The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  Rufus had stopped berating for long enough to take a breath. He had looked small, next to Blake. Richenda had said, trying hard to keep her voice even, smooth, “Did you know, Blake? You worked with him. Did you know?”

  At this new thought Rufus had glared afresh. Blake had said, “No. I had no idea at all until Rufus told me just now, although—”

  “Although what?” Rufus had asked.

  He’d shrugged. “Although police officers are trained to be suspicious, and they were in the same place at the same time. And a strange place at a strange time.” As he had spoken Richenda had felt what he meant, felt the coldness of the air and the sucking of the water, felt how real all this was, how real it would continue to be.

  “Has she told you? Is it certain?”

  “Yes,” Richenda had said. “Well, Patricia came here and told us that cystic fibrosis runs in her family. Kate’s face told us the rest.”

  “Oh,” Blake had said.

  “And she has pictures of them. Not that it’s any of your business,” Rufus had added, “and it’s not as though he’s here to face the consequences. Presumably he’d have been disciplined?”

  “Rufus, the man is dead. I think that’s punishment enough even for you,” Richenda had said, and Blake had half raised his arm, palm upward, in a gesture that said yes.

  To Rufus he had said, quietly, carefully, “We don’t really know what happened. But, assuming the relationship was consensual, and I don’t think we’ve seen any signs that it wasn’t—” He had paused. Richenda had nodded agreement with his assumption, saved him from the need to defend his friend from anything other than the kind of reckless stupidity that is a regular feature of life. “Then what he did wasn’t actually illegal. It was certainly unwise—”

  “Unwise?” Rufus had snapped straight again. Richenda had had water words ready to pour on the flames of what she had been sure would come next, but Rufus had just turned and banged out of the house.

  The sound of Kate’s tears had filled the silence. Blake had looked at Richenda, holding out his arms, and for a moment she had allowed herself the luxury of walking up to him and being folded into smells of soap and grass. She’d stood with her own arms by her sides as he’d wrapped her, not quite a friend, not quite a professional. Richenda had given herself a heartbeat, two, three, four, five, then stepped away, his embrace knowing exactly when to let her go so that she had, without awkwardness, been able to nod, touch his elbow, turn and go up the stairs toward the tears. Afterward, she’d thought that he had seemed to need that touch as much as she had.

  And now, Richenda has reached the door of the library. She puts her hand on the smooth, hot metal plate, pushes, and then lets the cooler air move out so that she can move in.

  • • •

  Patricia loves her work at the library. She loves the smell of the place, not dusty exactly—she makes sure there’s no dust—but papery, which is a smell very close to dust. She loves the relentless order of it: letters, numbers, categories, a place for everything. She loves the sense of purpose that finds her every day as she puts her coat on the wooden hanger she brought in, checks the date on the milk in the fridge, and puts some lavender hand cream on before starting work. She loves being able to give a child their first library card, see the parade of familiar books loaned and returned, and—depending, of course, on whether and when the child decides it has better things to do than go to the library—following that child’s progress as he or she makes their way through school, university, coming back with their own children and saying, “I remember this book.” Sometimes, walking through Throckton, she will hear the words “Mrs. Gray from the library” drift after her and she’ll feel proud of herself, and sorry that there’s no one who’ll understand if she tries to tell them how that feels.

  She loves the sense that here, in this place where she spends her days, is written, somewhere, everything she knows, or is ever likely to want or need to know. She cannot see the point of typing a question into a machine when you can walk to a shelf, take down a book, and find the page where that very thing you want is waiting for you. Although Patricia has gamely learned how to use the computers they now have, although she will concede that they bring people in and they do have their uses, she still can see no greater miracle than a finger running down a page, stopping, finding what was needed.

  But the most important thing of all is that here, there’s always something to do. And on days like today, Patricia thinks as she heads off to reshelve Large Print, you need to be able to see where you’ve been. Here, toward the back of the library, she’s less likely to be disturbed, and as the shelves become tidy and well-ordered under her hands, she finds herself becoming less agitated. The feeling of having an awful lot to think about becomes less, as she allows herself to think. The knowledge that she’s done something that she’s not especially proud of starts to find its proper place in Patricia. She remembers all the reasons why she did what she did, and if she thinks about the stricken look on that poor girl’s face, well, she remembers that the girl would have had to find out sooner or later. Patricia hadn’t frightened her; the thought of cystic fibrosis had frightened her. She could remember very well how that felt.

  What the library can’t solve for her, this morning, is the idea that people might misunderstand Michael, that they might think this whole thing, this baby, was his fault, his doing. That he was someone who made a habit of seducing young girls, when it’s obvious to Patricia that it’s the other way around. As far as she is concerned, Kate is one of the generation brought up to believe she is entitled to anything and everything she wants. Patricia was brought up to believe that what a man couldn’t get at home he’d look for elsewhere.

  Richenda’s appearance around the end of the shelf makes her jump. Patricia notices how pale she is.

  Richenda’s words have the sound of the carefully rehearsed about them. “I wanted to thank you,” she says, “for coming to see us. For—what you said.”

  Patricia nods.

  “And I wondered if we could talk”—Richenda lowers her voice further, although there is no one near to hear—“grandmother to grandmother.”

  • • •

  The staff room is little more than a cupboard, really, but it has two chairs and a door that closes, and for now, that’s all either of the women requires.

  Richenda begins, “I don’t think we’ll ever know quite how we got here, but I think we need to find a way to move forward. For the sake of the baby.”

  Patricia reminds herself that this woman is the girl’s mother, so there will always be things they won’t agree on. She thinks about what Michael used to say, when he was talking about work, about sorting out problems and arguments and fights: you start by working on what there is in common. So that’s what she does. She bites back her comment about having a fair idea of how they got here, and she says, “Yes. Yes we do.”

  Richenda says, “Kate will do her best, and so will I, but I think this baby will need all the love that we can give her. Am I right in thinking that you would like to be a part of that?”

  “Her? A girl? They can tell? A girl?” It’s as though a window has been thrown open somewhere in Patricia’s world: light. The hypothetical baby has become a plump, pink granddaughter, creases where her wrists should be, seashell toes, and pale, soft hair.

  Richenda smiles. “It’s amazing what they can tell. Yes, she’s a girl.”

  And from her handbag she pulls a photocopied sheet and hands it to Patricia, who realizes she is looking at the scan of her granddaughter. Bones. Lungs. Heart. Fingers. Michael’s nose. Definitely Michael’s nose.

  If Patricia had known the phrase “I’m in” she’d have said it now. Instead she wipes an eye and says, “Of course, of course I will be a part of this little one’s life. My granddaughter. Michael’s baby.”

  Richenda is smiling, wiping a tear too, and Patricia, feari
ng a slide into something more than she can manage, adds abruptly, “Even though I’m not too keen on the way she came about.”

  “Well, me neither,” Richenda says swiftly, taking a different road. “Kate is talking about calling her Kayla.”

  “Kayla?” Patricia repeats. “Is that even a name?”

  “Well, quite,” says Richenda. And suddenly the two women are laughing, quietly, cautiously, although Patricia stops when she thinks about the conversation she’s going to need to have with Elizabeth, and Richenda stops as she thinks about Kate, already up when her mother came downstairs, reading websites about cystic fibrosis and making note after note.

  “I can’t believe she isn’t perfect,” Kate had said, “but I suppose she will be perfect to me, won’t she?”

  • • •

  Rufus does want to be a better man. He just doesn’t want it enough, yet, to pass up the opportunity that life has thrown him for a little bit of revenge.

  As he walks up the road, he remembers how he felt when he was last making this journey. How carefully he’d chosen the flowers, how much time he’d spent standing in the florist’s while the bouquet was made up, that insufferable woman making snide remarks about how much Mrs. Micklethwaite would like these and how he must have done something very naughty indeed to merit such a gesture. In memory he smells the roses again, soft and sweet. In reality his shoulders knot and his hands clench. His thumb finds a hangnail on his little finger and works it back and forth until it hurts.

  When he arrives, it’s like history repeating itself. The sister is in the garden, smoking. She isn’t wearing the red boots. She’s barefoot, and her toenails are a deep ocean turquoise. She looks at Rufus with the same disdain. “Oh,” she says, “it’s you. No flowers today?”

  “No. Is your sister here?”

  “She’s asleep,” Mel says. “You’ll have to make do with me, I’m afraid.” Rufus recognizes that he’s being played with, teased, and his sense of injustice grows.

  “Wake her up.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Rufus,” Mel says, as though she had any right to say such a thing. She gets up and starts to move back toward the house. He takes her by the upper arm, and she looks at him properly, shocked, still a little amused, “That’s still ridiculous.”

  He drops his hand. “I need to talk to your sister.”

  “I’m not going to wake her. Anyway, you’re not exactly on the guest list around here.”

  “Very well,” Rufus says. “Perhaps you’ll give her a message for me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Please tell her from me that I now know that her late husband impregnated my daughter while, presumably, lying to her about the relationship. Please tell her that I regret every bit of credit and appreciation that I have given to that man. The thought of him being lauded as a hero makes me ill.”

  Mel is transfixed by the warp of his mouth as he speaks.

  “I probably won’t give her that message, actually,” she says, “and you might like to consider that your daughter has passed the age of consent. All of the hero stuff was posthumous so I’m not sure that Michael got the chance to sign off on it, and I’m not sure he would have liked it much. He was a good guy. Good enough to get into a freezing cold lake and pull your daughter out. And if we’re going to start believing every rumor that Throckton can think up, well, heaven help us all.”

  In her agitation Mel has lit up again—although it doesn’t read to Rufus as agitation, more like provocation, the pause midsentence for the inhale a further insult—and now she’s stuck outside, not wanting to put out her cigarette and show that she’s rattled, banned from smoking indoors.

  “Ah, then you’re behind the curve,” Rufus says, and the small, fat, bullied boy inside him is ecstatic, crowing at having a piece of news that others don’t, loving being the center of everything. The man, he knows, worried and afraid for his daughter, is waiting to take over, but not yet. “That’s not what his mother thinks.”

  “Rufus, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Patricia talks a lot of crap, though, so if she’s the source of your information, you might want to be careful.”

  This is Rufus’s moment, and he savors it. “Michael’s mother came to warn us that cystic fibrosis runs in the family, and Kate has taken her warning very seriously. In fact, Kate has told us that Michael is definitely the father of her baby. She has photographs of the two of them together. You might want to tell Elizabeth that too.”

  Mike,

  I didn’t know whether I’d like being back at work, but I do. There’s nothing of it that’s very spectacular, but there’s always something to do, and that’s what I like, I think: there’s always someone who wants me to do something, right then, and they ask, and I do it. I don’t have to decide things.

  I don’t look at a great long day and think, Well, if I put off having a shower until 10:30 a.m., then by the time I dry my hair that’s most of the morning gone. I look at my watch and think, How can it be 3:30 already? And that has to be better, doesn’t it? Today I booked the handyman to come and fix a tap, and I organized some flowers to go in the honeymoon suite on Saturday, and I arranged a refund for someone who’d been charged twice. I gave directions to the town square three separate times to three different sets of people, and I watched a baby while a woman nipped back to her room for something she’d forgotten. The baby didn’t do much but I watched her all the same. I thought of—well. You know.

  When I came home no one was here. Not even Pepper. It’s funny how you know whether a house is empty or not as soon as you step into it. I used to feel as though you were still here. I don’t anymore. Is that good or bad, do you think?

  I’ve cut out nearly all the hexagon templates. Mel says we made enough quilts when we were kids to excuse us for the rest of this lifetime and at least five to come, but I like doing it. I like the way time goes by faster when I’m doing it. You wouldn’t think fifteen hexagons cut from old cardboard means a whole hour gone, but it does.

  Love, love, love,

  E xxxx

  Between

  When Michael and Elizabeth came back from the spa, Michael had done everything he could to stop seeing Kate. He didn’t dare see her to tell her: just the thought of her made him unsettled, and he didn’t trust himself in the flesh. So he cut himself off. It was kinder, better for both of them. That was what he had told himself, anyway.

  He’d arranged to go dog walking with Blake and Hope, nodding brightly to Kate on the one occasion that they passed her on the way to Butler’s Pond. “Pretty girl,” Blake had said, and Michael had grunted what he hoped passed for casual agreement rather than permanent ache, amazed by how different she looked in the presence of another: younger, smaller, freshly beautiful. The fact that he couldn’t touch her, acknowledge her, hurt him more than he’d anticipated.

  She’d hidden her disappointment well. Michael’s phone had remained silent, his walks with Blake or Elizabeth uninterrupted.

  By day, he had congratulated himself on being free of her. Her silence only confirmed that he was doing the right thing. Walking past the place at Butler’s Pond where they’d had sex, Michael had remembered only the seedy indignity of it, and wondered at his own idiocy. Finding a moon-silver hair in the car, he had a crashing realization of the damage he could have done to his beautiful Elizabeth, felt himself to be the man who had gotten off the train at the stop before the crash. He pretended that he hoped she had found a boyfriend.

  But at night, his furtive feelings had stopped him from sleeping. He knew it wasn’t love, because love was what he felt when he looked at Elizabeth. But he was having a hard time pretending it was nothing. It was just the sex, he told himself, it was just that watching her discover all that the body could do had reminded him of the possibility of it, made him forget the limitations. Looking in the mirror as he shaved, he recognized a fool: a supposed adult who
was suffering over something that was never going to last, and so shouldn’t have a lasting impact.

  So he had started to run. Really run. He had thought if he was tired enough, he would sleep enough, and if he slept enough, he would stop thinking about Kate, who seemed to have vanished. She was never at Butler’s Pond, never sauntering out of the end of her road when he was walking past, never nearby when he finished work. Michael had started to comprehend just how much effort must have gone into those casual sightings and meetings. Everything that Kate had done to be near him made him feel as though water was rising around him.

  And if the running meant sleep and sleep meant that he stopped thinking about Kate—well, he would have stopped thinking about Kate. Mission accomplished.

  He asked Elizabeth about signing up for the Marsham Marathon with him. It was the first they had run together, and so even when they weren’t taking part they always went along and cheered. It was a marker in their lives, their love. It was exactly the thing, he thought, that would heal him, and bring them closer again. Not that they were distant, exactly, but there must have been a chink where Kate could get in.

  Elizabeth declined. The thought of training through the winter was too much, she said. Michael, ever mindful of how he had taken her from her native land, of how he had asked so much of her and failed to give her the thing she wanted most, felt a new nerve twitch.

  “I don’t want to go out running with you,” Elizabeth had said one evening, watching her husband as he stood, just inside the doorway, hands on knees, breath burning in and out, sweat gathering in a point on his nose, dripping. “But I miss seeing you.” And she’d smiled in a way that said, I offer this not as a criticism, but an example of my own flawed self. She’d looked cool, eerie, in the kitchen as his eyes had adjusted to coming indoors. And he’d thought, Oh God, another thing. Another tiny way in which this Kate business is hurting Elizabeth.