Chapter Forty-Six

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

GRAHAM KELLY IS having a drink at the end of the day. It's been hell – the way everybody starts panicking when a teacher has been accused of sexual impropriety. It's something every principal, and every administrator, fears. And now it's happened on his watch. He rues the day he ever hired Brad Turner.

He finishes his scotch in one gulp and pours himself another. Sandra walks into the living room and catches him.

‘What's going on?' she asks him uneasily.

‘You know what's going on,' he snaps. He's told her what's in that file that he gave to the police, and she said it didn't seem so bad to her. She told him that as far as she can tell, he's done everything right. He documented the complaint, and after Diana died, he went to the police.

She eyes him carefully. ‘I'm just wondering if there's something more you aren't telling me.'

He wonders what she would think if he told her the truth. Should he? Would it be easier to bear? ‘I might have made a mistake,' he says.

She steps closer. ‘What mistake?'

He looks at her, uncertain. ‘I should have reported it. And I didn't actually put the complaint in his official file. I kept it off the record, so to speak, in my own file.' He adds, ‘And now the higher-ups know, and they aren't happy with me.' It's just a fraction of the truth, a mere crumb.

‘Why the hell would you do that?'

She's upset. If this has upset her, then he certainly can't tell her the rest of it. ‘Because Diana didn't want me to report it, she didn't want it to be official,' he says testily. ‘She was adamant that it remain among just the three of us. She didn't want it to go any further. It's why I didn't believe her.'

She regards him suspiciously. ‘Why didn't Diana want it to be official? Why complain at all then? That doesn't make sense.'

‘No, it doesn't – unless she was lying. And that's what I thought, so I just kept a record for myself, and as far as I know, she was satisfied, and that was the end of it.'

She appears to think for a minute. Then she says, ‘But you should have reported it, and documented it officially, whether she liked it or not. You should think of yourself. You can't afford to lose your job! That isn't going to happen, is it?'

‘No,' he says, annoyed at her. ‘They're pissed at me, but they don't want it to look any worse than it is.' At least, he hopes that's true. But he fears it isn't.

‘Good,' she says.

She walks briskly out of the room, leaving him alone with his thoughts. He sits alone with his drink.

He has so many regrets. He wishes he were a different kind of man. A man of action, or at least a man who confronts things head-on and tries to put them right. He hasn't confronted the problems in his marriage. He and his wife have drifted apart. They don't sleep in separate rooms, but they might as well for all the distance between them. They had been in love once; it seems like a long time ago. He can still remember it, but they are different people now. Instead of facing this and trying to make things better – by going to marriage counselling, for instance – he'd avoided his problems at home by having a stupid fling with Cally Desjardins, twenty years his junior. She was a young, attractive new teacher who, it turns out, was only interested in him for what he might do for her career. It had all come crashing down around his ears. He'd felt like a fool, ashamed of himself. He wasn't afraid of Cally saying anything; it would not have reflected well on her either. He'd never realized that anyone knew. That Brad knew. Brad had seen them together. And now he's blackmailing him.

Graham Kelly sits alone in the living room, nursing his guilt and fear.

Paula is getting dinner ready, but her mind is somewhere else. She's thinking about Brenda Brewer and how alarming her behaviour had seemed this afternoon. She feels that she ought to do something. She needs to get her some help, but where?

Taylor wanders into the kitchen and asks, ‘How long till supper?'

‘About half an hour.'

She wanders out again.

That's another thing. Paula had spoken to a friend of hers, who has a daughter roughly the same age as Taylor. It hadn't been much use. Because Karen, apparently, had set up firm boundaries from the very start when she got her daughter her own phone. She knew her daughter's passwords for both her phone and computer and could go on them whenever she wished. Even as she'd listened to this, Paula asked herself if her friend was deluding herself. Or lying to her. Parenting can be so competitive. Maybe she had the passwords but was too afraid to look. Maybe her daughter had changed her passwords ages ago and Karen didn't know, and was living in wilful ignorance, as Paula suspects many parents these days are. Then Karen had admitted that, to be honest, she hadn't checked for months because her daughter gave her absolutely no cause for concern. It wasn't very reassuring.

Once she's got supper in the oven, Paula decides to seek out Taylor. She finds her in the den, looking at her phone. She sits down beside her on the old leather couch in front of the TV. She clears her throat and says, ‘Taylor, honey, can we talk for a minute?' Her daughter looks up at her warily, like last time. What's happened to her? Paula thinks. We used to be so close. Is this normal? ‘You don't seem so happy these days.'

‘What is there to be happy about?'

Put that way, Paula's not certain how to reply. There's so much wrong with the world now – wars, climate change. What a burden we have saddled our children with , she thinks.

‘Well,' she tries, ‘we're very fortunate. We have a family, a home, our health, our freedom. You can pursue whatever dreams you want.' She knows as soon as she says it that this isn't the way to reach a thirteen-year-old. Taylor rolls her eyes.

‘I'm thinking of changing schools,' Paula says.

‘What? Why?'

‘Because I don't think you having to go to high school where I teach is good for you, socially, I mean.'

‘What? No.'

‘I know what they say about me. Students will always complain about their teachers, I know that. It must make things awkward for you.'

Taylor shakes her head. ‘No, mostly they think you're great. I mean, they think you're strict, but they respect you. Not like some of the other teachers.'

This is a pleasant surprise; maybe she's got it all wrong. But then what is bothering her daughter? She sees tears forming in Taylor's eyes, and then the dam breaks.