Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  It had one large public room, and a small snug where the local farm workers sat, monopolising the fire. There was no garden to speak of, though outside the front door the tiny village green began, and Renoir managed to persuade the landlady Annie to serve them supper in an alcove under the overhanging roof of the pub’s one bedroom, so that from May to October he and Kate ate outside, under the shade of a large horse chestnut tree, next to the green. The food was simple but fresh and good. Local, without the faddism that touted pig hearts as Britain’s chief culinary virtue.

  This evening he stood at the bar and ate a large ham sandwich on rough stone bread with mustard and a handful of cherry tomatoes for salad, and drank two pints of best bitter. It was only as he was ready to go that Annie came over to him from behind the bar. ‘So where’s Kate then?’

  ‘She’s away on a business trip.’

  ‘So you’re down to keep the rest of them in order?’

  He laughed. Annie was always cheerfully impertinent, unlike many of the other locals who simulated an old-fashioned deference to the local land-owning families. He said, ‘You think they’d listen to the likes of me?’

  Annie shrugged. ‘You Yanks rule the rest of the world, don’t you? Why not here? Though I’m not sure her brother will listen to anyone.’ She leaned forward on the bar. ‘He’s been in once or twice lately.’

  ‘What, here?’ Renoir was surprised and displeased. He thought of the pub as private property, and Roddy’s arrival somehow spoiled it a little for him.

  ‘He says he likes the food,’ said Annie, drying a glass with a tea towel and holding it up for inspection against the light. ‘Though it seems to me it’s more a liquid lunch he likes to have.’

  ‘Was he on his own?’

  ‘Once on his own; once with another man. Big bloke with a moustache.’ She looked at Renoir. ‘I wouldn’t have mentioned it, only both times he was driving. I saw him as he left. He wants to be careful or he’ll get done.’ And after this unprecedented chattiness, Annie moved on along the bar.

  He drove carefully in the dark, conscious after Annie’s words of what he had drunk, for the five miles through fields of wheat and several gallops (this was racing country) until he came to the front gate. He remembered the trepidation of his first visit with Kate – Why didn’t she tell me? he’d thought as they’d turned into the grand sweep of the drive. You couldn’t have much to do with Silicon Valley without encountering some very wealthy people, but he had not slept with any of them, or moved six thousand miles to be with them.

  He went down the avenue of limes, with light forest – second or even third growth – set off on either side, until he emerged from woodland to find the house set on its own, fronted by a circular turnaround of bone-white gravel at the end of the drive. It was such a lovely house, and on first seeing it he’d said so.

  Kate said, ‘I wasn’t sure you’d like it, but I’m glad you do. It’s a bit of a small jewel, I think.’

  Small? he thought. Later he learned there were ten bedrooms.

  ‘How old is it?’

  ‘It’s Queen Anne,’ she’d said

  ‘What’s Queen Anne?’ he’d asked and she looked so startled that he laughed. ‘Why should I know about Queen Anne? Can you tell me within fifty years when Thomas Jefferson died?’

  ‘1670.’

  ‘I win,’ he said, though he had admired the confidence of her immediate reply.

  As he got out of his car tonight the security lights went on and their false luminescence gave the bricks of the Queen Anne walls an orange and garish hue; the effect was slightly surreal, like that of being on a film set designed to mimic nightfall. He crunched on the gravel around to the back, where a light was on in the kitchen.

  Inside he found Kate’s mother, Beatrice, waiting for the kettle on the Aga. You mean it’s on all the time? he’d asked incredulously when Kate first explained this fundament of the country house kitchen.

  Beatrice wore a faded silk dressing gown and looked ready for bed. She remained beautiful in her seventies, though why beauty was meant to be the province of youth alone always mystified Renoir. Her manner towards everyone was graceful, but also simple and direct. Renoir admired this, though he was slightly wary of her. She likes Americans, Kate told him, which was oddly unreassuring, since it was said in the same tone as She’s very fond of dogs. He never found her very warm or easy, though neither did her children, except Roddy, whom she doted on. She and her son shared a preoccupation with the place – Belfield – which Jack found unhealthy, even though sometimes it seemed Kate shared it too.

  ‘Jack,’ she said now, ‘you made it at last. Can I get you something to eat? Mrs Hills has gone but I’m sure I can find something.’

  ‘I’ve eaten, thanks,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll stay for Sunday lunch, won’t you? I don’t think we’ll get much chance for a chat tomorrow, do you?’

  ‘No. Are there many staying?’

  ‘Enough,’ she said with a hint of tiredness. ‘Somehow when you get to my age the last thing you feel like on Saturday night after a long day’s shooting is having people stay the night.’ She suddenly looked embarrassed. ‘I am not including you in that remark.’

  When he left the kitchen, he paused in the hall, staring at one of the ancestor’s drawings – a pen and ink sketch of the Vale of the White Horse – while he decided whether to go upstairs with his bag or join the others for a drink.

  You have to remember, Kate had explained, they were all taught to draw back then. And play the piano. And know the names of plants and birds. That’s what their education consisted of. She’d said this without respect, but it seemed admirable to Renoir, who couldn’t draw a lick; even his uncle, who had liked drawing – simple pen and ink sketches of wild flowers and trees – wasn’t in the same league as these genteel amateurs of the past.

  He decided he wanted a drink after all, and he opened the drawing-room door, hoping the rest were still at the dining-room table.

  ‘Renoir!’ It was Kate’s sister, Sarah, sounding pleased. She was sitting on the sofa next to her husband, Alastair, wearing a linen dress the colour of cranberries and a choker of pearls. In her hand she held a weak whisky and water – her husband’s looked much stronger.

  ‘Hello,’ said Renoir, smiling, since this was the part of Kate’s family he liked. ‘I thought I’d cadge a nightcap if I could. Can I give either of you a refill?’ They both shook their heads, and he noticed that Alastair was still wearing a suit from work – he would have come down in a rush from the City, picking up Sarah from their house in Holland Park.

  ‘There’s probably ice in the kitchen if you want some.’ Sarah was younger than Kate but looked and acted older. A brunette, she had her hair tied back, framing her high cheekbones and the small sharp nose she had inherited, along with her height, from her father, who, from the photographs Renoir had seen, had been a big man with a small face.

  ‘That’s all right.’ He walked over to the corner, where an array of bottles stood on top of a Pembroke table. On the wall above it hung a Seago landscape Renoir liked – it was of a church in Italy, the building itself receding behind dark trees that verged on the abstract. He found the whisky in a decanter, and poured two inches into a large tumbler, then added water from the Toby jug. He didn’t mind it without ice, had got used to it in fact; it was iceless gin and tonic he found unbearable.

  ‘Are you shooting tomorrow?’ Sarah asked.

  Renoir shook his head. ‘I’ve only come down to check the Gatehouse,’ he explained. He took his drink and was about to join them when the door to the dining room opened and Roddy came in.

  He was a small man, dapper, and good-looking in a boyish kind of way – like the Duke of Windsor, according to Kate, who had added spikily, ‘and with the same strength of character’. He had gone to school at Harrow, which he enjoyed, and university at Oxford, which he had not. He had the slightly bogus affability of the ‘well bred’, though not when he drank, which meant Ann
ie’s warning in the pub now put Renoir on his guard.

  He was also unemployed, having lost his City job two years before, though he seemed little inconvenienced by the absence of a pay cheque: there were always deals in the offing, the ‘offing’ proving their recurring characteristic. Most recently, he had become involved in various start-ups in Latvia, which he talked about in a fashion which Kate caustically said aped that of his colonial predecessors a century before – with a mixture of awe, racialist distaste and capitalist evangelism. Unlike Cecil Rhodes, however, none of Roddy’s faraway ships had come in, though he had managed to hang onto his small flat in Belgravia, despite his divorce from a French wife, who had taken most of his redundancy money and their young son back with her to live in the Languedoc. Rarely visiting there, Roddy could be found most weekends at Belfield, where his chief recreational pursuit, shooting, took place.

  Unlike Alastair, Roddy had changed, and was dressed for the country: a tweed jacket, Viyella shirt and red wool tie, corduroy trousers and brown brogues. He nodded at Renoir, who nodded back with his own false look of amity, which Kate had once described as ‘your American “hi pal how’s it going?” kind of look.’ Bland and seemingly unruffleable, it could annoy people who were already disposed to find Americans fatuously easygoing. Renoir saw no point trying to disabuse them.

  Roddy peered sourly at him, and walked over and sat down exactly where Renoir had planned to sit. ‘Excuse us if you will, Jack,’ said Roddy with the tone he used when talking to Mrs Hills, the cook. The words, though perfectly polite if transcribed, were delivered with an air of benign indulgence, as if allowances were being made for the fact that the listener was a fool. Roddy was clearly tight, for it was then he adopted an exaggerated air of precision. ‘But we need to talk about some family business.’

  ‘Roddy,’ said Sarah sharply, who had little patience with her brother’s high gentleman mode. Renoir felt himself begin to blush, the inevitable accompaniment to anger he knew he shouldn’t display. He tried to look friendlier still. ‘It’s fine,’ he said in Sarah’s direction, ‘I’m tired anyway.’ He lifted up the glass. ‘I’ll take this upstairs and see you in the morning.’

  As he went out into the hall, he heard Roddy’s voice, saying something about apple juice, then laughing at his own wit. Sarah said, ‘Oh do stop it, won’t you?’

  At the top of the main staircase he turned left, away from the main body of the house where the others would be sleeping. Even as a girl Kate had preferred the distance of the wing, and as he walked down the darkened corridor he reflected on the mix of dependence and independence she showed towards her family. Not for the first time, he wished he had met her father, Thomas Palmer, who had brought to his own marital union money made in manufacturing industries when there was money still to be made there. And with it he had managed to save this estate of his wife’s family from forced sale.

  Not, it turned out, that Thomas had been self-made. If superficially Lady Palmer supplied the class and her husband the cash, it was in fact his grandfather – Kate’s great-grandfather – who in Kate’s words had made ‘iron widgets, or whatever Victorian manufacturing fortunes came from. The ones made here, I mean – the export ones always seemed based on guano. But the point is, my father was two generations removed from the grosser aspects of new money. Yet Roddy always talks about Papa as if he were a miner’s son.’ This was true; listening to Roddy, Thomas had been an insignificant figure, a peripheral blip who’d had his uses, but not ones requiring acknowledgement.

  Kate had said, ‘I suppose that in one sense he was an arriviste in a way my mother never could be.’

  ‘So regardless of what he did for your mother’s family, he was less classy.’

  ‘“Less grand” is a better way of putting it. And only in the subtlest kind of way.’

  Renoir nodded. ‘Not behaviour then, right?’

  ‘Behaviour?’ She looked at him with a fond incomprehension.

  ‘I mean, there was nothing different in the way they acted that would show the difference.’

  ‘Good God no,’ said Kate. ‘My father had beautiful manners.’

  This was not something that would ever be said of Renoir, however politely he conducted himself. ‘Well,’ he said, starting to see the conversation as a slightly unreal tutorial, ‘how could you tell the difference between the old bluebloods and the upstarts? I mean, if there was no difference in behaviour, how could a stranger tell?’

  ‘It’s difficult,’ she said, and Renoir resisted the temptation to say, You bet it is. It was bad enough trying to learn the basic mores of the English, adapt to a country which, though superficially familiar, was deeply different from his own. But to be faced with even finer distinctions – the intricate byways of the thinnest upper slice of the English class system – made the task incalculably harder. It meant a second code had to be deciphered, and though he never had the slightest inclination to join in the traffic, like any cryptanalyst he wanted to understand it.

  ‘As well as being ridiculous,’ Kate added. ‘It’s little, subtle things. And nothing to do with money – that’s the key point. It’s to do with taste.’

  ‘Really?’ Renoir asked sceptically.

  Kate shrugged. ‘Taste becomes a euphemism for anything which lets people think they’re superior. For instance, they’d always rather live in a grand old property they can’t afford to maintain than some place ungrand, even if the latter gave them far more money to live on. They’d rather serve four pound plonk in a Regency decanter than twenty pound Bordeaux poured into nouveau goblets. Take pictures – my father’s family bought pictures. But they wouldn’t have all those sketches and watercolours done by Mummy’s lady ancestors in the nineteenth century. San Gimignano in Sunlight – 1847 by my great-great-grandmother. That sort of thing. And books – the Palmers would have bought the best library money and aspirations could find, but none of those ancestors wrote any. They were too busy making money.’

  In the corridor he stopped at the bookcase outside the bedroom to look for something to read among the faded spines of its shelves. Most of the books belonged to Beatrice or came from her family. Reading books, Beatrice called them; As opposed to what? Renoir wondered as he passed his eyes over the dusty sets of Kipling and Stevenson. Most meant nothing to him: he had vaguely heard of The Green Hat, but not Sassoon’s The Weald of Youth or Diana Holman Hunt’s My Grandmothers and I or Good Behaviour by Harold Nicolson. He picked up the latter, chose a page at random, and read the following:

  Froissart has left a not unattractive picture of the household life, or ‘Menie’ of Gaston de Foix with whom he lived for three months and whom he much admired in that ‘he loved that which ought to be loved and hated that which ought to be hated’.

  That was enough for Renoir, who put the book back on the shelf, then opened the door to Kate’s bedroom and turned on the light. It remained a young girl’s room, for Kate was completely unselfconscious about its decoration – the white wallpaper dotted with pink roses, the schoolgirl watercolours from vacations in Scotland (the Tay above Pitlochry, Blair Atholl out of proportion), ribbons and badges pinned up from horse shows, two mounted photographs of her school hockey team.

  He always liked this room, felt a simultaneous comfort and curiosity from the evidence around him of Kate’s past. What had she been like as a girl? Frisky, strong-willed, an outdoors girl one notch too pretty to convince as a tomboy, a Daddy’s girl, someone sometimes completely English.

  Emptying his trouser pockets of keys and change, Renoir put them down on Kate’s dressing table and looked at the small collection of books on the windowsill: The Wind in the Willows, A Child’s Treasury of Verse, To Kill a Mockingbird,Gardens of Provence, and a blend of other bedside children’s reading, assigned O-level texts and adult reference. He sat on the four-poster bed, leaving the curtains half open since at this dark time of year it would only be light well after he was up. He had slept here alone before, since Kate was so often away on busines
s, but for the first time he felt ill at ease in the room, as if perhaps the books and pictures and bibelots around him belonged to someone he didn’t know as well as he imagined.

  He double checked his mobile phone, but Kate hadn’t called, and he placed it on the rickety fruitwood bedside table, leaving it on in hope. She had warned him that she would have a late dinner with the chairman of one of the local subsidiaries, and his circle of assistants and cronies. The world of petrochemicals was male, old-fashioned, not unlike the computer hardware business, and Kate was an oddity as a woman in it. She was odder still for being young and attractive, but by now her opinions mattered to that world more than her looks. The scandal of Shell Oil might never have broken if the general press had not picked up the story from the Carlisle newsletter, where Kate first voiced suspicions about the corporate behemoth’s declared reserves.

  He got into bed, unrolling the folded tartan blanket against the cold, since the central heating went off early at Belfield; indeed, when Beatrice was alone in the house it rarely even went on. She was almost comically frugal, always saving used wrapping paper for reuse at the next Christmas, soaking unfranked stamps off letters to put on her own correspondence. And a fanatic for retaining leftover food.

  Renoir lay back and tried to relax and let his mind wander into sleep. Instead, he found himself wondering at the strangeness of the day: the weird unpleasant postcard, the rejected cash card, Roddy’s unconcealed hostility. They were discomfiting rather than alarming, and none of them would have mattered at all if Kate had been there. He conjured up the image of Kate – she was in the flat alternately talking and laughing, and then she smiled. But with a start that brought him back to full wakefulness, he recognised the constricted, artificial smile of the week before. The smile that told him she was lying.

  He tried to ignore the image, but it was slow to leave his head. He wished Kate had telephoned – he was sure it would have reassured him, even the lie about her conference call would not have mattered once he heard her voice. But then for the first time since leaving California he allowed himself to wonder just what she saw in him, and to wonder if, whatever it was, there wouldn’t come a day when she didn’t see it any more.