The Darkest Secret

by Alex Marwood

  ‘There must have been something wrong with her,’ says Charlie. He speaks into the air, as though he’s consulting the oracle. ‘She must have had some condition or something.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Jimmy, his eyes unfocused. ‘She had the same as all the others. It should have been fine.’

  ‘If only,’ says Sean, ‘she weren’t so paranoid. If she hadn’t picked a fight with Emilia we would have had someone to look after them.’

  ‘I did everything I could,’ says Jimmy. ‘You saw. Didn’t you? The adrenaline did nothing.’

  ‘It’s not like we’re the only people,’ says Charlie. ‘People are so fond of judging, but we’re hardly the only ones, are we?’

  ‘No,’ says Jimmy. ‘Doctors do it all the time. It’s totally safe.’

  ‘Normally,’ says Sean. ‘How was I to know? You’re a doctor. You said it was safe. It’s not my fault.’

  ‘It was,’ says Jimmy. ‘It shouldn’t have happened. There must have been something wrong with her.’

  They sit on and ruminate on their misfortune as the evening deepens. Indoors, Imogen and Linda read the children to sleep, carry them to their beds, tuck them in, ready for the morning.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  ‘Oh, no,’ says India. ‘Oh, no, oh, no. Oh, those poor little girls. Oh, no, Milly.’

  I’ve taken the phone down to the hotel garden while Ruby showers in our tiny bathroom. I’m weary to the bones. Ruby too. Though she slept at some point, her tears assuring it, I lay silently, staring at the dark.

  ‘I can’t tell her, can I?’

  I’m not really asking advice. I know already that I can’t.

  ‘No,’ says India. ‘I don’t see what that could possibly achieve.’

  India was right, about the truth. Some truths will shatter worlds. Some secrets are best kept, though the keeping can eat you up. Ruby is a sweet young woman whose burdens are already heavy. How will smashing her life achieve anything other than some clumsy tabloid interpretation of justice?

  I think of Coco, bones bleached at the bottom of the ocean, and the sadness is overwhelming. Nothing will bring her back. A rash decision put her there, but no one killed her. Not with wickedness involved. A broken door lock, curious minds, an adventure turned to disaster and the idiot decisions of minds in frenzy. And nothing will bring her back. She’s gone for good.

  India is crying at the other end of the phone. I’ve not witnessed her crying since she was thirteen. She doesn’t cry. We don’t cry. Jacksons are not weepers, but oh, the sadness. ‘I should have come,’ she says. ‘I don’t believe I thought it was okay not to. But I… oh, God, why didn’t they tell us? I’ve been despising him all this time and I never really knew him. And Claire. Oh, poor Claire.’

  ‘And poor Ruby.’

  ‘She can’t find out, Milly. She and Claire, she can’t find out.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No, they can’t. He took the right decision.’

  ‘He did,’ she says. ‘Oh, Camilla. Is it too late for me to do something? Send flowers? Something?’

  ‘I’ll take some for you,’ I say. ‘If there’s anything of him left, he’ll know.’

  Black tights, black slip, black dress. Black shoes for each of us, flat for the uneven ground in an English graveyard. A strange calm has settled over me. I half expected to wake in tears this morning, but it didn’t happen. Instead, I got up in the dark and wrote my eulogy sitting on the floor of the bathroom while Ruby slept, because I know now who he was. He wasn’t the monster I’d come to believe. Self-centred and thoughtless, but in the end everything he did since Coco was intended for good. It wasn’t only Claire and Ruby who lost her that day: it was us as well. I never knew her, and that’s my own fault. I can, at least, make sure that I have one sister in my life.

  Ruby has put her hair into a single plait that rolls thickly down her back. Her dress is plain on the top, black crêpe, the skirt pleated down to the tops of her knees. She’s obeyed her mother’s admonishments and wears lace tights whose only holes are the ones woven into them. I’ve only just realised that she is short-sighted, as she’s wearing a pair of heavy-framed glasses because she’s afraid she’ll cry her lenses out. And after my night’s no-sleep in the hotel where we decamped last night after Simone’s outburst, I am filled with that eerie calm that took me over the day I went to see his body three weeks ago. Really, only three weeks? It feels like years.

  The church starts to fill half an hour before the service: a parade of expensive cars nose-to-tail along the verge all the way through the village, chauffeurs gathering under the unused lych-gate in their dark coats, banging their hands together in black leather gloves and waiting for their employers to disappear inside before they start smoking. The modern pieties: tobacco verboten in front of millionaires, but nobody cares about smoking in the sight of God.

  Simone stands in the porch like a siren, smiling, her parents flanking her on either side. Thank you so much for coming. So lovely to see you. So kind of you to come. The scandals – not the old one, not the one surrounding his death – are clearly not enough to put the coterie of bankers, arms-dealers, politicians and their younger wives off coming to the party. They compose their faces gravely as they pass the pair of press photographers by the main gate, only to break into beaming smiles as they recognise each other among the graves. I glimpse the Clutterbucks, glad-handing men whose quality suits declare them useful. I suppose once you’re old enough, once you’ve been to enough of these, most funerals become social occasions. Places where you see people you haven’t seen in years. And, because they’re usually shorter than weddings, they’re a lot more fun.

  Ruby and Joe and I mill self-consciously among the gravestones, handing out orders of service and smiling weakly at all the people who don’t know who we are. It’s Simone’s occasion; we accept that. We are essentially the bit parts, lucky to be given a few lines. Emma is passed placidly from mother to grandparents as their arms tire, dressed in powder-blue and extracting coos of admiration as people pass by. I feel Ruby tremble beside me. I don’t know what she expected. I know some people see a death in the family as an opportunity for attention, but I don’t think that’s either of us.

  And then we’re going in. That familiar smell of wood polish and candlewax, of cut flowers beginning to turn by having their feet in ancient oasis, the pootle-pootle-pootle of an organ played freestyle as everyone finds their seats. We walk to the front, and I feel a little stir among some of the people. So that’s the other family. How many were there? Is that all of them? Is that the twin? And then we’re sitting on the right, Simone and her family on the left, nothing between us and my father, safely wrapped in his panelled oak coffin. They make them out of banana leaves these days, and cardboard and even wool, but it was always going to be the oak of Olde England for Sean. There’s one floral arrangement alone lying on the top: a small white bouquet. Everything’s been done by Maria, efficient Maria, taking responsibility so no one else has to. Leaving Simone and Emma alone and stately in their grief.

  And then the music changes, and we’re singing ‘Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer’, and my hand is shaking because I remember the big deal he’d make of the rugby, how he’d take a box and go with his buddies for a good singsong, and I’d forgotten that right up until this moment. So many things I don’t remember, won’t remember now because the cues will never be there. Ruby doesn’t remember at all. She’s singing out bravely, dabbing beneath her specs with one of the Kleenexes I slipped in her pocket before we left the hotel, but to her it’s just a hymn. And then Charlie is booming out a piece of Christina Rossetti and some vicar I’ve never met before is talking about my dad and how he’s in the bosom of Christ when God knows he’s probably gone the other way, and I’m walking up the aisle to the lectern and the whole world has focused in on the wodge of paper I’ve got in my hand, and on not looking at anyone’s faces, on keeping my voice clear and steady and on sounding, above all else, like a whole real person giving account
of the man. I think of all the things I thought I would say yesterday, and the deep sea-change that’s gone on within me and how all the anger I’ve carried with me all these years is pointless, useless, in the face of this loss. And I speak.

  ‘I’ve been thinking so much about my father over these last days,’ I say. ‘How there were parts that only I knew, and parts that only each of us knew, how nobody ever really knows the whole of another person. But what I do know is this. Sean George Jackson loved us, in his own rough, vibrant way, and by that we are all uniquely blessed.’

  Language is weird. I hear my voice as I speak, and I hear the responses – the laughs, the sighs, the holding of breath. But, inside my own head, these words I’ve written sound of nothing; make as much sense to me as the barking of a fox in the woodland. I hear syllables and consonants and mellifluous alliterations, but the sense has flown away. And then I reach the end and my face suddenly flames as the crowd swims back into focus, and I’m desperate to get down from there, get away from all those eyes. I force myself to fold the papers, step down slowly, give a small, loving bow to what’s left of Dad, and walk back to Ruby. Sit for a moment as she gives me the British arm-rub of consolation, and then the tears come, howling out from wherever I’ve kept them imprisoned, breaking over my head like a wave, and I’m drowning. The organ starts up again, the congregation stands and Ruby and I stay there in our seat, bowed forward together, rocking. ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,’ they sing, and I weep and weep and weep.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  2004 | Monday | Claire

  She doesn’t wake until ten o’clock; the first time she’s slept this late, or this long, since the twins were born. When she looks at the clock she feels a second of panic at the oversleep, then she remembers. Relaxes her tensed muscles beneath her Egyptian cotton sheets, starfishes into the cool side of the king-size bed where he so rarely sleeps these days. Remembers again what has brought her here alone and tenses once more with rage and sadness. What has happened to my life? Is it my fault? Did I bring this on myself?

  Of course I did, she thinks. I was plenty old enough when I met him to have no excuses for what I did. I know people like us like to throw around those tired old phrases. We couldn’t help ourselves. It was bigger than both of us. The heart wants what the heart wants. But there is always – always – at least one moment when a choice is made.

  I knew he was married from the moment I met him. Good God, Heather was even in the same room, looking harassed and frizzy-haired, but it didn’t stop me. I just tamely handed over my business card and knew perfectly well what doing so meant. I could have stopped it before it even started, but I didn’t. I made a decision at another person’s expense, and I’m paying the price now. It serves me right. It serves me bloody well right. I remember several people saying it, the warning – Claire, if he can do it to one wife he can do it to you – but all I did was rid myself of my friends so I didn’t have to see the adulteress reflected back at me in their eyes.

  She checks her phone to see if he has returned her calls, though it’s been sitting beside her all night and she’s known since he didn’t return the first one that he wouldn’t. Sean likes to punish with indifference. If he feels slighted, he’ll throw up a wall of silence around himself that is impossible to penetrate until he decides he’s done enough. It’s infuriating, frustrating; it fills her with rage and impotence.

  And hang on. She sits up. What am I saying, if he feels slighted? Has he really trained me so totally that I’m forgetting that he’s the one in the wrong?

  I must make a list, she thinks. Take a leaf from Maria’s book and start being organised. Make a list of all the things I must do once this bloody bank holiday is over. Get funds transferred into my bank account so he can’t freeze me out. Find a lawyer. Change the freaking locks. Once he brings the girls home, he’s out. He can go and live in one of his luxury condos. It’s not like he has as shortage of them.

  She gets up and makes a cup of coffee, takes it with her to the bath. The house is wonderfully silent, only the murmur of traffic out on the King’s Road to remind her that there are other people at all. I won’t be able to do this, of course, she thinks. Not for a while, till they’re old enough for me to be able to leave them alone and close the door. I can bet that if it turns to war I’ll be running the house, running the kids, without the help of staff. Well, so what? Other people do it. It’s not as though I grew up in this sort of luxury. I know how to work a hoover, cook a meal, mend a car. Only another year until they go off to school, and then I can get a job. Get a life. See if any of the people I used to know still want to know me. My God, I’ve been such a fool, making myself so dependent on him, letting him cut me off, one by one by one, from the people I knew before. I think he’s a psychopath, really. That thing, where one by one the old people disappear from your life because he doesn’t like them, or they’ve offended him, or you’ve become so unreliable from catering to his last-minute whims, it’s a classic abuser tactic. He may never have hit me, but there’s more to abuse than being a punchbag.

  She longs to speak to them. Her little ones. Regrets leaving in the night without taking the time to sweep them up, but she was in such a state that all she could think of was getting out. Getting away from those people and their secret smirking. Humiliation can kill you as surely as sadness, she thinks. But I’m not taking it any more. Today’s the day when I start my life again.

  She slides beneath the water and holds her breath.

  At eleven, hair wrapped in a towel and body wrapped in her oversized silk bathrobe, she goes downstairs to make more coffee. She’s lost her appetite over the past twenty-four hours. Stirred some pasta round a bowl at ten last night and ended up throwing it in the bin. Which in itself is more like me, she thinks. I’ve been eating my misery for the last few years, but a crisis always makes me want to fast. No wonder I couldn’t shed the baby weight, with the drip, drip, drip of gold-plated hopelessness falling on the back of my neck.

  She looks around her kitchen. Sean’s kitchen. Not a room she would ever have chosen for herself. He’s done it all out in white, except for the black granite work surfaces that are an even greater hell to keep clean than the cupboard doors. No handles, anywhere. Press and slide, press and slide, a man’s fantasy of living in a spaceship. And the garden she sees through the floor-length windows: paved side to side to save on weeding, a horrible formless Henry Moore knock-off in a pond of gravel in the centre, the only vegetation a pair of palm trees in gigantic pewter pots. Palm trees, for God’s sake. We’re in the middle of London. We need a paddling pool and a sandpit for the cats to crap in and beds where the girls can learn to grow tomatoes, not a fricking palm tree.

  She rings again. No answer. My husband is a shit, she thinks. He’s probably palmed them off on Linda to look after while he enjoys his last day. Well, I hope she enjoys them. It’s the last she’ll ever see of them.

  The coffee is good, and strong; filter, the way she likes it, not the endless fuss and spraying steam from the overlarge, overcomplicated espresso machine that looms on the work surface waiting to burn the grind. One of her fingernails has chipped in the rush to take her luggage from the car. Claire looks at it, holds her hand out to admire the damage. Smiles. And no more freaking manicures, she thinks. I’ll find the nail scissors in a bit and cut them right off.

  She goes to his study – takes a small, profound pleasure in invading his sacred space – and digs out a notepad from the bottom drawer of his desk. No time like the present, she thinks. I’ll start my list now, in the sunshine in the garden. Once the girls get back there will be too much noise to concentrate. She pours herself another coffee and opens the door.

  She’s lost in thought till lunchtime. Planning, dreaming, thinking of all the good times ahead. I could sell this house, she thinks. Or he could buy me out. It all seemed so dream-come-true once upon a time, living in Chelsea, going to restaurants every night, swanning from shop to shop. Funny how your priorities
change when you understand what these pathetic consumer dreams actually cost. A little house will do us somewhere. In the country, where the schools are nice and you know your neighbours. South, near the coast. But not near Brighton.

  She is so absorbed that she almost doesn’t notice the doorbell when it goes. Sean has, of course, installed a low, smooth electronic ring that won’t disturb his peace and quiet when someone else always has to go. It’s not until it goes again that she takes in that she’d heard it the first time. She stands up and re-ties her dressing gown. It can’t be him, she thinks. No way he’d have got them up and out in time to get back to London for one o’clock. Won’t be the postman, not on a bank holiday. Who is it?

  She takes her time about walking up the stairs; half hopes that whoever it is will have got bored and left. And then she looks through the spyhole and sees two police, a man and a woman, their hats held in their hands and serious looks on their faces, and her world falls apart forever.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  We leave straight after. We packed our bags last night and put them in the car before we set off for the funeral, and don’t even bother to change back into civvies; just jump into the front and drive in our mourning weeds. Back at some hotel on the seafront in Ilfracombe, one that’s been cleared of its character, Seanwise, to go with the Damien Hirsts, stout middle-aged men are spitting pastry as they laugh over Good Times Had and Good Times To Come, and Simone stands in the middle in her black satin muu-muu, smiling that smile until her face freezes. I don’t know if I will ever see her again. Or Emma. I should try. Later. Further down the line when the shock has worn off and, perhaps, just perhaps, the frenzy of her bereavement has died back. I’ve already lost one sister, barely have contact with the other, nearly never found the third. I must try. Family matters, I understand that now. And God knows, Emma will need my help one day, if Simone doesn’t get better.