‘My Lord, Cecilia, you’re an absolute freak.’ Erica Edgecliff, who was sitting in the row in front of Cecilia, turned around. ‘Polly’s hat looks amazing.’

‘John-Paul made it.’ Cecilia waved at Polly.

‘Seriously? That man is a catch,’ said Erica.

‘He’s a catch all right,’ agreed Cecilia, hearing a weird lilt in her voice. She sensed Mahalia turning to look at her.

Erica said, ‘You know me. Forgot all about the Easter hat parade until this morning at breakfast, then I stuck an old egg carton on Emily’s head and said, “That’ll have to do, kid.”’ Erica took pride in her haphazard approach to mothering. ‘There she is! Em! Whoo hoo!’ Erica half-stood, waving frantically, and then subsided. ‘Did you see that death stare she sent me? She knows it’s the worst hat in the parade. Someone give me another one of those chocolate balls before I shoot myself.’

‘Are you feeling okay, Cecilia?’ Mahalia leaned closer, so that Cecilia could smell the familiar musky scent of her perfume.

Cecilia glanced over at Mahalia and looked quickly away.

Oh no, don’t you dare be nice to me, Mahalia, with your smooth skin and the whites of your eyes so pearly white. Cecilia had noticed tiny splotches of red in the whites of her eyes this morning. Wasn’t that what happened when someone tried to strangle you? The capillaries in your eyes burst? How did she know that? She shuddered.

‘You’re shivering!’ said Mahalia. ‘That breeze is icy.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Cecilia. The longing to confide in someone, anyone, felt like a raging thirst. She cleared her throat. ‘Might be coming down with a cold.’

‘Here, put this around you.’ Mahalia pulled the scarf from around her neck and settled it over Cecilia’s shoulders. It was a beautiful scarf, and Mahalia’s beautiful scent drifted all around her.

‘No, no,’ said Cecilia ineffectually.

She knew exactly what Mahalia would say if she told her. It’s very simple, Cecilia, tell your husband he has twenty-four hours to confess or you’re going to the police yourself. Yes, you love your husband and, yes, your children will suffer as a result, but none of that is the point. It’s very simple. Mahalia was very fond of the word ‘simple’.

‘Horseradish and garlic,’ said Mahalia. ‘Simple.’

‘What? Oh yes. For my cold. Absolutely. I’ve got some at home.’

Cecilia caught sight of Tess O’Leary sitting on the other side of the quadrangle, with her mother’s wheelchair parked at the end of the row of chairs. Cecilia reminded herself that she must thank Tess for everything she’d done yesterday, and apologise for not even offering to call a taxi. The poor girl must have walked all the way back up the hill to her mother’s house. Also, she’d promised to make a lasagne for Lucy! Maybe she wasn’t skating as expertly as she’d thought. She was making lots of tiny mistakes that would eventually cause everything to fall apart.

Was it only Tuesday that Cecilia had been driving Polly to ballet and longing for some huge wave of emotion to sweep her off her feet? The Cecilia of two days ago had been a fool. She’d wanted the wave of clean, beautiful emotion you felt when you saw a heart-swelling movie scene with a magnificent soundtrack. She hadn’t wanted anything that would actually hurt.

‘Oops, oops, it’s going to go!’ said Erica. A boy from the other Year 1 class was wearing an actual birdcage on his head. The little boy, Luke Lehaney (Mary Lehaney’s son; Mary often overstepped the mark; she’d once made the mistake of running against Cecilia for the role of P&C president), was walking along like the Leaning Tower of Pisa with his whole body tipped to one side in a desperate attempt to keep the birdcage upright. Suddenly, inevitably, it slipped from his head, crashing to the ground and causing Bonnie Emmerson to trip and lose her own hat. Bonnie’s face crumpled, while Luke stared in bewildered horror at his mangled birdcage.

I want my mother too, thought Cecilia as she watched Luke and Bonnie’s mothers rush to retrieve their children. I want my mother to comfort me, to tell me that everything is going to be okay and that there’s no need to cry.

Normally her mother would be at the Easter hat parade, snapping blurry, headless photos of the girls with her disposable camera, but this year she’d gone to Sam’s parade at the exclusive preschool. There was going to be champagne for the grown-ups. ‘Isn’t that the silliest thing you’ve ever heard,’ she said to Cecilia. ‘Champagne at an Easter hat parade! That’s where Bridget’s fees are going.’ Cecilia’s mother loved champagne. She’d be having the time of her life hobnobbing with a better class of grandmas than you got at St Angela’s. She’d always made a point of pretending not to be interested in money, because she was, in fact, very interested in it.

What would her mother say if she told her about John-Paul? Cecilia had noticed that as her mother got older, whenever she heard anything distressing, or just too complicated, there was a disturbing moment where her face became dull and slack, like a stroke victim, as if her mind had momentarily closed down from the shock.

‘John-Paul committed a crime,’ Cecilia would begin.

‘Oh, darling, I’m sure he didn’t,’ her mother would interrupt.

What would Cecilia’s dad say? He had high blood pressure. It might actually kill him. She imagined the flash of terror that would cross his soft, wrinkled face, before he recovered himself, frowning ferociously while he tried to slot the information into the right box in his mind. ‘What does John-Paul think?’ he’d probably say, automatically, because the older her parents got, the more they seemed to rely on John-Paul’s opinion.

Her parents couldn’t cope without John-Paul in their lives, and they would never cope with the knowledge of what he’d done, or the shame in the community.

You had to weigh up the greater good. Life wasn’t black and white. Confessing wouldn’t bring back Janie. It would achieve nothing. It would hurt Cecilia’s daughters. It would hurt Cecilia’s parents. It would hurt John-Paul for a mistake (she hurried over that soft little word ‘mistake’, knowing that it wasn’t right, that there had to be a bigger word for what John-Paul had done) he’d made when he was seventeen years old.

‘There’s Esther!’ Cecilia was startled by Mahalia nudging her. She’d forgotten where she was. Cecilia looked up in time to see Esther nod coolly at her as she walked by, her hat stuck right on the back of her head, the sleeves of her jumper pulled right down to cover her hands like mittens. She was wearing an old straw hat of Cecilia’s with fake flowers and tiny chocolate eggs stuck all over it. Not Cecilia’s best effort, but it didn’t matter because Esther thought Easter hat parades were a waste of her valuable time. ‘What does the Easter hat parade actually teach us?’ she’d said to Cecilia that morning in the car.

‘Nothing about the Berlin Wall,’ Isabel had said smartly.

Cecilia had pretended not to notice that Isabel was wearing her mascara this morning. She’d done a good job of it. Only one tiny blue-black smudge just below her perfect eyebrow.

She looked up to the Year 6 balcony and saw Isabel and her friends dancing to the music.

If a nice young boy murdered Isabel, and got away with it, and if that boy felt very remorseful, and turned out to be a fine, upstanding member of the community, a good father and a good son-in-law, Cecilia would still want him jailed. Executed. She’d want to kill him with her own bare hands.

The world tipped.

She heard Mahalia say from a very long way away, ‘Cecilia?’

chapter thirty-four

Tess shifted in her seat and felt a pleasurable ache in her groin. Just how superficial are you? What happened to your supposedly broken heart? So, what, it takes you THREE DAYS to get over a marriage break-up? Here she was sitting at the St Angela’s Easter hat parade thinking about sex with one of the three parade judges, who was right now on the other side of the schoolyard wearing a giant pink baby’s bonnet tied under his chin and doing the chicken dance with a group of Year 6 boys.