Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘Revolting,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘Renoir, one of the many things I love about you is that you’re such a mix. Your grandmother was solid working class, decency and all, your mother was a hippy, you’re now an executive—’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Yes you are. Ticky said you even have shares.’

  ‘Everybody has shares.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt my flow, and the end result is that you’re absolutely classless. And that means you don’t have a chip.’

  ‘A chip?’

  ‘A chip on your shoulder. About class. You’re not “chippy”.’

  ‘No, I’m American. We don’t believe in that garbage.’

  ‘Balls. Lots of Americans do. Just not you. But why is that?’

  Wanting to shrug this off, he found himself thinking about it instead. He said, ‘I don’t mean this to sound arrogant. But if you have taken a fine-tooth comb through as many private lives as I have, what you find is, however grand the veneer, underneath the bad smells are all the same. Secrets don’t discriminate.’

  ‘So why aren’t you more cynical about people? You seem to like everybody unless they give you a really good reason not to. How can you have such a high opinion of human nature when you know what you do.’

  ‘Who said the opinion was high? I just said it was equal across the board.’

  ‘What about the people close to you? You know, people not at work.’

  There isn’t anyone close to me, he thought, but was embarrassed to admit. Except you, which he didn’t dare say in case it frightened her off.

  ‘Put it this way,’ she said in amendment. ‘What is the one thing you couldn’t stand? I mean, in a person you knew really well. Like a girlfriend,’ she added, letting the obvious implication stand unmodified.

  ‘Lies, I’m not good with lies. I see too many at work to be able to live with them at home.’

  ‘Can you always tell when a person is lying?’

  She said this lightly enough, but he sensed that something hung on his answer. Yet he wasn’t sure what to say. In some respects, he was about as close to a polygraph as a human being could be – his career was built on the ability to detect lying. And he had a nose for it, like the hero of the Lovejoy novels Kate read, an antiques dealer who could spot a fake piece instantly. But, despite this, he said emphatically to Kate, ‘No,’ adding for good measure, ‘I’m no better at it than you are.’ And though this was a lie he hoped paradoxically that just this once it was also true.

  ‘That’s a relief,’ she said, and he could tell she meant it.

  ‘So what’s the one thing you can’t stand?’ he asked.

  She nodded slightly, as if acknowledging that it was indeed her turn. ‘You’ll laugh, considering your job, but I can’t stand being spied on. Or jealousy. Angus did both,’ she said. ‘He hired a private detective to follow me. He couldn’t believe I was simply unhappy; there had to be another man.’

  ‘How did you discover you were being followed?’

  She snickered cynically. ‘Because Angus was too mean to hire a good detective. The chap stuck out like a sore thumb: once in Pitlochry I retraced my steps and actually caught him changing hats. He looked so embarrassed that I pretended not to notice him.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you married Angus to begin with.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ she said wistfully. ‘Perhaps it was because he was rich,’ she added, with an insouciance he saw through right away.

  ‘That won’t wash with me. Belfield doesn’t sound exactly like a tenement to me – you and your own family lake. Was he very intelligent?’

  ‘Who, Angus?’ She hooted at the thought. ‘No. And not educated either.’

  ‘Oh, like me,’ said Renoir; it was his turn for phoney nonchalance.

  ‘But you’re clever, Renoir. I don’t care what you say, you run rings around people when you want to. I know you didn’t go to Harvard but believe me you’re in a different league from Angus.’

  He was flattered by this – as he imagined he was intended to be. But she hadn’t really answered his question, and he still couldn’t make sense of her marriage; she seemed far too level headed to have married that dolt. Had she been so different ten years before? He doubted it, but didn’t want to push things; perhaps in time he would learn enough about the circumstances of the marriage to make sense of it. Maybe it was a class thing – not in the American sense of ‘classy’, denoting gracefulness, but something more rigid, a hierarchy he didn’t understand but which Kate occasionally alluded to in conversation. There was money in her ‘class’, whatever she said, but there was something subtler about it, apparently, though he didn’t know what this subtlety was.

  He said, ‘You’d never have found out if I had been following you.’

  She groaned, and said, ‘I know, I know.’

  He reached out to touch her arm, and said gently, ‘That’s why I’d never do it.’

  ‘Promise?’ she said lightly.

  ‘Promise,’ he said, more heavily and from what he thought was the heart.

  *

  He was curious how she’d got into the oil business, which he saw as overwhelmingly male, and she explained that she had studied geography as an undergraduate (‘It’s supposed to be for dimwits, but I liked it, and I was good at it’) then took an MA in economics in London. ‘The two converge into petroleum pretty easily,’ she explained. ‘It’s in the ground and it makes money if you take it out.’

  It was clear that the newsletter she and the senior partner, Seymour Carlisle, produced was very successful and much respected in the field. But it alone did not account for her professional prosperity – ‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘the newsletter could support Seymour alone in some style, but not an office in Berkeley Square, my services (not to mention a secretary) and two half-time researchers.’

  Consultancy was the real money-spinner. The focus of the newsletter was on exploration – part report, part prediction of where petroleum reserves would come from in future; the consultancy, if he understood it correctly, provided specific advice to specific clients about their individual exploration strategies. It was not so much, ‘How do you find the 75 million barrels worth of retrievable oil under a Finnish pocket of tundra?’ but rather was the price of extracting it worth it? And what were the odds that the putative 75 million barrels were actually 12 million? Sometimes they had to tell their clients what they didn’t want to hear. Increasingly, Kate said, she and Carlisle were becoming suspicious of the levels of reserves being claimed by the major producers, especially when the projections were hypotheticals arrived at with the help of state of the art expert systems.

  She made good money – very good money by Renoir’s standards, as far as he could tell, which was not the result of snooping around her cheque book but just the inferences drawn from a lifestyle she seemed to take for granted: her flat in central London was at least three bedrooms from her casual descriptions; she dressed expensively and stylishly, if without a trace of show-off glitz; her tastes in food and wine were, though not pretentious, high quality and expensive. For the moment he could keep up – he was making $110K and had no dependents. He was a saver, not a spender, and had always been careful to have some reserves. But he was aware of the earning differential between them, though it helped from the start that they effortlessly shared the expense of restaurants and movies and even – at her insistence – gasoline for his car on their excursions out of town. But Kate was by nature generous, and she liked to give him presents, bringing duty-free smoked salmon and CDs of the music she was learning he liked, and once a cashmere sweater so soft to the touch that he was reluctant to wear it.

  It was more the perspective on money than money itself that revealed the difference for Renoir, for sometimes Kate unwittingly tripped over it, as if hitting a relationship landmine. She asked him why if he liked the High Sierra foothills so much he didn’t buy a cabin like the Kaufmans’. ‘Money,’ he said simply. ‘I pay a lo
t of rent,’ he added, pointing to the rooms around them, ‘despite the unfancy nature of this place. I want to live in the city, and it’s so expensive that I just couldn’t swing both.’ It sounded almost pathetic. What else could he tell this rich girl? ‘I’m just a middle manager, ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘but let’s not overdo the modest bit. I think you are what you want to be.’ Oh God, he thought, San Francisco’s got to her with shrink gobbledygook at last. But she seemed intrigued by Renoir’s comparative lack of ambition. ‘Someone told me,’ she said later that night, while he steamed rice and grilled tuna in the apartment’s bachelor kitchen, ‘that when the old head of HR at your company left, the senior management asked you to apply but you wouldn’t. Is that true?’

  He looked at her sceptically. ‘You’ve been talking to Ticky.’

  She reddened slightly; he liked it, since it was such a girly contrast to her usual crisp confidence. ‘She wasn’t being critical,’ said Kate. ‘I think she admired it.’

  ‘What, my lack of ambition? You don’t.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ She seemed keen to persuade him. ‘I have never admired ambition for the sake of ambition. But I do think,’ and she looked at him in a meaningful way he didn’t really understand, ‘that when you do know what you want to do you should be ambitious. It’s wrong to be anything else.’

  He would have been suspicious if there were no downside to her, no aspects he disliked, yet even those he found intrigued him. There was a whiff of snobbery he didn’t like at all, for though he wasn’t especially politically correct, he had, thanks to his grandmother, none of the prejudices so common in his childhood neighbourhood. It was not that Kate was racist, far from it; it was a subtler prejudice which came out as words he did not at first fully understand – rough-acting people were ‘common’, drunks were ‘yobs’, there was even a word called ‘oik’ which Renoir suspected could be applied to most of his drinking buddies. And there was a tacit assumption too that ‘one’s friends’ were of a certain type with certain holdings. Holdings? Yes, land, or houses seemed a key part of it, particularly for the country people, mainly family friends, who were neighbours of Belfield.

  ‘You know,’ he said once, ‘you act sniffy about people who grew up in houses with numbers instead of names.’

  ‘I do not,’ she protested, but she blushed.

  ‘So what I want to know is, what are you doing with me? Where I grew up, it wasn’t just my house that had a number – the street had a number, too.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, and her voice grew plummier, as if to say I’m not backing down one inch, ‘but wasn’t there a cross street?’

  ‘Yes. Quintara.’

  ‘That’s prettier. If I were you, I’d say that was the street where you grew up.’ And he could only laugh, unable in the face of such defiant elitism to pursue the argument.

  She was five years younger than he was, but the combination of her professional standing, her extensive travelling around the world, and the dual experience of marriage and motherhood meant he thought of her as his contemporary. Not that this made her any easier to understand, for she was utterly different from any woman he had known.

  Which he liked, and he loved to have her talk about the simplest things: how often she took a cab to work (shockingly often); where she ate lunch (usually at her desk, though sometimes with clients in ridiculously fancy restaurants); where her friends lived (mainly Notting Hill, it seemed, which thanks to the movie he had heard of); where she took Emily on holidays (to France or Belfield for happy ones; to Kate’s ex-husband in Scotland for dutiful ones). In its complete unfamiliarity, all this information intrigued him.

  Only once did a difference emerge that he didn’t like. She had come in early on a Friday afternoon flight from Calgary and he came home to Lake Street early, hoping to surprise her. When he entered the apartment she was sitting in the back room next to an open window, smoking a joint. She looked at him guiltily.

  ‘I didn’t know you did that,’ he said, trying to sound completely neutral about it.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said. She pointed to the open window. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t sure if you’d mind.’

  ‘Where did you buy it?’ he asked. She’d seen Ticky on her last visit, maybe she’d got it from her. He hoped so; he didn’t want Kate buying it off the street.

  ‘I brought it with me,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean? From Canada?’ When she nodded, his voice began to rise. ‘You mean you brought it through Customs? You idiot.’ He stopped momentarily, shocked at himself, since he’d never been abusive to her in any way. She was looking down at her feet, so he couldn’t tell how she was reacting. But he didn’t care. ‘Do you realise how stupid you’ve been?’

  ‘They don’t throw you in jail any more. I asked a friend about it. They barely check the Canadian passengers anyway.’

  ‘It’s not jail I’m worried about, Kate,’ he said, his voice rising again. ‘Don’t you understand? If you get caught they won’t let you in the country again. Honest, they almost threw John Lennon out, and he had a Green card. Maybe you wouldn’t care – maybe that’s the point – but how am I supposed to feel when I don’t get to see you any more because you’ve brought in some shitty grass from Calgary? Christ, it’s not as if it’s better than what you’d get here. How could you be so dumb?’

  He went and took a shower to cool off. Had he overreacted? No, he decided, not really; he knew how dim a view the government took of even the mildest drug offence by foreigners. But he also knew his explosive reaction was not to do solely with the law. Marijuana did not mean for him DRUGS, as in the first step to heroin hell, impotence, loss of memory and untreatable schizophrenia. It was more personal than that, personal history.

  When he came out of the shower Kate was just getting off the phone. As he dressed she came into the bedroom. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you played golf?’

  ‘What’s to tell?’

  ‘Are you an ace?’

  Renoir was proficient enough to be called a golfer, but not enough to be called a good one. ‘That’s a sore point. But why are you talking about golf? Who was on the phone just now?’

  ‘Someone named Hank.’

  His golfing partner at Presidio. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He said he had a tee time for tomorrow at nine fifteen and could you please let him know if you weren’t going to show up so he could get somebody else. I said I didn’t know; I was telling the truth, since I’m not altogether sure what a tee time is. Then he said and I quote: “You must be some babe to make Renoir miss his golf.”’

  ‘I’m sorry. He’s an old army pal and one of my more unreconstructed friends.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mind. It’s quite flattering. Pale English women like me don’t often get called “babes”.’ She giggled. ‘I was just worried you were giving up something you love to do.’

  ‘I was. Or I am. Or I will be. Take your pick.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I wouldn’t if I didn’t want to. End of story. Okay?’

  The marijuana episode was as angry as he ever got with her, but Kate was far more volatile, though the two of them didn’t really argue – when Kate got cross Renoir would go quiet until the microburst of temper passed over. His refusal to respond in kind annoyed her, he could tell, and once she actually complained: ‘Why don’t you ever row?’

  ‘Is that what the English call bickering? I can’t stand couples who do that all the time. Why be together if you don’t like each other’s company? Anyway, I guess I don’t know how to “row” because I never learned.’

  ‘Saint Renoir,’ she said sarcastically, and he assumed an expression of such piety that her mood improved immediately.

  But he worried about her bad temper, which when mixed with what he saw as her ignorance (possibly fear) of ‘common people’ could be a potentially explosive combination. For she was not the suppressing type, and her temper would flare indiscriminately and without any sense of c
aution. When people other than Renoir angered her, she was not so easily appeased, as he saw for himself in a gas station, of all places, in the Twin Peaks neighbourhood where they stopped to fill up on the way back from a day trip south to Santa Cruz. It had been such a lovely day that he couldn’t understand, as he finished filling the car and she went to pay, why she grew so furious when a teenager, black and dressed in gangsta duds, cut in on her in the line. ‘Excuse me,’ she said sharply, and he could hear her from outside, ‘I think you should be behind me.’

  ‘That’s cool,’ said the kid and started humming.

  Renoir was fast approaching, and he could see Kate’s jaw clench and her eyes widen as she tapped the boy on the shoulder, not gently either, more like a poke one two with her extended index finger, and her voice lowered almost to a growl as she said, ‘If that’s cool, why don’t you just do it?’

  And the kid turned around, at once outraged and surprised, just as Renoir arrived, and as the kid started to expostulate, more fiercely even now that a white man had joined the discussion, Renoir said in a loud and friendly voice – loud, so as to publicise the dialogue before it could escalate through words unmediated by a larger audience; friendly, so as immediately to deflate the tension starting to swell up in this encounter like a balloon – ‘No problem.’ He gave his broadest smile, then pointed at the counter where the teller waited, looking anxious. ‘Go ahead. All yours.’

  The kid looked at him for a moment, said ‘That’s cool’ with amusement and walked slowly to the counter. Kate was fuming, and started to say, ‘But he was jumping the queue,’ until Renoir put an expansive arm around her, squeezed her shoulder tight and kissed her with a big smack on her cheek, whispering, ‘I will jump your queue if you say another word.’ And fortunately, before she could carry on arguing, another counter space opened up and he shuffled her there, his arm still around her shoulder, vice-like, and paid cash from his pocket to speed the transaction before hustling Kate out to the car before she could as much as squawk.