Perfect Little Children Read online

  Dedication

  For Dan, Phoebe, Guy and Brewstie

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Sophie Hannah

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  April 20, 2019

  Here we are, in the wrong place: Wyddial Lane. It’s a private road, as the sign unsubtly proclaims in letters larger than those spelling out its name, in a village called Hemingford Abbots. I switch off the engine, stretch my back to release the ache from two hours of driving, and wait for Ben to notice that there’s no football ground in sight.

  He’s buried in his phone. I can’t help thinking of it like that—as if he’s stuck inside the machine in his hand, unable to get out. Quite happy about it, too. Zannah’s the same. Most teenagers are, as far as I can tell: they spend all day and half the night in lock-eyed communion with an addictive device. No amount of my children telling me it’s “the way life is these days, so stop being so old and just chill” will ever persuade me to think it’s okay. It’s not. It’s frightening and depressing.

  Sometimes it’s also useful, to a parent who doesn’t want to be scrutinized. It’s likely to be a while before Ben notices the intense quiet—almost total silence, apart from the occasional bird chirp or gust of wind rustling the branches of the trees that line Wyddial Lane on both sides—and realizes that there are no teenage boys in football shirts traipsing past our car or anywhere nearby. He’s completely immersed: head down, lips moving as he types with his thumbs. I’ve probably got two minutes at least.

  Plenty of time. You can take in a lot in a hundred and twenty seconds, and that’s all I came here to do: have a good look. Many times over the past twelve years, I’ve wondered about Flora’s new house. Technically it ceased to be “new” at least a decade ago, though that’s still how I think of it. I checked last year to see if the “Street View not available in this location” message still came up, and it did. Maybe that’s got something to do with it being a private road. I can’t think what else it would be. Until today, I assumed that Wyddial Lane was very remote, but it isn’t. Despite the peaceful rural vibe, it’s only two minutes from a main road.

  I’ve no idea what kind of house I’d buy if, suddenly, money were no object, and I’ve always been curious to see what Flora and Lewis chose—certainly not curious enough to devote half a day to the four-hour round trip, especially when I might be spotted on my spying mission and I’d have no way to explain my presence, but interested enough to recognize a perfect opportunity when one presented itself. As soon as the list of impending football fixtures arrived and I saw “St. Ives, Cambridgeshire,” I knew what I was going to do. It felt like a reward for all those Saturdays spent driving Ben around, all the hours I’ve stood shivering by the sides of muddy fields far from home while he played. Finally a perk had been handed to me and I resolved on the spot to take full advantage of it.

  Today, if by any chance Flora or Lewis catches sight of me here, my excuse will be so close to the truth that it might as well be the truth: I’m driving my son to his Regional League match nearby and I took a wrong turn. Ben, sitting beside me in his red and white football gear, would be all the proof I’d need. Only the “wrong turn” part of the story would be false.

  For a better view, I’ve parked across the road from number 16, not directly outside it. To the left of the thick wooden gates, there’s a square sign, gray stone, attached to the high brick wall that protects all but the very top of the house from prying eyes like mine. The sign says, “Newnham House.”

  I shake my head. Unbelievable, that they chose to call it that. And those gates, a foot higher at their uppermost point than the top of the wall . . . Most of the houses here have high walls surrounding them. Being on a private road doesn’t offer these people enough privacy, apparently.

  Of course the home of The New Flora and Lewis Braid looks like this. I should have been able to predict it all: the ugly, sprawling modern mansion, the private road, the gates kidding themselves that they don’t appear superior and unfriendly because they’ve got curly flourishes at the top that look marginally more welcoming than the seven feet of dense wood immediately beneath them.

  There’s a silver box with buttons below the “Newnham House” sign—an intercom. I’d need to press those buttons if I wanted to gain access, which I definitely don’t.

  Is this what too much money does to people? Or is it only what too much money does to Lewis Braid? There’s no way this house is Flora’s choice—not the Flora I knew. And Lewis had a knack for getting his way whenever they disagreed.

  “Where are we? This isn’t the ground.” My son has finally noticed his surroundings.

  “I know.”

  “Then why’ve we stopped? I thought you knew where we’re going?”

  “I do.”

  “The warm-up starts in, like, fifteen minutes.”

  “And it’ll only take us ten to drive there. Lucky, eh?” I smile brightly, switching on the engine.

  Ben turns back to his phone with a sigh. He is considerate enough not to say, “I wish Dad was driving me.” According to our family folklore, Dominic is a good driver who plans well and allows enough time, and I am the opposite. This week was Dom’s turn to do football duty. He couldn’t believe his luck when I said I fancied an outing and offered to go instead. I doubt he remembers that Flora and Lewis moved to very near St. Ives soon after we last saw them. Even if he does, he wouldn’t suspect I had a secret agenda. Dominic would never take a ten-minute detour in order to see the current home of someone he hadn’t seen for twelve years—therefore, in his mind, neither would I.

  “Fuck off!” Ben says to his phone.

  “Ben. What have we—”

  “Sorry.” He makes that sound like a swear word too. “Do you have a list of everything Dad’s ever done wrong?”

  “What? No, of course not.”

  “So it’s not normal, then? Most people in relationships don’t do it?”

  “A written list? Definitely not.”

  “Lauren’s got a list on her phone of everything I’ve done wrong since we’ve been a thing.”

  Lauren, a model-level-beautiful girl who is excessively polite to me and eats nothing apart from noodles according to both my children, describes herself as Ben’s girlfriend. He objects to this terminology and insists that they are merely “a thing.”

  “But you’ve never done anything wrong to Lauren, have you? Or have you?” They’ve only been together—if that’s the right way to put it—for three weeks.

  “I put two ‘x’s in my last message instead of three. That’s the latest thing.”

  “Did you do it deliberately?”

  “No. I didn’t even know I’d done it. Didn’t think about it.”

  I indicate to turn onto the main road, wishing I had a choice and could stay a bit longer on Wyddial Lane. Why? I did what I wanted to
do, saw what there was to see from the outside. That ought to feel like enough.

  “Who the fu— Who counts kisses in a message?” Ben says.

  “Girls do. Some girls, anyway. Lauren’s obviously one of them.”

  “First the problem was me not doing it—she’d always put a line of ‘x’s at the bottom of her messages and I never would, and she thought that meant I don’t care about her—so I started putting them in, and now she’s counting how many, and thinking it means something if I do one less than in the last message. That’s crazy, right?”

  “Ask Zannah if she counts how many kisses Murad puts in each message.” Murad, to my knowledge, has only once done something wrong in the year and a half that he and Zannah have been whatever-they-call-it, and he turned up looking tearful the following morning, clutching a dozen red roses. Zannah was delighted, both by the roses and by the news of the sleepless night he’d suffered after “criticizing me when I’d done fuck all wrong. Mum, I literally don’t care what you think about me swearing right now. Sometimes I need to swear, or I’d throw myself off a bridge.”

  I would be very surprised if my daughter did not keep on top of the kisses-per-message statistics.

  Ben groans. “And now, because I didn’t instantly reply and say ‘Oh, sorry, sorry,’ and send a long line of ‘x’s, she’s going to accuse me of blanking her.”

  “So why not reply and send more kisses?”

  “No! Why should I?”

  “You’re right. You shouldn’t.” Poor boy. He’s fourteen, for God’s sake—too young to be engaged in fraught relationship negotiations.

  “I’ve done nothing wrong. Ask Zannah, Mum. Lauren’s a high-maintenance, needy—”

  “Ben!”

  “Person. I was going to say ‘person.’”

  “Yeah. Course you were.” I’m glad his instinct is to stand up for himself, and that he’s not planning to cry all night and take roses around to Lauren’s house tomorrow morning.

  Ten minutes later we’re parked in the right place. Ben climbs out of the car. “You coming to watch?” he asks, tossing his phone onto the passenger seat. I usually do. I’m not remotely interested in football, but I love to see Ben doing something healthy and worthwhile, something other than being the slave of an electronic device.

  “In a bit,” I say. “First I want to find a supermarket and get something for dinner tonight.”

  I watch him run off. Soon he and other red-and-white-clad boys are pushing each other around happily—trying to trip each other up, grabbing each other’s backpacks.

  On the passenger seat, Ben’s phone starts to ring. “Zannah” flashes up on the screen. I pick it up. “Hi, darling. Everything okay?” Zannah isn’t normally awake before noon on a Saturday.

  “Where’s Ben?” The clipped precision of her words doesn’t bode well.

  “Football.”

  “Really? According to Snap Maps, he was on a street called Widdle Lane or something ten minutes ago. What the hell was he doing there?”

  “Wyddial Lane. Yeah, that’s nearby. Now we’re at football.”

  “Right. When you next see him, can you please ask him to deal with his high-maintenance nightmare of a girlfriend? Thanks. She’s just called me and woken me up to tell me that Ben blanked her in the middle of an important conversation, and can I ask him to message her? Their pathetic relationship is not my problem, Mum, and I’m not getting dragged into it.”

  “I—”

  “Thanks, Mum. See you later. I’m going back to sleep. Ugh, it’s nine thirty—grim.”

  She’s gone. “Girlfriend,” she said. So using that word in a teenage context is not entirely disallowed. I add this important clue to my ongoing study of teenage behavior, glad that my investigative interest in every aspect of my children’s lives is not reciprocated. Zannah and Ben aren’t remotely concerned about the details of my day-to-day life. Neither of them asked me why I drove to Wyddial Lane before going to the St. Ives football ground; neither of them ever will.

  There’s something comforting about living with two people who never think about or question your behavior. I tried to explain this to Dominic once, when he complained that the kids never ask how our days have been. “They’re teenagers,” I said. “Anything happening outside of the teenage arena, they couldn’t care less. Be thankful—remember the time Ben found cigarettes and a lighter in your jacket pocket, and you told him you gave up ages ago, and they must have been there for at least ten years? You didn’t mind then that he didn’t pounce on that and say, ‘But wait, you only bought that jacket last month.’”

  I don’t have any bad habits that I’m concealing from the children. I’ve only ever had one near miss on a par with Dominic’s cigarettes-and-lighter scare, and that was when Zannah was four and still interested enough in people outside her immediate peer group to notice strange things her mother did. She walked into the kitchen and found me with a pair of scissors in one hand and a photograph in the other. I must have looked upset and guilty, because she asked me if I was okay. “Of course, darling,” I said in a bright voice.

  How could I have explained to a four-year-old what I was doing—or to anyone? Dominic was working in the living room, which was next to the kitchen in our old house. He’d have been horrified. I remember holding my breath, praying that my unnaturally high-pitched “Of course” hadn’t aroused his suspicions. Four-year-old Zannah looked doubtful, but she didn’t ask any more questions.

  The photograph she’d caught me holding was of the Braid family: Lewis and Flora and their three children—Thomas, Emily and Georgina. A happy family portrait, taken in the back garden. Flora had included it with their Christmas card. She always sent a photo, just as she always signed the card “Lewis, Flora . . .” His name had to come first because it was traditional, and the Braids cared about things like that. Dominic and I discussed it once. He said, “There’s no way Lewis has ever said to Flora, ‘Make sure to put my name first.’ He’d totally leave the Christmas card sending to her, wouldn’t he? I can’t see him giving it a single second’s thought.”

  “True,” I said. “But he also would never have ended up married to the kind of woman who wouldn’t automatically put his name first on all correspondence.”

  So often over the past twelve years, I’ve wanted to tell Dominic what I did to that photograph and ask him which he thinks is worse: that, or what Flora did to me.

  If I did, he’d probably laugh and say, “You’re mad, Beth,” in an affectionate way. He’d say the same—that I must be insane—about what I’m going to do next, which isn’t what I’ve just told Ben.

  I’m not going to the supermarket to buy tonight’s dinner.

  I’m going back to Wyddial Lane.

  * * *

  I’m amazed by how much more I notice now that I’m alone and there’s no pressure from an imminent football match to distract me: the black metal mailbox attached to a gatepost, with “16” on it in white, the burglar alarm, the row of what might be tiny security cameras or some kind of motion sensors lining the top of the house just under the gutters, like a string of paranoid fairy lights.

  As I drove back here, the gray sky gave way to a hazy blue and the sun appeared. Now it’s properly warm for the first time this year. Even with the window down, it’s already too hot in the car. I don’t want to put on the air conditioning—that would involve starting up the engine, and the last thing I need is for Flora to look out and wonder about the stationary car with its engine running.

  That’s funny: I’m assuming that, if anyone’s home, it’s going to be Flora. Twelve years ago, when I still knew the Braids, Lewis’s job on Saturdays was to ferry Thomas and Emily around by car to their various hobby duties: swimming lessons, drama club, tennis coaching. Five-year-old Thomas and three-year-old Emily had an absurd number of unmissable appointments. Lewis drove them to and fro while Flora caught up on the housework. He often used to say, “When I sell my company for a trillion dollars, we’ll have a fleet of c
hauffeurs and I’ll be able to spend weekends watching telly with my feet up.” In those days, he was always making jokes about how he would one day be rich. If we went to a crowded bar or café where we had to raise our voices to be heard, Lewis would announce, “When I’m rich I’ll have four chefs living in the annex of my mansion—Indian, Italian, French and English—so that I don’t have to put up with other people’s noise in order to get great food.” Flora would tut at his imaginary extravagance and say, “Lew-is,” in the same voice she used to subdue her small children when they were making a spectacle of themselves in public.

  As it turned out, Lewis didn’t need to worry about selling his company in order to get rich. His hoarder-miser grandfather died and left him several million pounds that nobody in the Braid family had known the old man had. Lewis and Flora moved from a three-bedroom basement flat to 16 Wyddial Lane, which looks as if it must have at least eight bedrooms, and now perhaps Lewis has all those chefs and chauffeurs he used to joke about acquiring. Maybe he and Flora and their kids are all inside the house now, staring at their iPhones.

  What age would Georgina be? Twelve, so not quite a teenager. We didn’t let Zannah have a phone until she was thirteen, but her teenager behavior had definitely started by then. She was eleven the first time she raised her eyebrows and asked me why I imagined in my wildest dreams that she might want to go into town with someone wearing a carpet. (I was dressed in a beautiful woolen poncho at the time.)

  I feel ashamed when I think about Georgina Braid, so I concentrate on the house instead. I got it wrong before—I glanced at it and decided it was modern, but, on closer inspection, it looks as if only the sides of it are newly built. The middle third of the building sticks out in front of the grand wings to the left and right, which are flat-fronted and have been added much more recently in what Zannah would call a “glow-up.” The dark-red pantiled roof of the newest sections starts higher up than the roof of the middle part, which has two dormer windows set into it. Presumably this was once an average-sized cottage. Only just visible above the closed wooden gates is a lychgate-style roofed porch, with the same red tiles. Apart from the two roofs—house and porch—the entire frontage is gleaming white. It looks as if it might have been painted yesterday. The overall effect is of a sleek, contemporary white-cube-style house that has swallowed a lumpy old cottage and been unable to digest it.