The Secret Path

by Karen Swan

  Tara felt her stomach swoop and fall at her friend’s brutal frankness. It was everything she had told herself since that dark blue line had shown up on the pregnancy stick; all her own doubts voiced.

  ‘You had that plan, remember? You wanted to get your dad to help you build those mother and child health clinics in every country that had communities living off grid – no power, no running water. You said if you could protect and empower the women—’

  ‘I know what I said,’ Tara interrupted, not wanting to hear it.

  Holly stared at her with a look of sadness. ‘Coming from anyone else, it was pie in the sky. But you? You actually could have done it! You told me it was your way of justifying being so lucky; you said your mother couldn’t understand why you’d want a career and that you had to fight to get them to allow you to go to uni at all. And now you’re just giving all that up for a guy you’ve known for less than six months?’

  Tears pricked at Tara’s eyes. She felt there was a weight pressing on her chest. ‘We love each other.’ It was a feeble argument, but all she could muster. She could feel Holly already withdrawing from her, as if they were two boats on separate tides, and she realized how much they had been bonded by their mutual ambition: the princess and the pauper who both wanted the same thing.

  ‘Yes, I know you do. But just answer me this – is he giving up everything for you? Would he be giving up his dreams, and his career, for you?’

  Every question was like a body blow. Tara was struggling to keep a lid on her emotions. ‘Look, all of this will change both our lives, not just mine. It’s just happening sooner than we had thought . . .’

  It wasn’t an answer. She knew it. Holly knew it.

  ‘Oh, so you’d discussed starting a family, then?’

  ‘Well, no, not yet, but—’

  ‘But . . .?’

  Tara swallowed. ‘It was . . . understood.’

  Holly’s eyes narrowed. ‘Understood. Right.’

  Tara looked down, feeling the first tear fall. It made her furious to be crying, as though this was the first sign of her disintegration into someone lesser – evidence of her changing hormones and new life path. ‘Life doesn’t always run to a timetable, Hols.’

  Holly sighed as a sob escaped her; she could never bear to see anyone upset. She stepped in and roughly gave Tara a hug. ‘No, I know it doesn’t.’ They embraced in the morning chill, but it was awkward and stiff, neither one of them finding resolution in the rapprochement. ‘But – oh shit! That anatomy module does – and . . .’ She pulled back sharply and double-checked the time on her phone. ‘I’m going to be late. I’ve gotta run.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Tara automatically went to jog beside her too, but Holly stopped her with an outstretched arm.

  ‘No, don’t run, you should take it easy. I’ll tell them you got delayed en route.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You mustn’t exert yourself now. And anyway, you’ll only be a few minutes behind me. I’ll save you a seat.’ She gave a shrug as she sped off, but Tara knew what that shrug meant: what did it matter now, how late she was? She was never going to be a doctor. Anything done after this point was just lip service to a dream she had tossed aside. She was going to be Mrs Alex Carter instead. Wife and mother.

  Chapter Three

  The front door closed with a slam, followed a second later by the thud of a bulging leather satchel hitting the encaustic-tiled hall floor.

  ‘God, that smells good!’ Alex came through and planted a kiss in the curve of her neck and shoulder. His nook, he called it. She turned her face towards him and he kissed her on the mouth. ‘I missed you.’

  ‘I missed you too,’ she murmured, and she felt him hesitate, knowing that to kiss her again would inevitably lead . . .

  He pulled back, indecision in his eyes, the vestiges of his working day still clinging to him like sticky buds. ‘Man, what a day.’ He tossed his jacket over the back of the chair and walked across the small kitchen. It was a perfect square, with eighties orange pine cabinets and white ceramic knobs. The splashback tiles were decorated with hens – incongruous for a kitchen in Kensington – and four rushback chairs were set round a small painted table that had once been turquoise but was now white, with just flecks of the old colour peeping through in places. Even stressed, Alex looked horizontally relaxed in his rumpled shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows and jeans that hung low on his hips.

  ‘Busy one?’ she asked as he pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge. The cork had been replaced at a jaunty angle after he’d opened it at dinner last night. It released again with a soft pop.

  He sighed. ‘No, just . . . frustrating. MacLennan’s paper got picked up by Proceedings so he’s been strutting about all day like the cock he is—’

  Proceedings was the Royal Society’s flagship publication and was to him what The Lancet was to her.

  ‘He reckons it’ll get the attention of that donor he’s been chasing and finally some—’ He rubbed his fingers together, meaning money. Funding.

  ‘Ah.’ There was no love lost between her boyfriend – fiancé! she corrected herself – and James MacLennan, the other PhD student in their department. Though Alex was brilliant – gifted, passionate and instinctive about his work – his rise through academia had been unorthodox. His love of biology had started in the fields of the farms and communes they lived on as his family travelled through the Golden State and he’d been entirely home-schooled, with no formal qualifications whatsoever. He had been seventeen when a botanist visiting the farm they were living on at the time offered Alex the chance to assist him on a research trip to Honduras in Central America. Six weeks had turned into five years as his carefree childhood quickly found a focus in the field. From Honduras, he went on to Nicaragua, Brazil and Costa Rica, at one point studying only twenty miles from where Tara and her family had holidayed every year since she was a little girl. Along the way he became an expert on tropical forest habitats, and particularly on the effect of species decline on biodiversity. He had made a chance comment – on the abundance and range of butterflies in a given area as a marker of biodiversity health – to a professor, Robert Hamlyn, whom he’d met while changing a flat tyre on a jungle road on the way back to San José. Hamlyn was on his way home from an expedition for Imperial College London and, intrigued by Alex’s observation, had eventually invited him to study for a doctorate there, without even a bachelor’s degree to his name. Hamlyn had even offered to oversee his research.

  It was the unorthodox nature of Alex’s induction into the world of academia that rankled with James MacLennan and made him such a thorn in Alex’s side. As James saw it, he had grafted and gained access to Hamlyn’s inner sanctum the hard way – picking up degrees first at Edinburgh and then Cambridge – whilst the ‘American hipster’ had simply curried favour to get there.

  ‘Here.’ Alex held out a glass of wine for her.

  ‘Oh. I’ve already got a drink.’ She reached for her glass of Purdey’s. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘So you don’t want it?’

  ‘No. I’ll have another night off tonight, I think. More tests coming up. I need to keep a clear head.’

  ‘Okay.’ And he sank her glass whilst still holding his own.

  She watched, seeing anger still in his movements. He definitely looked wired, his eyes a bit too bright, and she knew he’d had a tough day. He never moaned, not really, but he often struggled with the politics of academia; it frustrated him, a self-titled ‘farm boy’ who just wanted to leave the world a better place than he had found it. He didn’t engage in power plays, didn’t care which of them Hamlyn bought a coffee for. Tara had never met anyone with more passion to learn, act and make a difference – not even Holly could match him for drive – and it was one of the things she loved most about him. But she was beginning to sense it wouldn’t always make him easy to live with. There was still so much they had to learn about one another, and a tiny voice in her head wondered if Holly been right. Were they rushing in
to this? Was it all far too much, far too soon?

  He caught her watching him as he drained his own glass too – a very tough day, then – and he startled, as if embarrassed, remembering himself. He leaned forward to kiss her again, his lips soft against hers, tasting now of Chablis. She felt his tongue lightly against her lips and her stomach fluttered, butterfly-like, in response. It was always so easy to fall into one another. A default option. Their ‘factory settings’, he had joked once.

  She put her hand on his chest, pushing him away lightly. ‘Why don’t you go and have a shower? Unwind a bit. This’ll be ready in five.’

  His smile was grateful. ‘Thanks, baby. I just need to . . .’ He gave a shudder as though trying to physically cast off the day’s tests. He was trying so hard to be his usual loving self, but he was as tightly wound as a spring.

  ‘I know.’

  He kissed her once more lightly, before walking through to the bedroom at the back. She watched him go, loving the breadth of his shoulders, the narrowness of his hips. He was always so unaware of the physical impression he made – growing up without TV or internet meant he had no interest in how he looked; good or bad, it was all the same to him – and Tara was pretty sure part of James MacLennan’s rancour towards him was thwarted lust. Alex Carter had the charisma to make anyone fall in love with him: man, woman, young, old.

  The extractor fan had stopped working at some point in the noughties, and she opened the window to let the steam escape as the steak sizzled on the heat, pausing a moment to glance over the patchwork of gardens below. A wooden swing with red abacus beads hung limply from the branch of a crab apple tree in the garden opposite theirs; Bumpy, the cockapoo two houses up, was racing around the small garden in frenzied loops; a grey squirrel leaped from the branch of a horse chestnut to a silver birch, straddling No. 24 and No. 26 Tor Gardens in one graceful jump. She gave a small smile. The Sumatran rainforest it might not be, but they still had a mini paradise outside their window.

  She caught herself. Their window. So would she move in here with him, then? They hadn’t discussed specifics yet, but that was the intimation. The flat she shared a mile and a half away in Bayswater with Holly was a study in student grot. It looked onto a laundrette at the front and the bins of the Chinese restaurant at the back, and she was woken every morning by the dawn delivery lorry to the Polish store four numbers down. There was mildew in the shower, the kitchen sink was stained, the tap leaked – dripping noisily all day and night – and the cracks in the walls seemed more substantial than ‘settlement’ to her eye. Nonetheless, it had been her choice to live there and, in an odd way, she loved it. She and Holly had chosen it together, before Tara had admitted the truth about her family’s wealth, and it was all Holly could afford. Once she did find out, Holly had spent a year alternately pleading with her not to ‘sacrifice herself’ to their subpar accommodation and berating Tara for not having come clean earlier and put them up in a Hyde Park penthouse. She had been fully incredulous at Tara’s insistence that she wanted to be there. That she liked being normal.

  Alex’s flat – a grace-and-favour residence in the gift of the university – was still tiny but it had two bedrooms at least (although one was so small she was certain she’d received bigger Amazon boxes) and it came up well after a clean. But perhaps they would get somewhere new, somewhere they would start afresh as a family?

  Her hands fell to her tummy again – a fresh habit. She smoothed it tenderly, still so flat. She wasn’t showing at all although her breasts were more tender and the nausea was beginning to steadily dial up. Alex hadn’t noticed yet that she’d found excuses not to drink alcohol for the past couple of weeks – a test the next day, a headache – but he soon would. He had an eye for detail, and she felt a twinge of guilt to be keeping it a secret from him still. It felt like a deception somehow, almost a theft, but Holly’s reaction that morning had startled her. There was no guarantee he would take the news of imminent parenthood well and she had to be prepared for another bad response. She had to judge the right moment to tell him.

  She was dressing the salad when Alex came back a few minutes later, towelling his wet hair and wearing just his jeans – the cold never bothered him – his t-shirt tucked into the waistband and hanging down like a window-washer’s rag. Everything hung loosely on him, his body spare, lean and finely muscled, though he never worked out. He was just active.

  She relaxed under his touch as he kissed her in the crook of her neck again – his place. ‘Let’s try again,’ he murmured, taking the salad servers out of her hands and turning her towards him. ‘Hello, love of my life.’ He smoothed her long dark hair off her pale face. ‘You look especially beautiful today.’

  She smiled, feeling the day’s tension begin to rise off her too. ‘Hello. You’re not too shabby either. Had a good day?’

  ‘Excellent. I spent it thinking up ways to impress my future parents-in-law.’ He arched an eyebrow, looking pleased with himself.

  ‘Intriguing. And what did you come up with?’

  ‘Well, you said your father was big on environmental issues, right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’m thinking a trip to the Aquarium? I know a guy who works there. He could get us in after closing time, take us around the tanks round the back, show us their protection and breeding programmes in place? Then I thought drinks at . . .’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Well, not sure on that bit yet, but somewhere fancy. And then dinner at this new Korean place in Notting Hill Gate, they’ve got a pioneering recycling scheme which, if that’s his thing—’

  Tara laughed. ‘You’re a nut! Alex, you don’t need to do anything fancy to impress my parents. They’ll love you. How could they not?’

  ‘Uh-uh. Fathers-in-law are different. They never like the guy who’s taking away their little princess.’

  ‘My dad isn’t like most other dads.’

  ‘Said every girl ever.’

  ‘No, I mean it. We’re . . . not like other people.’

  ‘Ha! Say that after you’ve met my folks!’ He clasped her face with his hands, kissing her tenderly, blocking out the world. ‘Another Purdey’s?’ He picked up her empty glass and waggled it in his hand.

  She smiled weakly, knowing she’d just missed a chance to tell him. Why couldn’t she just say it? You either trust him or you don’t. ‘Lovely.’

  She plated up the steak and took it, with the salad, to the table. She sat as he poured them fresh drinks. He came and sat opposite her, his knees touching hers under the table as he tonged the salad onto her plate. ‘So tell me what you’ve told them about me.’ He paused. ‘You have told them about me, haven’t you?’

  ‘Of course! They know that your name’s Alex, that you’re American, twenty-three years old, a PhD biology student at Imperial.’ She shrugged. ‘Uh . . . yeah. That’s pretty much it.’

  ‘That’s it? That’s the sum total of what they know about me?’

  ‘I—’ Her mouth opened, looking for excuses. ‘I don’t like giving them too much detail early on! We’ve only been together a few months, after all, and trust me, my mother would need no encouragement to start planning a wedding. She’s been waiting since the day I turned eighteen. No, scratch that, twelve.’

  ‘Hmm. So then it sounds like it’s your mother I need to get on side.’ He cast a sidelong glance, winking at her and making her stomach somersault. Just like that.

  ‘She actually cried – not tears of pride, mind you – when I told her I was going to be a doctor, can you believe that?’

  He considered for a moment, a morsel of medium-rare steak perched on the tines of his fork. ‘No. That is odd.’

  She leaned in towards him. ‘So what have you told your parents about me?’

  ‘That you’re a stone-cold fox, shit-hot at anatomy.’ He winked at her. ‘And that once you’re a doctor and I’m a professor, our letters are going to look really cool on the doormat.’

  She felt her smile falter as Holly’s predictions continued to
echo through her mind. Was she right? Would it really be too hard for her to pick up the reins a year from now and continue on with her dream?

  He noticed her absent look and gave her a quizzical look. ‘You okay? You’re a little pale.’

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ she nodded, knowing that now was the time to tell him. She had to do it before the moment slipped away again, a silk scarf in the wind. ‘But actually, there is something I’ve been wanting to tell you. For a while, actually.’

  ‘Sounds ominous.’

  ‘No, it’s nothing bad. I’m just . . . not sure how you’re going to take it.’

  ‘You’re not already married, are you?’ He looked around the room mock-apprehensively, as though he expected someone to leap from the larder.

  ‘No, I’m not married; I’m just . . . rich.’

  His apparent confusion deepened. ‘. . . You’re rich?’ He looked sceptical and she knew she looked anything but in her vintage jeans and Zara jumper; that was partly the point, after all.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

  He stared at her, a long silence opening up. ‘Sorry, I’m not getting why . . . why’s that a thing?’

  She felt her cheeks redden. ‘It’s just the stuff that comes with it, that’s all. It can be overwhelming.’

  A light came into his eyes. ‘What, you mean the jets, the yachts, having to remember which clothes are in which homes . . .?’

  He had been joking, but she nodded. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Oh!’ His smile faded as he ran a hand through his hair. His forehead was two shades lighter than the rest of his face, his fringe always flopping down over it. ‘Okay, so then you’re rich,’ he said finally. ‘But what’s it got to do with us?’