The Secret Path

by Karen Swan

  Tara sighed. ‘Anyway, I’ll leave him to explain it to you. He makes it sound much more interesting than I can.’

  ‘I don’t see how.’ Her mother’s eyes narrowed interestedly. ‘Still, you must really like him to be introducing him to us.’ For all her social flightiness, she could still drill down to the nub of a matter more succinctly than any other person Tara knew. Years of tolerating sycophants had taught her how to read people and know whom to trust; if she was her father’s daughter, Miles was his mother’s son.

  ‘I do.’ Tara felt the secret bubble in her throat again – she wanted to shout it out and swallow it down all at once; it was the same curious feeling she’d had as a little girl when she would laugh so hard, she’d tip over into crying, her body confused about what her mind felt.

  ‘He’s only the second boy you’ve ever brought home to us.’

  ‘I’m not sure the prom date even counts, does he?’

  ‘Well, I still don’t understand when proms became a thing over here,’ her mother said disapprovingly. ‘But talking of all things American, have you met his parents?’

  ‘Not yet. They’re . . . in America,’ she shrugged.

  ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘Southern California.’

  ‘San Diego? Santa Barbara? I wonder if they know the Palmers?’

  ‘They won’t,’ Tara said quickly. ‘They moved around a lot when Alex was growing up. His parents were . . . farmers.’

  ‘Ah. Arable? Livestock?’

  ‘. . . Smallholdings, mainly.’

  ‘Ah.’ Her mother’s smile faltered as all potential avenues for conversation seemed to lead to dead ends. ‘And how did you meet him? Did you tell me that already?’

  ‘Yes. He’s at Imperial too, studying for a PhD. We met in the coffee shop down the road from the campus.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Jakob picked up a can of Elnett and shook it violently. ‘Samantha, just close your eyes for a moment.’

  Her mother shut her eyes as the room was misted with hairspray. It was one of the scents of Tara’s childhood. She looked at her mother’s face in repose – rosy skin with only a few deepening lines down the sides of her mouth, owing (in spite of her ‘little tweaks’) to her readiness to laugh; champagne-blonde hair styled in a long bob; the deep-set hazel eyes she shared with Tara, which flashed like amber in candlelight (her preferred lighting setting). Samantha had never been the most beautiful woman in a room, but she was always one of the most sought-after, her warmth and flair for recounting anecdotes bringing friends to her side like moths to the flame.

  Tara went to put the bottle back on the dressing table but it slipped from her fingers and fell with a clatter onto the shagreen tray. Thankfully, nothing was broken. ‘Oh!’

  ‘You seem . . . nervous, darling,’ her mother said, regarding her through slitted eyes again, and not – Tara suspected – on account of avoiding the hairspray.

  ‘Nervous? No. I’m fine. Just a bit tired, perhaps.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  The secret expanded like bellows in her chest. ‘Of course.’ She got up again, not wanting to lie outright, not wanting to linger in case Jakob was drafted in to ‘do something’ quickly with her hair. ‘I’m going to find Daddy before Alex gets here. He was on a call to Gerard when I arrived.’

  ‘Well, when you see him, remind him not to be . . .’ Her mother twirled her hands in the air, almost clocking Jakob again. ‘You know how he gets.’

  A tiny smile danced in her eyes and Tara laughed as she left the dressing room. She appreciated her mother’s soft, subtle humour – her father was understated to the point of invisibility. Unlike his wife, who wore couture at breakfast, he had more than once been mistaken for the driver, which he loved. It wasn’t that he was shabbily dressed; there was just nothing about what he wore that broadcast he was worth £2.4 billion (or whatever the most recent estimate was; it shifted with the markets) – not his shoes, not his watch. In fact, Holly had a fancier iPhone than he did. Tara was convinced he downplayed his status markers in order to lull his opponents into a false sense of superiority. Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t invented the concept of the t-shirt-wearing chairman; Bruce Tremain had.

  She found him in his study on the ground floor. His desk, always so neat, was dotted with a small stacked pile of papers. He was writing something but looked up as she came in, his expression still stern as his concentration lagged a moment behind his gaze, and she glimpsed him for a moment as the rest of the world saw him – an immensely powerful man, self-made, almost unlimited in his reach. As predicted, he was wearing clothes that, to the casual observer, could have come from Gap or L. L. Bean.

  ‘Twiglet.’ He dropped the pen and rose to hug her. ‘How’s my piglet?’

  ‘Twiglet the piglet’ had been his nickname for her since she was a little girl. He stepped back to take a better look at her, as though looking for changes since their last meeting six weeks before. No doubt she had bags under her eyes but if so, they wouldn’t be from overwork for once. Now that he’d come round from behind the desk, she could see he was wearing his gold-monogrammed navy velvet slippers – an annual Christmas present from her mother. ‘I’m fine, Daddy. How are you? Is this a bad time? You look busy.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just one or two things to sign off on for that pledge business.’ He frowned, checking his watch. ‘He’s not here already, is he?’

  ‘Alex? No, not yet. He’s coming straight from Imperial so I thought I’d take the opportunity to see you all alone first.’

  Her father gave a knowing look, crossing his arms in front of his chest and leaning against the desk. ‘Oh, I see. So you mean this is a briefing.’

  She grinned. He had always understood her horror of ostentation; she got it from him. ‘If that’s what you want to call it. I’ve simply asked Miles and Ma to maybe just not mention . . . the toys.’

  ‘The toys, I see.’

  ‘And of course to do a slipper check.’ She cast a quick look down at the slippers again, one eyebrow lifted.

  He laughed, squeezing her shoulder like he was pinching a toddler’s cheek. ‘Outrageous! And what have you told him about us? Knowing you as I do, I imagine you’ve said almost nothing? Or has he had time to read up on me and now he thinks I’m the big bad wolf?’

  ‘Of course not. I told him you’re a sweetheart.’

  ‘Sweetheart. Dear God.’ He groaned, amused. For a man with all the responsibility that came with running a giant corporation, he had somehow maintained a light-hearted approach to life. For her, at least, he was ready to smile, laugh, listen to a story, tell a joke.

  Tara grinned as her father went to his chair beside the fire and slipped off his slippers, reaching for his shoes. She wandered slowly around the room, her hand trailing over the familiar furniture and artefacts. Her father’s study had always been comforting to her: walls lined with books, that faded rug, the sun-bleached striped chair by the fire, its arms worn bald over the years. Her mother rarely ventured in here and as such, it had a worn-in, slightly nibbled look.

  She went and stood by the window, looking out onto the street, scanning for the lean lope of her fiancé. Gleaming dark cars were parked along both sides, the streetlamps already shining as daylight faded fast. The days, though growing longer, were still too short for her liking and the glow of lights inside their neighbours’ houses was contained by heavy passementerie-trimmed curtains, spilling out only in half crescents through fanlight windows above old Georgian doors. Not a person was to be seen. They were in the centre of London, only a few hundred metres from Piccadilly, Park Lane and Regent Street, but it may as well have been a village in the Dales for all the footfall after dark here.

  ‘Well, just so you know,’ he said, tying his laces, ‘in the interests of transparency, I’ve had a profile worked up on our guest.’

  ‘Daddy!’ she admonished.

  ‘Only a short one,’ he replied, shaking his head quickly. ‘I wasn’t looking fo
r skeletons in the closet or anything like that – although you may be pleased that I can confirm he’s not been married before or got any kids,’ he added with an amused glint in his eye. ‘Relax, I just wanted to find some common ground with him. Your summary of “twenty-three-year-old American botanist” didn’t exactly give me much to go on. But I like what I see. He appears to have gone about things in an unusual manner and he’s a doer, gets his hands dirty. I like that.’

  ‘Well, I knew you would. He’s a bit of a maverick, but so passionate about his work.’

  ‘And he’s written some interesting articles. I particularly liked that one on reforestation and food waste.’

  ‘With the orange peels?’ she asked, pleased. She was pretty sure she had begun to fall in love with Alex in the course of that conversation. He had explained to her how, back in the mid-nineties in Costa Rica, an agreement between an orange juice manufacturer and a conservation-inspired landowner had led to 12,000 metric tonnes of orange peel and waste being allowed to biodegrade on scrub land within the landowner’s park. A rival juice manufacturer had taken a case to the Costa Rican Supreme Court a year later, successfully arguing the waste had despoiled a national park (but really wanting to trim their rival’s expanded profit margin, as their waste disposal costs were slashed) and nothing further was allowed. For fifteen years it was forgotten, until a Princeton biologist friend of Alex’s happened to look in on the site and saw with his own eyes a flourishing, thriving forest so thick with trees and vines that the road wasn’t visible even a few feet away. ‘Can you just imagine,’ Alex had asked her, his eyes shining, ‘how many problems could be eradicated if we could get the private sector to work with environmental communities? Imagine if we could bring back tropical forests by using the leftovers from industrial food production?’ The way his eyes had glittered at that question, his passion for the subject, his need to not just do good by the planet but to do better by it . . .

  ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it? He’s got so many ideas. His mind is just alive to possibilities, getting different industries to link up and offset one another. He knows the future is about collaboration, re-engaging communities at the grass roots.’

  ‘Mmm.’ He looked thoughtful suddenly and went over to the desk, beginning to rifle through the slim pile of papers. ‘Hmm . . . I wonder if . . .’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Hmm, no,’ he murmured, reaching the bottom of the pile. The rest of his desk was bare but for a solid gold nugget paperweight shaped like a bird’s egg, and a selection of ink pens in a pot. ‘I thought I wrote a small cheque a while back to a charity in central America doing something similar, but I can’t see it. I’ll ask Patsy tomorrow, she’ll know.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Saturday.’

  He looked at her blankly for a second before getting her gist – he might work every day of the week, but his PA didn’t work the weekends.

  ‘Oh well, Monday then. But I’m keen to get into the detail of it with him tonight. It sounds like it’s got legs.’ He smiled, his eyes softening. ‘Not to mention, he clearly knows a thing or two about our favourite place.’

  Tara smiled. Her father had been taking her and Miles to a small cove on the Costa Rican Caribbean coast since they were small children. It had been his way of reconnecting with them when building his business had consumed him; weeks could go by in which they never saw him, he was always in a meeting, on a plane . . . but their month in the Central American tropics was ring-fenced every summer and nothing – absolutely nothing – was allowed to impinge upon it. Costa Rica had been the place where they rewilded, escaping the gilded cages they lived in throughout the year; it was where they ran about like normal kids, the only place where they had no security. It was an arduous journey in and out of the region; no one knew who they were, or cared, so he employed just a local man and his son to provide them with adventures and local knowledge and to keep a beady eye on them. Tara and Miles had learned to surf there, abseil, zipwire, scuba dive, go on jungle safaris . . . and their mother would fly in from Jamaica, ‘just across the water’, at the weekends. She preferred to visit a detox clinic there whilst the rest of them ‘went feral’.

  ‘It was one of the first things we connected over,’ she said. ‘He spent eleven months recording butterfly populations in Limon.’

  ‘Yes. I see he’s doing his PhD on how they’re a marker of the health of an ecosystem.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Tara smiled. Her father was nothing if not thorough. ‘Did you know the species found there make up about ninety per cent of all Central American butterflies and eighteen per cent of all the world’s species?’

  ‘Well, I do now,’ he smiled, regarding her intently.

  She shifted under his gaze. He had always been able to read her so well and she didn’t want him to guess her secrets yet, to ask the one pertinent question and steal Alex’s thunder. If it had been hard keeping quiet with her mother, it would be harder still with him—

  As if on cue, they heard the heavy knock of the bronze lion’s head on the door. Her father waggled his eyebrows at her the way he had always done when she was little, to make her laugh (usually at inopportune moments, like a parent–teacher meeting). ‘Aha. The great moment is finally upon us.’

  It was a joke but Tara swallowed, feeling her nerves skyrocket. So this was really it? She looked back at her father with a sudden sense of an ending. He didn’t know it yet, but their family was about to change shape; he was going to be asked a question he had probably assumed was another decade off. They would no longer be a family of four, but of five. It wasn’t just her life that would change with tonight’s news, but theirs as well, to an extent. Should she have given him – them – some more warning?

  Or any warning? For the first time, a thought occurred to her: what if her father actually said no? He’d never met Alex before. He had no way of knowing that Alex really wasn’t after her money. He might well say it was all far too early and tell them to wait. Oh God, had she fully conveyed to him what Alex meant to her? Her father’s refusal wouldn’t stop them, of course – this was a gesture of respect, not an actual request for permission – but it would throw a shadow over their happiness if things didn’t go the way she hoped.

  ‘Piglet?’ Her father clicked his fingers to get her attention, motioning for her to move towards the door. ‘We should go and put a face to the brain?’

  ‘. . . Yes . . . Okay.’

  Her father held the door open for her, regarding her shell-shocked expression with bemusement. She stopped in the middle of the doorway. ‘You know, Daddy, he’s a really special person. One of a kind, really, I’ve never met anyone like him. I think you’re going to find him fascinating.’

  ‘Well, unlike the other friends you’ve introduced us to I imagine this one will giggle less.’

  ‘He’s definitely not a giggler.’

  He shrugged. ‘Then I like him already.’

  Chapter Five

  His footsteps were hurried on the stairs behind her, as her key slid into the lock and she flung open the door.

  ‘Oh, you’re still up!’

  Tara was surprised to find Holly and Dev sprawled on the sofa, legs intertwined, an almost-empty bottle of red on the table in front of them. They were watching an American murder documentary on Netflix and Dev had pressed pause at a particularly unfortunate moment. Even as a trainee doctor, Tara grimaced.

  Her eyes slid over to Holly. They hadn’t seen each other since their tiff a few days earlier. Tara had been lying low at Alex’s flat ever since and she was pretty certain Holly had been avoiding her at uni, too; she hadn’t glimpsed her in the cafeteria, and Holly could always, always be found by a vending machine.

  Alex caught up with her at last and she felt him come and stand behind her as Holly met her gaze with a look of recrimination and, worse, disappointment – before looking away again. ‘Wasn’t expecting you back tonight,’ she said shortly, reaching for the wine bottle and emptying the dregs into her glass. />
  ‘We . . . we just came back from dinner with my parents.’

  ‘Oh.’ Holly nodded, getting it immediately, understanding what that meant. Operation Domesticity was underway. Little did she realize that they were mid-argument; that Tara had only come back here because she didn’t want to stay at Alex’s, and he was only here because he’d followed after her in another cab. If she hadn’t been so surprised by the vision of her flatmate clearly reconciled with the guy she had been so adamant on rejecting, she would have closed the door on Alex and thrown over the chain, leaving him abject in the corridor. Instead, she felt his hand press lightly on the small of her back. She tried to arch away but it was impossible to escape his touch without leaping from the spot, and she didn’t want Holly to see –

  ‘Go well, did it?’ Holly looked over at Alex.

  Tara could feel his smile behind her head, feel his body heat like a glowing coal at her shoulder. ‘Fantastic. Twig’s parents were so welcoming.’ He glanced at Tara as if for corroboration, but she kept her gaze dead ahead.

  ‘Yeah, they’re sweet, aren’t they?’ Holly agreed with a tone that Tara – and only Tara – knew was mocking. ‘If you didn’t know, you’d never know.’

  ‘Know what?’ Dev asked, but Holly just kicked him with her leg as a shushing gesture.

  The poor guy frowned. ‘What’d I say?’ He had such a hapless expression, Tara felt a rush of sympathy for him. He deserved better than the rollercoaster ride Holly was putting him through, saying one thing, wanting quite another. She was all bravado and independence at breakfast, but three glasses in at the pub and she was speed-dialling him from the toilets. Tall and skinny, bespectacled with a small goatee, he didn’t exude any obvious raw sexual energy, but there was something in his quiet, easy-going manner that had hooked her ambitious, outspoken friend.

  Former friend? Holly was staring at the TV screen again, her head resting in one hand, as though she could flick it off ‘pause’ through sheer willpower alone.