Watching You: A Novel

Jenna saw Freddie Fitzwilliam about to turn up the hill to Melville Heights. Even from here she could see there was something different about him, something beyond the haircut. She crossed the road at the zebra and called out to him.

He turned and put his hand up to her in some kind of greeting.

‘Are you busy?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I am.’ He looked at her and she saw for the first time in his eyes a glimmer of something commanding; something of his father.

She said, ‘Can we talk somewhere?’

‘Now?’

‘Yes. Now.’

‘Well, you can come to my house.’ He glanced up at the painted houses in the distance. ‘If you like?’

‘Will your dad be there?’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘He never gets home till eight. At the earliest.’

‘Will your mum mind?’

‘No. She’ll be pleased that I know someone well enough to ask them to our house. You know what mothers are like.’

She looked up towards the houses, the pale, gold eyes of them in the afternoon gloom. She’d never been inside a Melville Heights house before. Her mother had; she’d had a best friend at primary school – the family had long since moved away – who’d lived in the pink house. Her mother had spent dozens of afternoons up there, she said, kneeling on a window seat and staring down into the village, making up stories about the people they saw below, small as dolls’ house figures.

‘If you’re sure?’ she said.

‘I’m sure,’ he replied.

Freddie’s house was cold. She pulled her padded coat closer around her as she followed Freddie down a wide, tiled hallway towards a kitchen at the back.

‘Where’s your mum?’

He shrugged and dropped his school bag and coat on to a settle. ‘Maybe in bed. She says she has flu.’

‘Oh,’ she replied. ‘Poor thing.’

‘She’s putting it on,’ he said, somewhat harshly. ‘Attention-seeking.’

‘Oh,’ she said again.

‘Do you want to take off your coat? I’ll make us some tea. If you like tea?’

‘I like tea.’

‘Cool.’

She left her coat and bag next to his and followed him into the kitchen.

‘English Breakfast. Camomile. Peppermint. Earl Grey. Rooibos.’

She had no idea what the last word he’d said was but nodded and said, ‘Just normal tea. Please.’

He pulled an English Breakfast teabag from a box and dropped it in a mug. He asked her if she wanted milk. She said yes. Divested of her coat, she was even colder. She noticed a window in the glass extension at the back of the kitchen, held closed with string. She could see the tail of the string wagging from side to side in the draught.

‘You should get that window fixed,’ she said. ‘It’s freezing in here.’

He glanced at her. ‘My father likes cold houses. He says it keeps the mind focused.’

‘Just keeps the mind focused on how cold it is,’ she said, tucking her hands into her jumper sleeves and shivering.

She watched him make her tea. His movements were very measured, almost robotic. He took the brewed teabags from the mugs without squeezing them dry, leaving a trail of tea splashes in their wake as he transferred them to a bin.

‘Did you ask the girl?’ she started. ‘To the ball?’

‘I did ask her. Yes. I asked her just now. About thirty-five minutes ago. She didn’t say yes. But she didn’t say no. She has Asperger’s.’

Jenna nodded politely and took the mug of tea from him. More tea splashed on to the table and she mopped it up with the cuffs of her jumper. She didn’t know what to say about the Asperger’s so she didn’t say anything. She wondered if Freddie had Asperger’s too, but decided it would be rude to ask.

‘So,’ he said, sitting alongside her, one thin leg crossed high upon the other. ‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about? Did you want to ask me something about boys?’

She laughed, gently. ‘Er, no. Not exactly. No. It was …’ She paused. How could she broach this? In his house? With his mother upstairs, ill in bed? She sipped her tea and then put it down. In a very quiet voice she said, ‘I wanted to talk about your father.’

His whole demeanour changed in a flash. He uncrossed his legs and leaned in towards her, his eyes wide with concern. ‘What about my father?’

She shouldn’t do this. She should thank Freddie for the tea, collect her bag and coat from the hallway and go. But then she thought of what she’d seen earlier: Mr Fitzwilliam’s hand on Bess’s arm, calling her his girl. She thought of the man in the black BMW who’d collected Bess from Jed’s house last week. She thought of Bess and Mr Fitzwilliam in the village, chatting in the dark of night, in the hotel in Seville, sitting on the landing. She thought of the love hearts Bess used to draw on Mr Fitzwilliam’s face, Bess crying in the toilets because she thought she was pregnant. She thought about the way that Mr Fitzwilliam sometimes looked at her, Jenna, the intensity of his gaze, the velvet of his voice, the softness of his jumpers, the well-placed box of tissues, the uninvited intimacy of their encounters. And then she thought, yet again, of the woman in the Lake District who had hated him so much and a voice screamed out somewhere deep inside her saying this is all wrong, wrong, wrong! And she looked straight into Freddie Fitzwilliam’s eyes and she said, ‘Do you think he likes young girls?’

She watched for his reaction, her bottom lip pinched between her teeth. She prepared herself for anger, or hurt. But instead she saw his face open into an expression of intrigue and he said, ‘No. Do you?’

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.

Freddie got up then, walked across the kitchen and closed the door. Then he returned and sat next to her again. ‘Has he done something to you?’ he asked.

‘Me? No.’

‘Then who?’

‘My friend. Bess Ridley.’ And then she told him everything, right from the beginning. He nodded as she talked and looked oddly unsurprised, almost as though he knew what she was going to say before she said it. ‘I suspected’, he said, when she told him about the hotel-landing incident in Seville, ‘that there was an ulterior motive for him going on that trip.’

When she’d finished talking he leaned back against the table and breathed out into his cheeks. ‘God,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This must be really hard for you. I can see that. This is your dad we’re talking about.’

‘I love my father,’ said Freddie. ‘In many ways he’s one of the greatest men I know. But in many others …’

Jenna waited for his next words, alarmed by the thought of what they might imply.

‘I have no idea if he likes young girls. But I think maybe he hurts my mother,’ he said.

Jenna flinched.

‘Sometimes,’ he began slowly, very carefully, ‘I hear things at night. From their room. Really weird, like thumps, and hard whispering, and it suddenly goes really quiet and then sometimes I’ll hear something that sounds like someone throwing up and then the next day, quite often, my mum wears a polo neck or a scarf or has bruises on her wrists and looks really ill and then she stops running and stops smiling and this happened a few days ago and she has a huge bruise on her neck which she will not talk about. And so, although I think my father is a great man I also, at the exact same time, think he may be one of the worst men I know. And I want to know, in a way; I want to know a truth-based bad fact about him so that I can properly decide what I think. Because it’s hard having two opinions, two types of feeling, both at the same time. I would prefer just to have one.’

Jenna thought suddenly of Bess wincing when she went to hug her in the toilets the other day.

‘Have you ever asked your mother?’ she asked. ‘Have you ever asked her about your dad? About the bruises?’

‘Yes,’ said Freddie. ‘But my mum thinks my dad’s perfect. He’s all she cares about. She loves me – but she cares more about him. All the food in our house is for him. It’s all just food that he likes. The heating is off for him, because he doesn’t like being warm. Even though I really like being warm. We never go on holiday, because he doesn’t like holidays. Even though I really do. But that doesn’t matter. He is the only person in our house that matters. My mum would never say anything bad about my dad. Ever.’

Jenna suddenly wanted to hold his hand, put an arm across his shoulder. But she had no idea how he would react. She wondered if maybe he was going to cry, but instead he looked up at her and said, ‘So don’t worry about saying bad things about my dad. I can take it. I really can.’

They fell silent for a moment and Jenna stared out towards the garden.

‘You know,’ Freddie said, ‘my mum was a student at my dad’s school. He was an English teacher there. He says they didn’t meet until my mum was nineteen, but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’

‘Do you think maybe there was something going on between them, then? When she was still a student?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘It’s possible. I sometimes think …’ He paused and rubbed his fingertips over his lips. ‘I sometimes think I don’t know either of them at all. And there’s another thing.’ He lowered his voice again. ‘My mum, the other day she said something interesting. I was asking her about the angry woman at the lake and she said …’ and then he broke into an incredibly convincing impersonation of what she assumed was his mother’s voice: ‘Maybe he had to expel her daughter or maybe she wasn’t pleased with her last report. You know how over-sensitive some parents can be. So obviously she knows more than she’s letting on about who she was and what was happening.’

Jenna’s eyes widened. ‘Did she really say that?’

‘Yes. I swear.’

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I bet we could find something on the internet about it. Do you know the names of the schools your dad used to teach at?’

‘Er, yes. Kind of. At least I know the names of the places he’s lived and could probably remember the names of the schools if I saw them.’

‘Have you got a laptop?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I’m going to get it right now. Wait there. Just wait there – and don’t move.’

She smiled. ‘I won’t move,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

He was gone for a minute or two. Jenna didn’t move a muscle, paralysed somehow by the strangeness of being in her head teacher’s kitchen. When he returned he plugged his laptop into the wall behind him and flipped it open.

‘Right,’ he said, opening his browser. ‘So, the first place he taught was Burton-on-Trent. That was where he met my mum. So, let’s look up schools there.’

Jenna turned to face the screen and let Freddie scroll through the results.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s the one. Robert Sutton High. I’ve heard them mention it before.’

‘OK. Now search for things about that school with your dad’s name in the search.’

He did this and they found a long list of newsletters about clubs and awards, local news stories about trips and plays. But nothing to suggest that Mr Fitzwilliam had done anything to make a parent angry enough to hit him.

‘Add “Viva”,’ she said.

He glanced at her. ‘Good thinking,’ he said. ‘Really good thinking.’

He typed the word Viva into his search terms and pressed find. When they saw the first line of the first search result they both inhaled audibly. They turned to look at each other.

‘Oh my God,’ whispered Jenna.

Freddie left the cursor blinking next to the result, his finger hovering over the trackpad.

‘Go on then,’ said Jenna. ‘Click on it.’

‘I’m scared to,’ he said.

‘Do you want me to?’

He nodded and she moved the laptop towards her. She clicked on the link.