I can’t remember Thomas Braid’s exact birthday but I know it’s in February. That wouldn’t be considered young relative to other pupils in his year group, or old – just average.
‘Did Flora ever chat to other mums? Was she friends with any of them?’
‘Never that I saw. She kept herself to herself. Some people are good at projecting an air of self-containment, aren’t they? Especially the dads.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I say. ‘All dads turn into deaf–mute hermits at the school gates. My husband used to come back from collecting our kids in a mood of actual triumph if he’d managed to avoid being spoken to by any other parent.’
‘And those dads know where and how to stand so that no one will talk to them,’ says Lou. ‘Mrs Cater did too.’
‘Did?’
‘Does, I mean. Though, now that I think about it, she hasn’t been to drop-off or pick-up in ages. Or if she has, I haven’t spotted her.’
‘Has anyone else seen her? Recently, I mean?’
‘I haven’t asked them. We’re all so trained to mind our own business, aren’t we? It makes every aspect of life so much easier if we do.’
‘What’s your impression of Kevin Cater and Yanina?’ I ask.
‘I don’t warm to him at all,’ says Lou. ‘I think he’s got too much free time on his hands. No idea what work he does, if any. Which is unusual. With most parents, we find out quite quickly. It comes up in conversation. Mr Cater can talk and talk – unlike his wife. Sometimes you can’t shut him up. That’s usually when he’s at his most pompous, finding fault with someone or something.’
I roll the words ‘unlike his wife’ around in my brain. They feel so odd. Is Flora really Kevin’s wife? If her relationship with Lewis is over, why was she in Florida with him last night? An equally unanswerable question is: why would Kevin and Flora pretend to be married if they aren’t?
‘If there’s ever a mix-up or misunderstanding in communications, Mr Cater’s ready to pounce,’ says Lou. ‘Instead of drawing attention to it nicely, he’ll write in indignantly, cc-ing everyone from the head to the chair of the board of governors. It’s like he’s just waiting to dump his disapproval all over us, you know?’
‘I didn’t warm to him either,’ I tell her. ‘Before he lied to me, even. His manner was off-putting and unpleasant.’
‘Yes, it is, generally.’
‘What about Yanina?’
‘Hard to know what kind of person she is. Superficial, would be my guess. She’s friendly and smiley on the surface, but you can sort of tell it doesn’t go very deep. It’s more like she uses friendliness and charm as currency, to reach whatever her goal is at any given time. You know, the weirdest thing of all …’ Lou breaks off with a shake of her head.
‘What?’
‘Everything you’ve told me: Mrs Cater being the same person as your friend Flora, Yanina pretending to be Jeanette, the Toby and Emma lie, the older Thomas and Emily who live in Florida with their dad … it’s all so utterly creepy and beyond the bounds of normal behaviour, but … no part of it shocks me. I don’t disbelieve any of it. It was sort of a relief when you told me all those things.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I’m trying to work it out.’
Next to us, a girl with blonde curly hair in bunches starts to cry. Her mother leans across the table and says, ‘Jessica, you’ve already had one. You’re not having another. It’s bad for you.’
Lou says, ‘I ought to find your story implausible from start to finish. I ought to be horrified, but … in a strange sort of way, everything you’ve told me feelsright. All the suspicions I’ve had about the Caters and what might be going on … they’ve never been ordinary. I’ve never thought, “Oh, maybe Mr Cater’s sleeping with the nanny and Mrs Cater’s furious about it.” I think I’ve always known, deep down, that something was really wrong, but not known that I knew it. Or not let myself know I knew it because it was too big and horrible. Does that make sense?’
I nod.
‘But, like, at the same time, I don’t see how it can be true? I had no proof of anything. And if my intuition about it was so strong, how come none of my colleagues agreed with me that there was a problem?’
‘Intuition isn’t something most people have time for,’ I say.
‘I suppose it’s easy for me to say this now, but I do think I knew. Two things, really: that the behaviour I saw, however unusual, wasn’t half as odd as whatever was behind it. The cause.’
I wonder how much she’s allowing what I’ve told her to distort her memory of what she used to think. ‘What’s the second thing?’ I ask.
‘That the explanation, whatever’s really going on with the Caters, must be something so strange that I couldn’t ever imagine it,’ Lou says. ‘No matter how hard I tried.’
15
