Seven For a Secret

by Judy Astley

  ‘Especially in pubs,’ Heather laughed. ‘All those landlords asking if your daughter wanted orange squash.’

  ‘When I used to read about Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith, I always wondered if he felt as nervous as I used to when he tried to get her into nightclubs.’

  Heather savoured her lobster ravioli and thought about the things that had been going on in the world since she had started and stopped being married to Iain. When she’d got onto that slow train back to London from Edinburgh there’d been no colour television, no VAT, no food sold at Marks and Spencer, not even, just, decimal currency. Comprehensive schools were an experiment, cocaine was something the dentist anaesthetized teeth with, and ozone didn’t come in fragile layers but as something bracing to be inhaled at the seaside. She and Iain had been having separate but parallel lives; reading the same things in probably the same newspapers, experiencing the Gulf and Falkland wars as TV spectator sports, rendering them less shocking than they should have been. Heather sipped her wine and pondered on the impossibility of discussing a quarter of a century of missed exchanges of views. They were little more than strangers really – what would be the point of asking how he’d felt on the death of Elvis or the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister?

  ‘Kate is really quite talented, of course . . .’ Iain was saying as the plates were cleared away. ‘Does she get that from you? I don’t recall you being in a school play.’

  ‘I never volunteered,’ Heather told him, ‘being tallish, there was every chance I’d have to be cast as a boy. You could bet your life that if I got to play Professor Higgins they’d make me kiss Eliza Doolittle – whether the script called for it or not. It was that kind of school.’

  ‘Excitingly perverse,’ Iain leered. ‘There’s something about girls’ schools.’

  ‘That’s what Kate said, which is one of the reasons why she’s left hers. She absolutely hated it and its atmosphere – she said it made the staff just as childish as the pupils.’

  ‘A-levels next, I take it? She seems very bright.’ Iain put his hand on hers and looked at her fingers as he stroked them idly. ‘She reminds me so much of you at her age.’

  Kate’s hand isn’t age-speckled and dry like mine is now, she thought, quickly banning the thought from her head. Heather laughed lightly. ‘Much more common sense, I think. Do you, do you ever miss not having had a family?’ She wondered if that had been impertinent, and the spectre of their sad-fated baby hovered fleetingly and vanished. He might have all sorts of reasons for not having one; there might by now be some problem that went beyond his notorious attraction to young and unsuitable women.

  ‘Of course I do. You know, I envy you. You seem to have got it all – husband, good place to live where you know who you are, lovely daughters. I’m still something of a nomad, albeit a successful one career-wise. Things sometimes seem to be working out, but then they just don’t. You’re still the only one I actually married.’

  Heather gave him a wry look, wary of his little-boy expression. He didn’t need to go for her sympathy-vote to get her into bed. ‘Men can breed till the day they die, you’ve got plenty of time if you need to produce an heir to all that family baggage,’ she told him, feeling like a mother comforting a child for the loss of a heartless lover, and not wishing to be doing this at all. She’d been brought out tonight to be wooed, lusted after, guiltlessly seduced; she would have enough emotional mopping-up to do when Tom got home.

  Glorious food came and was eaten. ‘All this trouble these chefs go to and all we do is eat it,’ she sighed over the last spoonful of a celestial coffee soufflé. ‘There should be some other process of savouring this that’s different from the method that’s just the same for munching boring old fish and chips.’

  ‘I’m so glad you agreed to come,’ Iain suddenly said, leaning forward and giving her an almost fiercely direct look. ‘Having met you again like this, it would have been awful not to find we could be friends.’

  ‘So civilized,’ she murmured, immediately wishing she wasn’t blighted by instinctive sarcasm. She wondered if that was anything to do with why, rather suddenly, there seemed to have been coffee, the bill, the way out and the beginning of the long drive back to the village. She felt a mixture of things: mildly drunk was one of them, but along with that was rejection and dejection, and the pathetic futility of trying to have the kind of adventure that seemed only to be available to those who were too young to need it. If she’d been one of Iain’s sweet girlish things, she was certain she’d be still in the hotel and by now down to at least her underwear. ‘Romping’, a word so treasured by the tabloid press, was obviously an activity reserved solely for those barely out of rompers. She sighed quietly and thought about her unappealing flesh, coarsened by sunshine and wind and lacking youthful ‘give’, like over-washed elastic. Good-looking rich men of any age had such choices, she thought glumly Surely the whole point of this lavish dinner hadn’t been to apologize for the day he’d put her on the train and out of his mind like a used-up disposable razor?

  ‘By tomorrow I’ll be thinking of all the things I intended to say to you and didn’t,’ he was saying as the car swung into the Golf Club car park.

  ‘You could try saying them now,’ she replied, suspecting there was nothing to say.

  ‘When I think I’ll try, I somehow can’t find the right words – awful admission for a writer,’ he said as he stopped the car next to the Renault under the chestnut tree. ‘Sorry, but I just want you not to think badly of me.’

  ‘It shouldn’t matter to you what I think, not now,’ she told him, opening the car door. ‘You should stop thinking everyone thinks about you all the time.’ She gave a light, rather hard laugh. ‘God, I sounded just like my mother then.’

  When he’d gone, Heather unlocked her own car and sat in the driving seat feeling cross. She didn’t really like him very much, after all, she decided. He just, as he had before, represented An Adventure. He was being deliberately mysterious, as if it made him more interesting – a sure sign of bloated ego. Instead, she was just confused and cross. He’d gone all heavy on her, she thought, reverting appropriately to her teenage vocabulary. It was way after midnight and she was supposed to be tucked up in a cosy bed-and-breakfast place miles from the village. She could wake up the household with an awkward tangle of excuses for an early return, or she could stay in the car all night getting cold and stiff and unnerved by prowling foxes. Eventually she started the car, drove with exaggerated care down the lane and out on to the main road and turned into Margot’s driveway, tucking the Renault away on the far side of Margot’s BMW. Russell was safely (or not) in Coventry, and she thought of him asleep, satiated from ‘Delphine’, with his conference name-badge pinned securely to his silk pyjamas. She giggled quietly as she threw gravel gently up to the lighted window, and Margot’s make-up-cleaned face as round and pale as a moon, leaned out of the window.

  ‘Oh, it’s you. I thought for a minute my prince had come.’

  ‘One day,’ Heather promised her, crossing her fingers against the lie.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Heather woke up feeling stiff from the effort, even in sleep, of keeping to her side of the bed. Margot was probably the last person she’d have guessed she’d be sleeping with. She imagined Margot could have thought of more thrilling bedfellows, too.

  ‘If you don’t want the whole village gossiping about the two of us, you’ll have to leave before 10.30. That’s about when Tamsin and Simon start feeling hungry enough to drag themselves out of bed,’ Margot said as she brought Heather an early cup of tea. ‘Of course, Simon probably wouldn’t actually notice you’re here, seeing as he’s in training for being a man,’ she added, with the kind of smile that told Heather it was only halfway to a joke.

  Just after ten, Heather thought it might be reasonable to be on her way home, seeing as she was pretending to have made an early start from the other side of Kettering. She felt slightly queasy, as if all the lies she’d been telling
had given her mental indigestion. They’d been unnecessary too, which made her feel as cloyed inside as if she was overstuffed with chocolate cream cakes and guilty regret. It’s my own stupid fault, trying ridiculously to dig up the thrills of the past, she told herself as she drove out of Margot’s gates, looking carefully to the left and right as if she could swiftly hide the Renault behind a tree, should a familiar face come into view. She was just thinking about sensibly (and boringly) leaving teenage kicks to teenagers when she noticed the large white van with blackened windows pulling out of her own driveway. Heather could see ‘Private Ambulance’ written in red on the side and felt immediate heart-banging panic, knowing, just a hundred per cent certain, that her mother was in it and that something catastrophic must have happened. It was unsurprising, really; obviously a punishment. She only wished she’d actually done something thrilling enough to be punished for. Trembling, she steered up her drive, sure she was about to be assailed by a tearful Suzy or Kate hurling themselves on her and wailing about heart attacks, broken hip joints, blood on the carpet or strokes. Why didn’t they phone, she wondered, and also, since when had her mother been subscribing to anything medical that involved an ambulance flaunting itself as ‘Private’.

  ‘Mum, Mum, you won’t believe it!’ Both Kate and Suzy came running out of the house, wide-eyed and worried, towards her as she forced her shaky legs out of the car.

  ‘What’s happened? What’s happened to Grandma?’

  ‘Grandma? Oh she’s here,’ Suzy said.

  ‘Oh yes, she’s here all right,’ Kate echoed crossly, ‘and not just her.’

  ‘Well who was in the ambulance then? Surely not Mrs Gibson?’

  ‘Mrs Gibson went home cross and said she wouldn’t do any cleaning, not while Uncle Edward’s here,’ Suzy told her, with her thumb in her mouth, a sure sign, Heather knew, that she was quite seriously alarmed.

  ‘Yeah he’s come to stay, so Gran says.’

  Heather strode into the house to confront her mother, hoping at the same time that Edward had at least got his lid nailed down.

  ‘Hello dear, did you have a nice evening?’ Delia greeted her cheerfully as she walked across the hallway from the dining-room.

  ‘Not bad. Look, Mother, what’s all this about Edward? Kate and Suzy say he’s here.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. I had him brought home. It’s quite usual, you know, the day before the you-know.’

  ‘Well not here, it isn’t, and I mean we haven’t even discussed it. And where . . . where exactly is he?’ Heather looked around the hall nervously, seeing in her own house closed doors that she was too spooked to open. Jasper was running up and down, snuffling excitedly at the bottom of one of them, his little tail frantically wagging with disrespectful curiosity. What would happen if he actually got in hardly bore thinking about.

  ‘On the dining-room table. Don’t worry, I made them line up all your place mats under the coffin, so there won’t be scratches. It’s not as if you use that room very often anyway, is it? You always eat in the kitchen.’ Delia started muttering about family meals with proper damask tablecloths.

  Suzy did her homework on the dining-room table, Heather was thinking. She’d probably feel too creepy to sit alone in there from now on. She’d need to be talked to. She took her mother’s arm and led her gently outside to sit by the pool. ‘Look. I know that for your generation it’s the proper thing to do,’ she began carefully. ‘It’s just that, well, the girls. Their generation don’t come into contact with the dead. Come to think of it, neither does mine. They’re feeling a bit nervous, scared. Dead people make them think of ghosts at their age. And they weren’t expecting it.’ Who was? she thought. ‘Nothing had been said. You just—’

  ‘It’s all right, I get the picture,’ Delia said, sniffing and fishing in her sleeve for a handkerchief. ‘But perhaps you could explain a few little things to them. Edward is family. Just because he’s dead and gone, it doesn’t mean that his body should stay in that awful anonymous undertaker’s chapel among strangers. I hope I don’t have to. I’d want to come home.’

  ‘But this isn’t his home,’ Heather pointed out, carefully not answering the hint of a question.

  ‘Well he could hardly stay all by himself back in the sheltered housing. Home is where your family is, where last respects can be paid. It’s proper to accompany a person to his last resting place,’ Delia insisted. ‘You don’t just say “I’ll meet you there” as if you’re going to the pictures.’

  Heather sighed and surrendered. She hadn’t the heart to summon the undertaker and demand the removal of Edward. Part of her understood and agreed about death being a natural part of life, and that it shouldn’t be tidied away by people barely different from the specialist collectors who dispose of difficult refuse, like asbestos and old fridges. ‘Goodness knows what Tom will say,’ she said eventually, hoping to give up and pass the buck.

  Later, having showered and changed and had a good think about exactly when her mother had made these arrangements, and if it was anything connected, however obliquely, with the presence of Iain, she crept down the stairs and summoned enough courage to open the dining-room door. She hadn’t minded Edward being dead at the hospital, that had been such a small progression from his last moments of life. But there was something so creepy, Uriah Heep-ish about having been got at by undertakers, she thought, that it turned death into a quite horribly artificial process, with all its secretive rituals – something similar to the sneaky addition of water and chemicals to bulk out bacon.

  Edward was lying in the snug blue ruffled-satin nest in his best suit, which had obviously fitted him several, heavier, years ago. He looked as smart as if he was going to a Rotary Club dinner, with his tie militarily straight and his shoes richly polished. The wrong shade of blusher had been applied to his sagging cheeks and his eyelids were suspiciously bluish. Delia had closed the curtains and lit two pairs of geranium-scented candles in Heather’s favourite silver holders, which told Heather that she must have been preparing this little surprise quite carefully on the sly – even ‘Inside Story’ didn’t stock candles like these, they must have been secretly purchased on the trip to Oxford. The discreet scent brought to mind pot pourri on lavatory window sills. I’ll think of this every time we have people to dinner, she thought, trying to banish grumpy selfish thoughts and replace them with more humble ones in the presence of death.

  Outside the dining-room door, furious whispering was going on.

  ‘I’m not going in there. Not if you paid me a million,’ Suzy was saying.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind for a million,’ Kate whispered back. ‘But I’m not going to give myself nightmares just for Gran’s satisfaction.’

  There was a stifled giggle from Suzy. ‘I dare you!’ she hissed at her sister.

  ‘Dare me how much?’

  ‘The new Blur CD, and Oasis. Simon’s got loads of stuff apparently going spare, Tamsin says, and she can get them off him . . .’

  ‘Well . . . maybe,’ Kate wavered greedily, faced with a bribe.

  ‘But it has to be at night. In the dark, just the candles.’ Suzy was pushing her luck, Heather considered, at the same time having a passing thought about what Simon was doing with a load of spare CDs. The idea of crime did not, of course, enter her head. He wasn’t that sort of boy.

  ‘So when the noise got too much with all the drunks yelling and laughing, this little chap asks the stewardess for ear plugs and she’s too busy and waves him off in the direction of the loo.’ Tom paused for breath and sipped his wine. ‘Couple of minutes later, back he comes with a Tampax sticking out of each ear with the string dangling! “You all right, Sir?” she says, and of course the things obviously work ’cos all he says is “Pardon?”!’

  Suzy and Kate were spluttering over their chocolate mousse. Delia smiled politely to show no real hard feelings, but Heather saw her eyes turn worriedly towards the direction of the dining-room, as if Uncle Edward, in his condition, should not be exposed to su
ch unseemly conversation. It was no good saying yet again that he couldn’t hear. Since his arrival, Delia had been ostentatiously tiptoeing round the house, shushing anyone who dared to speak in more than a whisper. Kate had lost her temper and told her that it would take more than a Senseless Things album played at full volume to wake the dead, at which Delia had gone to her room for a new handkerchief to cry into down by the river, where everyone could see her. Kate had apologized, but warily, still smarting from when Delia had been so waspish about her going to the pub with Iain.

  Tom seemed so grateful and relieved that, after the Hughie business, Heather allowed him back into the house at all, that he was being determinedly cheerful and entertaining.

  ‘He’s being very wearing,’ Delia complained as she watched Heather making coffee after supper.

  ‘Just glad to be home, I think,’ Heather told her. ‘I’m glad he’s here too,’ she added, which she would have done, out of loyalty, whether she meant it or not. Luckily, she realized that she did.

  ‘Sorry about the presence of death,’ she said to Tom as they got ready for bed, getting in first with the apologizing. It would be his turn soon enough.

  ‘I don’t mind. It’s not as if he’s being any trouble – not like some visitors. And at least we don’t have to feed him or listen to endless tales of golf triumphs,’ Tom told her from the bed where he was flipping through the TV channels pretending he was trying to find something worth catching up on. ‘And if it makes your mother happy.’

  ‘You’re being very accommodating.’ she commented.

  ‘Yes, well.’ He shifted and adjusted pillows, not looking at her. ‘Guilty conscience I suppose. Do you want to talk about it?’

  Heather fleetingly thought he meant Iain, not Hughie. She only had a guilty conscience about intent and couldn’t work out where that rated on the Richter scale of marital earthquake. ‘Did you honestly imagine I wouldn’t want to?’ she asked him, ‘I mean wouldn’t most people rate it a fairly cataclysmic event, having your husband’s boyfriend call you up from across the world and spill the beans?’ Heather’s hands were shaking as she folded her skirt, unfolded it and then threw it inaccurately towards the laundry basket in the bathroom. They’d spent the evening play-acting at happy families and now it was as if not just that one performance, but the whole run might be over.