Dead Secret

by Deveney Catherine

Through the thin, unlined curtains, clouds swirl in a fast-moving sky.

  “Peggy’s coming early this morning,” says Sarah. “She said she’d be here at eight.”

  “Hours yet.”

  “And then hours until the church. It’s going to seem like for ever.”

  I look up at the ceiling, at a black, damp patch on the white paper. A pipe had burst years ago and we’d never repainted it. Da never finished decorating jobs, which was why the house was always a mess. He would get out the plumb lines and the measuring tape and the sugar soap and I’d always end up leaving in exasperation. “Preparation is everything,” he’d say. He spent so long on the preparation he never got to the job itself.

  “I don’t know how to get through this morning,” says Sarah, so intensely that I feel guilty. For the last few days, while I have been off dealing with things inside myself, Sarah has been left dealing with everything else. Yet despite her practicality, I am far more ready for today than she is.

  “I know,” I say and squeeze her hand. I have felt a tenderness for Sarah since I found out, the tenderness of loss and regret. I am waiting to find out what else there is when that tenderness goes, what really binds us.

  “Try and think only about the first five minutes, about surviving the first five minutes,” I tell her. “Then the next five and the next and the next. One step at a time.”

  “Da really loved you,” she says suddenly and I sense a hurt, a terrible deep hurt in her.

  “He loved us both.”

  “I know. But I always felt…”

  “What?”

  She shrugs unable to speak. Her lips tremble. “You’d go off and work and I’d stay. Always. And yet, I felt he came alive a bit more when you came home.”

  There is silence. Grief is a terrible thing for making everyone take their gloves off, for revealing the dirty nails beneath the neat, kid leather.

  “If you’d gone and I’d stayed,” I point out, “it would have happened the other way round. It’s just the prodigal son thing. Prodigal daughter.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Sarah, Da was really, really proud of you. Remember your graduation day? When he talked to me that day about you, I thought he was going to burst. His girl. A lawyer.”

  She smiles, a watery smile.

  “Really?” she says, with a neediness that I’ve never heard in her before.

  “I was jealous.”

  “You!” Sarah looks at me incredulously. “Why?”

  “I never gave him that. I never made him proud in that way. I bummed around and made him worry. He always used to shake his head and say what was going to happen to me when he wasn’t around. He said I’d end up an old bag lady on the streets without a home or a pension.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said it was okay, I’d have a rich bitch lawyer sister.”

  She smiles.

  “Are you going to stay with Des?”

  “Yeah,” she says a little uneasily, smile fading. She thinks I am going to have a go at her. Instead, I nod.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I do.”

  “Does he love you?”

  “Think so. Hope so.”

  “Marry him, then,” I say. She looks suspicious, like she thinks I’m being sarcastic, but I mean it. Life is short. Happiness is short. Take it while it’s yours. “I thought you weren’t keen.” Her voice is curious. “You’re always horrible to him.”

  “I am not!”

  “Even last night…”

  “That was just a joke!”

  Des had been for a haircut so he would look smart for the funeral. Shorter at the sides but still full on top. Looked like he had a Mr Whippy on top of his head. “Nice haircut, Des,” I’d said. “Do you want raspberry with that?”

  “You don’t exactly hide the fact that you don’t like him.”

  “I don’t dislike him. Not really. And anyway, what do I know? I’m heading for thirty without a proper job, without even a sniff of Mr Right. What do I know?” I repeat.

  It is true. I know nothing. I always thought Des was dull, that he was old, that he wanted a trophy wife. Pretty little Sarah, ten years younger to serve up at corporate dinners. But you can’t tell about others people’s love, can you? You can’t know, can’t judge. Nobody knows what goes on between two people. Not ever.

  “He’s good to me, Becca,” she says.

  “Marry him then, and have lots of little lawyer children.” I prop my pillow further up against the headboard. “Remember that advert that Ronnie Corbett used to be in when we were kids? Some car or other. And this little troop of kids, who looked exactly like him, all piled out of the back seat with their thick black glasses, just like his.” I look at her sideways. “Your kids can be a little row of Cornettos.”

  She gives a little snort, a half-laugh in spite of herself.

  “With Des, I feel like… for the first time in my life… I come first,” she says hesitantly, looking to see if I am going to slap her down. “Like I’m not the second most important person, or the third most important. I’m the first. And that I don’t have to prove myself, or try to make myself more interesting.”

  “Why on earth would you have to do that?”

  “You were always more interesting than me.”

  “What? Don’t be daft, Sarah. I have always been the one everyone sniffs disapprovingly at. The disruptive one. The ill-disciplined one. You were Saint Sarah.”

  She smiles.

  “And you were Peggy’s favourite,” I add.

  “I wasn’t! I just did what she told me.”

  “That’s a bad habit of yours.”

  Sarah laughs. “What about you? Is there anyone?”

  I make a face, don’t reply.

  “Tariq?” she asks tentatively. “Was he…?”

  “Who knows.”

  I say it more dismissively than I mean to but I can’t talk about Tariq. Not today. Maybe not ever. Sarah flushes slightly.

  “Maybe,” I add, more softly, and she looks gratefully at me. She smiles comfortingly like she understands. I think maybe she does.

  Is it emotionally stunted to say someone you knew at sixteen, someone you kissed only once, might be the best there is? I can’t ever know what Tariq would have been, and that is both burden and comfort. What was there was unfulfilled, and that makes it perfect, brimming with possibilities, not spoiled by twenty years of disappointment, of expectations that never materialised. And yet, somehow I believe that there was more. That love is strange and unpredictable and timeless.

  In the silence, I lift Sarah’s hand from the duvet and squeeze it gently. She looks surprised.

  “It’s going to be awful today but we will get through it all together,” I say.

  She nods. “Want the first shower?”

  “No, you go on. I’ll make the tea.”

  I watch her as she goes out, with her honey hair and almond shaped eyes, her peaches-and-cream skin. She is slender and perfect, fragile as a china doll. I could smash her in pieces. I know it, and I don’t know what to do. I really don’t.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I should have known that Peggy putting her arms round me and saying, “Glad you’re back dear,” wasn’t the end of it. That was for show. For Sarah.

  She arrives at seven, not eight, while Sarah is in the shower. Charlie is with her, looking tense and uneasy. He has on the dark suit he used to wear for the office, and a white shirt with a black tie, but he’s put on a few more pounds since retirement and it all looks tight and uncomfortable. The jacket barely meets round his ample middle and his face is pink, like his tie is tied too tight around his collar. Peggy walks right by me and into the living room, but Charlie hugs me. He doesn’t say anything but he pats my shoulder. I look at him and he raises his eyes in Peggy’s direction. He’s very expressive, Charlie, without ever actually saying anything. I sometimes wonder if you added up all the words he’s ever spoken, how many pages he’d fill.
>
  Peggy is looking out the window when I walk into the sitting room, her shoulders hunched and tense. Her body has developed that wizened look of old age, some time when I wasn’t looking.

  “Want some tea, Peggy?” I ask.

  She doesn’t sit but she turns from the window.

  “Where did you go when you went north, Becca?”

  Silence. Charlie sits down heavily in the armchair, his eyes darting unhappily from one of us to the other.

  “Inverness.”

  “Nowhere else?”

  I nearly say no but suddenly I’ve had enough of secrets.

  “Lochglas.”

  Peggy looks stricken, like someone fired a bullet straight into her belly. She looks at Charlie and he nods his head, motioning to her with his hands to calm down.

  “Sit down, Peg,” he says quietly. “Come on now.”

  “You know?” Peggy says, looking straight at me.

  I nod. She falls into the sofa, like her legs can’t support her own body any more. She has lost weight in the last few days, and her face seems angular and fox-like and I feel a surge of affection for her. Peggy had been short and sharp and nervous all through our lives, but she is tender too, and I have loved her for that. But I have never loved her more than now, because now I understand the extent of her loyalty to Da in all those years.

  “What are you going to do?” she asks. “We have to talk quickly before Sarah…”

  “I don’t know,” I say honestly, and her face crumples. She is too old for this, I think. I sit beside her on the sofa and take her hand.

  “How did you know to go to Lochglas?”

  “The bureau.”

  “I knew it, Charlie,” she says, looking accusingly at him.

  “Peggy,” I say softly, but she can’t look at me.

  “He tried so hard to protect you,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “He didn’t want you to know. He didn’t want you to carry this in your life. It was such a terrible burden for him, trying to keep it secret.”

  “A terrible burden for you both.”

  I stroke her hand. It is so thin and fragile. I can feel the raised veins on the surface. They spread hard and blue like a skinny little bird’s claws under the skin.

  “Joe, oh Joe,” she whispers, rocking back and forward in her seat. “Joe…”

  I hold her now while she rocks. “Peggy, please don’t get upset,” I murmur against her head.

  “He deserved so much more. Joe was worth more. I warned him from the start about Kath. I saw what she was. We all saw what she was. But not Joe. He just couldn’t see it. She had him on a string and she dangled him this way and that. He was a fool where Kath was concerned.”

  “Peggy,” says Charlie warningly.

  “She was a tramp.”

  “She was Becca’s mother,” says Charlie firmly.

  “Didn’t she love him at all?” I ask. The question isn’t anything to do with Mother. I just want to be reassured that Da knew love, however briefly.

  “She loved herself,” says Peggy.

  “Peg, that’s not fair,” protests Charlie. “She did love him in her own way.”

  “Sure, for five minutes.”

  Charlie sighs and loosens the tie round his neck, undoing the top button of his shirt.

  “What was Da like when… How did he cope when she, you know… disappeared?” I ask.

  Peggy’s eyes shoot from her lap up to my face.

  “Your dad didn’t lay a finger on her, Becca.”

  “No, I just mean, what happened that day?”

  “She just never came home. Joe phoned me around half seven that night. I remember because Charlie had worked late and we had just finished the dinner and were sitting down to watch Coronation Street. Weren’t we, Charlie?” she says, and Charlie half smiles.

  “Then the phone rang,” she continues. “It was Joe but I couldn’t make out a word he was saying. Poor Joe.” She shakes her head. “He was in a terrible state. Sarah was bawling in the background and he was trying to mix formula milk. He was crying and saying Kath hadn’t come home. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “Did you know about Cory then?”

  “Oh, I knew all right. I had gone up there when he first found out about Cory and… and the baby. Kath had gone off into a fancy hotel for a week and I came to help with you. Cory paid for the hotel, of course. Said she needed some time to think, but I thought he wanted to get her on her own and convince her to have an abortion. Joe told her to have the baby and he would be a father to it. He would clean up her mess as usual.” She shakes her head bitterly.

  “I told Joe, I told him not to take her back. I said he was being a fool and she would end up leaving him but he wouldn’t listen. He was mad for her. Always had been. She drove him crazy with that separate bed stuff when the affair with Cory took off. It was her way of controlling him, of dangling him on a string.”

  I feel my cheeks flush. Charlie glances apologetically at me. Peggy is talking almost to herself.

  “There was no question about who the baby’s father was. Joe hadn’t slept with her for months. Hadn’t been allowed to. But he held on, thinking the affair would fizzle out, that Kath would come back to him. And when she got pregnant, Joe said he could learn to love the baby even though it wasn’t his, because it was Kath’s. But she had to choose between them. He was thrilled when she said they could make another go of it. But she did exactly what I told him she would do. Went back to Cory.”

  “When he phoned you that night, what did he think had happened to her?”

  “He thought she’d gone off with Cory. He phoned Cory’s house but Cory claimed he had no idea where she was. I told Joe I’d be up on the first train the next morning. Charlie dropped me at the station on the way to work. I stayed up there for the rest of July and the first week of August. Charlie used to come up at weekends. It was an awful time. It just went on and on and on. More and more stories and less and less news. Your father was taken in for questioning by the police fifteen times over those two months. I suppose Cory was too. And David Carruthers. The police knew about Cory long before the papers did. But they just couldn’t get the lead they needed. Eventually we left and came back to Glasgow but I went back later on that month. Then Joe left for good.”

  “On the twenty-fifth of August,” I say. Peggy has her handkerchief half to her nose but she freezes in surprise. “How did you know that?”

  “There was an article in the library. And I spoke to Kirstin.”

  “To Kirstin!” Peggy’s body stiffens. “She’s still there? What did she say?”

  “She told me what happened. How she doubted Da. She said she was sorry.”

  “Bit bloody late for that.”

  “She lost her sister,” says Charlie unexpectedly. Peggy and I both swivel round to him. He’d been quiet so long, we’d almost forgotten he was there.

  “She lost her sister,” he repeats gently, looking at Peggy.

  “And I lost my brother,” says Peggy. “You saw him, Charlie. You were there.” Her voice begins to shake. “Though you weren’t there the night we came back to Glasgow. I’ll never forget how Joe was that night as long as I live. The state of him.”

  They had driven down from Glasgow late at night, the day Da spoke to Kirstin. He couldn’t bear to be there a minute longer, according to Peggy. She tried to persuade him to stay a few days and pack up the house properly but he wouldn’t. He said the house felt dirty and he wanted none of it. He didn’t ever want to see it again and he didn’t want anything from it, or Lochglas, or Kath’s family. He threw some things in a couple of suitcases, put me and Sarah in our pyjamas and lifted us into the car in the dark.

  They drove in silence, Peggy says. Until somewhere round Aviemore a song came on the radio. Percy Sledge. It was ‘their’ song – my parents’ song when they were dating. How strange for me to hear that. Da pulled into a lay-by and simply broke. Peggy tried to calm him down but he was inconso
lable. Eight years, he kept saying. That’s all he had got out of a lifetime.

  “I said he still had a lifetime but he wouldn’t hear of it,” says Peggy. “Not without Kath, he kept saying. It was over. He got a bit hysterical then and stumbled away, over to the bushes. I tried to stop him, but he shook me off, and I saw him leaning against a tree and heard him retching.”

  I don’t cry, listening to Peggy. The pain is deep and tearless. It is hard trying to picture Da, controlled, quiet Da, in that state. I try to imagine what he was feeling. The darkness. The fear. The fear, not just of losing Mother but of being blamed. Of being constantly interrogated by the police. Of being father to two children on his own for the rest of his life. And maybe worst of all, the fear of knowing that he had been given his life’s share of love already. It was over.

  “You woke up,” Peggy says. “In the back of the car. Your dad could hear you crying and he came back. He was white and shivering, though it wasn’t cold. I hadn’t realised how thin he’d got. He lost two stone that summer. I said to him, ‘Joe, in the back of that car are the women you’re going to have to love now.’”

  “What did Da say?”

  “He just lifted you up and comforted you, and then he started up the engine and you went back to sleep with the noise of it, the movement.” Peggy sits back on the sofa, puts her head back against the cushion.

  “We talked then. About what he was going to do. I tried to persuade him to get an accountancy job in Glasgow but for some reason he didn’t want to know. I couldn’t understand it. What was the point of that? I told him he had two kids to support and he’d be better paid in his own profession, but he said money was nothing to him. It was a new life he wanted. A new start. He didn’t want anything from the old life. He didn’t ever want to talk about it. I said well, he would have to talk about it because what was he going to tell you and Sarah when you were older? And Joe said, ‘Nothing.’ He was going to tell you nothing.”

  She takes my hand this time, and we sit side by side on the sofa, fingers entwined.

  “And he never did. He wanted you and Sarah to be happy, Becca. He didn’t want you to carry this. It was bad enough that you would be growing up without a mother. We knew what that was like, me and Joe. Joe loved Mammy. We both did but Joe…” She stops again, unable to speak for a moment. “On Mammy’s funeral day, he lay on her coffin and told Daddy he wanted to go with her. He was so intense, Joe.”