Page 51 of The Women

For a moment, Samantha is too choked to speak. She has felt her vulnerability as sharp as a blade this week, but there is so much good in the world; she mustn’t forget it.

‘Emily settled in fine.’ Suzanne is at the door. ‘Do you want a hand with the desks?’

It occurs to Samantha that Suzanne must have been checking her own child in earlier, as she said she was going to last week, but there is no time to ask about it there and then. Together they arrange the desks into a horseshoe, and as Samantha positions her own desk in the centre, she resolves to say nothing about the villanelle, about the police coming to her home; simply hand out the dialogue pieces and crack on. Whoever is the frustrated would-be author of those mean little poems will get no satisfaction from her.

‘So last week we looked at dialogue,’ she begins, scanning her students, noting that Tommy is absent. ‘But what happens if you go into the dialogue or the action without setting the scene – the where and the who and the what time of day?’

Aisha half raises her hand.

Fuck off, Aisha, she thinks.

‘Aisha?’ she says, rictus grin fixed to her face.

‘If you don’t set the scene, the reader doesn’t know where they are?’ Aisha’s eyebrows are keen and diligent. Does the woman have an expression that isn’t earnest, for God’s sake? Can eyebrows evenbediligent?

‘The reader doesn’t know wherethe charactersare,’ Samantha corrects, pedantically perhaps. ‘Or whether it’s night or day, or who is there. And if the reader doesn’t know where your charactersare, what are they wondering?’

‘Um, where they are?’ Aisha’s voice betrays her fear of stating the obvious.

‘And if the reader is wondering where they are, who is with them, whether it’s three in the morning or five in the afternoon, what is the readernotthinking about?’ Samantha looks around. ‘Suzanne?’

Suzanne blushes, shake her head.

Too soon, Samantha realises. Still too shy. ‘Reggie?’

‘The … well, the story?’

‘Exactly.’

Together they study a scene fromBrooklynby Colm Tóibín, one fromOur Man in Havanaby Graham Greene, both Peter’s suggestions, and while the Tóibín has a vulnerable young woman at its heart, now it irks her that both authors are men. It could be her raging stress levels, but Peter’s help is beginning to seem more like interference to her now, a desire to tell her how to do things, to control how she does them.

‘So, clarity is your biggest challenge,’ she says. ‘Youknow what’s in your head, you can see it, but you have to remember to let the reader see it too.’

She sets them an exercise: to write a scene around last week’s dialogues, focusing on clarity. The class has almost taken her mind off the poems, her first night alone in the house, but when half past one comes, she checks the door, opens it a fraction and looks out. No sign of Harry. Quarter to, ten to. Five to. She peers out once again into the corridor. He isn’t coming. He must have been waylaid, as often happens. Everyone in this place is pulled in five different directions at once.

Two o’clock.

Aisha and Jenny mime coffee and Samantha nods. Too right she’ll have coffee. She will have coffee and ask the pair of them what the hell is going on. Now that she knows it isn’t Sean, it can only be one or other of these two. Or both.

The classroom empties. Pit in her stomach, she flicks through the scenes one by one. There is no anonymous work. She counts them out again, double-checking, then triple-checking, but still there is nothing that shouldn’t be there. She picks up the empty folder and, illogically, turns it upside down and shakes it. Seven students were here. Seven pieces of paper. The only other person in this whole circus who isn’t here is Peter.

She shakes her head. Nonsense. That idea is nonsense. But even as her mind strays where it shouldn’t, part of her almost hopes that this evening, another nasty note will arrive, if only to prove that it isn’t her own partner playing some hateful trick.

A hubbub of different languages reaches her from the corridor. She watches the other class file in, led by Gabby, her blonde hair and black-framed glasses whizzing by. Some of the women wear hijabs, one of the men wears a turban, and she wonders what brought them here, how they live, how they cope with so little English.

She should get a move on, she thinks, see what Aisha and Jenny come up with.

Twenty-One

In the cafeteria, Aisha is biting into a huge toasted sandwich. Two ropes of melted cheese escape, sending a blob of tomato swinging down like a trapeze. Both she and Jenny are finding this hilarious.

‘Hey,’ Samantha says, already feeling on the outside.

‘We got you a peppermint tea,’ Jenny says, wiping her eyes. ‘There’s sugar on the side. Don’t look at Aisha if you’re squeamish, it’s revolting.’

Aisha raises a hand, grinning through her mouthful of food. Her wrists are so delicate, her fingers long and thin as a pianist’s. She is so pretty, even with food all over her face. She could have any man she wanted. Why try and manipulate her way back to Peter?

Samantha sits down, her spine rigid as a pole. ‘How’s it going?’

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