Friday Morning

Mrs Wakeham was in the south study at quarter past eight on the Friday morning, in the dove-grey wool dress she always wore on Mr Wakeham's first morning home, with the small jet earrings, with the iron-grey hair pinned back from the forehead with two plain black grips, and with a single sheet of cream A4 paper in her left hand.

The cream A4 sheet had been typed, the previous afternoon, on the Imperial typewriter in the corner of the south study that Maeve had assumed for three weeks was decorative.

The sheet read, at the top, in the same Imperial-typewriter typeface as the manuscript:

For Maeve, on the morning of the fourth day, before five o'clock — Eleanor.

Mrs Wakeham was standing at the writing desk under the window, with the green-leather chair pushed in, with both her hands now folded over the cream sheet at her waist, when Maeve came up the marble stairs.

Mrs Wakeham said, very quietly, 'Sit down, dear. There is one part of the story I did not write into the manuscript on Tuesday. I shall give it to you this morning. I have written it down because I shall not, today, be able to say it.'

She handed Maeve the cream sheet.

She sat down on the small embroidered chair against the south wall, which was, Maeve had not noticed in three weeks, the only chair in the room from which a person could not, looking up, see the south window. The window in November light was a thing the chair had been turned away from on purpose.

Maeve sat down in the green-leather chair at the writing desk, in the carer's overall she would, today, not be changing out of, and Maeve read the cream sheet.

—

The cream sheet read:

Maeve, my darling — On the morning of the fourth of April 1975, your mother and I went into the headmaster's study together, before chapel, while the cleaners were still in. We had decided, on the staircase of the east wing the night before, that the two of us together would say, aloud, in the headmaster's study, the thing Tessa had walked across the quad to say alone on the second. The headmaster's study was empty. On the headmaster's desk, in the morning light, was a single sheet of school letterhead with a typed paragraph at the top of it that read, in the headmaster's hand: "Tessa Halligan, of the Lower Sixth, removed from St Brigid's by parental request. Friday, third of April 1975. To be removed from all class rolls forthwith. No forwarding address required." Below it, in the headmaster's pen, in ink, was a single short note in a second hand we did not at first recognise. The note read: "Done. He won't be a problem to us again. Tell the girls she's been moved to a school in Brighton. They will believe it. — M." Your mother read the note. I read the note. Your mother, who had been on the verge of being sick since she had walked into the room, walked very steadily back out of the room. I followed her. We did not speak in the corridor. We went to the small room at the end of the east corridor. We sat down on Tessa's bed, which had not been slept in the previous two nights, which had not been stripped of its sheets, which still had Tessa's small canvas overnight bag at the foot of it because Tessa had not, that previous Friday, taken her overnight bag home. I went through the bag. Your mother sat with her hands in her lap and watched me. In the inside pocket of the overnight bag, sewn shut by Tessa with a black thread that her mother had taught her to use for hems — the same black thread, my darling, that your mother sewed your school-uniform badge on with in 2008 — was a small folded sheet of paper. On the small folded sheet of paper, in Tessa's own hand, was written: "If anything happens to me at this school after the second of April, please give this to Cath Brennan and Eleanor Dorrien and not to my father, who will go to prison for what he will do to the man who did it. — Tessa." Underneath, on the other side of the folded sheet, was a single typed paragraph that Tessa had typed on her father's Olivetti the previous Sunday at home, and which she had carried in the sewn pocket of her overnight bag for nine days, and which was a fair copy of the letter she had taken to the bursar's study on the second of April. The typed paragraph said the thing. It said it in the way Tessa, who had been at the top of her year in moral philosophy, would have said it: in five sentences. Each sentence named the person responsible — the bursar — by his full name. Each sentence said what he had done, on what date, in what room of the school, with which witness in the corridor. There was no doubt in any of the five sentences. Your mother and I took the typed paragraph out of the bag. We took the sewn shell of the inside pocket. We took, from beside Tessa's bed, the small enamel hairbrush her mother had given her for her thirteenth birthday with TH in red on the handle. Your mother put all three things into the inside pocket of her own overnight bag. She kept them, my darling, for thirty-four years. They are, this morning, the second sheet of paper in the secret drawer of this writing desk. Press the moulded bead on the inside top of the right-hand top drawer. The secret drawer slides out. The typed paragraph is in a small green silk pouch. The hairbrush is in tissue paper. The pocket-shell is folded inside the brush. I am giving them to you, today, because they are not mine. They are not your mother's. They are Tessa's. They have been waiting fifty years for the right hands. The right hands are yours. — E.

Maeve sat in the green-leather chair, with the cream A4 sheet in her lap, and Maeve did not, for a long second, do anything.

Then Maeve put the cream sheet down on the leather inlay, parallel to the top edge.

Then Maeve, very carefully, opened the right-hand top drawer of the Davenport, and ran the pad of her right index finger along the inside top edge until she felt the small moulded bead, and Maeve pressed the bead.

The secret drawer slid out.

Inside the secret drawer was a small piece of tissue paper wrapped around a small enamel hairbrush with the letters TH in red on the handle. Beside it was a small green silk pouch. Beside the pouch, folded once, was a small piece of patterned cotton — the inside pocket of an overnight bag from 1975, with a row of small black hand-stitches across its torn edge.

Maeve lifted the green silk pouch.

She loosened the silk drawstring.

She took out a single folded sheet of typewriter paper, the colour of old butter.

She unfolded it.

She read it.

She read it three times.

Then she folded the sheet back along the same three folds the sheet had been folded in for fifty years, and she put the sheet back into the green silk pouch, and she pulled the drawstring shut, and she replaced the pouch in the secret drawer, and she pushed the secret drawer in.

—

She turned, in the green-leather chair, to Mrs Wakeham.

She said, in the careful neutral voice that had broken on the green silk ribbon in this room on the Tuesday afternoon and not before or since, 'The witness in the corridor. The witness in the corridor is named in the second sentence.'

Mrs Wakeham, in the small embroidered chair against the south wall, did not look up.

Mrs Wakeham said, 'She is.'

Maeve said, 'Her name is Mrs Hollis. The woman who lived in Surrey. The woman whose son cleared her house in 2023 and sent you the letter. The woman who, on the morning of the third of April 1975, signed the headmaster's note in the second hand we did not at first recognise.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'Yes.'

Maeve said, 'And the second part of her name in the second sentence — what is it.'

Mrs Wakeham said, very quietly, 'The name in the second sentence is Mr Wakeham's. He had two surnames at that time, my dear. He had been raised under his stepfather's name — Hollis — until he came up to Oxford in 1969, when he reverted to his birth father's name, which is Wakeham. Mrs Hollis was his mother. She was the matron of the upper boarding house at St Brigid's. She had been the matron for eleven years. Tessa, in the second sentence of the letter, names them both.'

She paused.

She said, 'That is why I married him in 1981, my dear. I married him because, by 1981, I knew that I would never, on any pension a girl of my year was likely to make, be able to prove what he and his mother between them had done. The only way I would ever be in the same room as the evidence, for the rest of my life, was to be inside the house in which the evidence lived. I married him so that one day someone in his house would, on a Tuesday in November fifty years later, be able to take the brass key off his watch-fob during the winding of his clock and open the glass front of a clock that contains, my dear, the third copy of the typed paragraph — the one he kept, in his own desk, for proof against his mother in 1975, which I took out of his desk drawer in 1983 on the morning after our anniversary and put inside the cabinet of the clock in the morning room while he was at chapel.'

She paused.

She said, 'I have not been near the clock for forty-two years. I have not, since 1983, been the woman who would have been able to take a key off her own husband's fob and not, by the small change in her hand under his hand, give the change away. I knew, in 1983, that I would need someone else to take it for me. I knew, in 2009, when your mother rang me from a phone box at Lewisham, who the someone else would be.'

She lifted her head, very slowly, from the small embroidered chair against the south wall.

She said, 'Your mother and I have been waiting for you, dear, for sixteen years. I am sorry. There was no kinder way.'

—

Maeve did not, when Mrs Wakeham finished, allow her face to do any of the things her face would, by the count of any honest observer, very reasonably have done.

She sat in the green-leather chair of the south study of the Belgravia townhouse on the Friday morning, with the typed paragraph her grandmother Tessa Halligan had typed on her father's Olivetti in March 1975 in the green silk pouch in the secret drawer beside her, and Maeve thought, in the small precise voice that had risen up in her in the morning room three days ago — and which she would, in the next nine hours, understand had been her own voice all along, the voice she had been given in the small Lewisham flat in the autumn of 2009, when her mother had taken her into the kitchen and had sat her down at the small green plate and had said, Maeve, my darling, I am going to tell you a thing that I shall be able only to tell you once —

The voice said, very clearly, Maeve. Now. The second drawer.

Maeve opened the second drawer of the right-hand side of the Davenport.

Inside the second drawer was the typed manuscript Maeve had read on the Tuesday afternoon, with the green silk ribbon retied around it, on top of which Mrs Wakeham had placed, that morning, three further things — a small unframed sepia photograph of a young woman of perhaps seventeen with a French plait done badly over the left shoulder and a small chip in the front tooth, in a school blazer with St Brigid's red piping; a small folded sheet of typing paper with a typed address in West London on it; and a small flat brass key, the size of a postage stamp, with a green silk thread tied through its eye.

Maeve looked at the flat brass key.

Maeve said, very calmly, 'Mrs Wakeham. There are two keys to the glass front of the Knibb clock.'

Mrs Wakeham, in the small embroidered chair against the south wall, said, 'There are two keys, dear. There have always been two keys. He carries the second one. He does not know I have the first one. I had a smith on Marylebone Road cut the first one to the original in 1984. It has been in this drawer for forty-one years.'

Maeve said, 'Then why must I take the key from his fob.'

Mrs Wakeham said, very gently, 'Because, dear, the thing inside the clock is to be taken out of the clock by Tessa's granddaughter, with Tessa's grandfather's own key in her own hand, while he is standing in his own morning room watching her do it. That is the thing your mother and I agreed to in 2009. I am not, my dear, prepared to release you from the agreement now you have come to it. I am asking you to make the swap. I am asking you to take his key off his fob during the four turns of his winding, to use the key in your own hand to open the cabinet of the clock, and to take out, in front of him, the typed paragraph that has been waiting for forty-two years inside it. The second key, which you may put on his fob in the place of his own, is for the chambers of the cabinet that he does not, my dear, know to look for. You may leave that key where it is in this drawer if you wish. The first key — his — is sufficient for the typed paragraph.'

She paused.

She said, 'I have arranged for the paragraph to be in the hand of a particular man at the Metropolitan Police, on Bishopsgate, by half past five this evening. The address is on the second small sheet in this drawer. The man's name is on the third line of the typed sheet under the address. The man is Tessa's father's nephew, my dear. He has been waiting, in his own way, for forty-three years. He will know what to do.'

She paused.

She said, 'Take your own time, dear. He winds the clock at five. We have until then.'

—

Maeve sat in the green-leather chair of the south study, with the small flat brass key in her right hand and the unframed sepia photograph of her grandmother Tessa Halligan in her left hand, and Maeve looked at the photograph.

The girl in the photograph had Maeve's eyes.

The girl in the photograph had Maeve's mouth.

The girl in the photograph had, in the small badly-done French plait over the left shoulder, the same loose flatness of plait Maeve's adoptive mother had taught Maeve to do her own hair in, on a Sunday evening, badly, in the small wall mirror of the bathroom of the bedsit in Lewisham, all of Maeve's adolescence.

The girl in the photograph had been seventeen when the photograph had been taken.

The girl in the photograph would, two years later, be the bravest person in any room she had ever been in, and would, in the spring of 1975, walk across a quad in the dark to a study door she should not on any account have opened.

Maeve sat with the photograph in her left hand for a long second.

She did not, on the long second, weep.

She had, on the Tuesday afternoon, used her allowance of weeping in this house, and the allowance was, by her own count, spent.

She said, very quietly, to the photograph — in the small precise voice that had risen up in her three days ago in the morning room downstairs, and was, this morning, the voice of her grandmother who she had never met and her mother who she had buried three weeks ago and Eleanor Wakeham who she had been working for for three weeks and Eleanor Wakeham's friend Cath Brennan and the small brave thirteen-year-old in 1975 in the small room at the end of the east corridor all at once —

'Tessa. I shall take it off his fob at five past five. I shall open the cabinet. I shall read the paragraph aloud. The man on Bishopsgate will have it by half past. The thing his mother wrote in the headmaster's hand in 1975 will not, my dear, hold for the rest of the day.'

She placed the photograph back in the second drawer.

She placed the brass key — Eleanor's spare, the one cut on Marylebone Road in 1984 — back in the drawer beside the photograph.

She did not take Eleanor's key with her.

The key she would take, at five past five, was the key on Mr Wakeham's own watch-fob. The key the typed paragraph was to come out from under was his.

She stood up from the green-leather chair.

She looked, for the last time that day, at Mrs Wakeham in the small embroidered chair against the south wall.

She said, 'Mrs Wakeham. Eleanor. I have understood. I shall do it at five past five. Will you do me one kindness this morning.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'Anything, dear.'

Maeve said, 'Sit in the morning-room chair you have been sitting in for forty-two years when he winds the clock. Sit in it as if today is a Friday like any other Friday of forty-two years. When I take the key off his fob, look at me. Look at me until I have used it. Do not look at him. He will not, while you are looking at me, look at you. He has not, in forty-two years, looked at you. He will look at me. He has been looking at me, my dear, since I came up the gravel drive three weeks ago.'

Mrs Wakeham, in the small embroidered chair against the south wall, did not, at first, say anything.

Then Mrs Wakeham, very quietly, said, 'Yes, my darling. I have always looked at you. I shall look at you this afternoon.'

Maeve went out of the south study, and went down the marble staircase, and went into the kitchen of the Belgravia townhouse, and put the kettle on for the breakfast tray she had been making for Mrs Wakeham every Friday morning of three weeks, and she made the tray in the same precise order she had made it for three weeks — the cup, the saucer, the spoon, the small dish of one half-grapefruit, the small dish of two oatcakes, the small jar of honey, the small linen cloth folded into a flat triangle at the corner of the tray, the small white lily in the small glass bud-vase Mrs Wakeham kept on the dresser for this one purpose — and Maeve carried the tray up the back staircase to the bedroom of the first floor, and Maeve put the tray down on Mrs Wakeham's writing table by the window, and Maeve drew the curtains all the way back as Mrs Wakeham had taught her to do on her first morning, and Maeve went back down to the kitchen.

She had eight hours.

She would, in eight hours, take the key off his fob, open the cabinet, take out the paragraph, read it aloud, hand it to a courier she would, at four o'clock that afternoon, telephone from the kitchen extension, and walk out of the Belgravia townhouse with Mrs Wakeham on her arm, into the back of a black taxi waiting on the corner of Eaton Square, and to the small flat in Pimlico Mrs Wakeham had, in March 2024, rented in her own maiden name and furnished, since, every Wednesday afternoon while Mr Wakeham had been at his club.

That, on the cream A4 sheet that morning, had also been written.

Maeve had read that part too.

She had not, while reading it, allowed her face to do any of the things her face would, by the count of any honest observer, very reasonably have done.

* * *