Seven For a Secret

by Judy Astley

  Iain lit a cigarette, still the same brand of French ones she had found so exotic at sixteen. ‘I thought we were,’ he told her softly. ‘It was you who wanted to go home to Mother.’

  Heather felt hot and quickly gulped some more of her drink. ‘What else could I do? It was that or be murdered by that foul old nanny of yours. Her and her bloody knitting needle.’ Heather was starting to feel tearful. She remembered Mrs Kirby sitting in the old kitchen chair in the half light, rocking rhythmically on the flagstones as she knitted something complicated in a Fairisle pattern for her precious Iain. At the end of a row, she’d waved the free needle towards Heather and whispered, ‘Any wee problem you might be having, you come to me.’ Then she’d leaned across and tapped the back of Heather’s fingers with the cold steel needle, ‘I can help ye.’

  Iain reached across the table for her hand and she snatched it back. ‘Come on Heather, she only meant to be helpful. Did you really want to start having babies at sixteen? You were hardly more than a child yourself.’

  ‘Didn’t stop you hauling me out of school and marrying me, did it?’ Her voice was rising. Maureen’s rosy frock was leaning across towards their table.

  ‘Nanny was quite experienced, you know, she wouldn’t have hurt you,’ Iain drawled casually, as if he was talking about removing a splinter.

  ‘Oh, well that’s terrific. How many other little abortions had she performed on the ancestral dining table? Or did they take place below stairs in the servants’ hall where she thought little sluts like me really belonged?’ Heather realized quite suddenly that she had got drunk. Too drunk to drive home, anyway. There would now be the complications of organizing a taxi.

  ‘Would you like pudding?’ Iain asked as the waiter approached.

  ‘No. Actually I’d rather just go home if you don’t mind. This really wasn’t a good idea at all. I only wanted to come to tell you that my family know nothing about you, and that’s because you are not the slightest bit relevant to the life I have now. I’d like it to stay that way.’

  Iain smiled, conceding defeat with a graceful gesture of his long hands. ‘I’m sorry. I just thought it would be amusing to see each other again.’

  ‘You always thought everything would be “amusing”. Some things weren’t,’ she replied flatly. He’d depressed her. The champagne had depressed her. She would have a headache by supper time and have a sleepless night. Sulkily, she decided it was all his fault.

  ‘I’ll drive you back to Friarsford,’ he said as he signed the credit card slip. ‘If you’re worried about who sees you, we can pretend your car broke down.’

  Heather felt too gloomy to argue and slid, unprotesting, into the creamy leather passenger seat of the Mercedes. Only as she was tiptoeing across the crunchy gravel, hoping to get to the safety of her bedroom and her comforting old gardening clothes before Delia cross-examined her, did she realize that Iain had never thought to ask what became of his baby.

  Chapter Ten

  Heather quickly shoved all her clothes into the laundry basket and then took them out again, deciding to take them downstairs immediately and give them priority in the washing machine so that she could eliminate the smell of the restaurant, the Gitanes, Iain. Her limbs felt heavy from lunchtime alcohol. She hurried into her swimsuit and then down the stairs to dive into the soothing pool.

  Delia, who had been dozing with a detective novel under the walnut tree, was startled by the splash. ‘How was your lunch, dear?’ she asked as Heather surfaced. ‘I didn’t hear your car.’

  ‘Er, no, it got a bit overheated. I’ll have to collect it in the morning,’ she told her, preparing to hide the lie by swimming under water for a couple of lengths. Why hadn’t she simply said she’d drunk too much and to drive home was quite beyond her? What could have been simpler or truer? She seemed to be compelled to complicate things as much as possible. It was like knitting a scarf with five different colours at once and, after keeping each strand carefully separate till it was a couple of yards long, suddenly abandoning it for a kitten to play with. She felt pent-up energy churning about uncomfortably inside her, an unreleasable tension, rather too reminiscent of sexual frustration. Perhaps she was already missing Tom more than usual, or perhaps it was true that some women don’t reach a peak of sexual desire until they are in their forties. Rather unfair of old Ma Nature if that was true, she thought. Most likely it was a combination of sunshine and champagne, she decided as she surfaced and swam on her back, gazing at the arc of blue sky above her. Water cleared from her ears and she floated, letting the sounds of the household start to invade her consciousness. From the paddock she could hear Tamsin and Suzy squabbling over whose turn it was to ride Bluebell. Tamsin had a beautiful leggy Palomino pony of her own, liveried and cared for in immaculate comfort and at huge expense at the village stables beyond the recreation ground. ‘Lazy little sod would rather plod round your paddock on Suzy’s pony than walk across the rec and tack up her own. It’ll get all fat and lumpy, like your Bluebell,’ Margot had complained to Heather, only weeks after the pretty pony had been acquired, complete with a full range of equine accessories, and its novelty had worn off. Margot and Russell, first-generation pony-owners, preferred to maintain its board and lodging safely away from their own premises, taken care of by Fenella Kenning, the sort of outdoor woman who owned seventeen pairs of jodhpurs and one out-of-date dusty evening frock, whereas Margot preferred to have seventeen glittering dresses and one never-worn, unrealistically small pair of jodhpurs.

  ‘Have you got any plans for the rest of the day?’ Delia asked Heather as she clambered out of the pool.

  Heather considered vigorous activities that would help dissipate the bulge of stifled energy that she could still feel. It was worse than chronic constipation, heavy and slightly nauseating, lurking in the part of her stomach where butterflies sometimes feathered anxiously. Double-digging a new potato bed would probably help. ‘I’ll have to do some hoeing round the lettuces,’ she decided, ‘and the basil needs potting on. Then, if you like, we could go for a walk up along the High Street and have a look at the shops?’

  ‘Yes I’d like that,’ Delia said, then added, ‘is there anywhere that sells swimsuits?’

  You didn’t get into cars with strange men, Kate knew. It was rule one from childhood. Or rule two, anyway, if you counted taking sweets from strangers as the one that came first, simply because you were likely to be younger when you were told it. The man with the Mercedes, the writer called Iain, was slowing down alongside her as she walked back towards home. Was this kerb-crawling? Kate wondered. Was he going to offer her money? That would be something worth telling Annabelle if she ever again deigned to phone. She would refuse, of course she would. She was paid well for walking the disgusting dogs, really well, simply because lovely rich Margot, who only read the kind of newspapers that reported on restaurants and royal gossip, was completely unaware that many people actually did all kinds of work for less than £5.00 per hour. But you didn’t get to be rich and famous walking dogs. Iain was, after all, a man who had Movie-Power. If he couldn’t make her a star, he certainly knew someone who could. The car pulled up a few strides ahead of her and, disappointingly, Brian of the baggy jeans was in the passenger seat. The window slid down and Iain leaned across as she approached.

  ‘Kate. How lovely to see you.’ She smiled broadly. He pronounced her name as if she was a box of silky hand-made chocolates. She wished he’d say it again, just like that, with a slight growl of pleasure. He grinned at her and she suddenly realized he wanted something. Her smile congealed, she was far more used to being the one who did the wanting. ‘Could you do me the most awfully huge favour?’ he asked. Brian, and the hot smell of hard manual work was wedged unattractively between her and Iain. ‘I need your mother’s car keys. She’s had to leave her Renault at the place where we . . . she had lunch with someone, and I thought it would be neighbourly to go and fetch it for her,’ he finished with another persuasive smile.

  He ha
d nice eyes, Kate thought, for someone of practically grandfather age. ‘OK,’ she said simply, skipping off quickly.

  A quick beep on the Mercedes horn called her back. ‘And don’t bother to tell her, OK? We’ll just surprise her.’

  Kate ran into the house, raided her mother’s handbag for the keys and ambled slowly back down the drive to where the car waited, knowing that she was being watched and not wanting to look too childishly eager. Self-consciously, she felt herself loping with exaggerated elegance, which was difficult in flip-flops, as if she was strolling along a Paris catwalk. She hoped a favourable comparison with Claudia Schiffer was being made. Brian had now been relegated to the back seat, she noticed.

  ‘Coming with us, for the ride?’ Iain invited, patting the cream leather seat next to him. Kate jumped in, stretching out her legs to show off their tanned length, then gathering them back in again in case any possible part in this film involved being a very young teenager, vampire’s victim or whatever, something like Suzy’s age, which of course someone who was really Suzy’s age would be far too juvenile and stupid to play. The drive took about fifteen minutes, during which Iain turned up the air conditioning till Kate’s bare skin tingled icily. She didn’t want to complain, he’d obviously done it to obliterate the whiff of Brian, who she thought smelled like the lion cage at the zoo.

  ‘I take it you’re friendly with Margot’s boy, Simon?’ lain said as they swept past fields of rape.

  Kate frowned. How ‘friendly’ was Iain implying? Surely he could tell Simon was a bit on the young side, for her? ‘Well I know him, obviously. But we don’t have the same social circles,’ she said grandly. She glanced sideways and caught Iain’s mouth curved into a highly amused grin. He was teasing her, and she minded. ‘He’s at boarding school, so he’s years behind,’ she explained, making things somehow worse and feeling silly.

  ‘Oh? I went to boarding school, so I suppose I should know what you mean,’ he told her.

  She simply thought he was mad; his schooldays must have been at about the time when children were still writing with chalk on little slate boards and calling all the teachers ‘Sir’. Iain was a Sir, she reminded herself, thinking how he might have looked quite Lancelot-ish when he was young.

  At the restaurant, to Kate’s surprise, Iain handed Heather’s keys to Brian and left him to drive the Renault back to Friarsford, keeping Kate and the Mercedes to himself. She’d assumed she and Iain would be in her mother’s car, with Brian taking the Mercedes.

  ‘Don’t worry about the insurance,’ he told her, misinterpreting her confused expression, ‘Brian’s covered for anything.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ she told him, having given no thought to anything as adult and boring as insurance. He switched off the air conditioning and pressed buttons to open the windows wide.

  ‘Real fresh country air, much better isn’t it?’ he asked her as they pulled out of the car park.

  ‘Better than Brian,’ she giggled. ‘What’s he been doing?’

  ‘Working very hard. It’s hot, he’s busy. It’s only body and heat,’ he admonished her.

  She wriggled slightly, it was the way he said ‘body and heat’, quietly and insistently, making them sound vaguely sexual. Nothing sexual about the smell of Brian, she thought, slightly shocked that she had thought of someone of Iain’s age in connection with sex. That was for young, lively people with a lot to find out, not for the old who should have found it all out and given it up long ago.

  ‘OK, let’s take the scenic route back. Not that there’s anything round that isn’t scenic,’ Iain said appreciatively, pulling out of the car park and turning in the wrong direction. Kate felt a moment of alarm, but Iain was grinning at her as if they were out on a secret naughty jaunt. Surely he was really just a bit too old to be dangerous in the rape-and-murder sense? She had some vague idea that the really dangerous ones were actually fairly youngish, fit, body-builders who looked as if they could probably find women for sex through the usual social channels if they could only be bothered.

  ‘You look like you’re skiving off school,’ she told him.

  ‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said. ‘That makes an old man feel young. As, of course, does the company of such a pretty young girl.’ Kate smiled cynically, well aware that this was a well-polished piece of gallantry. ‘Perhaps we could have tea somewhere, if you’d like to,’ he suggested.

  ‘Yes please, I would,’ she told him, sliding her feet out of the flip-flops and gathering them up on the seat in front of her. Being ‘out for tea’ was something she associated with her grandmother, an old person’s idea of a treat. She thought of the restaurant at the top of Selfridges and the individual silvery teapots with too-hot handles. She wrapped her arms round her knees and gazed contentedly out of the window ahead of her, at the summer glories of the English countryside. Everything was at a peak of ripeness, she noticed. The barley ears were fat and shining. The trees were as intensely green as they were going to get for that year, just waiting, reluctant to spill over into the desiccation of autumn. The wild flowers craned out over the ditches, arching eagerly over each other, competing for passing insects and pollination as if aware that time was running out, and extra effort was needed for this last chance to reproduce.

  ‘You have very grubby little feet,’ Iain commented with amusement, as they sped through Streatley and across the river into Goring.

  Kate wriggled her toes and inspected them. They were filthy, caked with mud and bits of dry grass. ‘Well it’s a sign of hard work, just like Brian and his smell. I’ve been walking Margot’s dog-lodgers,’ she told him pertly. ‘A girl has to earn a living, you know.’

  He laughed. ‘Haven’t you found yourself a lovely rich boyfriend to wine and dine you?’

  Kate snorted with delight.‘“Wine and dine”? People like me don’t wine and dine, we go clubbing, see bands, have parties. Well sometimes, anyway. Not much happens in a place like this. It’s dreadful being a teenager in the country. I can’t wait to learn to drive.’ She looked sideways covertly, watching to see if Iain gave her the expected sympathy glance. He did, but still seemed to be laughing at her, which was annoying. ‘I need a proper job for the summer really, nothing ordinary of course.’

  ‘Course not,’ he agreed.

  She slid her feet back down to the floor and crossed her legs. ‘I’m quite good at acting. I mean if they needed—’

  ‘This place looks OK, don’t you think?’ Ian said, interrupting and infuriating her as he pulled off the road in front of a small café half-submerged beneath a jumble of honeysuckle. ‘It says “Cream Teas”. Would you like that?’ Iain asked Kate, taking her hand and leading her through a small wooden gate into a shady orchard dotted with benches and tables.

  Kate wondered about the hand that was holding hers. Was it being fatherly, or even grandfatherly? It was certainly a hand that was taking charge of her as if she was so very much younger than she was. He wasn’t quite old enough for grandparent status, or somehow proper enough for a godparent either, she decided, looking at the back of his head as they crossed the bouncy grass. He had too much hair, quite thick and long and streaky, like an old rock star who still expected to have just one more hit; and he wore black chinos, with a cream T-shirt and black linen jacket, like something out of GAP’s window. He was more like one of those men who have a series of families – if she was his daughter she would probably already have been an aunt from the day she was born. There would be sure to be various older brothers and sisters, some who were long-ago grown-up with jobs as doctors or lawyers, with smart offices and secretaries of their own. The sprinkling of customers looked up from their scones as they made their way to a table under an apple tree.

  ‘Those women over there are staring at you,’ she pointed out to Iain as they sat down. ‘The fat ones scoffing cakes. Look like they’re on a day off from Weight Watchers.’

  ‘Spiteful little girl,’ Iain laughed at her, then glanced round and gave the women a half smile,
acknowledging their interest. They blushed and smirked like teenagers.

  Kate curled her lip with scorn. ‘God, they’re like a bunch of Sharons in McDonalds ogling some bloke,’ she said. ‘Gross.’

  ‘What’s “gross”? The fact that they’re not in the first flush of youth, or the fact that I’m not?’ he asked her bluntly.

  Kate felt embarrassed and squirmed a bit on the bench. She was facing the sun and it burned on her cheeks, adding to her uncomfortable blush. Opposite her, Iain’s clear blue eyes were looking directly and steadily into her face, waiting for her reply as if he really, truly wanted to know. ‘Oh, neither, you know, it’s just, just an observation,’ she floundered, biting her lip. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Didn’t mean what?’ he pursued determinedly. ‘That we Aged Adults are all completely past it by the age of thirty? Ought to shut up shop with the first wrinkle?’ He was laughing at her again and she smiled with relief. It wouldn’t do to get on the wrong side of him, and besides he was nice. He went on, looking intently into her head. ‘Katie, honestly, I know it’s something you don’t want to hear, but the sexual urge doesn’t fade away like old-age eyesight. Most of us don’t actually need the equivalent of reading glasses in order to get it up after the age of fifty.’

  Kate hid in her hair, giggling with excruciating shame as all around her she could see interested heads turning in their direction. She felt like a small child hearing her father say ‘fuck’ in front of the vicar. Iain had spoken out loudly and clearly and emphatically, like a teacher dictating in two write-this-down-and-learn-it sentences the central dilemma of Othello.

  ‘Sorry,’ he apologized gently, reaching across the table and pushing her hair back from her embarrassed face. ‘Didn’t mean to sound off at you like that.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, wiping away a laughter tear from her eye. ‘It was funny, really.’