Second Chance - Jane Green [14]
‘Hey!’ Anna says as he picks up. ‘Where were you? I thought you were going to be stuck to your desk for the whole afternoon. I got your message. Is everything okay?’
‘I…’ He doesn’t know how to say it, how to fit his mouth around the words.
There is a silence and Anna takes a sharp intake of breath, knowing suddenly that there is something terribly wrong.
‘What it is, Paul? What is the matter? What has happened?’
‘It’s Tom,’ he says, his voice flatter and darker than Anna has ever heard it. ‘He was on that train in America. He’s dead.’
Another sharp intake from Anna, and then her business side takes over. ‘Stay where you are,’ she commands. ‘I am coming home now.’
Anna walks in to find Paul exactly where he was after they spoke on the phone. He is sitting on the sofa, still in his boxers and the T-shirt he slept in last night, a shower now the last thing on his mind, and he is staring at the wall.
He looks up slowly as Anna rushes over, and she is speechless at the shock and pain in his eyes. They look at each other as Anna sinks down next to him and puts her arms around him, and for a while he just leans his head on her shoulder as she strokes his back, too raw to cry, too raw to do anything other than stay right here where it is safe and warm and good.
The girls’ school where Holly, Saffron and Olivia met sits high up on a hill in one of London’s leafier suburbs.
ST CATHERINE’S PRIVATE SCHOOL FOR GIRLS says the sign outside. Although if you drive past at 3.20 p.m. on a weekday, you won’t see the sign for the swarms of girls, large and small, identically dressed in burgundy pleated skirts and white shirts, the little ones bundled up in hats and scarves, the older, cooler ones thinking they can’t be seen, sprawling on the bench under the gazebo around the corner, cigarettes in hand as they give disapproving mothers the evil eye, resplendent in their teenage truculence.
Nestled in the valley of the leafy suburbs, a few streets away, is St Joseph’s private school for boys, yang to St Catherine’s yin, home of St Catherine’s male counterparts, recipients of thousands of schoolgirl crushes over the years.
St Catherine’s girls and St Joseph’s boys were destined to be together. Some of the more rebellious girls got in with a crowd from Kingsgate, the comprehensive in Kilburn, but what was the point in travelling so far when all the choral societies, all the fairs, all the parties and social events occurred between St Catherine’s and St Joseph’s?
There was even a rumour that Mrs Lederer, the steely-eyed, firm-but-fair headmistress of St Catherine’s, had been having an affair for several years with Mr Foster-Stevens, the steely-eyed, firm-but-fair headmaster of St Joseph’s, but nobody had ever been able to prove it, although Adam Buckmaster in lower fifth swore blind he saw them snogging after the schools’ joint performance of The Importance of Being Earnest.
Holly had been a late starter when it came to boys. The other girls in her class had seemed to discover them at around twelve, but Holly, apart from a crush on Donny Osmond when she was a little girl, had not really understood what all the fuss was about. Olivia, her best friend since they had started senior school, was exactly the same; and both of them were slightly worried about Saffron, who had always been just like them but in the last six months had started going to Kensington Market for black-leather, impossibly pointed shoes, and had sewn her school skirt so tight it was less of a hobble skirt and more of a straitjacket.
Saffron, while still their best friend out of school, had started getting in with a crowd that already wore make-up, already had boyfriends, and met up after school every day with a gang from St Joseph’s, usually going to someone’s house for games of spin the bottle or just