Seven For a Secret

by Judy Astley

  The sweetest and most tempting answer would be ‘Darling I married him’. Heather considered, wondering if she could raise the energy for devilment. Tom was being hostile and challenging. She certainly didn’t feel awake enough to enter into an explanation that would, given his mood, become inevitably defensive. It would simply be easier to keep the information to herself. It would only lead to derision, to disbelief and to an exhausting late-night bout of self-justification. What’s another twenty-five years, she thought, if I can possibly get away with it? ‘He’s just someone I met years and years ago,’ she told Tom, then added, ‘long before you.’ It wasn’t quite ‘Mind your own business’, but close enough.

  ‘Knew him well, did you?’ Tom wasn’t looking at her, feigning only half-interest as he nonchalantly tapped at the keys of his Psion organizer, already half-absent, checking out the next day’s flight times.

  Heather smiled at him as she brushed her hair in the mirror. It was a trick question and they both knew it. He was asking if she’d slept with Iain, but she mulishly refused to identify the code he was using. ‘I didn’t know him terribly well actually, and not for very long,’ she told him instead. Well at least that much was true, she thought, switching off the light.

  Simon decided it would be safer to go by river. Even if no-one saw him climb over the wall, and he managed not to spear himself on the dense invader-deterring barrier of holly and hawthorn, there was still the danger that their security lights would go on, revealing him creeping round the edge of the herb-lawn like a stealthy burglar. The rowing boat made no noise as he gently dipped the oars into the flat black water, but moorhens flapped like abandoned bin-liners as he passed them, and the rats and voles scuttled and rustled into holes in the bank. Night-time noises were so exaggerated, he thought, as an owl took off from the oak tree with a tremendous commotion. He was hardly daring to breathe in case lights went on and shotguns came out all over the village.

  Simon rowed round the back of the little island to lessen the chances of the bankside residents wondering what a lone, unlit rower was up to so late at night, and he approached the almost derelict dock from downstream. As he looked at the house, crouched silently in the boat while he shipped the oars and tied a rope to a rusty iron ring, a woman appeared at an upstairs window and briskly closed the curtains. His heart boomed under his leather jacket and he needed quite suddenly to pee. It felt all wrong, having a pee behind the willow overhanging the dock in Kate’s garden, somehow sacrilegious, as if he was in a graveyard, defiling the dead. He hadn’t dared direct the flow into the river in case the noise in the silent night cascaded like Niagara. He tried to think of it as marking territory like a lion, pissing a pattern of his initials up the tree bark to avoid the thunderous sound of splashing on the grass.

  Afterwards, he edged past the paddock, terrified that Suzy’s podgy pony would canter across to him, whickering for a midnight feast. Next he crept along the wall of espaliered fruit trees, alarmed at how, in the gloom, their skinny crucified limbs made him think of a row of torture victims. Simon’s breathing was juddery and shallow as he finally reached the house and stood quaking under the window that he’d identified as Kate’s. Ideally, he knew, she would have a balcony like Juliet’s, twined with night-pungent jasmine and easy to climb up to. (A set of steps would be helpful, he thought, feeling he had exhausted his adventurousness for one night.) Unlike Romeo, though, Simon had no illusions that Kate would welcome his nocturnal visit. For one thing, she was not posed above him in a see-through nightie gazing languidly at the stars and wishing he, and only he, would appear. Her light was out. She was probably fast asleep, he realized dejectedly, dreaming of that gross nerd Darren, or the smarmy git who’d pulled her out of the pool. Simon lurked under Kate’s window and wondered rather drunkenly what he had hoped to achieve. He’d been imagining she would be wandering about in the garden, having realized Darren was a complete crud and that older men drooling over teenage girls were nothing short of sad vampires looking to leech off young blood.

  Bored and tired, he kicked carelessly at a stone on the terrace which clattered against an earthenware pot. Immediately a dog started a hectic yapping, and Simon fled, terrified, down the garden, pursued by lights that went on at three windows and spread their beams down the garden. On balance, he thought as he lay uncomfortably flat in his boat beyond the willow till the commotion died down, it would be cooler to be caught burgling than romancing.

  In the morning, Tom was preparing to be on the move again. Heather woke up unnecessarily early and in need of aspirin, to hear him clattering noisily in the bathroom. The shelves were emptying once more. The familiar flight bag was out, being reloaded for another trip, this time a double, taking in Singapore and continuing for an extra couple of runs from there to Australia. He could be gone for up to three weeks, but she didn’t ask when he expected to be back, having got used to vagueness of answer over the years. When the girls were little, she’d disappointed them too often by geeing them up into a state of excited tension, promising, ‘Daddy will be home on Tuesday, definitely.’ Then, after baking a cake and cooking a welcome-home supper, she’d find that there were delays and he’d wander in two days late. They’d always blamed her, of course, being the one on the premises, accusing ‘But you promised. You promised.’ This was so often followed by a sulk and a declaration (usually from Kate) of eternal hatred, that she’d long ago adopted a casual indifference to Tom’s schedule, and they’d soon learned to do the same. It was, anyway, difficult to keep up a heartfelt atmosphere of celebration for the return of someone who kept coming and going during eighteen long years. It was like wearily applauding too many curtain calls at the theatre – all strained smile and a need to get on with something else. All Heather could manage to feel about his forthcoming absence, that slightly hungover morning, was a hope that he wouldn’t pack the John Frieda shampoo.

  Down in the kitchen, Delia made the kind of fuss that implied Tom was leaving to defend Queen and country rather than to ferry a few hundred executives to enjoy corporate hospitality in one of the world’s best shopping centres. ‘It’s important to have a good breakfast when you’re going to travel,’ she was telling Tom out on the terrace, as Heather slopped drowsily into the kitchen. Tom had walked through, leaving the room pungent with aftershave which he wore only for work, feeling it was part of the uniform. Delia was grilling bacon, many slices of it, along with tomatoes and mushrooms. ‘Would you like an egg as well?’ she called out to Tom solicitously.

  Heather immediately felt a need for comfort food. ‘You don’t need six slices, do you Tom? I quite fancy a toasted bacon sandwich.’

  ‘Oh it’s not for you!’ Delia told her sharply. ‘It’s not as if you’re going anywhere.’

  ‘Why do I have to be going somewhere?’ she asked, inspecting the contents of the fridge. There was no more bacon. ‘Here, let me do that,’ she said, moving to take over from her mother who seemed to be finding the grill heavy to handle.

  ‘No. I’m doing it,’ Delia insisted, shoving at Heather with her elbow. Heather noticed the arthritic mounds on her mother’s fingers and understood the old lady’s stubbornness. This obstinacy must be the old-age manifestation of the strength she had had in her youth. Pity for declining powers prevented Heather from childishly wresting the grill-pan away, and she contented herself with making toast and then going outside and surreptitiously stealing a slice of bacon from Tom’s overloaded plate.

  ‘She’s trying to kill me,’ he muttered to Heather while Delia clanked the crockery in the sink.

  ‘Only with kindness,’ Heather whispered.

  ‘What’s the difference? Dead is dead,’ he said, nevertheless eagerly piling mushrooms, toast and a deftly folded slice of bacon on to his fork.

  ‘What was going on in the garden last night?’ Delia asked, bringing her coffee out to join them on the sunlit terrace.

  ‘No idea,’ Heather said, ‘probably just a fox mooching about.’

  Delia shudde
red. ‘They’re wicked, nasty things, foxes, we get them coming along the railway embankment at home. They scavenge at all those fast-food places. I’m sure they spread disease.’

  ‘Here they just pick off the ducklings,’ Heather told her, wishing that fifteen years of riverside living had made her feel tougher towards murderous wildlife.

  ‘Perhaps they could scavenge among Heather’s old boyfriends,’ Tom joked through a final mouthful of bacon. ‘Plenty of those about.’

  ‘Just the one, darling,’ Heather hissed sweetly, flashing him what she hoped was a menacing smile, ‘for now.’

  In spite of misgivings about his arteries silting up, Tom was finishing the last of his breakfast, a piece of speared toast was circling the plate, mopping up leaked mushroom juice. Heather picked up her coffee cup and went back in to the kitchen, not looking at Delia, not wanting to know whether her mother’s curiosity-radar was in full working order or not. Her insides tensed as she heard music starting up in Kate’s room. Oh God, she’s up, she thought. How long before Iain’s name is actually mentioned in front of Delia? Feeling cowardly, she retreated upstairs to get ready for the day, calling back to her mother, ‘I’ll give you a lift over to the clinic later if you like. I’ve got to go that way to Julia’s, to plant her camellias.’

  ‘Thank you dear, I was rather counting on it.’

  ‘Kate, if you want breakfast, the kitchen canteen is about to close,’ Heather called to her as she passed her bedroom door.

  ‘Mum?’ Kate’s head appeared round the doorway, followed by a body wearing only an ancient tie-dye T-shirt and a pair of tiny black knickers. ‘Has anyone phoned for me this morning?’

  ‘No – are you expecting someone?’ Heather asked.

  ‘Not particularly.’ Kate’s brown legs were fidgety, a sure sign that she was being only half truthful. Probably that boy Darren, Heather thought, wondering why each generation of teenagers unfailingly imagines that their parents don’t notice anything. She knew quite well, with the enlightenment of hindsight, that he, lumpen and undeserving as he was, was the reason why Kate had so gracefully tripped herself into the pool. How infuriating it must have been for poor Kate to have ancient Iain thinking he was doing her a favour by pulling her out.

  ‘Look, I’m going out later after lunch, taking your gran over to the clinic again and then on to Julia’s. Why don’t I give you a lift into town and you can go and see one of your school friends?’ Kate wrinkled her nose with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. ‘Not even Annabelle?’ Heather asked. Kate and Annabelle had been inseparable for the past six months. Only weeks ago, Heather had dreaded the ringing of the phone, because it would then be monopolised for at least an hour while Kate curled up on Heather’s bedroom carpet and giggled and whispered about all the things they’d already giggled and whispered about all day at school. As she flurried about in her bedroom putting last night’s abandoned clothes away so that Mrs Gibson had space to do her cleaning, it occurred to Heather that the phone had been distinctly quiet ever since the end of term.

  She went back out on to the landing. Noises of reluctant bed-making came from Kate’s room. ‘Has Annabelle gone away?’ she called.

  ‘No, why?’ Kate asked, padding out of her room and rubbing last night’s mascara out of her eyes.

  ‘Just that you don’t seem to see as much of her, and the phone’s been so quiet,’ Heather said.

  Kate was tangling the end of her T-shirt and looking uncomfortable. ‘Well, we don’t really see each other so much now. I mean we won’t, will we, with me being at the college next term and her still being at school.’

  ‘Well you could still be friends, surely. And it’s the holidays – so what difference does it make where you’re going next term?’ Heather asked. She felt a vague unease, something horribly familiar from a long time ago, like the remembered sparks of an oncoming migraine or the first twinges of going into labour.

  Kate started going slowly down the stairs and then looked back with her face full of painful honesty. ‘I suppose it’s because I’ve left and moved on. It’s as if there’s a gap. It’s not just Annabelle, I’ve got it too. Not like I’m older than all that lot or anything, just further on, just, well, different. I’ve made one more choice than they have so far – they won’t have to decide anything that important till they get their UCAS forms way on into next year. You know?’

  Heather knew. She took refuge in the airing cupboard, sorting duvet covers that were already perfectly in order as Kate went down to mess up the kitchen and get in Delia’s way. Goodness, how she remembered that feeling, that isolation. She’d had hers after that summer, the married summer. By September she was, in spite of her mother’s warnings that she wouldn’t be welcome, humbly home again and somehow assuming, with blithe teenage optimism, that if she went back to just how things used to be, everything would fall comfortably into its old place, and her ‘old place’ would still be there, as if she’d only gone off for a practice run at real life.

  The first shock was not being allowed back into school. There had been an interview with the headmistress. She remembered waiting with her mother outside the door on which there was the little set of miniature traffic lights. You knocked on the door and the appropriate light came up: red for go away and return later, orange for wait and green for enter. For years into adulthood, Heather’s stomach had given a tiny reflex flicker while she waited in her car for real traffic lights to change. It was just before term-time, and the corridor had the oily smell of its new fruity green paint. Another, more sickly smell wafted from the main hall where the parquet floor gleamed richly chestnut with new polish, in preparation for another year’s pounding from regulation Clark’s shoes filing in for morning assembly. The school had been dustily deserted except for the head and a couple of office staff, but the light system was still in officious use. Amber had flashed for at least five nerve-wracking minutes after she had knocked, and on green for enter her mother had pushed her quite roughly ahead of her into the gloomy room. No-one else had come out, paperwork had been getting priority.

  Pre-computers, there had been a huge whole-school timetable, a muddle of different biro colours, taking up a whole wall. Heather had looked at it briefly and realized suddenly that she was wasting her time. There could be no room for her now, not even with her nine good O-level passes. She was going to be made an Example – going to the bad was neither to be condoned nor forgiven. The brief, but flashily public, upheaval caused by her running away had been smoothed over, patted down, and there must be nothing left to show it had happened. It reminded Heather now of the secret burial of a small child’s hamster, the ground carefully levelled by conscientious parents so the child wouldn’t know where to be tempted to dig.

  ‘I don’t run a school for married women,’ the headmistress had told her, her heavy black fountain pen still in her hand from dealing with something so much more important than mere pupils. Heather, with a subversive urge to giggle, had been willing her to proclaim ‘You’ve made your bed, you must lie on it . . .’ so that she could relish her realizing too late that she’d clichéd herself into a near double entendre. Instead she had stared coldly before suggesting, ‘Have you thought of evening classes?’ while Heather calculated if she was actually trying to be constructive and kind. ‘You could perhaps learn some basic cookery . . .’ she’d continued with calculated spite. How callously she’d almost managed to reduce Heather to tears with that. Clever girls at her school, girls like Heather, weren’t allowed to take cookery lessons. They were reserved for forms like 5C (Commercial) who alone were allowed the delight of taking home Hungarian goulash and apple strüdel instead of ‘A’ grades for Chaucer essays and zoology dissections. They’d talked mysteriously about RSA and Pitmans, back-combed their hair rigorously and left the school at sixteen to have giggly times in typing pools. While Heather’s clever friends haggled with parents to be allowed out later than 10.30, the Commercial girls would be sipping Dubonnet over steaks in Berni Inns with men w
ho were being ruthlessly assessed for their potential Mr Right-ness. So the headmistress had lumped A-stream Heather in with these.

  ‘Spinsters!’ Delia had spat the word scornfully as they waited for the bus home from that interview. ‘Shouldn’t even have bothered going. Shouldn’t have given her the satisfaction of turning you away.’ It was the only time Heather had known for sure that her mother wasn’t the opposition. Later, from the local College of Further Education along with other Bad Girls, public school throw-outs, ambitious second-chancers and quiet, new-start former victims of school bullies, she had watched her former friends still banding together and, like the school itself, seamlessly closing over the space where she had been. They wore uniform, she didn’t. She worked with boys, they only giggled and flirted at them. She wore make-up, as much as she wanted – they were given childish detention for the slightest trace of mascara. Being married became only the smallest part of the difference between them – she couldn’t even blame Iain for this one.

  She remembered now, as she keenly felt Kate’s isolation, how much of school friendships depended on the simple presence and small daily patterns of the school itself. Kate would be left out because she was out. ‘You know Kate, it’ll all be over by Christmas,’ Heather called down to the kitchen.

  ‘What, like the war?’ Kate shouted back up.

  ‘What war?’ Delia asked as she opened the front door to take Jasper down to the rec.

  ‘No war,’ Kate told her. ‘Just, well, stuff.’

  ‘Oh, “stuff”,’ Delia said huffily, sensing it was no good expecting to be informed.

  ‘You’ll have a whole lot of new friends by then,’ Heather told Kate as she came back up the stairs. ‘And the old ones who matter, you’ll still have them too if you make the effort.’

  She’d gone too far. Kate scowled. ‘Look Mum, it’s OK. I’ve got things to do, I wasn’t complaining. You asked about Annabelle, I told you. End of story, and I’m fine. You don’t have to worry. In fact please don’t.’ Her door closed and music started again.