‘Did she never tell you?’
‘No, not really.’ She had tried, but I hadn’t let her. I knew if I let her get too close I’d never be able to pull back if I needed to.
‘There was this boy in her year who she was friendly with. But then he started to want more, told her he was in love with her. She told him she wasn’t interested, just wanted to be friends. But she felt a bit uncomfortable around him after that and pulled back, started spending less time with him. That’s when it started.’
‘When what started, exactly?’
‘Notes in her bag at first, things like that: “Why won’t you see me any more?”; “I know we’re meant to be together”. Then he started waiting outside our house in the mornings before school, wanting to walk with her, and then when she wouldn’t he’d walk a few metres behind us all the way.’
‘Did you tell anyone? Your parents?’
‘Not at first. I mean, we used to laugh about it when it began. Also, I don’t know, teenagers didn’t tell their parents things in the eighties, did they? Not like they seem to now. The idea was that we got on with things ourselves. I hope my daughter’s not like that when she’s older.’
I know exactly what he means. Henry’s still so little that he tells me everything that happens to him, his life an open book, but even Polly’s daughters are much franker with her than I was with my parents. When I was a teenager, even before Maria disappeared, the life I had with my parents was completely separate from the rest of my existence – my real life, as I thought of it. When Polly asks her daughters how their day has been, she gets it all – the rivalries, the disagreements, the small kindnesses. She knows them. What my parents knew, and still know, is a highly edited version of me, a composite of who I was as a child and what I chose to show them of the person I was becoming.
‘Then when he wasn’t getting anywhere with that,’ Tim goes on, ‘he ramped it up. A couple of times she saw him outside our house late at night, looking up at her window. She didn’t tell Mum and Dad about that, in case they thought she was encouraging it. And then the rumours started.’
This was what Maria had hinted at to me, but I hadn’t wanted to hear it. I am overcome, as I have been so often recently, with an impotent sense of longing to go back and change the past. Change my behaviour, at least. I am a decent person now. I pay my taxes and go to the dentist. I recycle. I care about my friends, and about the world in general. But how do I reconcile that with the things I did when I was sixteen? I’m that person too, aren’t I?
‘What sort of rumours?’
Tim’s face closes up a little. ‘Horrible stuff. Sexual. But not only that she’d slept with such and such a boy, or whatever. He said she’d slept with girls too. I know that seems to be all the rage with teenage girls nowadays, but back then being called a lesbian was akin to being called a baby-murderer. Girls started to avoid her, even ones that had previously been her friends. Boys that had never even noticed her started sniffing around. And then a rumour went round that she’d slept with three boys at once. One —’ he stops to control the tremor in his voice, biting his lower lip, and then spits out the rest of the sentence ‘— one in each hole.’
‘But why did people believe him? If they knew her?’
‘If you get enough people talking about something it gathers its own momentum. And the idea that there’s no smoke without fire is a powerful one. Think about famous men who’ve been accused of sexual assault. Even if they are completely exonerated, if the case is thrown out due to lack of evidence; even if the woman withdraws her statement. What’s the first thing you think every time you see them on TV or hear them on the radio? “I wonder if he did it”. That’s what you think, every time.’
‘So your parents decided to move? You told them in the end?’ I remember that first day in the lunch hall; Maria explaining the cause for the move as ‘a bit of trouble’ at her old school; she was so determined not to carry it with her.
‘Not exactly. He did that for her. He wrote them an anonymous letter signed by a “concerned well-wisher”. Telling them about the rumours, these… things that were being said about her. Can you imagine hearing those things about your own daughter?’
I can’t imagine it, can’t imagine the pain and horror and sorrow of it. I think of Polly at her kitchen table, her voice dripping with barely concealed hatred for her daughter’s persecutor. And of Bridget at the end of the leavers’ party when she realised Maria was missing, her unflinching stare accusing me of an unknown crime.
‘What was the boy’s name? Do you remember?’
‘Remember it? Of course. His name was Nathan Drinkwater.’
I stop dead on the pavement and a mother with a double buggy bangs into the back of my legs, tutting as she manoeuvres round me.
‘Nathan Drinkwater? Are you sure?’ Maria’s only other Facebook friend, apart from me and Sophie.
‘I’m hardly likely to forget it, am I? What’s the matter?’
‘Did anyone else know his name? Anyone from Sharne Bay?’
‘Loads of people knew. Matt Lewis’s cousin knew someone who went to our old school. I was fuming at the time when he told everyone. We came all that way to escape what had happened, but we couldn’t. It followed us to Norfolk. I think it would have followed us anywhere.’
‘What happened to Nathan? Did Maria ever hear from him after you moved?’
‘No. I actually heard that he had died a few years ago, from a friend of a friend of someone who knew him. I don’t know if it’s true though.’
Is Nathan Drinkwater dead? If not, he doesn’t sound like the type to give up due to mere lack of proximity. Could it really be him on Maria’s friends list on Facebook? I wonder whether Maria continued to hear from Nathan after they moved, but told no one. And more than that, I wonder if he really is dead. And, if not, where is he now?
Chapter 31
2016
I had been hoping that my encounter with Pete in the café opposite Foster and Lyme would be my last; but as I emerge from the stunning Dulwich Village house belonging to one of my regular clients, Sue Plumpton, my phone rings and his name flashes up on the display. I am tempted to ignore it. There has been a comforting normality about today. I got absorbed in my consultation with Sue, and my head is brimming with ideas for one of her spare bedrooms, the latest in her house to get a makeover.