Page 59 of The Promise of Tomorrow
Quickly, she raised the mug to her lips.
Rory pulled down the bit of the blanket covering him and turned sideways to face her. ‘It’s more of a question really – that might shed some light on what happened years ago.’
‘But… don’t you, like Morag, believe that children’s book provides all the answers?’
‘Huh? Not all. Not in my opinion.’
Was there a chance he didn’t think her ridiculous?
He put down her mug too, and took her hands. ‘Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that you did get confused and there really wasn’t a promise made…’
‘Onewas,’ she said, face pinched.
‘Okay. But can you recall any episode in your life where you’ve convinced yourself that something bad has happened – but it hadn’t really?’
She pursed her lips.
‘It’s important, Elena,’ he said gently.
She thought hard. ‘Nope.’
‘Nothing at all, where you’ve been convinced of something that would make no sense to anyone else?’
She broke eye contact. Well, there was that thing that happened at school. She was sixteen. It had felt like the end of the world. But it was nothing; she’d just been a stupid teen.
‘Elena?’ he pushed gently.
She sighed. ‘It was just me being weird as a teenager, during a stressful time. I don’t see how it’s relevant.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I revised really hard for my GCSEs. The pupils I hung out with were straight-A people and I wanted to be the same. It… it happened right at the beginning of the exam period. I came home from a chemistry paper. I’d had a crisis of confidence halfway through and panicked afterwards, convinced I’d failed. It was the first exam and it really affected me. I didn’t perform as well as I reckoned I should have, in the following ones. I worried about it all summer, hardly sleeping, telling myself I wouldn’t be allowed to do the A levels I was interested in, telling myself I’d let my parents down. But then the results came through and I more or less got straight As. I don’t know why, but the idea popped into my head that the exam board had made a mistake and muddled my results with another pupil’s, especially as a couple of people in my class were devastated by their unexpectedly bad results – and one of them had a similar surname to me. That mere idea became a solid belief, fed by doubt – it grew and grew. I didn’t say anything as it would have sounded stupid, but keeping quiet made me feel even more guilty, even less deserving.’
‘Did you know it wasn’t true at the time?’
‘Deep down, yes. You remember what pupils are like – every exam we came out talking about our answers, and mine were the same as my bright friends who also got As. I could appreciate that, when the results came through, but even that logic didn’t erase the doubts in my mind about being given the wrong results, not at the time. That logic couldn’t overpower the ‘what if’ voice. Mum and Dad were so proud when I opened my results, but this obsession clung on tight. I pretended to be happy, but as soon as the fuss died down, I went up to my room and cried and cried.’
‘You’ve come to terms with the truth now?’
‘It took several years. Told you it was weird.’
Rory took her hand. ‘I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been. But… there’s someone who could.’
Elena raised an eyebrow.
‘The reason I went to see Julian on Sunday… I hope you don’t mind, Elena, but I told him about the woods and the children’s book, because he’s been through a similar thing.’
She sat more upright. ‘He met a fortune teller as a child? Did Julian make a deal? Did it come true?’
‘No, nothing like that. He was doing voluntary work at an animal shelter that had a veterinary wing. A favourite patient he’d been working on, an Alsatian dog, rescued from years of abuse, died, despite him insisting on personally giving around-the-clock care. Julian was approaching exam time. He’d convinced himself he’d killed the dog in a cruel way, that he’d let it die on purpose; that the animal had looked him straight in the eye as it passed, knowing that Julian had effectively murdered it. He couldn’t shake this off for a couple of years, telling himself hewas a bad vet and it would only happen again. After he recovered from this, like you, Julian put it down to him being… odd, the whole episode simply being one of the quirks of his personality.’
What has this got to do with Elena’s story? Exam time was stressful; they’d both simply let the pressure get to them. This had nothing to do with that night on the common.
‘Then a few years ago, when he went through a difficult divorce…’
‘Julian’s been married?’
‘He doesn’t talk about it often… Things turned ugly, and what with a busy career, bad stress kicked in again. Julian went through a phase – it lasted about a year – of convincing himself he knocked pets over with his car and killed them – that he was guilty of multiple hit-and-runs and leaving the animals to die in pain and their owners bereft. Driving to and from work became increasingly upsetting as he kept having to park up and go back and check the street behind him. Eventually, he broke down in front of his boss when he was late, yet again, for his shift.’
