Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  He left the garage and walked along Notting Hill Gate, then, since the park would be closed, strolled down Kensington Church Street, past the locked-up antique shops and down the hill to Kensington High Street. He realised something was niggling at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. Was it something to do with the stray pellets that had hit him? No; that would be enough to unsettle anyone, but this was something else, something waiting to be discovered but obstinately refusing to reveal itself. It seemed tantalisingly close, poised like a name on the tip of one’s tongue that stubbornly refuses to materialise.

  He crossed the High Street and moved down Kensington Court, the atmosphere changing almost at once from bustle to the quiet of any neighbourhood on Sunday evening. He liked the quietness, as he liked the steady residential comfort of the building where he and Kate lived, but he wished there were more of what he liked to describe to Kate as ‘normal people’ living in the streets around them. As in much of San Francisco, the middle class had been driven out long before from so many parts of London, especially this one; it was the international rich who now seemed to populate most of Kensington. They had introduced grander cars in the parking bays of the side streets, with special parking allocated to the diplomats, security bars and grilles on the house windows and astronomical inflation in both rents and freehold prices for the houses themselves.

  He came through the foyer of his building and was about to start up the stairs when he heard a cough above him in the stairwell, then a slight shuffle of feet. He stopped, and tried to slow his breathing. He put down his overnight bag gently onto the stairs, feeling at once ridiculous and apprehensive, and moved slowly up the staircase, gripping the iron banister. Before he reached the first floor he stopped to listen. Again there was a shuffling of feet, another floor up, so he moved stealthily up to the first floor and turned the corner. Here he waited again, listening for more movements. It was cold in the hallway; the radiators on the landings were losing their competition with the cold air brought in each time someone entered the building. He heard nothing at first, then, improbably, a loud sigh – weary yet youthful sounding.

  He tried to still his growing tension, and went past the poet’s widow’s door, which was firmly shut, then passed the landing’s burnished bowl of roses before he stopped again, held his breath and listened as someone sighed again above him. Was it female? Almost certainly. He relaxed involuntarily – something he wouldn’t have done in the past, not after Mrs Makito – and moved quickly up the last section of carpeted stairs.

  As his eyes came up to the level of the landing, what he saw first were the soles of a pair of pointed leather boots, then a pair of legs, enveloped snugly in tight designer jeans. Then the rest of a girl’s figure, wearing a blue down parka. Sitting with her back against the wall of his flat, her face hidden behind a teenage girl’s magazine she was reading.

  ‘Emily,’ he said incredulously, suddenly extricated from the paranoid world he had re-entered, ‘what are you doing here?’

  The girl scrambled to her feet, looking nervous but happy. ‘Renoir,’ she said softly, and stood there hesitantly with the same sweet shy half-smile of the little girl he had come to care so much about. The puppy fat was gone, and there was a gawkiness to her, caught in the territory between little girl and adolescent. Yet if extraordinary looks came, paradoxically, from standard features, Emily was going to be a stunner. Not yet as striking as her mother, she was already more conventionally beautiful, with a classic symmetry of cheeks and eyes, a small and perfect nose, and a mouth which teenage boys would absolutely die to kiss.

  Meeting her, men would say, ‘She’s going to break a lot of hearts.’ Perhaps, but Renoir thought she would never do it on purpose, never show the callousness of the self-absorbed. True, she was slightly spoiled, in a material sense, thanks to her father the laird’s insistence that she live ‘to a certain standard’. But she had an enormous capacity for love, and there was an insecurity to her (Renoir knew that unlike her grandmother she would never believe in her own beauty), a very deep softness and fragility which worried Renoir, worried him a lot.

  ‘Why aren’t you with the Faradays?’ he demanded. He spoke more sharply than he meant to, and Emily suddenly looked to be on the verge of tears. Her chin wobbled, she blinked several times, and he could see the little girl in her take over again.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, and reaching down picked up her bag in one hand while he extracted his keys and opened the door to the flat. Inside, she took off her coat and hung it up in the hall closet.

  ‘Renoir, I’m desperate for the loo. Absolutely bursting.’ And she ran down the corridor towards her own bedroom and bathroom while Renoir retrieved his bag from the stairs. When he came back he went into the sitting room and drew the curtains, and when Emily returned she had taken off her coat. She was wearing a soft beige jumper with a rollneck, and looked grown up – until she sat down with a pre-adolescent slump on the long soft sofa where Kate liked to stretch in the evenings after work. He remembered the ten-year-old of his first acquaintance and smiled a little. ‘What’s funny, Renoir?’ she asked, sounding insecure.

  ‘I was just thinking you’re lucky your mom’s not here. She’d be furious. What happened with the Faradays? I thought they were taking you back to school.’

  She shook her head. ‘They were meant to, but I said there’d been a change of plan.’

  ‘And they believed you?’

  She nodded. ‘I told them Mummy had rung me on my mobile. Mr Faraday wouldn’t let me take the Tube. He put me in a taxi.’

  ‘You know your mother’s not back until tomorrow. What would you have done if I hadn’t shown up?’

  ‘Oh, I would have gone down to Valerie’s. She’s the one who let me into the building.’

  ‘Valerie?’

  ‘You know,’ she said pointing to the floor. ‘The lady downstairs.’

  ‘You called her Valerie?’ he said and began to laugh. Even in her absence, neither he nor Kate would dream of calling the poet’s widow by her first name.

  ‘She told me to call her that. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise,’ she said defensively, as if he had ticked her off.

  He shook his head in amazement. ‘Okay, well it’s nice to see you,’ he said, starting, a little perplexed to find her there. ‘Let me get you something to eat, and then I’d better run you back to school.’

  She didn’t reply, and looking at her he saw that she was again on the edge of tears. ‘What is it Em?’ he said, sitting down across from her and lowering his head so it was at eye level.

  ‘Please, Renoir, just this once. I promise I’ll go back in the morning. Just not yet. Please.’

  He decided to relent. ‘All right,’ he declared. ‘But you have to tell me what’s wrong. I thought you liked school.’

  ‘I don’t like it at all. But please, Renoir, don’t tell Mummy I said that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’ll just worry. But nothing will change. She travels too much to have me here. Please promise you won’t say anything.’

  ‘I promise. Now I’d better phone the school.’

  Emily’s house mistress was named Miss Dalrymple. When he explained that Emily was with him – and who he was, using the dread ‘partner’ word – her immediate reaction was relief. But it was followed by annoyance when he said he would bring her back in the morning. ‘Not tonight? She was due here by six.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, adding pointedly, ‘that’s why I’m calling. She’s exhausted, so I’d rather bring her back in the morning.’

  ‘It will be very disruptive that way.’ There was no concession in the voice.

  ‘All right, let’s say I’m exhausted. I would still like to bring her back in the morning.’

  He rang off and returned to the sitting room where Emily looked at him anxiously. ‘Is it all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘No problem. They were just worried about where you were. I said I’d bring yo
u back first thing.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Which means, young lady, that you’d better get to bed. I have to have you there before school starts.’

  ‘Are you still going to take me to California?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know when. There’s a lot to do at Belfield. The Gatehouse is almost finished. I think you’ll like it. You might not even have to sleep on the floor.’

  ‘Will you come up to Glen Ferban at Easter?’ she asked. ‘Please. Say you will. Please.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said.

  ‘That means you won’t come. It always means that, Renoir.’

  He laughed at her perceptiveness and sent her to bed while he listened for messages on the answering machine and checked the fridge for milk and eggs. When he went back to her room she’d brushed her teeth and put on a pair of blue pyjamas. As she got into bed he said, ‘Lights out now. We’ve got an early start.’

  ‘Please can I keep this on?’ she asked about her bedside lamp. She was in so many ways still a little girl, much younger than her contemporaries, Renoir supposed, perhaps on account of that softness. He nodded and came over and leaned down to kiss her good-night. As he stood up she said, ‘And, Renoir, please will you tell me one of your stories?’

  ‘Come on, Emily, it’s late.’ He didn’t want to say she was too old for story-telling, though he thought it.

  ‘Please,’ she said, her voice regressing to little girl talk. An enchanting little girl when she wanted to be. But also wilful.

  ‘You’re too old for a story.’

  She said nothing but looked hurt, and Renoir wished he hadn’t said it – Why would you want her to grow up any faster?

  ‘I’m too tired for a story,’ Renoir said, though the truth of the matter was that he was not confident he could remember the ones he had previously made up and told her. Billy the Bear, George the Gorilla – a cast of minor characters from the animal kingdom, almost certainly fixed in her memory but utterly absent from his.

  ‘I don’t want one of those stories. I know I’m too old.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Tell me again about the California farm. Our secret, remember?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Well go on then. Start in the orchard.’

  He paused, and a voice collected inside him. ‘Every day that summer it was hot, hotter than hot ever is over here. Here you say hot, but in California that would just be warm. It was true that a breeze could reach that high, on the hillside of the farm, though on the hottest of the summer days the farmer there felt that the breeze itself was just so much more hot air streaming in all over him.

  ‘And it didn’t rain, and it didn’t rain. The farmer didn’t know quite what to do, because he was an apple farmer and his trees needed water very badly. He was scared his trees were going to die if rain didn’t come soon.

  ‘But just as things were getting really desperate, the farmer had to go to town for provisions. And it so happened that on that very day in town they were having a festival. And at the festival someone had brought along some native Americans (we used to call them Indians) to show off their rituals and dances. And one of these dances was a rain dance, performed by the oldest Indian there, an old, old man who couldn’t speak English and who went barefoot.

  ‘Now when this man began to dance it wasn’t very pretty to watch – he was an old man, after all, and a little shaky on his pins. Most of the people watching him felt sorry for the old man, though a few – I am sorry to say – just laughed at him. But the farmer didn’t. He watched very carefully and then he got back in his truck and drove back to his farm, which was way up in the hills.

  ‘And when he got home he went behind his house and stood there on the parched grass, which was almost white from the dryness, and he took his clothes off.’

  Emily giggled drowsily, then Renoir continued. ‘Which didn’t matter because there was no one else around to see him. And then, slowly at first, he began to dance, with the same jerky steps he had seen the old Indian perform down in the town, and pretty quickly he got the hang of it and he began to dance faster. And he danced faster and faster until he ran plumb out of breath and had to stop.

  ‘Now at first nothing happened. The sun shone bright as ever, and the grass in the fields stayed almost white in its dryness, and the sky stayed empty of clouds, and the heat seemed to be sucking the life right out of the trees. But then one day the farmer woke up and when he looked outside for the first time in weeks he saw a cloud in the sky. At first, there was just one, but soon the sky was positively dotted with them, and some of them were even dark. And the wind had picked up, and it was cooler now, and then, lo and behold, there was a drop on the farmer’s arm when he went outside. And at first he thought it had to be a drop of sweat – that was all the wet he’d seen for ages – but no, there was another drop on his arm, and then another and another.’

  Renoir paused here, before the deluge, and listened to Emily’s breathing, which was regular and soft and sounded full of sleep.

  In the kitchen he poured himself a large glass of Chianti, then walked into the living room, put on a Van Morrison CD and stood by the window, looking out across the rooftops in the direction of the park. He thought of the girl in her bed, so much more grown up than when they’d first met. She’d been boarding since the age of seven. At a pinch Renoir could understand why after her divorce Kate had needed to send Emily away to school, what with her own busy travelling career, which took off rapidly once she was at it full time. But why now? It continued to baffle him. Because he had not been brought up by his own parents, Renoir could not understand why any child should be brought up by non-parents when they didn’t have to be. He didn’t believe in it – not at Emily’s age. Not when her mother had a ‘partner’ now (how he hated the word, one argument for getting married) who was willing and able to act as a parent, especially when the mother was away. And who wanted to act as a parent; who cared enough now to do so.

  Though it had certainly taken time to reach that point. Initially, when he had first visited, Emily hadn’t said much at all, and he’d found her hard to read. But when he’d actually come back and stayed, when he’d moved in, the hostility bloomed like hothouse flowers. When Renoir was in the room, she ostentatiously left it; when Renoir said anything, she sniffed in disdain. With Kate she picked fights, talked back and sulked like a precocious drama queen. One particularly bad day she also left the freezer door open for twelve hours, leading Kate to remark as she and Renoir threw out a freezer’s worth of food, ‘Well, at least it can’t get any worse than this.’ When Emily promptly let her bath overflow, Kate lost her temper completely. Hearing the commotion, Renoir appeared in the bathroom door to find Kate shouting at Emily and Emily crying. As they both calmed down a little, Emily exclaimed, ‘But you said it couldn’t get any worse.’ Renoir had laughed out loud, and to his great relief Emily had too.

  After that it slowly got better, though he was not her father. He could worry about her marks or her friendships or her weight (too thin for a time) without having any stake in the rather larger issue of where she went to school and where home was. The natural father, Angus the Laird, seemed remarkably uninvolved, or maybe just plain uninterested, focusing his attention and expending his energies on the children he had with his second wife. Emily could certainly use a father, but Renoir didn’t see how he could play that role, not when no one seemed to want him to, not even Kate. It saddened him now, and then the melancholy he felt staring out the window, as Van Morrison sang ‘Someone Like You’, was joined by a slight unease, until he realised he had been accumulating a series of small uneases since the postcard of two days before.

  And it was made far worse when he suddenly knew what had been nagging at him since returning that evening to London. Among the trips listed by the GPS were two to Berkshire, which Kate had made alone. Each within the last month, and at first glance visits to Belfield. How had she explained them? I thought I’d see how the Gatehouse is getting along and lo
ok in on my mother. Two birds with one stone. And the second trip? I forgot to pick up some things when I went down last week.

  But the readings of the GPS were precise. And though the first trip had been 78.8 miles, the exact distance to Belfield, the second read only 74.2 miles. If it had been more than the first 78.8 miles it wouldn’t have meant a thing – maybe Kate had taken the longer and prettier way, maybe she’d gone via the shop in the neighbouring village. But the fact that the mileage was less than 78.8 miles meant a good deal; it meant she hadn’t travelled as far as Belfield. She had certainly gone to Berkshire: he’d seen on the tiny screen of the GPS in almost nauseating detail the details of her journey – M4, then A34, exiting at Chieveley. But she had driven only as far as a point four miles short and east of Belfield. Which could only be one place, well known to Renoir – Burdick’s Farm.

  And that would have been fine, thought Renoir, as he visualised how Kate would have pulled into the farmyard there in the Audi and could imagine her light and lovely voice as she gossiped with the old boy, whom she had adored and often visited, especially in the years after the death of her own father.

  But there was one thing wrong with this touching mental picture: when Kate had gone to Burdick’s Farm just before New Year’s, old man Burdick had been dead for a little over six months. His farm had been sold. ‘Oh,’ she said when he’d first mentioned the new owner’s name to her, and he remembered how she’d blushed. What had that meant? Why hadn’t he pressed her on it? Oh. Did she still have feelings for Conrad Benedict? Was that why she had visited him? And was that why she kept it a secret from Renoir?

  Four days before Renoir had felt a rough perfection to his life that now seemed to be crumbling. Was it all about to disappear? he wondered, as he tried to rationalise away Kate’s trip to Burdick’s Farm, tried not to link it in any case to the bogus smile he had seen through.

  ‘Renoir.’ It was Emily calling from her bedroom. Damn, he thought, she should be asleep by now. She’ll be exhausted tomorrow.