One Plus One: A Novel by Jojo Moyes

madam.”
    The Fishers. With their reputation, she’d be lucky if a single person “remembered” what they’d seen.
    For a moment Jess let her head fall into her hands. They would never let up. And it would be Tanzie next, once she started secondary school. She would be a prime target with her love of maths and her oddness and her total lack of guile. Jess went cold. She thought about Marty’s sledgehammer in the garage, and how it would feel to walk down to the Fishers’ house and—
    The phone rang. She snatched it up. “What now? Are you going to tell me he beat himself up, too? Is that it?”
    “Mrs. Thomas?”
    She blinked.
    “Mrs. Thomas? It’s Mr. Tsvangarai.”
    “Oh. Mr. Tsvangarai, I’m sorry. It—it’s not a great time.” She held out her hand in front of her. It was shaking.
    “I’m sorry to call you so late, but it’s a matter of some urgency. I have discovered something of interest. It’s called the Maths Olympiad.” He spoke the words carefully.
    “The what?”
    “It’s a new thing, in Scotland, for gifted students. A maths competition. And we still have time to enter Tanzie.”
    “A maths competition?” Jess closed her eyes. “You know, that’sreally nice, Mr. Tsvangarai, but we have quite a lot going on here right now, and I don’t think I—”
    “Mrs. Thomas, the prizes are five hundred pounds, a thousand pounds, and five thousand pounds. Five thousand pounds. If she won, you’d have at least the first year of your St. Anne’s school fees sorted out.”
    “Say that again.”
    Jess sat down on the chair as he explained in greater depth.
    “This is an actual thing?”
    “It is an actual thing.”
    “And you really think she could do it?”
    “There is a category especially for her age group. I cannot see how she could fail.”
    Five thousand pounds, a voice sang in her head. Enough to get her through the first two years.
    “What’s the catch?”
    “No catch. Well, you have to do advanced maths, obviously. But I can’t see that this would be a problem for Tanzie.”
    She stood up and sat down again.
    “And of course you would have to travel to Scotland.”
    “Details, Mr. Tsvangarai. Details.” Her head was spinning. “This is for real, right? This isn’t a joke?”
    “I am not a funny man, Mrs. Thomas.”
    “Fuck.
Fuck!
Mr. Tsvangarai, you are an absolute beauty.”
    She could hear his embarrassed laugh.
    “So . . . what do we do now?”
    “Well, they waived the qualifying test after I sent over some examples of Tanzie’s work. I understand they are very keen to have children from less-advantaged schools. And between you and me, it is, of course, an enormous benefit that she’s a girl. But we have to decide quickly. You see, this year’s Olympiad is only five days away.”
    Five days. The deadline for registration at St. Anne’s was tomorrow.
    She stood in the middle of the room, thinking. Then she ranupstairs, pulled Mr. Nicholls’s money from its nest among her tights, and before she could think she stuffed it into an envelope, scrawled a note, and wrote ADMISSIONS OFFICE, ST. ANNE’S in careful letters on the front. She would drop it in on the way to clean tomorrow.
    She would pay it back. Every penny.
    But right now she didn’t have a choice.
    —
    That night, Jess sat at the kitchen table and worked out a rough plan. She looked up the schedule for trains to Edinburgh, laughed a bit hysterically, then looked up the cost of three coach tickets (£187, including the £13 it would cost to get to the station) and the cost of putting Norman in a kennel for a week (£94). She put the palms of her hands into her eye sockets and let them stay there for a bit. And then, when the children were asleep, she dug out the keys to the Rolls-Royce, went outside, brushed the mouse droppings off the driver’s seat and tried the ignition.
    It turned over on the third attempt.
    Jess sat in the garage that always smelled of damp, surrounded by old garden furniture,