Want to Know a Secret? (Choc Lit)

by Moorcroft, Sue

  Diane offered her hand and found it enfolded between both of Harold’s. In contrast to James’s, his fingers were chill and clammy.

  ‘I’m so pleased to meet you – at long last!’

  She returned his smile, searching his face for some echo of Gareth to support the preposterous idea that he could, indeed, be Gareth’s father. To her, Gareth had always resembled his mother, the same hard mouth and rock-set jaw. But now she could see that Harold was smiling at her with familiar eyes; warmer, on Harold, but exactly the same combination of hazel and green. ‘Gareth’s father,’ she marvelled softly. But Gareth doesn’t have a father. Gareth carries his illegitimacy like a chip on his shoulder as big as a boat. Growing up in an era when illegitimacy was a positive scandal, he’d suffered for his mother’s haphazard fortunes with a defiance matched only by his determination not to blame her.

  Harold squeezed Diane’s hand. ‘Thank God that Gareth isn’t in any danger. Broken bones heal. We’ll get him and Valerie moved to the new Ackerman Hospital as soon as possible.’ He took out a clean handkerchief, ironed neatly into a square, to dab at the corner of his eye.

  Ackerman was a private hospital. Gareth didn’t have a private hospital income. He barely had a new-pyjamas-for-hospital income. Diane opened her mouth, flicked her gaze around the surrounding faces then closed her mouth without speaking. Tamzin, hair hanging like straw, looked as if she’d already been in bed when news of the accident came. Harold was obviously bone tired, and James had the air that this was just one more day when the cares of the world had descended upon his shoulders. They had enough to worry about without Diane blurting out, ‘But we can’t afford a private hospital!’ No doubt there would come a point when she could explain to the staff, discreetly, why Gareth would remain in the arms of the NHS.

  ‘The helicopter must have come down with a bang,’ Harold observed. ‘Valerie was always telling me how safe it was. How do you think it could have happened, James?’

  James shrugged. ‘Mechanical failure? Cross wind? That’s the Civil Aviation Authority’s province. There will be an enquiry, I expect.’ His voice was even but, again, Diane caught the glitter of anger in his eyes.

  ‘Do you really think Mum’s going to be all right?’ Tamzin sniffed. ‘I mean, she’s not going to ...?’

  James threw an arm around her. ‘Tamz, she’ll heal. We’ll just have to be patient for a few months.’

  ‘What on earth were they doing in a helicopter, anyway?’ asked Diane, idly. The police hadn’t been able to provide any information beyond the preposterous fact that Gareth had been the passenger in a two-seater Robinson R22 helicopter that had crashed on take-off at Medes Flying Club. If they drove the country route to visit Gareth’s brother, Melvyn, she and Gareth passed the flying club, on the edge of Peterborough, without ever entertaining the notion of turning in under the matt black iron archway, past security. That was for other people, people in a salary bracket that Jenners only dreamed of.

  Her enquiry seemed to rouse James’s annoyingly patient tone again. ‘Valerie got her private pilot’s licence for helicopters last year. She often takes Gareth up on his days off.’

  ‘On his what?’ Diane spluttered her coffee all down her chin.

  Silence. Wariness crept into James’s dark eyes. ‘Is there anyone you want me to phone? To be with you?’

  Diane was an old hand at not allowing subject changes as a question-avoidance tactic. Even blessed with what her mother used to term a ‘silvery’ voice, she wasn’t easily talked down. ‘What do you mean by “Gareth’s days off”?’

  James shrugged. ‘Since Gareth took semi-retirement, he only works Tuesday to Thursday, right?’

  Diane stared. ‘Tuesday to Thursday,’ she repeated, faintly, wondering how this could be when Gareth’s working week apparently also encompassed Monday, Friday and most Saturdays. Even the occasional Sunday. ‘So, Gareth’s taken semi-retirement, discovered his long-lost family and spends his spare time whizzing around in helicopters?’

  A grin flashed across James’s face, filling his eyes with suppressed laughter. ‘It doesn’t normally sound quite so ludicrous – but, yes.’

  She refrained from retorting that ludicrous was exactly what it was, because she so desperately needed to understand what the hell was going on. ‘And you know who I am, yet you’ve never met me?’

  Smile fading, James acknowledged, ‘No. Owing to health issues.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Yours!’

  She made her eyes big and puzzled, a trick that could make even the bank manager responsive. ‘Oh dear, am I ill? What on earth can be the matter with me?’

  James exchanged a look with Harold.

  She pounced. ‘You don’t know!’

  ‘Of course I know! Gareth explained – that you have a nervous complaint, compounded by agoraphobia.’

  ‘Why didn’t he bring you to our house to meet me?’

  Harold smiled a weary and gently perplexed smile. ‘But you don’t like meeting new people, Diane, do you?’

  Diane studied first Harold’s helpful smile, then James’s puzzled frown. They meant it. They genuinely believed what they said. Her heart began to beat hard. She fought to keep her voice steady, the voice of a sane, rational person that everyone would believe in. ‘Have I behaved tonight like an agoraphobic with a fear of meeting people?’

  James watched her. Eventually, he admitted, ‘I suppose not.’

  Breathlessly, almost as if she didn’t know if her input were welcome, Tamzin added, ‘We all wanted to meet you. We wished we could.’

  ‘Meeting would have made everything clearer,’ Diane agreed, before picking up her now cold coffee and withdrawing into meditative silence.

  PC Stone left the hospital, having gathered information for his report and satisfied himself that no one was about to die.

  The corridors began to quieten.

  James tried to relax, but the chair wasn’t made to loll in. He felt stiff and bristly. As first Harold and then Tamzin fell silent, he was able to watch Diane Jenner out of the corner of his eye. Her expressions, flitting across her face like a slide show, told him that her thoughts weren’t sweet. It had been an education, meeting her. Mindful of everything he’d been told about her precarious health, he’d made a huge effort to cater to her fragility – although the last thing he needed was an extra person to treat like china – and she’d reacted with the kind of outraged disbelief that she might reserve for an amiable drunk with a turd in each hand.

  She made him want to laugh. And she made him want to throttle her when she gave him that politely scornful stare and demolished every statement he made.

  A reassuring doctor brought news, first that Gareth had gone down to theatre to have pins in his wrist and fingers, a plate in his leg and an external fixation device – whatever that was – screwed into his pelvis, then of Valerie’s multiple leg injuries, a similar pelvic device and a collapsed lung. James received the news stoically. ‘On the whole, it’s slightly better than I expected. Gareth and Valerie have been lucky. Helicopters aren’t designed to bounce.’

  ‘Neither Gareth nor Valerie will be on a ward for some time,’ the white-coated doctor added. ‘You might be better going home for some sleep.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ Diane returned, instantly, as if preprogrammed to rebut any idea she didn’t originate.

  James looked at Harold, who looked as if he could sleep for a year. ‘I’ll take you home.’

  Harold shifted. ‘I’m not sure … Valerie’s my daughter. And Gareth, I’ve only known him a couple of years –’

  ‘A couple of years?’ murmured Diane. James looked at her sharply. Harold was obviously shattered by the shock of having his child – his children – badly injured and he didn’t need Diane interrogating him, not now.

  James tried Tamzin. ‘And I think you’ve had enough.’

  Tamzin clutched her chair, her pleading eyes melting his heart. ‘I want to see Mum when she comes round.’

>   James patted her arm, avoiding words like, careful, medication and rest. ‘I could drop you off at your sister’s. Nat won’t mind you crashing in her spare bed. She’ll fix you up with night things and something to read.’

  Shaking her head mutinously, straw hair quivering, Tamzin’s voice tightened, a great tear trembled on her lashes. ‘I want to see Mum.’

  James had to relent. ‘All right, we’ll take Pops home and pick up Mum’s stuff.’

  He noticed Diane watching them gather their things. ‘Rather than staying here alone, you could come with us,’ he offered.

  ‘No, thanks,’ returned Diane, cordially. ‘I’ll be OK.’

  ‘Fine.’ It might be a struggle to look after his exhausted father-in-law, his waif-like daughter, and this agoraphobic nervous wreck half-sister-in-law of his wife’s who never left home. But, unaccountably … here she was out.

  Still, she was a woman alone in the middle of the night, far from home, and she’d just sustained a series of bruising shocks ... He sat down again, ready to cajole her into co-operation. ‘It might be better if –’

  ‘– you stop knowing what’s best for me. Because I’ll probably slap you if you use that patiently patronising voice on me again.’

  He frowned horribly to disguise the almost overwhelming urge to laugh at her awful politeness. ‘I’m not patronising.’

  ‘You bloody well are, you know.’ She patted his hand. ‘I’m not a child, I’m not an imbecile and, as we now all know, I’m not ill. So I’m the one who makes up my mind. OK?’

  Chapter Two

  ‘Oh-kay,’ he conceded.

  Diane watched them leave, the big man and his lame ducks, leaving behind them only silence and space.

  She fetched herself another drink and settled down in contemplation of her world gone mad. Two years, Harold said he’d known Gareth. Two years. Had Gareth’s behaviour changed in that period, had he been more than usually secretive? Done anything that should have alerted her to the fact that for two days of each week he was not at work, but …

  … where? Almost any other man who was leading a double life would have a mistress tucked away. But Gareth’s secret, it seemed, was a nice family.

  She was word perfect on the story of Gareth’s childhood and how Wendy had brought him up any way she could. In the sixties, the benefit system hadn’t been what it was now. Unmarried mothers had found it hard to scrape by and, like many others, Wendy had drifted into a relationship, trading sex and housekeeping for a man to put his roof over her family’s head. Or surviving on jobs that paid peanuts.

  So why hadn’t she made Harold cough up for Gareth’s keep?

  Diane’s eyes grew gritty as the wee hours stilled the antiseptic corridors. James returned with weary tread, a wraith-like Tamzin drifting beside him, just in time to be allowed in to see Valerie.

  And Diane’s vigil was rewarded when she was shown in to see her poorly, battered, but stable husband. ‘Just ten minutes tonight, please.’ The nurse consulted Gareth’s chart, pen in hand. ‘He’s just about conscious but we’d like him to rest.’

  ‘I understand,’ breathed Diane, staring down at the bed

  Gareth’s face was grotesquely swollen. Diane had difficulty recognising this purpling balloon-head as her husband. Every feature was puffed, distorted and discoloured beneath his incongruously normal thatch of iron-grey hair. His jaw was swollen shut, there was an enormous egg at the left side of his forehead and that, and the eye socket beneath, were flooded a dark angry red. He looked as if an elephant had pirouetted on his head.

  But he was evidently sensible enough to recognise her and, un-Gareth-like, groggily search out her hand with his chilly fingers. His other hand, the right, was encased in plaster and plastic troughs.

  The distortion of his features seemed appropriate, somehow, as everything Diane thought she’d known about this elusive, self-contained man had warped, too. He was inclined to guard what was his and she’d always known he wasn’t good at sharing. But finding his natural father two years ago and keeping it a secret ...

  She glanced at her reflection in the huge window. Her hair hung long in its neat plait, her clothes were, admittedly, self-made, but then that was her job. What was he so ashamed of?

  It might’ve relieved her feelings to round on him with ferocious questions but she kept her anger to herself. Habit. Long habit. She never roused Gareth’s temper unnecessarily. She liked to have her challenge all worked out in her mind before she incurred his house-shaking rage or punishing silence. And she had been punished plenty, in recent years.

  ‘So,’ she observed. ‘You survived.’

  ‘Uh.’

  She took the grunt for assent. ‘The doctors say you’ll recover.’

  ‘Uh.’

  ‘I expect you’re woozy.’

  ‘Uh.’ He closed his eyes. His breathing deepened.

  Sliding her hand from his, she turned to the scarred locker beside the bed and opened the drawer. Beside a handful of change lay his wallet, black and soft with use. She’d bought it several years ago at John Lewis’s one drizzly, dank December morning, £24.99, as a Christmas gift. He’d said one from the market would’ve done just as well, £4.99 or even less, but she’d argued that this would last longer.

  She’d never had it in her hands since the day she gave it to him; they respected one another’s private space so far as things like wallets were concerned. Gareth was particular that way. But now, defiantly, she flipped open the snap. Her purse was housing mainly moths and she’d need money to get home.

  Cards in the card sleeves, including one Bryony had sent with her contact details in Brazil. Lonely in the note slots, a twenty-pound note and a five.

  She fingered the leather thoughtfully. Its substance suggested further paperwork in there somewhere. Her fingertips found the smooth oval tag of the zip to the inner compartment and she ran it gently along the top edge, ZZZzzz.

  The inner compartment was full of twenties.

  She almost dropped the wallet in shock. Heart picking up, fingers stiff and trembling, she counted. Twenty. Twenty twenties! She stared at the lightly mauve notes, unable to remember the last time she’d held twenty twenties. A fortune. She’d almost exhausted the housekeeping for the week and there might be all kinds of incidental expenses for her to meet while Gareth was in hospital. And why should Gareth squirrel away dosh, when things were squeaky tight at home?

  Slowly, she slipped out two notes and dropped the wallet back in the drawer.

  Twenty twenties. Eighteen twenties, now.

  After a moment, she picked up the wallet again and extracted another three twenties. Then five more. That was fair. Halvies.

  She jumped to see that Gareth’s eyes had opened. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’ Her voice emerged matter-of-factly, as if she were the type of wife who routinely rooted through her husband’s personal possessions.

  Gareth said, ‘Uh,’ again, moving his head and then sucking in his breath in pain. She could almost hear the protests he was too ill to make.

  She licked her lips. ‘You’d better sleep.’ The unfamiliar substance of two hundred pounds clutched in her hand, she crossed the room slowly, waiting for objections and reprimands to bound after her like maddened cats. But Gareth said nothing. Two hundred pounds. The notes felt soft and thick, coated with the prints of all the fingers they’d passed through, fingers perhaps more used to holding a wedge of notes than hers were. Two. Hundred. Pounds. She’d never suspected robbing her husband would be so empowering. Fun, in fact.

  The door shushed as she opened it and clunked softly closed behind her. She let out her breath.

  In the corridor, James was pacing, glancing at his watch. Lines of fatigued grooved his face. ‘I thought you must still be here. I waited to run you home.’

  She rubbed her temples, her mind still on the blast of Gareth’s outrage that had never come. ‘But I live way out in the country.’ Her eyes went to Tamzin, who was propped against the wall, eyes huge with
weariness.

  ‘Purtenon St. Paul. I know it.’ He pressed a flat chrome button and the lift doors opened.

  She didn’t want him to take her home, didn’t want to have to be grateful, to satisfy his obviously over-developed protective streak by needing his help. Proudly, she flourished the stack of twenties. ‘Don’t worry, I just raided Gareth’s wallet for taxi fare.’

  James stepped back to allow her into the lift, Tamzin drifting in beside her. The doors breezed shut and they stood in the small space for a few silent seconds until the doors opened again in the foyer where a cleaning crew were buffing the floor. Through the main doors, the night they stepped into was cool and fresh. And damn! The taxi rank was empty. Diane tutted. She’d been looking forward to putting some of her ill-gotten gains to frivolous use.

  Gareth so disliked frivolity.

  She turned back. ‘I’ll ask at reception for the number of a cab company.’

  James groaned, rubbing a square hand over his hair. ‘Please, Diane. It’s nearly morning and you’ve had a shock and I can relax if I know you’ve made it home. Let’s not bicker about it. Just get in the fu – in the car.’

  Diane glared up at James. His gaze met hers. She hesitated. He looked really tired yet – judging by the obstinate set of his mouth – was apparently unwilling to abandon her, a woman he’d never met until tonight – a fairly awkward and ungrateful woman he’d never met until tonight. She found herself looking at his mouth, as she examined the thought and wondered what she had to prove by refusing his kind offer.

  ‘Give in,’ Tamzin advised. ‘It’s easier in the long run.’

  Tamzin didn’t like riding in the back of the car but insisting that Diane sit in the front beside her father was the sort of courtesy her parents had drummed into their kids.

  The sky was just thinking about turning silver and pearly. She could sit in the middle of the back seat and watch it, occasionally letting her gaze slide over to the still figure of Diane Jenner.

  Uncle Gareth’s wife! How strange was that? For two years they’d referred to her as ‘Mrs Rochester’, the unbalanced wife that Uncle Gareth hid away and cared for so heroically.