queuing for hours with half of London.’
Damn. How could I have been so stupid? Houghton Primary is a state school. Anyone who lives locally can send their five-year-old here for free. If I wasn’t so tired, I would have realised this much sooner. There’s no way on earth that Lewis Braid, with the money he must have now, would send his kids to a state school. Thomas – both Thomases, the seventeen-year-old one in Florida and the five-year-old one in Hemingford Abbots – will be receiving an expensive private education.
That’s how I’m thinking about this until I’ve gathered enough information to make sense of all the contradictory evidence: there are two Thomases. I’ve seen two Thomases – one in real life, the one I can’t possibly have seen, and one in photographs online, the one that other people believe in too.
My phone starts to ring on the seat next to me. It’s Dom. He was still asleep when I left the house, and has no idea where I am. I’ll text him, but not now. If I take the call, we’ll only end up having the same conversation we had last night; he’ll tell me I need to stop wanting the answers I’m always going to want until I get them.
Flora never called me back, though she promised she would. Lewis didn’t answer his phone again, though I tried calling it many more times.
‘When are you going to accept that there’s nothing more you can reasonably do?’ Dom asked me.
I didn’t reply, apart from in my head: When are you going to realise how fucking bizarre and creepy it is that a woman in the same room as Lewis Braid in Florida said the same words I heard Flora say outside Newnham House yesterday? ‘Lucky. I’m very lucky.’
Once Dom’s name has disappeared from the screen, I pick up my phone and put the words ‘Private primary schools near Hemingford Abbots, Cambs’ into the search box.
Various results come up, enough to convince me that there isn’t one obvious next port of call. I try to look at the first few search results, but it’s no good. My screen is too small, and cracked from when I dropped it on the tiles at St Pancras station last year. I’m not ready to go home. Where can I go that might have internet access and computers?
Half an hour later I’m at Huntingdon Library, staring at a screen large enough to contain all the information I need at a glance. There’s no obvious answer to the question of which school five-year-old Thomas is likely to attend. There are plenty of private prep schools in Cambridge but, having lived there for many years, I know how impossible it can be to get in on the A14 in the morning. From Hemingford Abbots, in rush-hour traffic, it could easily take an hour or more. Still, as a proud University of Cambridge graduate, Lewis would certainly believe that Cambridge was where the best education was to be had. No doubt about that.
He also believed in ease and convenience, and not waiting in queues, whether at airports or on busy commuter roads …
Would Flora be willing to expose her children to exhaust fumes for an hour twice a day? I wouldn’t. What would I do, if I lived in Hemingford Abbots and wanted my children to attend a straw-boater-and-striped-blazer sort of private school, but didn’t want to see, or inhale, too much of the A14?
I start to look through the other options and find one that looks promising: Kimbolton Prep School. Not too long a drive from Wyddial Lane, and possible to reach without getting snarled up in the Cambridge traffic.
A woman’s voice behind me says breathlessly, ‘You’ll never guess who’s upstairs!’
I turn, but she’s not talking to me. The white-haired man at the computer next to me, without turning his head, says, ‘Who?’ as if bracing himself for bad news.
‘John Major – well, a statue of him, anyway. Bronze or copper or something like that. What a funny thing to have in a library. John Major,’ she says again wistfully. ‘I never thought I’d miss him, but I do. Should have appreciated him when he was Prime Minister. He’d never have landed us in this mess.’
The white-haired man harrumphs in response.
I pick up my bag and make my way outside. Kimbolton Prep School. That has to be what Zan and Ben would call ‘a good shout’. There’s nowhere else nearby that looks like the sort of place Lewis Braid would choose for his child. And he always made all the important decisions.
Did Flora want to ring me yesterday or did he force her to, and then tell her when to end the call and that she mustn’t ring me back? Did he make her withhold her number so that I couldn’t phone her back later?
Dom didn’t originally want me to contact Lewis, but he couldn’t stop me, just like I couldn’t stop him from spending too much money on pub meals all those years ago, to support The Olde Jug’s new owners before they were our friends. That’s because neither one of us controls the other; we’re both free agents. Flora and Lewis, on the other hand …
What if he’s always manipulated her, and I just didn’t realise? So often she would say, ‘Lew-is’, as if she wished he would stop whatever he was doing. I interpreted it as her trying and failing to control him, but what if it was the other way round: him controlling her, keeping her alert and in check by demonstrating how far he was willing to go? Like the two-grand changing room …
When you’re young, you don’t seriously wonder whether your friends might be terrible people. You’re naive and optimistic; you assume anyone occupying the structural position of best friend must be a good person deep down.