The Offer

Clare Sayer caught me outside the pharmacy on Thursday morning with a carrier bag containing plasters, shampoo and a packet of biscuits Mum said we were not opening until she got home.

“Bea. Could I borrow you for five minutes?”

I had known Clare long enough for that not to sound like a question. She was good at making requests seem as if you had already agreed to them in a conversation you had forgotten.

“Mum's expecting me to take these home.”

“I won't keep you.”

She touched my elbow, then let go immediately, and we moved out of the doorway. She wore trainers with her work trousers. There was a coffee stain on one cuff. I noticed because I had expected her to look perfect, which was unfair and did not stop me feeling briefly relieved.

“Finn said you had a difficult conversation yesterday.”

“Yes.”

“He's not sleeping.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I know none of you are.”

She said it quickly, before I could object. A delivery bicycle passed us on the pavement, its rider calling an apology too late for either of us to move.

Clare looked towards the little square behind the pharmacy. “Shall we sit?”

I could see Mum through the window, reaching for something on a high shelf. I pointed to Clare and then towards the bench. Mum nodded, but her expression changed enough that I knew she would ask me about it later.

The bench was warm from the sun. Clare put her coffee down between her shoes.

“I don't want you to feel you have to choose sides,” she said.

“I didn't know there were sides.”

“Exactly.”

She smiled as if we had agreed on the same thing.

“I've always thought very highly of your work, Bea. You know that.”

“You came to the screening.”

“I did. And the little film you made about the shoe repairer. That was lovely.”

It had been a good film. He had closed his shop three months later, and I still had the sound of his machine working in the back room. I did not like the fact that she remembered something specific. It made the conversation harder to dismiss.

“Finn mentioned Northbridge,” she said. “That you're having to change your portfolio.”

“I am.”

“One of my clients teaches on a foundation course there. Not necessarily the same course, but she knows the admissions people. She might be happy to look at your work informally.”

I looked down at the bag. A corner of the plaster box was pressing a white mark into the plastic.

“That would normally be really helpful,” I said.

“It can still be helpful.”

“Is that why you wanted to talk?”

Clare's smile faded, not entirely.

“I wanted to make sure you knew there were people willing to support you. It's been a horrible week.”

“Yes.”

“And I wanted to ask you to be gentle with Finn.”

There it was. Not a threat, not a cheque pushed across a table. A useful name offered beside a request I could not separate from it.

“I asked him about something in his application.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

She looked at me properly then.

“What do you mean?”

“He said you were dealing with the financial form.”

“The correction, yes. I spoke to the programme yesterday.”

“But when he filled it in.”

“No. Finn did his own application.”

A bus went round the square, rattling the loose panel beneath the bench. Clare waited for it to pass.

“He asked me about one or two things in the personal statement,” she said. “And I proofread the final version. I didn't complete the income declaration. I assumed he had the figures from his father.”

“Did his father give them to him?”

Her face closed a little.

“That's something we're sorting out as a family.”

I nodded.

“I don't think you should discuss private financial information with other students,” she said.

“I haven't.”

“With anyone who doesn't need it, then.”

“The police have the paper Rowan kept.”

“I know.”

Her voice was quieter now. The word had cost her something.

Across the square, a man was trying to persuade a terrier to walk past a sandwich board. The terrier had planted all four feet and appeared prepared to remain there until winter.

“Finn told me it was a question about where he stayed,” I said. “That you dealt with most of it.”

“He shouldn't have said that.”

We sat without talking for a few seconds.

I had expected her to defend him so thoroughly that nothing could get through. Instead I could see her rearranging what she knew. She picked up her coffee, discovered it was empty, and held it anyway.

“He was embarrassed,” she said.

“Probably.”

“Not everything done out of embarrassment is calculated.”

“I know.”

That answer seemed to reach her. She looked at the pharmacy window, where Mum was now talking to a customer.

“I didn't come here to make your life more difficult.”

“I don't think you did.”

“Then let me send you the tutor's email.”

I wanted it. That was the awkward, unflattering truth. I wanted somebody who knew the system to look at my work and say there was a way through. I wanted a conversation in which I was a promising student rather than a girl who had lied to a detective.

“Not like this,” I said.

Clare looked hurt.

“It isn't a transaction.”

“Then offer it another time. When it doesn't come with being gentler about Finn.”

She put the empty cup back between her feet.

For a moment I thought she might become angry. Instead she took a breath and said, “That's fair.”

It was not the answer I had prepared for. I had several sharper sentences ready and nowhere useful to put them.

“I'll leave it,” she said. “But please don't decide that everyone who cares about him is against Rowan.”

“I haven't decided that.”

“All right.”

She stood, smoothed the front of her trousers, and picked up her cup. At the edge of the square she turned back.

“Has anyone offered to drive you to an open day?”

“I can get a train.”

“That wasn't what I asked.”

“No.”

She nodded once. “Ask your mother to call me when things are less impossible. No conditions.”

Then she went, and I was left annoyed that I liked her better than I had at the beginning.

Mum finished at one. I met her outside with the bag because I had forgotten to take it home at all.

“What did she want?”

“To help.”

Mum looked at me.

“And for me to stop upsetting Finn.”

“Ah.”

We walked towards the supermarket. Mum had twenty minutes before a bus and wanted something that could become dinner without requiring her to think.

“Did you say yes?”

“To which bit?”

“Either.”

“No.”

“Did she ask you to keep anything from the police?”

“No.”

“Good. Don't make it into that if she didn't.”

“I wasn't.”

“I know. I'm just saying.”

In the chilled aisle she examined two identical packets of chicken as if one might contain a helpful message.

“She didn't fill in the form,” I said. “Finn said she did most of it. She says she didn't.”

Mum put one packet back.

“Then one of them isn't telling you the truth.”

“Or they mean different things.”

“Do you think they do?”

I watched a man put a reduced-price cake in his basket and then take it out again.

“No.”

Mum chose the chicken. “Then don't do the explaining for them.”

At home I wrote to Adebayo with what Clare had said. I did not know whether Finn's parents had already told the police. I said that too.

Then I opened the portfolio folder Ms Delaney had made me. Four files, all looking very small on the screen.

The shoe-repair film was there. I watched the first thirty seconds. The man in it was called Mr Patel, and he had made me wait while he finished a heel before he would answer any questions. At seventeen, a three-minute wait behind a camera had felt like a terrible failure of direction. Now it was my favourite part.

I emailed the number printed on his old business card, then realised it was a phone number, not an email address, and sat staring at my own exhaustion until I laughed.

I called instead.

A woman answered. When I explained, she shouted, “Dad, the film girl!” away from the receiver.

He remembered me.

“You made me look very slow,” he said.

“I left out how long you made me wait.”

“Then you were kind.”

I asked whether I could include the film in a college application. He wanted to know who would see it, whether it would go online, and whether I still had the bit where he showed the difference between stitched and glued soles.

“Yes,” I said. “That bit's still there.”

“Good. People need to know.”

When I got off the phone, I wrote down his answer and sent him the private viewing link he had asked for.

It was one thing I could do that afternoon which did not require guessing what somebody else meant.