I know where I heard the word lucky. Flora said it, standing outside Newnham House yesterday, talking on the phone. As well as saying she was home, talking about Peterborough and saying hello to someone called Chimpy, she said, at the very end of the phone call, ‘Lucky. I’m very lucky.’
I pick up my phone again.
‘What happened?’ says Dom. ‘Where did she go? Who are you ringing now?’
‘No one. Look. Look what it says for the last call.’ I pass him the phone.
‘No caller ID.’ He says it as if it’s an answer that raises no questions, and hands the phone back to me.
‘What does that mean?’ I try Lewis’s number again and get a busy signal.
I can’t call Flora back, or see where she called me from. If she’s in Hemingford Abbots and not Delray Beach, for instance. Which would explain why there had to be a separate call – why Lewis couldn’t pass his phone to her so that she could speak to me.
Then who was the woman I just heard saying ‘lucky’?
‘It could mean many things,’ says Dom.
‘No.’ It could, but it doesn’t. ‘It means one thing. It means that Flora deliberately withheld her number.’
7
The nearest school to Wyddial Lane is in a village called Wyton. Houghton Primary has a large, square courtyard playground bordered by an L-shaped beige-brick building and another L made from green prefabricated units. There’s a tree in one corner, tall and thick with pink flowers, pushing up the concrete on either side of it. I think it might be a cherry tree. Dom and I have often agreed that trees are like fish – we ought to know more than we do about the differences between the various types, but we’ve reached our forties and can still only identify weeping willows and salmon with any certainty.
The tree, together with a fence painted the same green as the prefabs, allows Houghton Primary School to make a welcoming first impression. It’s eight forty-five. The bell signalling the start of morning school rang a few seconds ago, and the children are shrieking with delight and running circles around one another. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to have so much energy. I got up and left the house at five this morning, having had only about two and a half hours’ sleep. I wanted to make sure to get here before the pre-school breakfast club part of the day, so that I wouldn’t miss any parents who dropped their children off early.
Flora Braid – that’s who you didn’t want to miss. Dropping off Thomas.
I’m no longer correcting every thought that passes through my mind. I know why I’m here and I’m not going to argue with myself about it: I’m waiting for Flora to bring her son, five-year-old Thomas, to school. Emily, at only three, is still too young for school. Maybe she’ll be getting dropped off at nursery on the way.
So far, it’s not looking promising. I’ve seen two black Range Rovers, but no sign of the silver one I saw outside Newnham House. When the children start to form a queue to enter the building, I know it’s not going to happen. They’re not coming. Flora wouldn’t allow Thomas to be late for school. Lewis always used to tease her for wanting to get to the airport two and a half hours before even a domestic flight. When we went to Corfu, he grumbled all the way to Gatwick about how early she’d insisted on leaving. ‘When I’ve got my own private jet, I’ll get picked up from my house,’ he said matter-of-factly, as if this was something inevitable that would one day happen.
‘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.’