Page 1 of Letting Go of Yesterday
1
Laughter drifted down from the end of the wood-panelled corridor that led from Rowan’s office to the staffroom. Lessons had finished almost two hours earlier, but the school was still a hive of activity. She glanced out of one of the windows as she continued towards the staffroom. Outside some of the girls on the all-weather pitch were whizzing hockey balls at a goalkeeper, whose protective gear made it look like she’d been wrapped in a duvet. Voices carried up from the hockey practice, and beyond that from the rugby pitches where the first and second teams were training for an upcoming tournament. Membory Grange was never quiet in term time. There were more than two hundred boarders on site seven days a week, and a further seven hundred day pupils, as well as the large team of staff who took care of them. Even if all of them had teamed up, Rowan still wasn’t sure they’d be able to drown out the raucous laughter emanating from the staffroom.
‘Okay what am I missing out on, because it sounds worth hearing?’ Smiling, she looked at the two women sitting side by side on a dark green sofa in front of an oak coffee table, strewn with magazines. They were the only people in the staffroom, which was typical by this time on a Friday evening. It was why a debrief of the week, over a cup of coffee, was a regular date for the three of them.
‘Ooh watch out, the head’s here. We better stop having fun.’ Odette West, the school’s head of modern languages mimed putting a finger to her lips and then gave another hearty laugh. Rowan might technically be the boss of the other women, but first and foremost she was their friend and, after the day she’d had, she badly needed to know what was so funny. The tension must have shown in her face, as Odette stopped laughing and tilted her head to one side. ‘Why don’t you sit down, Rowan. I’ll make you a drink and Pippa can tell you what’s she’s just told me.’
‘It’s okay, I don’t mind making the drinks.’ Rowan was conscious of her friends treating her slightly differently since she’d become headteacher. Thankfully it hadn’t been a huge change, they were her closest friends after all and she would have hated to lose that bond as a result of her promotion, but there had been a subtle shift. Before they’d have taken it in turns to make the drinks if they met up in the staffroom, but now Odette was jumping to her feet and waving away Rowan’s offer, as if the idea of the headteacher making the coffee was absurd.
‘No, I’ll get them.’ Odette gestured towards the seat she’d just vacated. ‘You’re going to want to sit down for this anyway.’
‘Will I need something stronger than coffee?’ Rowan looked from Odette to Pippa, who was already laughing again.
‘I think you might.’
‘And once you’ve heard it, you’re never going to stop imagining what might be going on behind the doors of Keeper’s Lodge either.’ Odette grinned. ‘I thought we were all the same – living this quiet, boring life – and then bam, you get hit with something like this. It just goes to show that you never know who your neighbours are.’
‘Okay, now I’m not even sure I want you to tell me.’ Keeper’s Lodge was one of eight staff houses in the grounds of Membory Grange. Rowan lived in the largest of the properties, with her husband, James, the school’s chaplain, and their two children. It was a four-bedroomed detached cottage somewhat unimaginatively called Head’s House. The bursar lived next door and beyond that was Elderberry Cottage, where Odette lived with her family. In addition to their teaching responsibilities, Odette and her husband were house parents taking care of some of the boarders. Pippa, who taught English, was also a house parent and lived in Keeper’s Lodge with her husband Daniel, who ran the school’s farm. They were almost like any other neighbours in a suburban cul-de-sac, except that they lived in the magnificent 250-acre grounds of an exclusive private school, as sheltered from the realities of the real world as their pupils were.
It could easily have been a nightmare living in such close proximity to people she had to work with too, but from the moment Rowan had started at Membory Grange, nine years earlier, when her daughter Bella had been less than a year old, it had been like finding her tribe. She’d bonded with Odette and Pippa quickly, and both of them were godmother to Theo, her youngest child, who was now almost seven. She felt blessed to be raising her children in a place like Membory Grange, but clearly something had been going on at Keeper’s Lodge.
‘If you don’t want to hear it, I’d better just show you.’ Pippa pressed play as she passed her phone to Rowan, and a video of her husband Daniel appeared on the screen. He was wearing a dinner suit and could have been dressed for any one of the events the school regularly hosted, where formal attire was a must, but then suddenly the strains of ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’ started playing. Daniel turned his back to the screen, flicked up the tails of his jacket, looked over his shoulder and wiggled his bottom like a part-time stripper who should definitely have stuck to the day job. Pippa’s distinctive laugh could be heard in the background of the video and suddenly it was in stereo, as she started laughing again, watching Daniel attempting to remove his jacket in what Rowan assumed was supposed to be a sexy way. Unfortunately, his arm got stuck in the sleeve and his attempts to flick the jacket off ended up with it wrapped around his head. When Daniel finally emerged, he was laughing too and had abandoned any attempt to take his strip tease seriously. He was lip-synching to the words and pulling ridiculous faces, as he slid his belt out of the loops of his trousers and lassoed it around his head.
‘Oh my God.’ Rowan started laughing long before Daniel undid the top four buttons of his shirt and pretended to tease his ‘audience’ by sliding it off one shoulder and up again. By that point he was laughing too and the camera was shaking badly, Pippa clearly having lost the battle to hold it steady. The laughter already felt like it had done Rowan some good, but she couldn’t help feeling a tiny bit guilty. ‘Does he know you’re showing this to people?’
‘He gave me permission to show you two and don’t worry, it doesn’t go any further than a little hint of shoulder. We were both laughing too much, but it still gets funnier every time I watch it.’
‘Poor Daniel, there he was trying to be sexy and all you could do was laugh.’ Rowan tried to keep a straight face, but it was impossible.
‘Oh, don’t worry, Daniel knewexactlywhat he was doing. He knew his sense of humour was what made me fall for him in the first place, and being funny is always going to do it for me.’ Pippa put down her phone. ‘If he’d done a striptease with serious intentions I’d be running for the hills. Thank God it was supposed to be funny and let’s just say he got what he was hoping for.’
‘You’ve got to give Daniel his due.’ Odette set the coffee cup down on the table. ‘Seb is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, grabbing my bum when he walks past, or pressing up against me while I’m trying to make the kids’ dinner or unload the dishwasher. Why is it that men never seem to grow out of acting like sex-obsessed teenagers? Sometimes I just want to fall asleep in front of the TV, without getting pestered, but men are just always bloody well up for it, aren’t they?’
‘I think it’s wired into their DNA.’ Pippa rolled her eyes. ‘At least Daniel seems to have realised he needs to make an effort over the course of the day if he’s going to stand a chance by the time we get into bed, although the dance was a whole new level of effort.’
‘What about James? Does he whip his cassock off for you the moment he gets through the door? Or dance for you in just his dog collar.’ Odette wiggled her eyebrows suggestively and Rowan gave a non-committal smile.
‘Ooh look, she’s gone quiet, you know what that means. It’s always the quiet ones you’ve got to watch.’ Pippa grinned and Rowan shrugged, grateful that her friend’s imagination had let her off the hook. She could have told them the truth, and a big part of her desperately wanted to confide in someone, but she just couldn’t do it. How was she supposed to admit to her two closest friends that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had sex with her husband? And that when she tried to reach out and touch him, he rolled away, making an elaborate show of snoring, even when she’d been certain from the sound of his breathing that he’d been awake just seconds before. Heat swept over her at the thought of the attempts she’d made to spark his interest when they’d been away for the weekend for their wedding anniversary. Thank God no one had videoed that, because it had been mortifying to be a part of, never mind how humiliating it would have been for anyone else to see it. Daniel had nothing to be embarrassed about in comparison.
Rowan had spent a fortune on the type of lingerie that an online forum had informed her was guaranteed to ‘reignite the passion’. When James had emerged from the bathroom after his shower, she’d been lying on the bed, in a position a contortionist would have been proud of, in an attempt to flaunt her best bits, and disguise the parts of her body she hated the most, which these days seemed to be the majority of it. When the person who was supposed to love you most didn’t seem to find you remotely attractive, it was hard to hold on to any shred of self-esteem. James’s eyes had widened in what she’d hoped was surprise, but which she had a feeling now had been far closer to horror. He’d mumbled something about having an upset stomach and had bolted straight back into the bathroom, where he’d remained for the next twenty minutes. By the time he’d re-emerged, Rowan had got dressed and downed half a bottle of champagne to drown her sorrows in the wake of James’s reaction to her attempt at seducing him.
He’d been all smiles when he’d finally come back out of the bathroom, reminding Rowan that they had plans for dinner in thirty minutes.
‘I thought you had a bad stomach.’ Even the words had tasted bitter in her mouth and she’d taken another huge slug of champagne to try and wash them away.
‘I think it was just a bit of cramp, but I feel fine now.’ He’d smiled again and she’d felt like slapping the expression off his face; the mixture of humiliation and anger were a dangerous combination.
‘Funny that. The sight of me without my clothes on always seems to make you feel ill just lately.’
‘Rowan, please.’
‘What? Not this again? Is that what you’re going to say?’ She took another glug of champagne. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t want to have the same conversation we’ve had a hundred times before again either. It always goes the same way anyway. I ask you what’s wrong and tell you how unattractive it makes me feel, and you come up with half a dozen excuses to avoid admitting that anything’s wrong. Except we both know it is.’
‘Having young kids and busy jobs is tough on us both. Every relationship goes through changes and dry spells. I’m sure things will shift again in the future.’ He’d reached out then and put a hand on her shoulder, but she’d shaken him off and refilled her glass. She’d wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that more than eighteen months without any physical intimacy didn’t represent the kind of dry spell that everyone went through, it was the goddamn Sahara Desert.
Rowan had never been confident and had often felt like she came last on the list with her parents. Her father had been a workaholic and her mother had seemed to feel hemmed in when she was at home, always finding somewhere else to go or something else to do instead. Rowan had never felt at ease with her appearance, either. At five feet nine she’d been taller than most of the boys growing up and had felt awkward and clumsy. She’d had hair that had been almost the exact same shade as Ginger Nut biscuits, which was the nickname that had stuck all the way through school. She might have eventually grown into the limbs that had once felt far too long, and started receiving compliments about how beautiful her hair was and how her height meant she could have been a model, but inside she still felt like the gawky kid with red hair. When she hit her teens she’d had a good group of friends, but she was still quite shy outside of that circle and preferred going unnoticed to attracting the kind of comments that might make her face flush red and clash with her hair. Then something had changed, maybe because she’d begun to excel at school and her confidence no longer seemed to pivot on whether or not someone called her Ginger Nut. Just when she’d begun to feel comfortable in her own skin, her parents’ marriage had ended in a way that had made them the talk of Port Agnes and all she’d wanted to do was hide again.
Everything that had happened had robbed Rowan of the confidence she’d finally begun to build up and when she and her mother had started over somewhere new, she’d gone back to being the girl standing in the corner, desperately hoping to blend into the background. Except then she’d met James, and he hadn’t seemed to notice how awkward she felt. They’d been friends at first, and maybe that’s why she’d never been tongue-tied or embarrassed around him. Instead she’d been completely herself, the way most teenagers never truly are, and he’d liked her anyway. Over the years her confidence had grown, not just because of James, but because she was proud of what she’d achieved in her career and her personal life. Until things had started to change again, as they always seemed to do, and it hadn’t taken much for that fragile confidence to unravel. James’s unwillingness to touch her fed straight into the self-loathing she’d fought so hard to conquer. She was ugly, she must be, and the fact that her husband would rather fake a stomach ache than have sex with her proved it.
