The Husband's Secret(107)
She knew exactly what Mahalia would say if she told her. It’s very simple, Cecilia; tell your husband he has twenty-four hours to confess or you’re going to the police yourself. Yes, you love your husband, and yes, your children will suffer as a result, but none of that is the point. It’s very simple. Mahalia was very fond of the word “simple.”
“Horseradish and garlic,” said Mahalia. “Simple.”
“What? Oh, yes. For my cold. Absolutely. I’ve got some at home.”
Cecilia caught sight of Tess Curtis sitting on the other side of the quadrangle, with her mother’s wheelchair parked at the end of the row of chairs. Cecilia reminded herself that she must thank Tess for everything she’d done yesterday and apologize for not even offering to call a taxi. The poor girl must have walked all the way back up the hill to her mother’s house. Also, she’d promised to make a lasagna for Lucy! Maybe she wasn’t skating so expertly over life as she thought. She was making lots of tiny mistakes that would eventually cause everything to fall apart.
Was it only Tuesday that Cecilia had been driving Polly to ballet and longing for some huge wave of emotion to sweep her off her feet? The Cecilia of two days ago had been a fool. She’d wanted the wave of clean, beautiful emotion you felt when you saw a heart-swelling movie scene with a magnificent sound track. She hadn’t wanted anything that would actually hurt.
“Oops, oops, it’s going to go!” said Erica. A boy from the other Year 1 class was wearing an actual birdcage on his head. The little boy, Luke Lehaney (Mary Lehaney’s son; Mary often overstepped the mark, and had once made the mistake of running against Cecilia for the role of P&F president), was walking along like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, with his whole body tipped to one side in a desperate attempt to keep the birdcage upright. Suddenly, inevitably, it slipped from his head, crashing to the ground and causing Bonnie Emerson to trip and lose her own hat. Bonnie’s face crumpled, while Luke stared in bewildered horror at his mangled birdcage.
I want my mother too, thought Cecilia as she watched Luke’s and Bonnie’s mothers rush to retrieve their children. I want my mother to comfort me, to tell me that everything is going to be okay and that there’s no need to cry.
Normally her mother would be at the Easter Hat Parade, snapping blurry, headless photos of the girls with her disposable camera, but this year she’d gone to Sam’s parade at the exclusive preschool. There was going to be champagne for the grown-ups. “Isn’t that the silliest thing you’ve ever heard?” she said to Cecilia. “Champagne at an Easter hat parade! That’s where Bridget’s fees are going.” Cecilia’s mother loved champagne. She’d be having the time of her life hobnobbing with a better class of grandmas than you got at St. Angela’s. She’d always made a point of pretending not to be interested in money, because she was, in fact, very interested in it.
What would her mother say if she told her about John-Paul? Cecilia had noticed that as her mother got older, whenever she heard anything distressing, or just too complicated, there was a disturbing moment where her face became dull and slack, like a stroke victim’s, as if her mind had momentarily closed down from the shock.
“John-Paul committed a crime,” Cecilia would begin.
“Oh, darling, I’m sure he didn’t,” her mother would interrupt.
What would Cecilia’s dad say? He had high blood pressure. It might actually kill him. She imagined the flash of terror that would cross his soft, wrinkled face before he recovered himself, frowning ferociously while he tried to slot the information into the right box in his mind. “What does John-Paul think?” he’d probably say automatically, because the older her parents got, the more they seemed to rely on John-Paul’s opinion.
Her parents couldn’t cope without John-Paul in their lives, and they would never cope with the knowledge of what he’d done and the shame in the community.