“Oh, dear—”
“Lille wanted me to let you know how much you meant to her,” Kersti lies. “And to make sure you’re okay.”
“Me? After all these years? Why?”
“She cared about you. You were her favorite teacher. And . . . well, she really wanted me to get in touch with you and find out how you are. She always wondered after—”
“She was such a sweet girl. A really good human being. Marked for tragedy though, I suppose.”
“I’m sorry to call you out of the blue like this,” Kersti says. “I just felt I owed it to Lille. And the truth is, I’ve thought about you a lot, too. We all cared about you.”
“That’s very nice to hear,” she says, her voice sounding choked up. “You hope as a teacher to have some impact on your students. I’m touched, really.”
“I’m relieved I didn’t upset you. I just wanted to tell you about Lille.” And ask you if you went up to Cressida’s room the night she fell and possibly scuffled with her and pushed her off her balcony in a fit of jealous rage?
“I’m remarried,” she volunteers, quite matter-of-factly. “Simon and I have four girls. He tells people we live in Abberley-Upon-Hormones, in Hormoneshire.” She chuckles at their inside joke and right on cue, Kersti can hear a chorus of girls’ voices in the background, squealing or arguing. It’s hard to tell with girls.
“I still teach here in Abberley,” she goes on. “I have a good life. Simple and quiet. Lille can rest assured, wherever she is. It’s all turned out rather well.”
“It sounds nice,” Kersti says, elaborating on her earlier picture of their life and placing them in a charming stone cottage nestled in the Cotswolds. Kersti visited there once, in her second year at the Lycée. It was the Ascension holiday in May and they went to watch the annual cheese rolling in Gloucester. She remembers standing on the side of a hill, surrounded by turreted stone churches and medieval cottages and Union Jacks flapping alongside her under a steady drizzle, and a horde of people chasing a ten-pound cheese wheel down a steep hill with all the fervor and passion of the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Afterward, they drove through the rolling, rain-soaked Cotswolds, stopping at a place called the Crown & Crumpet for scones and clotted cream.
“And how are you doing, Kersti? Are you still in Canada?”
“Yes, in Toronto,” Kersti responds. “I’m a writer.”
“A writer? Really.”
“I write fiction. Historical novels.”
“Can I take any credit?”
“Absolutely.”
“I knew you had a talent for it,” she says, probably fibbing. “You just needed to polish your diamond.”
“You should be able to find my books in the UK,” Kersti tells her, and then rattles off the titles, rationalizing that if you’re going to brag about your literary success to anyone, it should be your English Lit teacher. “I was chosen one of the Hundred Women of the Lycée as part of their centennial anniversary celebration.”
“Congratulations, Kersti. My time there wasn’t all for nothing then.”
Kersti doesn’t know what to say. She remains quiet. Both of them do, for what feels to Kersti like an excruciatingly long time. The only thing crackling on the line between them is the tension from what they dare not speak out loud—the very public humiliation that ended Mrs. Fithern’s tenure and her marriage.
“Is she still alive?” Mrs. Fithern finally asks.
It takes Kersti a moment to figure out she’s talking about Cressida. “Yes,” she says. “She has permanent brain damage, but she’s alive.”
“I’ve often wondered. I think about her often.”
“You do?”
“Of course. She was only a child and I was very fond of her.” Her voice is tender, extraordinarily generous, given what Cressida did to her. And yet Kersti wonders, does some part of her believe that Cressida got what she deserved? If so, she doesn’t say it. What she says is, “Charles was the predator.”
Kersti can’t imagine what it must be like to find that out about your husband. She thinks of the early days of her own marriage, how life had once brimmed with promise, and how it’s turned out now. Disappointment is a thing you don’t see coming. It’s something you crash into, like the back of a bus.
“Did you know about the affair before Magnus told you?”
“I suspected, but I didn’t know for sure,” she admits. “Charles admitted everything to me after Cressida’s accident.”
“If it was an accident.”
“You know what I think?” Mrs. Fithern volunteers. “I think Cressida jumped from her balcony. She was an unhappy girl who got in over her head and tried to kill herself. Charles didn’t want that baby any more than she did. Suicide was her way out. That’s what I’ve always believed.”
“What baby?”
“She never told you?”
“No—”
“He got her pregnant.”
“Mr. Fithern did?”
“Indeed,” she says, as though Kersti should have known. Like it was common knowledge. “Charles always thought she jumped to punish him.”
Chapter 20
LAUSANNE—May 1997
Mrs. Fithern has a new haircut. It’s very short on the sides and puffy on top, like a poodle with a Mohawk. She’s also put on some weight in recent months and there’s speculation she might be pregnant. “What’s the book about?” she asks the class.
They’re studying Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night in AP English. Cressida is obsessed with it, has read it three times. Kersti finds it dull and depressing.
“It’s about rich people doing nothing in the Riviera,” Rafaella answers. “It’s about my parents.”
The class erupts in laughter. Naturally, they can all relate. Except Kersti.
“It’s about the dissolution of a marriage,” Cressida says. “About two people who bring out the worst in each other—mental illness and alcoholism.”
Mrs. Fithern sits down on the front of her desk. “What about themes? I want you thinking thematically.”
“Youth,” Cressida calls out.
“Yes,” Mrs. Fithern cries. “And specifically, the sheen of youth. The promise of youth.”
She slides off the desk and scribbles on the blackboard: “YOUTH.” “Dick was obsessed with his own mortality and lost youth,” she tells them, as though she’s speaking about mutual friends.
“And Zelda’s,” Cressida adds.
“You mean Nicole’s,” Mrs. Fithern corrects.
“Aren’t they one and the same?” Cressida responds. “Isn’t this book Fitzgerald’s attempt to rationalize his own decline and unrealized potential by blaming it on Zelda’s schizophrenia?”
Kersti and Rafaella look at each other and roll their eyes. Cressida is a brilliant student, but she can be cloyingly pretentious.