Secret Keeping for Beginners

by Maggie Alderson

  ‘Amazing ceiling,’ said Mattie.

  ‘My clever sister,’ said Natasha proudly. ‘My dad is a big fan of sleeping outside under the stars like this, we’ve all done it with him. I don’t remember the big outback road trip thing we did because I was too little, but he took me on some great camping trips when I moved back with him for a while. Have you ever slept in the desert?’

  ‘No,’ said Mattie. ‘I’m more of a typical Aussie. I’ve never strayed further inland than a suburb where there’s really good Lebanese food.’

  Natasha laughed.

  ‘There,’ said Daisy. ‘I’ve finished your look, Mattie. What do you think?’

  Mattie rolled over onto her front and looked at the iPad.

  ‘That’s genius,’ she said, ‘I love my hat, I love my chains, I love my Chanel hula-hoop bag.’

  ‘Yeah, I thought you could play with that if you got bored dancing,’ said Daisy.

  Mattie and Natasha burst out laughing again. Daisy beamed at them.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘I need someone else to dress. Who are you going to go to this club with?’

  Mattie lay back down again and turned her head so she was looking straight at Natasha, who turned to look back at her.

  ‘I’m going to the club with Natasha,’ she said and, as she spoke, she reached behind Daisy’s back and took hold of Natasha’s hand, twining their fingers together.

  Natasha looked at her steadily and smiled, very slowly. Then she squeezed Mattie’s hand back.

  Tuesday, 3 June

  Outer Circle, Regent’s Park, London NW1

  Simon looked at his reflection in his shaving mirror and tried to give himself a good talking to. For the first time he could remember, he didn’t feel like going into the office.

  Even on the relatively rare occasions when he had a hangover, knuckling down to some concentrated work always seemed like the best way to get over it. But this Tuesday morning, going into the office was not an appealing prospect.

  He’d been so relieved the day before that he’d had a visit scheduled to a client’s new workshop just outside Oxford, on the way back from Herefordshire. With a long lunch and visits to some high-end antique dealers he knew nearby, Simon had managed to string it out until late afternoon, giving him an excuse to be away from the office all day, but there was no escaping it this morning.

  The problem was Rachel. He was simply dreading seeing her. Having to look her in the eye and be normal, not shouting: ‘I once shagged your sister like a wild animal and I want to do it again. Immediately. And very often after that. If not sooner.’

  He was terrified that whatever he tried to say to her would turn into the word ‘Tessa’ as it came out of his mouth.

  Tessa Tessa Tessa Tessa. It had been going round and round in his head, a one-word ear worm, ever since he’d driven away that Friday evening, leaving her standing in the driveway. Never had it been harder to keep his foot on the accelerator when all he’d wanted to do was jump on the brakes, turn round and go back to her.

  He’d tried to control his imagination, but all the way to Herefordshire, and again on Monday’s return journey, his brain kept replaying a scenario where he had gone back, pulled up outside the house and she’d immediately climbed into the car with him, without saying a word. Then he saw them driving off into the sunset, to a new life together.

  He hadn’t gone so far as to sketch out any dreary details of that new life – like where they’d live and what on, and what would happen about her children and the not inconsiderable issue of her husband. In his nostalgia-addled head it had just been enough that they were together.

  And he’d had even less success in preventing himself fast-forwarding to what would happen next in that scenario. Before he could help himself, they were back in that beautiful meadow, a squashy bed of clover beneath the carpet of wild flowers …

  Ouch! He’d cut his chin. It didn’t matter how many times Simon’s brain replayed it, and even despite his best efforts to joke the power out of it, by mentally labelling it ‘Summer lovin’ had me a blast’, the effect was immediate and, as he’d just discovered, potentially injurious.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he muttered, as the bright red blood dripped onto his grey-and-white marble wash basin. What was happening to him? One chance meeting with a middle-aged woman he’d known years before and he was like a sex-obsessed fourteen-year-old infatuated with his French teacher.

  It was hard to fathom, but seeing Tessa again, the woman who had made such a deep impression on the twenty-two-year-old Simon Rathbone, fresh out of Bristol university and hungry for experiences, seemed as transformative now as it had then.

  The thing was, he was beginning to conclude, that while he’d had his pick of gap-year and uni girlfriends before meeting Tessa, plus various liaisons in his adult life, nothing else in his sexual history had come near that one night with her.

  Of course the setting had been ludicrously romantic and they’d both been in their most perfect physical prime and a fresh state of youthful naivety, before the cynicism of experience could set in, so it wasn’t surprising he remembered it infused with such a golden glow.

  But beyond that he still felt in some fundamental way that although their time together had been so brief – not even twenty-four hours – there’d been a depth of connection he’d never had with anyone else, before or since.

  What would have happened, he wondered, staring at himself in the mirror, the blood still dripping from his chin, if he had got in contact with her the following week, as he’d meant to, before everything changed so dramatically for him? Or if all that had never happened? From a start like that would they have inevitably ended up together, as a couple? Would different versions of those young chaps he’d played skittles with be his children?

  Furious with himself for this uncharacteristic mental indulgence, he threw his razor into the sink with such force it bounced right out again and landed on the floor. Snap out of it, Rathbone, he told himself angrily, picking it up and washing it under the tap.

  Glancing at the clock on the wall behind him he saw he was already running behind schedule and now he’d have to clean every trace of the blood away before it stained the marble, which would probably make him late for the office. Simon was never late. He always got in an hour before his staff.

  Even earlier recently, as he’d had quite a lot of extra work to deal with on the boring financial side of things. With his clients’ rather relaxed attitudes to paying their bills, it had always been a bit of a juggling act, but with a recent hike in the rent on the Sydney Street building he was beginning to feel as though he was doing it on a high wire, standing on one leg. All the more reason not to let one rather ludicrous chance meeting with an old flame put him off his game.

  He stuck a bit of loo roll to the still-bleeding nick on his chin, picked up his phone and texted his PA saying he had an unexpected appointment first thing – entirely fictitious – and resumed shaving, after turning on Radio 4, loud.

  Lots of depressing news about wars and the state of the economy might keep his mind off historic hanky panky at least until he had a face tidy enough to show the world.

  An hour later, safely arrived at the office, Simon was actually glad that Rachel was her usual twenty minutes late. Being installed in his leather Charles Eames swivel chair behind the barrier of his shiny white desk, everything just as he liked it, made him feel a little bit protected.

  But that was undone the moment Rachel appeared in his office doorway wearing that navy shirtdress. The one that always made him feel a bit funny in the head. Or rather lower than his head. To his great surprise it still had the same effect.

  He knew he’d been well on the way to being completely infatuated with Rachel, but after that extraordinary encounter with Tessa, and the subsequent mania, he’d assumed all his feelings for her younger sister would be gone. Surely one obsession would push out the other?

  But one look at her curvy shape and her lovely bright face, and he f
elt exactly the same twinge of longing Rachel always inspired in him. Now he was more confused than ever and, even behind his desk barrier, felt horribly exposed. Not only was he dealing with inappropriate thoughts about one of his staff, he had now added to it some kind of weird incestuous obsession with her sister.

  He could only find it in himself to answer Rachel’s perfectly valid and brief enquiry about a detail of the Lawn & Stone press trip, by pretending to be concentrating on something very important on his computer and being quite short with her. And he was intensely grateful that his curt reply ensured that she didn’t actually come into his office, as he feared she would, but legged it off as soon as she had his reply.

  Once she’d gone Simon leaned back in his chair, stretching his legs out, hands linked on top of his head, staring up at the ceiling and sighing loudly. There was only one way to deal with this escalating and increasingly creepy situation.

  He would have to get himself properly laid. And soon.

  Rachel got back to her desk still smarting from Simon’s rudeness. Why did he have to do that? She knew he was busy, but was there really any need to act like she was intruding inappropriately by asking him a pressing question which pertained only to the greater success of his business?

  She wondered why she tried so hard. Maybe she should just cruise along like the other women in the office, most of whom seemed to spend their entire time there making personal phone calls, shopping online, or checking Facebook to see if there were any less than fabulous snaps of themselves which needed taking down after a weekend of japes in Hampshire.

  But of course, she was still on probation, so she had to keep trying. More than that, it was who she was. She simply loved work, lived for it, was constantly inspired by the challenge of it; the game of getting new business and keeping the clients they already had happy, delighted with the service they were getting.

  Apart from fun times with her daughters, nothing in her life beat the thrill of securing a really great press, television or online mention for one of her brands.

  Work and family were the two balancing platforms of her life, she thought, scrolling through her emails and filing them in the relevant client folders. But they only stayed balanced if they were kept separate. That was why she’d been so uncomfortable having her boss mixing socially with her extended clan the previous Friday.

  Maybe it was odd, as her mother had said, but work was too important to Rachel to be able to ease off about any aspect of it just because she was in a family setting. The two things just didn’t go together.

  It had been fine for Simon, because it wasn’t his family. He’d been infuriatingly relaxed and chummy down there – what a contrast to the grumpy bastard she’d just spoken to. He’d played skittles with the kids, for god’s sake.

  What points she’d score with her colleagues if she shared that nugget of gossip with them, but she wouldn’t. Rachel didn’t go to work to make friends. She went there to be the best. And if Simon couldn’t appreciate how good she was, he could get stuffed.

  She’d already started making a few tentative enquiries at other agencies, in case it didn’t pan out with Rathbone’s, but she really didn’t want to go anywhere else. Rathbone & Associates was the best PR agency at the elite end of interiors, and that was where she belonged. But Mr Rathbone really did need to start showing that he knew how lucky he was to have her in a work context, as well as being all nicey-nicey with her family.

  Putting his recent unpleasantness out of her mind, Rachel refreshed her email inbox again to see if a key editor had responded yet to her invitation to the Lawn & Stone Tangiers trip. There was nothing from her, but an email from Daisy and Ari’s father made her just as happy in a different context.

  After some passive-aggressive crap about how he’d had to rearrange all his plans for the entire month after she’d insisted on having the girls the previous weekend, he confirmed that he was ‘willing to accommodate her’ and have them the following one.

  Rachel danced her feet under her desk to express her delight. The girls going to Michael’s could mean a weekend of carefree bliss with Link. She grabbed her phone to text him and his reply came back almost immediately:

  ‘Great. And I’m not in the shop so we can hang out on Saturday too. Come here Friday after closing and we can ride down together.’

  Rachel’s heart sank a little at the thought of the long bike ride, but then remembering the last time, when they’d taken Link’s preferred route via Richmond Park and stopped briefly in a thicket of trees for a delicious interlude, she thought she could handle it.

  There was just the issue of the flat front tyre that she was fairly sure was a puncture. She didn’t have a clue what to do with it and she could hardly take it into Link to get him to fix it. That would be the same as admitting she never rode the thing.

  She knew how often her friends who really did cycle to work got punctures on London’s streets, often strewn with broken glass. Knowing how to mend a tyre was part of riding a bike in London. Rachel didn’t even know how to pump the stupid things up properly.

  She opened Google and tapped in a search for other bicycle shops within easy wheeling access of her house, but then had a better idea and texted Branko to ask if he knew how to fix the tyre. Two minutes later her phone pinged in reply.

  Rachel looked down at it and grinned. He did.

  Thursday, 5 June

  Hôtel Costes, Paris

  Natasha was lying in bed with Mattie. She looked down at her face and ran her forefinger gently over the contours of those beautiful lips. Mattie opened her mouth and gently bit Natasha’s finger, smiling up at her.

  ‘Ow,’ said Natasha, ‘I need that finger.’

  ‘You certainly do,’ said Mattie, giggling, and Natasha laughed too, pulling her hand away and running it slowly down Mattie’s body.

  ‘Mmmm,’ said Mattie, turning over and stroking Natasha’s breasts, making her whole body tingle with residual pleasure from what had gone on most of the night and seemed about to start up again.

  Natasha had been so nervous waiting for Mattie the evening before in a tiny bistro on the Saint Michel canal, well away from the more fashionable restaurant where the rest of the crew were celebrating the end of the three-day Paris shoot.

  She’d bowed out, claiming a busy schedule the next day, but as she waited, constantly checking her phone, she’d wondered if she’d been crazy making the arrangement. It wasn’t like catching up for a quick coffee, after all … Will you have dinner with me in Paris?

  Perhaps she’d been under some kind of spell cast by Tessa’s rather magical house, surrounded by the people she loved the most. Had it made her view Mattie through a false rosy glow, or would she still find her as attractive when she saw her again?

  Passing the time until Mattie arrived – she’d just sent a text saying the Eurostar had arrived twenty minutes late – she flicked through the photos from the day they’d met. Mattie and Branko sitting in Tessa’s garden with their feet in the water of the copper tank. Mattie in a group shot holding up their glasses at the dinner table. Mattie playing with Daisy and Ariadne. And one of Mattie by herself, looking straight into the camera. Natasha had felt almost giddy as she looked at it.

  The heavy eyebrows and the dark blonde hair, side-parted and slicked over one eye. The full but finely sculpted lips, which were Natasha’s weakness. She spent her days painting colour onto famous pouts, so she’d made a study of them and Mattie’s were as luscious as any she’d seen.

  From the moment she’d seen those beautiful lips, she’d longed to find out if they’d feel as good to kiss as they looked. And now, after that romantic dinner and the night together in her hotel suite, she knew they did.

  She had just bent down to kiss them again when there was a knock on the door. They froze, looking at each other with wide eyes, Mattie’s hands still on Natasha’s breasts.

  ‘Room service,’ Natasha whispered.

  ‘Shall I go and hide in the bathroom?’ aske
d Mattie, pinching Natasha’s nipples a bit harder.

  Natasha thought for a moment – as well as she could, with what Mattie was doing. It was Paris, she told herself, no one would blink an eye at finding two women in bed together, but they were at the hotel where she always stayed for work. A hotel that was such a part of the fashion world it was practically a label in its own right. She was certain that the news of who had been in Natasha Younger’s bed that morning would be around the industry in no time.

  ‘Would you mind?’ she asked, feeling horrible about it.

  ‘I’ve done worse,’ said Mattie, kissing her quickly, then hopping off the bed and heading for the bathroom. Natasha watched her go, as gorgeous from behind as she was from the front, and looked forward to resuming what had just started, but meanwhile there was the waiter to deal with.

  ‘Attendez-vous un instant,’ she called out towards the hotel room door. ‘J’arrive …’

  Natasha smiled to herself at the appropriateness of the French double entendre, which was the same as the English one. I’m coming. I will be soon, she thought, getting out of bed and grabbing a bathrobe.

  As soon as the waiter had gone – and it took a while as he wheeled the breakfast in on a trolley, which he then turned into a small round table, lifting up flaps on either side – Natasha called to Mattie that it was safe to come out.

  ‘Oooh,’ she said, her face lighting up, ‘a hotel breakfast on one of those special tables. How glamorous.’

  Natasha smiled. On trips like this, she normally got up running and grabbed a green tea when she got to the studio, and it was so lovely to have someone to share her luxurious hotel suite with.

  ‘Do you want to eat at the table, or in bed?’ she asked.

  ‘At the table, duh,’ said Mattie, heading back into the bathroom and coming back out wearing a robe the same as the one Natasha had on. ‘We don’t want any crumbs in the bed, do we?’

  Natasha grinned at her and reached into the ice bucket for the bottle of champagne she’d ordered to arrive with their breakfast. She popped it open and poured them both a glass. They toasted each other and lifted the metal plate covers, exclaiming with delight at the eggs benedict they’d completely forgotten ordering the night before.