The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  Andy looks away. Mel studies her nails. Blake looks steadily at her and says, “Sit down, Elizabeth.”

  She slides into the fourth seat. “What’s happened?” she asks. “Just tell me, will you? I’ve had a long day.”

  A long day of relaxed couples and heedlessly happy families checking in, and a wedding party coming by to make sure everything is ready for the weekend. Elizabeth’s face hurts from smiling and her feet ache from standing. In her mind, she runs over the possibilities for disaster.

  The three of them are here. Mike is already gone. Pepper came to greet her with his usual yapping joie de vivre before flopping back into his basket. So, she should be able to manage it, whatever it is.

  Andy sees the pulse beating in the top of her jaw as she sits and looks around at them all. There’s no point in dragging this out. He takes a deep breath and begins.

  “There’s a rumor you should know about,” he says. “Just a rumor. About Michael.”

  Elizabeth almost laughs. She can’t imagine any rumor that could hurt her. And he is safe from everything now. “Is that all?” she says. “You should see the three of you. You look as though you’ve murdered somebody.”

  “It could come to that,” Mel mutters.

  Blake says, “There’s a rumor that Michael is—was—the father of Kate Micklethwaite’s baby.” And then they all look at her, watching.

  All Elizabeth can think is that no one is telling her it’s not true. She sits very still, her hands clasped in front of her, her head dropped, as though she is pleading, or praying.

  She waits.

  Still nothing.

  So she says it herself. “It’s not true.”

  The trouble is, she can’t seem to say it just once. Now she’s started saying it, she can’t stop. “It’s not true. It’s not true.” Without looking up, she can feel the uneasiness around her grow. There is a small part of Elizabeth that is very clear that for as long as she keeps saying it’s not true, it cannot be true. The words are blurring, losing meaning, taking hold of her tongue.

  Mel says, too late, “Of course it’s not true,” but Elizabeth is caught up in her own rhythm now, three words the only fragile wall between her and a tidal wave.

  “It’s not true.”

  Andy is the one who gets her to stop. He takes both of Elizabeth’s hands in both of his.

  “Elizabeth.” He says it very quietly.

  “It’s not true.”

  “Elizabeth.” He says it more quietly still.

  “It’s not.”

  “Elizabeth.” The third time is barely a whisper, and it’s the smallness of it that lets it slip through.

  She stops talking. She looks up, at each of them in turn, and she says, “What do you think?”

  Mel says, “I just don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Blake says, “I’d be very surprised, Elizabeth.”

  Andy says, “Michael loved you so much.”

  And suddenly, Elizabeth is furious at the stupidity of these people, who are supposed to love her, to have loved Mike, but cannot see what’s in front of them. She stands up, leans forward, the tips of her fingers and thumbs making mirrored churches on the table top. And she lets them have it.

  She tells them that Mike wouldn’t look twice at some doe-eyed teenager.

  “I knew him better than anyone,” she spits. “I knew where he was, what he did, what he liked, and I can tell you for sure that it wasn’t screwing teenage girls.”

  And then she tells them that if anyone is even thinking about saying anything about smoke and fires, then they can go now and not come back, that she doesn’t want to hear another word about it until they can tell her who the father really is and how sorry they are for thinking ill of the dead. Then she turns, and she goes upstairs, and she waits for her breath to come evenly, and she waits for her tears to stop.

  Between

  Michael forgot the girl from the fete as soon as he turned his back on her. Or he thought he did. But every time pumpkin jam was mentioned—and it was mentioned often, quickly becoming the joke of the moment—he’d see a pair of pale eyes, hear a laugh, listen to an echo of himself saying, “Turtles?” When his mother complained about the cake, he smiled to himself.

  And then he started to bump into her. He knew it was too often to be coincidence, really, but he couldn’t see any harm in it. She’d wander out of the end of her road as he passed, and say, Oh, hello, I was just going to get some fresh air. He’d be almost at Butler’s Pond and he’d hear running behind him, and there she’d be, hair swinging out from side to side, pink cheeked with effort.

  I thought I recognized Pepper, she’d say. I wish I had a dog, but with going away soon, there’s no point.

  You’ll have a turtle, Michael would say, and they’d laugh, even though it wasn’t that funny.

  Yes, Michael knew it happened too often to be coincidence. When she took his arm at the water’s edge where the ground was slippery underfoot and then he moved away, just a fraction, and she dropped it, he knew that he wasn’t being very clever. But he thought he was safe.

  Now

  Patricia’s heart sinks when she answers the door to Andy. He’s a nice enough lad, and she makes a point of telling his mother so whenever she comes into the library, but she sees an awful lot of him at Elizabeth’s, and she can’t imagine what he has to say that won’t wait until tomorrow. She stands at the door for a moment, hoping that he’s dropping off a pie dish as she isn’t far out of his way, but no. He stands his ground, says he’s sorry to disturb her, but he needs to talk to her about something.

  “Is everything all right, Andy?” she asks. She’d planned a quiet half hour with her photo albums before bed. If he’d arrived ten minutes later, she would have answered the door in her dressing gown. She likes to think that she won’t answer the door after nine at night, but actually, if there’s a knock after nine it’s more likely to matter.

  “Yes, it’s nothing like that,” he says. “Just something I’ve heard that I think it’s best you know about.”

  “You’d better come in then,” she says, thinking that there’s not a lot that happens in Throckton that he would know about before she did.

  “Yes,” he says. “This won’t take long.”

  Patricia offers him coffee. She thinks she can smell whiskey, which will be down to Mel again. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead, Patricia,” she’d said the other night, which was all very well, but Michael and Elizabeth were never big drinkers, and Patricia would hate to see Elizabeth being led astray. Especially with those pills Andy has her on.

  “I saw that Elizabeth and Mel were drinking whiskey again the other night,” she says as they wait for the kettle to boil, “and I wondered about those pills you’ve given her. If it could be dangerous.”

  “Oh, it’s all right, Patricia,” Andy says, though he seems a bit distracted. “It’s either the sleeping pills or the whiskey. One or the other, I’ve told her.”

  “Well, good,” Patricia says uncertainly as she carries their drinks through, coffee for him, chamomile tea for her. But she soon understands why she hasn’t had his full attention.

  Sitting in the room full of photographs of two dead men, Andy tells Patricia that he’s heard a rumor that Kate Micklethwaite’s baby had been fathered by Michael. He tries to be as matter-of-fact as he can. He tells her that Kate has said nothing about the father, and that he couldn’t see that there was any truth in it, just people putting two and two together to make five because he was near enough to save her when she went into the water. He says he really didn’t think it was worth worrying about, and he’s only here because he doesn’t want her to hear it from elsewhere.

  And then Andy braces himself for the rant about That Girl, and the goodness of Michael. Part of the reason he is here now, on the brink of when she will think it acceptable of him to call, is becau
se Blake had said that she would need time to think about it, and Mel had wanted to put the maximum possible distance between her hearing the news and her being able to talk to anyone—especially Elizabeth. So he’d gone home for bath- and bedtime, told Lucy the tale, and come to do the deed.

  But Patricia doesn’t rant about Kate and she doesn’t reminisce about Michael. Her mind is tumbling and turning like ferrets in a sack. She knows, of course, that Michael would be very, very unlikely to do anything as sordid as get involved with a girl when he was so happily married himself. But she also knows, with the wisdom of a long life, that these things will and do happen, no matter how contrary appearances are.

  She starts to think about Elizabeth: such a lovely girl, but always working, no babies. Michael wasn’t brought up that way, and she should know.

  Well. Stranger things have happened, that’s for certain.

  She puts down her cup and saucer, carefully, by her feet, and she puts her hands on her knees and takes a deep breath, bracing, and then she looks straight at Andy and says, “You’re telling me that I may have a grandchild?”

  Mike,

  When you died there were a lot of things I had to do that I didn’t like. Go to your funeral. Look into your poor mother’s devastated face every day and understand that it was a reflection of what my own face looked like. Read letters with the words “late” and “deceased” in them. Go to sleep on my own, every night—or try to—and wake up on my own, every morning. Not be able to talk to you, or at least not have you talk back to me when I did. Look at your weird beer in the fridge and your horrible sweet cereal in the cupboard and know you wouldn’t be back for them.

  And I know that there are decisions I will have to make that I won’t like either. Mel wants me to think about going home with her, she says for a change of scene, but I know what she’s thinking. I’m refusing, for now, but the day might come when I have to really think about where I want to spend the rest of my days, and whether to move back to Australia or not. One day I might have to make decisions about Pepper without you—he’s started limping, sometimes, when he’s been running too hard, and it makes me think that one day he’ll have something really wrong with him. It was hard enough to make the decision about Salty together, and then to take him to the vet and leave without him. I remember how you wouldn’t let me go into the consulting room with you. I said good-bye to him in the waiting room and then you did the hard thing. I can’t imagine losing Pepper, let alone having to be the brave one when the time comes.

  I can’t even bear the thought of the mundane things, replacing the double glazing, renewing the insurance, buying a new car before our beloved banger rusts itself to death during another crappy, damp English autumn/winter/spring. But I’ve come to accept that I can manage to do these things without you, when I have to, because I tried lying down and dying and that didn’t work, and so now I don’t have a lot of other options.

  One thing I never thought I’d have to do—something that wouldn’t have crossed my mind until I got ambushed into that vile conversation—was to stand up for your good name. I didn’t think I’d need to tell people who loved you too that you didn’t screw a teenage girl, that you’re not the father of her child. Because it’s so blindingly obvious. Why would anyone even think that you would do such a thing? Everyone knows we were happy. Everyone knows that we loved each other and that we didn’t need anyone else. For crying out loud, it’s Throckton. Your mother once asked me why you’d been buying white bread when we normally had brown. Someone would have known if you’d so much as looked at Kate Micklethwaite. And even if they hadn’t, I would have known. I was your wife. I loved you. You loved me. I would have known.

  I know that you probably don’t care about this stuff anymore, because you’re all made of grace and starlight now, or whatever, and human suffering is something that you’ve forgotten, or are seeing from a long way away, like watching a rainstorm through a window.

  But, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I need you to know that I care, and I don’t believe it, really don’t believe it. I won’t believe it. It’s not true. I know that.

  I’m standing up for you.

  I love you.

  E xxx

  Then

  The trip was meant to be blissful. “Remember,” Michael had said when they booked it, a break before IVF began and therefore, very possibly, their last time away as a couple rather than a family. “My darling Elizabeth, we are going to relax because you’ve worked hard all summer and we need to top up your sunshine before winter comes. We are not going on a baby-making expedition.” She’d laughed, and said no, of course not, but she did rather hope there would be some sex, and she’d kissed him, but she’d wondered if he had been reading her mind. Because just at that moment she’d been thinking about the advice she’d been giving Mel—that the best way to find a man was to stop looking for one, and just go and enjoy having her own life—and she’d thought, Yes, perhaps the best way to get a baby is to forget that that’s what we’re trying to do. All those teenagers with baby carriages who thought it could never happen to them: maybe that’s what we need, to be forgetful of the consequences.

  And Michael and Elizabeth had tried. Elizabeth hadn’t taken her temperature; Michael had tried not to watch her for signs of excitement, disappointment, premenstrual syndrome, tried not to step carefully around her, calculate dates and times—although at this point it wasn’t really possible for him to unlearn everything he knew about cycles and timings. They had lazed in bed in the mornings, gone to markets, gone snorkeling, lain in hammocks, reading, during the hottest part of the day, settled on the balcony at night. All in all, they did an excellent impression of people who didn’t have the baby they had yet to make on their minds all the time.

  Elizabeth had tried to remember how much she loved, simply loved, her husband; he had tried to appreciate her, turning golden in the sun, beautiful and fit and strong, although her shoulders drooped when she thought he wasn’t watching, and her eyes took on a fairy-tale hunger as she watched toddlers splashing in the shallows on the beach.

  They had drunk too much on the last night. Elizabeth had been bright and brittle during dinner, but afterward, walking along the shoreline, warm evening water lapping at their ankles, she’d confessed how much easier it was for her to be happy here, at night, when all of the children were safely tucked up in bed. How she dreaded the flight tomorrow, the babies who could only be comforted by their mothers, the fathers proudly pretend-apologizing as their big-eyed offspring tried to play with everyone around them. Elizabeth tried to explain how it’s the assumption children have that they will be loved that broke her heart: because she would love—oh, how she would love—a child of her own. Of their own.

  Michael had held her and they had stood in the warm tide until the water lapped at the backs of Elizabeth’s knees, tickling her into the now again. They’d walked up to the hotel hand in hand, and Michael had told her that he thought they were getting some help with this, just in time, before they both got broken, and she had nodded and smiled and said, “Yes, Mike, it’s time. I know I’m breaking. I know you’re holding me together, and that’s not fair on you.” That night they had both slept better than they had in a while, and in the morning they’d smiled straight into each other’s eyes.

  During the flight home, Elizabeth had played peek-a-boo with the toddler on the seat in front of her for what seemed like hours, and Michael had watched her: the patience on her face, the smile in her eyes. The child’s mother had thanked her as they got ready to get off the plane; Elizabeth, still smiling at the child, had said that she was getting some practice in. “Oh! Congratulations,” the mother had said. “You’ll make a lovely mother.” And somehow, in that moment, it had been easier for Elizabeth and Michael to smile at each other and squeeze each other’s hands and say thank you than it had been to embark on an awkward correction.

  “It’s a sign,” E
lizabeth had said in the car on the way home, and although Michael didn’t believe in signs, he’d just smiled and said, “Well, you will be a lovely mother.” And then they were back in Throckton and it felt as though everyone was lining up to tell them how well they looked, how relaxed, how happy, and the baby seemed no longer a distant, fading possibility, but a little plump gurgle of newness waiting just around the corner.

  • • •

  Two months later, the first cycle of IVF had a certain novelty value to it: the daily injections, the appointments, the schedule, all meant that Elizabeth and Michael had a sense of purpose. Things were happening at last.

  Elizabeth was shining with excitement. The baby-naming conversations started again.

  “Does it have to be a flower, for a girl?” she’d asked.

  He’d said, “What’s more beautiful than a flower?”

  Elizabeth had shrugged and said, “OK, but I’m crossing Rose off. Too thorny.”

  Michael had known he should have said something, just a cautionary word or two, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to remind her of everything that the consultant had told them—that it might take a while, that it might not work, that Elizabeth’s body would strain and that their relationship would be tautened and tested, that it would be hard, and unpleasant in places, and that the success rate was a lot better than it used to be, but it was not guaranteed.

  Elizabeth had smiled and said, “We think we’ve waited long enough,” and, well, that had been it. They were off. Blood tests, pills, injections, dates in their diary. In the coldest November Elizabeth had experienced since she came to Throckton, she glowed with warmth and excitement. Patricia had kept commenting on how well she looked, even risked the word “blooming” a couple of times, but Elizabeth had stuck with their resolve to tell no one anything until they had something to tell. As she injected her thigh every morning, she reminded herself that there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with either of them, so what they were doing was a boost. Michael kissed the little circles of bruises on her thighs better and brought her flowers. And so she bloated, and she ached, and she waited, and she was absolutely certain that she’d taken the stern advice of the nurse to heart: that on no account was she to think that she might be pregnant during the two-week wait to see if an embryo had implanted. That there was no way to know. That she must put the whole question out of her mind.