Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  He moved slowly down St James’s, turning occasionally to check the entrance of Boodle’s, until he reached Pall Mall, and his mobile rang. Ricky – such was Renoir’s relief that he had forgotten about him. ‘The lady came out of the hotel a minute ago, looking at her watch. I thought she was about to give up. But then your punter showed up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah. Bloke in a dark overcoat, looks cashmere to me, walking up Duke Street. Six foot, just what you said.’

  ‘Moustache?’ he asked. Please say no.

  ‘Couldn’t say for sure. I didn’t really see his face.’

  His heart sank. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘They went back in the hotel.’

  It didn’t make sense. Unless . . . dark overcoats were not exactly unusual. So was she meeting someone else?

  Ricky asked, ‘Do you want me to wait for them to come out?’

  How long would it take? Renoir thought bitterly. Did they have a drink first while the man unloosened his tie and Kate kicked her shoes off. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ll see you Thursday. Can we settle up then?’

  ‘Take your time,’ said Ricky. ‘You might want to use me again.’

  Which turned out to be the case. That evening Kate and he sat and had their usual drink before dinner. She seemed nervous, though in fairness – no, not fairness, Renoir thought bitterly – she admitted as much, and said why. She had been asked some time before to give the annual lecture funded by the Big Three oil companies in the ballroom of – he saw the irony without pleasure – a West End hotel. The audience would include most major figures from the industry. It was confirmation of Kate’s standing that she had been asked, but any sense of pride seemed outweighed by her performance anxiety. She never, to his knowledge, enjoyed public speaking, and this occasion seemed especially daunting. Now she said as much.

  ‘Is it because there are so many people in the audience?’

  She nodded. ‘That, and what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Technology and exploration.’

  ‘Is drilling much different from the way it used to be?’

  ‘No, no,’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s the new ways of finding it, not extracting it. You should know.’

  He did: his old company sold about fifty per cent of the software packages the producers use to find the stuff. ‘What’s your thesis?’

  ‘That’s the problem. I want to warn people about the increasing dependence on technology when they make their reserves estimates. Expert systems in particular. There’s an increasingly grey line between proven reserves and suspected ones. You can guess which way the trend is.’

  ‘And they’re counting expert system projections as proven?’

  ‘More and more.’

  ‘If it’s true why is that a problem for you?’

  ‘Because they’re not going to like what they hear.’ As she explained, her anxiety seemed to recede. There was always something intensely attractive about the way she became so engaged in her work. ‘I’m going to tell them that some of their so-called reserves are just that – so-called. Implicitly I’m accusing them of inflating them. But the industry wants the world to think there’s plenty of oil left.’

  ‘Do you name names?’

  She hesitated, then said, ‘I don’t have to. Everybody does it – there’s no point singling out any one company.’

  ‘Will it have much impact?’

  ‘It may do. Not because it’s me’ – she smiled knowingly – ‘but because of the venue. And the audience. They’ll all be there.’

  ‘You always get nervous speaking in public, and yet you always do it well,’ he began.

  ‘I know, and I know what you’re going to tell me: “Focus on what you are saying, not how you’re saying it.”’ She sounded weary rather than tolerant. ‘“And try and be yourself”. What an old-fashioned expression.’

  ‘But a good one.’ God I sound pompous, he thought. But what could he offer other than platitudinous encouragement? What did he know about oil reserves? Thanks to Ticky, he knew plenty about expert systems, but that wasn’t really the issue at stake here.

  She sighed. Renoir said, ‘What’s the matter? Go on, I’m listening.’ He waited, fully aware it might not be oil she wanted to discuss. Is she going to tell me now?

  ‘The problem with you, Jack,’ she said, ‘is you always help people who need it, but you never need help yourself.’

  ‘What?’ he asked with astonishment. ‘You help me all the time. Look how I live.’

  She shook her head, almost as if they had had this conversation before. It made him feel she was arguing with an idea of him. ‘That’s not help. I know you – if you were on your own, even if you had all the money in the world you’d still live very simply.’

  He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Maybe, but what about Burdick’s Field? I wouldn’t have a place for eight thousand apple trees if it weren’t for you.’

  ‘And no Roddy either.’ She laughed but it was not happy. ‘Or my mother for that matter.’

  ‘I like your mother just fine. You know that.’

  She started shaking her head again. ‘You know what she said about you, after that weekend when you went down and I was away?’

  Kate waited until reluctantly he rose to the bait. ‘What?’

  ‘She said you were very helpful.’

  And Renoir didn’t know what to make of this conversation. Everybody needed help; Renoir was no exception. Did he really never make that clear to Kate? There was a resignation to her voice that suggested a dissatisfaction he had not heard before. With me, he thought, trying not to think too directly of what she was doing about it. But he needed to know. Ask her, he suddenly thought, struggling to emerge from a growing cocoon of secrecy. But how could he? Ask her what? ‘Are you having an affair with Conrad Benedict?’ Just like that, out of the blue after this bland conversation about her speech the following month. How could he say anything without explaining he had seen her at the hotel – not just once, but twice.

  It was raining this time, so Renoir wore a light raincoat. In the coat’s deep inner pocket he’d brought along two telescoped umbrellas – one anonymously black, the other a girly number with yellow dots on a blue background. His other inner pocket contained a Red Sox baseball cap, with its bill folded and tucked in, and an acrylic hood taken from a rain slicker which he could wear with its loose bottom tucked into his raincoat. He wouldn’t get anywhere near Benedict, but he wanted to ensure that he remained unrecognised even at a distance. The point was not to go unnoticed, for the more you tried to look ‘average’ the more you stuck out, but rather to be noted as a different person each time.

  Weather aside, the surveillance proved virtually identical. Benedict came out of his building ten minutes later, and moved perhaps that little bit faster across St James’s Park. Kate showed up early, according to Ricky, who said he was parked inside the hotel’s drop-off on Duke Street, St James’s, having squared the doorman by saying he had an account fare inside. He rang again five minutes later to say that Kate was now waiting impatiently outside the hotel, just as Renoir, standing two hundred yards away, saw Benedict climb the short steps into Boodle’s.

  So who was Kate meeting? Renoir moved up St James’s, careful not to look into the restaurant windows, since he supposed that in this square mile of Mayfair a high percentage of Kate’s acquaintance probably had lunch from time to time. He kept his eyes on the front steps of Boodle’s but there was no sign of Benedict, so before he reached the club he turned right onto Ryder Street, and walked along the small, enchanting street of Victorian fronts, home of art dealers in everything from French still lifes to Chinese porcelain. He played the idle tourist stopping to inspect an oil landscape of the American West, while across the street, at the back of Christie’s, a porter and a young woman in twinset and pearls stood next to each other, smoking cigarettes without exchanging a word.

  Renoir planned to turn right when he reached
Duke Street, and started to reach for the raincoat hood, so that even were Kate still outside the hotel she wouldn’t spot him so far down the street. He was absorbed in this image of Kate, not a hundred yards away, waiting with unconcealed impatience for what he was now starting to feel must be a lover. And so it was very lucky that he happened to see the man just ten feet ahead of him on the pavement, so close that he hadn’t noticed him, thus proving the Sherlock Holmes maxim that the best place to hide is under the nose of the person looking for you. The man wore a dark blue overcoat, its collar pulled up around his neck against the drizzle, and had unmistakably wide shoulders.

  Renoir suddenly stopped and stared at an enormous French still life of two roses in a green vase, which was propped against an easel in the dealer’s window. He held his breath and resisted the temptation to turn and walk away, since if Benedict happened to look back it was precisely that sudden movement he might notice. All Renoir could do was stare at the painting, trying to ape the look of a prospective purchaser, while waiting for the man just on the edge of his peripheral vision to turn the corner.

  Which Benedict only sort of did, cutting diagonally across and onto Ryder Street, striding quickly, his shoes clacking audibly since there was no traffic in this little backwater stretch, and when the noise faded and nothing flickered across his lateral vision, Renoir exhaled and turned and carefully followed. Catching up just in time to see Benedict turn left up Duke Street, though Renoir didn’t dare follow any further. Sure enough, not half a minute later Ricky rang to say yes, the same bloke was back, and again he’d gone into the hotel with Kate.

  And retracing his steps he saw where he had gone wrong. There, in the small plaza which seemed more Manhattan than Mayfair, he saw a sign for Boodle’s Chambers, just across from – another irony – the Economist building, where Kate had once worked. So the mystery was solved. Benedict hadn’t appeared out of thin air; he had simply entered his club and then left by the back door. An oversight on Renoir’s part which pure luck had exposed; he’d been pretty unprofessional, he dully noted, almost past caring, his attention being swamped really by heartsickness and the knowledge that Kate was spending her lunch hour with Conrad Benedict somewhere in the Cavendish Hotel.

  ‘How is the speech going?’

  Kate looked at Renoir blankly, then nodded. ‘It’s fine, thanks. Just fine.’

  ‘Honestly, Kate,’ he started to say, piqued by her abstracted air, but then had enough presence of mind to realise he had to get a hold of himself. Minimise, minimise. He had certainly done that successfully in the past. Why couldn’t he do it now? He did his best to focus on Kate, if only to divert himself from his own swarming feelings.

  He was of course used to watching people hide secrets, expert at detecting the telltale indicators of that most stressful activity – living a lie. But Kate was good, really good at acting perfectly natural. Which meant showing some stress (like the natural tension of having to give a major speech), since if there hadn’t been any sign of stress, that would have been suspicious.

  What he was discovering was that he wasn’t very good at this lie business. Of course, he was keeping an ongoing secret of his own, the fact that he knew about her secret. Yet he seemed surprisingly bad at it. If I can keep a secret thirty years, he thought, why is a few weeks so hard? He needed to escalate things, uncover absolute proof of her affair, for anything was better than living with the certainty of betrayal without the certainty of proof. Until he had that, he did not want her to know he had spied on her. In the remote possibility of an innocent explanation, he would be damaging their relationship, possibly enough to destroy it.

  Who was he kidding? If his suspicions were true, the relationship was finished anyway. What was he going to do then? Retreat to San Francisco? Maybe he should go now, cut his losses and return with his tail between his legs and horns on his head. Back to the security side of the software industry. Or if that weren’t possible, a move into the dreaded security industry itself, with its veneer of ‘consultants’ and ‘experts’, these inflated titles signally failing to disguise the grubby truth of lowlifes watching over even greater lowlifes.

  Yet he wouldn’t do this yet. It was not these retrograde prospects that bothered him. It was the thought of life without Kate.

  He could not specify the way she had changed him. It wasn’t the outward circumstances of his life – the flat, the Gatehouse, his mid-life career shift; those changes were transparent. It was inside him where she had opened up a new world. He found that talking with Kate, or even being with her in silence, made the world come alive for him. Anything and everything somehow engaged him when he was with her: from oil futures to the varieties of apples that had yellow skin, from the homogeneity of English television taste – during one year, gardening programmes were all the rage, the next DIY, the following one food – to the calibre of surfing in Cornwall versus California.

  But actually, it was his emotions that had really exploded into life because of Kate. Before her, Renoir had been simple, formal, shut down; with her he felt reborn, as if revisiting an emotional Arcadia. Perhaps it was the Valley Orchard of boyhood. That hadn’t lasted, he reminded himself, and he had spent thirty years protecting himself from being so vulnerable again.

  By Wednesday it was so bad that he took himself off to Belfield, claiming he needed to do more work on the new plantings and get the house ready for their first stay there the coming weekend. If Kate was surprised, she hid it, and they agreed she would come down Friday night. And he did work in the Old Orchard, clearing the growing grass and weeds carefully around the individual trees, restaking those which had been pushed out of true by the wind, laying out his Israeli system of perforated hose as a trial for the new trees which he now thought he would never plant.

  Yet the running battle in his mind continued. Did he really want to throw all this away? Did he need to end the one relationship that mattered to him – the only one, in fact, at least since he was ten years old – because of a lousy rendezvous in a not-so-cheap hotel? It had happened to other men before, and God knows countless women, without triggering the end of what in his case was effectively a marriage. Could he not see past his present pain, his bruised pride, to a healed future with Kate? Did he really want to up stakes and head back to a home that wasn’t really home any more because of a slip by the women he loved?

  He might have calmed down in the serenity of the countryside, away from any opportunity to torture himself with new evidence, had he not remembered the metal box he had brought over from the Hall. He hauled it out from under their bed. It was about two feet long, perhaps eighteen inches wide, and shallow, capable of containing the thickness of a full file or an average novel but not much else. The lock was old-fashioned, and not easily picked. Renoir toyed with the idea of jimmying it with a chisel, but that would be madness. One look and Kate would see what he’d been up to. But it proved a simple matter to unscrew the hinges of the lid, and lift the entire top off.

  Inside he found: two birth certificates, for Kate and Emily, an envelope with cuttings of baby hair, a photograph of Kate’s father, and a folded piece of stationery. It was a letter, handwritten, dated fifteen months before, and as he read it he realised who the writer was.

  Dear Kate

  I don’t know what to say. When this man showed up I couldn’t help but think ‘this won’t last’ and now you tell me it’s not only going to last but you act as if I never meant anything to you. Though I don’t really believe that. You claim this man is the first person you’ve ever really totally loved but you told me once you thought love was just infatuation with a fancy name. So don’t you think this version of it is going to wear off?

  Who is he anyway? Someone with a jumped-up surname from a different country with different tastes and different everything. I asked about him and everybody said he was pleasant enough in a nondescript sort of way. But what does that mean? You can’t live with someone because they’re ‘pleasant’. Please think about what I�
��m saying. There’s nothing I can do right now about my situation, but there’s every chance of its changing in the future at some point. Don’t close the door on me. I really wouldn’t if I were you.

  C.

  Renoir didn’t know if the letter enraged or hurt him more. He tried to take comfort from the fact that Benedict sounded spurned; he told himself that just because Benedict was in love with Kate, it didn’t mean this was reciprocated. Even if, say for old time’s sake, she had made a slip. But that was the problem. One mistake, one slip – sure; but slips? Week after week, snatched lunch-time hours, as she let another man do . . . as she . . . He stopped, unwilling to torture himself further.

  And it wasn’t just pride. Her infidelity changed things. However they rebuilt, their house would always have an exposed beam, a suspect foundation.

  On Friday night Kate missed the train for Newbury, so he collected her at Didcot instead, driving through the Harwell fruit country down across the A34 and along the grim access road that ran towards the looming towers, which stood like vast bleached beakers in the flat plate of the Thames Valley. As he slowed down near the station, waiting for the emerging traffic and for the arriving commuters to cross the road to their parked cars, he saw Kate standing outside. She looked smart in her belted white raincoat, carrying her briefcase in one hand and an overnight bag in the other, as she looked around for him. Before any other feeling got in the way, he felt a sudden, melting warmth, as if his body were bathed in love. Then a male commuter, wearing a dark suit, walked past her to meet his own ride, and the spell was fractured.

  She was all animation in the car, chatting away as the sun set ahead of them and he turned into the folds of the Downs for home. At the Gatehouse he cooked omelettes on the new stove, while Kate opened a bottle of Sancerre and was on her second glass before they sat down.