‘Talk to me, Phil.’
He twisted his hands together. ‘I do love you, Cate. You know that, don’t you?’
She waited for the ‘but’, the wine churning in her empty stomach. Was the relationship that had sustained her for two decades about to collapse? Had his seemingly casual attitude to their neighbour Kiran been a clever bluff?
She looked into her husband’s dead eyes. ‘Are you leaving me, Phil?’
He shot forward in his seat. ‘Leaving you? How can you think such a thing?’ Her words seemed to knock a spark of life back into him.
‘You’re not having an affair?’
‘Cate, Cate!’ He shook his head. ‘Of course not. You’re more likely to leave me.’
‘Why? I’d never do that. You’re a great husband, a wonderful father. And a good man.’
‘A good man? You wouldn’t say that if you really knew me.’
‘It’s not just me who thinks that. Your children love you, your parents, your old friends like Evan and Lucy.’
‘Evan.’ He spat out the name. ‘Sometimes, I wish I’d never met him.’
He reached for the bottle of Valpolicella. She placed her hand over the top of his glass.
‘Phil. Talk to me. Whatever it is, you have to tell me or I’ll be imagining something worse. It’s Venice, isn’t it? You haven’t been yourself since the TV company told us where we were being sent. Is it something to do with Evan? Something that happened on your school trip? But you’re still such good friends…’
‘I don’t blame Evan for what happened. It was all my fault. But it was all because I was scared. Scared of…him.’
‘Of who?’
Phil bit his lip. Tears pricked his eyes again.
Cate waited.
‘Mr King.’ Phil dropped his head.
‘One of the teachers? You’ve never mentioned him.’
‘King was only there for a year. They didn’t tell us why he left. I wondered later if they – the school – had found out about him and got him to leave quietly without a fuss. They used to do that, you know, schools like mine: move a teacher on with a good reference rather than cause a scandal.’
He reached for the bottle again. This time, she kept her hands folded in her lap.
‘King was straight out of teacher training, young, handsome, charismatic. He taught PE; he was a brilliant cricketer. He wasn’t very tall and with his baby face, he could almost pass for one of us. Most of the boys looked up to him, as though he were a cool older school chum. But all that charm was a front. I thought I was the only one he picked on but there were probably others like me: a scholarship boy, without a deep circle of friends, a boy who knew he didn’t really belong, who was desperate to be accepted, to fit in. He could smell weakness; the more I failed, the more he’d goad me. I would never have signed up for the school trip if I’d known he’d be there. He joined at the last moment after the art teacher broke his hip falling off a ladder pinning the third form’s watercolours to the classroom wall.
‘He used to sneer at me, make me feel small; at school, he’d bash into me in the corridor accidentally on purpose, knock my books out of my hand. And in the changing rooms, if I wasn’t quick enough, he’d corner me…’
Cate’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘He touched you?’
‘He only ever touched me through my clothes, but I was terrified. I was so relieved to find we slept in dormitories in Venice like we did at Hillingdon. I knew he wouldn’t dare creep in there in case someone like Evan was awake. Looking back, I don’t think he was even interested in me that way. It must have been a power trip, letting me know what he could do to me. He preferred prettier boys with sharp cheekbones and pouty, petal-pink lips, so they said. Girls, too. The police found all sorts on his computer at the next school where he taught.’
Cate lowered her voice, conscious of three elderly ladies sitting nearby. ‘Did he go to prison? Has he come out?’
Phil stared at a point beyond Cate’s head. ‘He can’t go anywhere. Not any more. They say he ripped up his sheet and twisted it into a rope. And the weird thing is that when I heard he was dead, all I could think about was my trainers, that now I’d never get them back.’
‘Your trainers? I don’t understand.’
Phil rubbed his forehead. ‘Grandad died a few months before we went to Venice. He left me a few hundred pounds out of his meagre savings. Dad got the rest; he insisted on using most of his share to pay for the school trip. I should have saved the money or bought something sensible but I longed for these trendy trainers with bright-yellow laces I’d seen one of the sixth formers wear.’ Phil took another great swig of wine. ‘I stupidly thought the other boys would see me differently, that people would want to be friends with me. My best friend Raj told me to save the money for uni, for books and stuff and not waste it on trying to impress people. Raj grew up on the same estate as me, he won a scholarship the same year I did, but he never seemed to care if anyone looked down their nose at him, or maybe he just didn’t show it.
‘I got the trainers delivered to the school; they arrived just in time for the trip. I felt I was the bees’ knees when I got them out of my suitcase. A couple of the boys were impressed like I’d hoped but others just took the mick. King was even worse. He sidled up and hissed in my ear that they looked stupid on scum like me.’
