Want to Know a Secret? (Choc Lit)

by Moorcroft, Sue

  James fought down irritation. ‘Do what kind of stuff?’

  ‘When my granny died Dad and Uncle Melvyn and Uncle Gareth had a load of stuff to organise, the funeral and that. There’s always a load of stuff, isn’t there, when somebody dies? I’d make her do that. Ask her to do that, for her mum. She’ll do it for her mum. Then maybe she’d have less time to rip herself up. But you’d probably have to, like, let her think you really needed the help, not that you were just trying to get her out of her room.’

  ‘So you think it’s wrong, do you, for her to be left alone in her room?’ James was curious. This lad had become hugely important to Tamzin in a few weeks – maybe he might be the one with the insight?

  George rubbed his chin. ‘I think she needs to be out of there but you’ve got to do it without letting on that that’s what you want. Make it something real or she’ll just get the meanies. She’s like it with food. If I act like I don’t care whether she eats or not, she shares my meal. If I make a thing about it or buy her a meal of her own, she hardly touches it.’

  When George had gone James stared at his list, at his angular handwriting. George made him feel old and cranky, to think in uncharacteristic phrases such as, young man, I believe I know my daughter and, probably, better than you.

  He’d been desperate to end Tamzin’s nightmare.

  He’d thought Valerie unfeeling when she said he was making too much of Tamzin’s problems. Depression was a medical diagnosis, not some babble he’d picked out of a trendy magazine; his instinct had been to make things easy for his daughter. Unlike some households, her lack of occupation hadn’t mattered, financially. She could be safe at home for however long it took for her to find her way out of the grey caves.

  But … in taking all possible pressure off, had he removed ‘motivation to progress’ as Cherry in HR would say? Both George and Diane plainly thought that Tamzin should be steered towards occupation.

  He wrote, Ask Tamzin for help across the top of the list.

  Stared at his words on the page. They seemed so foreign. So against the natural order of things. She didn’t give him help – he gave it to her. But, with a mental shrug, he threw down the pen and went to knock on Tamzin’s door. On the third knock, she answered through the door, drearily, blearily, from the depths of her despair.

  ‘I’m stuck,’ he called. He didn’t have to contrive the flatness in his voice.

  A long pause, before her voice came again, puzzled. ‘On what?’

  ‘On what to do next. There’s so much to do. My head hurts and I’ve hardly slept and I can’t think straight. Any chance that you could help me?’

  A long pause. He could imagine her, rolled in her bedclothes, a frown curling her pale eyebrows. ‘OK,’ she answered, cautiously. ‘I’ll get dressed.’

  Whilst he waited for her to appear, he made them each a slice of toast and a cup of tea. Following Diane’s example of the morning before, he simply put food down in Tamzin’s place and began to eat his own. She arrived with her hair pulled up into a navy blue scrunchie, blinking. She looked at the toast as if it were left there by aliens but picked up the cup of tea as she sat down.

  ‘So, what have we got to do?’

  He shrugged, palms up. ‘I’m trying to make a list of people we have to tell about Mum. Things we have to do. I can’t think straight.’

  ‘Oh.’ She picked up a pen and wiggled it. Skewed her head to see what he’d written.

  Inform:–

  Solicitor

  Bank

  Insurance companies

  ‘Rellies?’ she asked. It sounded like the kind of word George would use. ‘Let’s begin with her cousins.’

  Wordlessly, he passed her the pad and, after a moment’s surprised hesitation, she began to write down the names of Valerie’s cousins, going from the oldest to the youngest, in order, to ensure nobody was left out. Then they began on Valerie’s aunts and uncles, then friends. ‘She had so many,’ observed Tamzin, rubbing her eyes. ‘Let’s work through them by place – you know, flying club, village, school …’

  ‘Great.’ He got up and made a second cup of tea. Tamzin worked at her list methodically, James tossing in names if he thought she’d missed any, carefully making no remark when she dipped a corner of toast into her tea and ate it. Valerie had hated her dunking, said it made her look like a navvy.

  He didn’t care in what form food got into her stomach. Just that it did.

  She heaved a massive sigh. ‘We’ve got to sort out a funeral, haven’t we?’

  Without knowing whether he was comforting her or himself, he took her hand as he dropped heavily back into his chair. ‘Yes. I think we need a family conference about that. What do you think?’

  A tear tipped over her lashes. ‘Yes, better talk to the others. Do we have to put a box in the newspaper, too? Dad, this is really horrible.’ The tears began to slide slowly down her cheeks.

  He slid his arm around her weightless shoulders. ‘We’ll have to be strong for each other.’

  ‘OK,’ she whispered.

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘You’re not going to be able to manage me.’ Gareth’s fingers moved restlessly over the spokes of the wheelchair.

  Diane didn’t pause in her task of transferring things from her usual old handbag into a small black one, new, that she’d bought to go with her dress. ‘I can get you into the car – you’re mobile enough on your crutches in short bursts. Melvyn and Ivan will help at the church.’

  ‘I feel funny about Melvyn and Ivan being at Valerie’s funeral. They’ve hardly met her but it hasn’t seemed to occur to them not to go.’ His brows were hard over his eyes.

  Diane found her keys. ‘She’s the half-sister of their half-brother. They have a pronounced idea of family.’

  ‘Did you get directions?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her stark black dress showed not a flash of white or even a gold-coloured button. She glanced in the mirror. It was amazing how well black suited her and her pale hair. She hadn’t bought anything of such quality since before she met Gareth and was entranced by the way the fabric hung and moved.

  He was watching. ‘So where’s that dress from, then?’

  She looked up. ‘I bought it at cost from Unity’s because I’ve had no time to make anything suitable.’

  ‘You seem thick as thieves with this Unity. I heard you, on the phone, turning away work from Trish Warboys.’

  She looked down into her bag. It had a bright paisley lining but she was sure nobody would mind that, or notice. ‘I’ve too much to do for Unity’s and she wants more for next season. It’s more remunerative than doing occasional commissions for Trish Warboys. Good job I’ve moved into the bigger workroom. I’m working flat out, even with Bryony helping.’ She didn’t tell him that she’d successfully negotiated working capital both via a deposit from Unity and a small bank loan. Let him wonder.

  ‘It’s a regular little rag factory in there.’

  She didn’t answer. It was one of her new strategies. Whenever Gareth sneered, she fell silent.

  ‘I don’t want to be late,’ he snapped.

  ‘We won’t be.’ She looked again in the mirror and brushed the shoulders of the dress.

  ‘Where’s Bryony?’

  ‘In the bathroom.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘She’s pregnant and she’s nervous because she’s never been to a funeral before. She’ll be OK.’ She reached for her jacket.

  He looked around the modest, old-fashioned kitchen. ‘I’m thirsty. Any chance of a cold drink before we go?’

  ‘Yes, you get it. Up on your feet little and often, that’s what they said, wasn’t it? You can shout if you get stuck.’ She left the room and went upstairs. At the moment, he was easy enough to avoid. During the day, he had the choice of the sitting room or the kitchen, to avoid the undignified palaver of scooting upstairs on his behind. Good job they had a downstairs loo.

  He hobbled around, his progress slow on crutches because of his wris
t.

  By the time she had to help him into the car, he’d taken refuge in grumpiness. He wasn’t taking well the cool way that Diane was ignoring his wishes and also his temper. Her absence from the marital bed. The segregation of their finances.

  She was a remote Diane.

  She smiled to herself as he glowered out of the car window at a field of stubble. No way could he look after himself as yet, so having support at home had been fundamental to his discharge from hospital. But if he’d thought that Diane not leaving him when his secrets popped out like naughty children meant they’d return to their old relationship, then he couldn’t have been more wrong. With cool courtesy Diane helped him wash and dress; she also prepared his meals and did his laundry.

  But she didn’t discuss her movements nor seek his opinions. She offered him no company other than at meal times and her conversation consisted of finances, hospital appointments and the information that she had booked a local gardener to transform their garden into an easy-care oasis.

  Even Bryony, silent in the back seat, wasn’t demonstrating her love in the unconditional, effusive way that she used to.

  For Gareth, his life had changed when his father found him. And now, if it was changing again ... well, that was unfortunate. Diane could no longer live her life to suit him, she reminded herself, picking up speed on the straight lane.

  But then he disarmed her by muttering, ‘It’s unfair that somebody who loved life so much shouldn’t have it.’ And she realised that his surliness wasn’t necessarily about her. He was missing Valerie, who’d represented fun in his life in the last two years. No more helicopter jaunts. No more sitting in her large, beautifully equipped kitchen and listening to her describing the childhood he never had. Discovering how comfortable wealth made things.

  ‘I know you miss her,’ she said, gently. And how much did he miss Stella? Not as much, she was sure, as she missed James.

  As St. Agnes-in-the-Field Church was only around the corner from Valerie’s house there was no motor cortège to join. Diane took Gareth directly to the pointy Norman greyness of St. Agnes’s and Ivan and Melvyn were waiting to lift his wheelchair from the boot, steadying it on the lane’s bumpy surface while Gareth hauled himself across from the car.

  The hearse carried Valerie’s oak casket from her home with the family walking behind.

  James. Harold. Natalia. Alice. Tamzin.

  In the pause while the casket slid smoothly from the hearse and on to a gurney, Diane wheeled Gareth to join the family group.

  ‘Dad.’ Gareth put his hand out to his father. Harold was pale and his nose looked larger and more heavily veined than ever.

  ‘Gareth,’ said Harold, hoarsely. ‘At least you’re still here –’ His lips set tightly. Tamzin, a liquorice stick in a straight black dress, took her grandfather’s hand. Diane pushed Gareth slowly, behind the casket, up the sloping path to the dim interior of the small village church. But she watched James, in front, James who set his shoulders and looked only straight ahead.

  Gareth let Melvyn hoist him onto his crutches to shuffle between the scarred old pews, flinching each time he put weight on his leg. Diane left him and Bryony in the family pew and she melted back into the body of the church to stand with Melvyn and Ivan.

  She wanted to put space between herself and James. If she could have avoided the funeral she would have. It felt wrong for her to be there.

  The church was cold and smelled of hymn books. She watched Gareth casting his eye over the simple village church, without stained glass, silver ornaments or gilded crosses and only worn old flagstones to floor the nave and the aisles. Then frown at James, as if wondering why the funeral hadn’t been held somewhere grand.

  But there was a nice enough choir and a breathy organ and the red-faced vicar, raising his voice to the rafters, managed to avoid giving that speech about the deceased having merely stepped into the next room, which, far from comforting the loved ones, usually left them enraged.

  And one of Valerie’s friends read a eulogy about keeping Valerie alive in their minds – especially whenever they heard a sports car gunning past.

  Gareth listened, motionless. Harold’s complexion was so grey that he could have been carved from the same stone as the church. James stood between his softly weeping daughters, holding their hands.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Had she ever been so busy?

  These days, Diane’s ‘to do’ list was as long as her arm. Top of the list was Unity’s order, which she had scheduled by the simple expedient of calculating how many garments there were left to make and dividing that figure by the number of weeks before delivery was due, which left her still three garments to make each week; frightening, bearing in mind that she had to take Gareth to his outpatient appointments and physio, which always took hours.

  And Diane found herself calling at the supermarket on the way home from these appointments because the fridge and the cupboards emptied themselves quickly and thoroughly now that Gareth and Bryony were both living at home.

  Bryony contracted a stubborn chest infection and a cough like an old coalminer, making her hot and listless. Because of her pregnancy, she didn’t want to use a steroid inhaler. Diane, dropping automatically into worried mum mode, found herself driving Bryony to her antenatal appointments even though Bryony had bought a little Ford KA now. Lots of the mums-to-be seemed to have their mums or friends with them, either for moral support or to look after existing children during check-ups and Diane loved the feeling of being involved, but then had to work long into the evening to keep up with her punishing schedule. Somehow she’d squeezed in the meeting about Christmas stock with Unity, resulting in an order that she was trying not to think about, yet.

  When Bryony began to get better she embarked on a shopping spree for the baby, an activity that Diane just couldn’t entirely resist.

  And when she was at home visitors were a constant interruption. Melvyn and Ivan persuaded Gareth into spending some of his money on an immense new television and satellite TV box – whereupon they called much more often.

  Bryony visited Harold to keep him company in his desperate mourning for his daughter and reported that, filleted by his grief, he didn’t seem to care whether he ate or not. Very worrying. Diane began inviting him for meals.

  George brought Tamzin to visit Diane ‘to cheer her up’, although Diane did keep explaining to him that Tamzin wasn’t suddenly going to get over her bereavement, as if it were a bad cold.

  In between, Diane kept her head down, battling grimly to deliver Unity’s order on time.

  Then there was James. Before she crashed into all-too brief sleep, sometimes she’d send him carefully friendly texts. How r u? How r u coping? How r the girls? Do you need help? He’d reply, Lots of crap to get though. Taxman a pain. Tamzin worrying but Nat and Ally spending lots of time with her. Occasionally, he drove Tamzin to the house and Diane’s heart bled at the shock in James’s dark grey eyes as he somehow steered his family through the uncharted land of grief.

  One task on her ‘to do’ list kept sliding down the order: Diane still needed to investigate why a shop in Covent Garden Market was selling her garments at a huge mark-up. But then the day finally came when she could deliver her entire order to Unity – feeling quite important at drawing the Peugeot up to the delivery entrance.

  ‘I never thought you’d manage the whole lot,’ confessed Unity, slender in a gold tunic that brought out the lights in her hair. ‘You must have worked your poor fingers to the bone.’

  ‘I did.’ Diane hung the last garment on the hanging rail with a, ‘Phew!’ ready for Unity to inventory and price.

  ‘You deserve a rest. But I will need the first of the Christmas order ASAP …’ She pulled an apologetic face.

  ‘Some of the fabrics have arrived and I’ll get onto it in a few days,’ Diane had promised. But she knew that before she plunged up to her eyes in beads and bows, she had to face the evil hour.

  The train to London t
ook only an hour from Peterborough, yet Diane hadn’t been to London for years. At least ten. She tried not to look too country-mousey as she stepped down from the train and shuffled along the platform at King’s Cross, the voices of fellow passengers battling the thrumming of the trains in the echoing station.

  Country Mouse had wanted to wear her ‘best dress’, the beautifully cut black number from Unity’s. But Idiosyncratic Fashionista had dressed in a skirt in dingy pink and drab blue – wonderful colours – overlapping and pockety, and every edge unfinished, dark-pink corduroy dancing slippers belonging to Bryony and a white top spattered with appliquéd metallic blue shark fins.

  Almost falling into the stairwell, she descended into the tiled corridors leading to the underground station. Although she’d pored over the map in the back of her diary and knew very well that Covent Garden Station was only three stops down the Piccadilly Line, the diagonal, dark blue one, she still checked again with a large map on the wall before committing her travel card to the slot in the barriers.

  Clutching her safely returned ticket, her stomach rose to meet her heart as she descended into the warm air of the subterranean network. Where were all these people going? Why was she the only one who had to pause to scan each colour-coded sign before selecting her route?

  She wished she could have come down to London when she had first learned what was going on and was still good and angry. Then she wouldn’t have felt so trepidatious about storming into some swanky shop in Covent Garden.

  The tube was almost exactly as she remembered it; first a crowded platform and then a crowded train, the passengers divided into sitters and standers – the sitters having to watch their feet weren’t stood upon by the standers – breathing overused air as the hissing monster trains clattered and whooshed through the tunnels. Diane clung to a metal pole near the doors and tried not to think about a breakdown in a tunnel. She alighted at Covent Garden and became one of a block of passengers herding into the big sheep-pen lifts. There, she tried not to think about a breakdown en route to the surface.