This Secret We're Keeping

by Rebecca Done

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Zak told her. ‘I must say, I love your hair that colour, Anna. It suits you.’

  Apparently not thinking this strange, given that she’d never in her life changed her hair colour, Anna simpered. ‘Oh, thanks.’

  Zak turned to Jess, his hand still flat against her back as he bent down and delivered a kiss to the top of her head. ‘Managed to swap my shift. Happy anniversary, baby.’

  ‘How long are you in Norfolk for, Zak?’ Anna asked him brightly, saving Jess the trouble of having to cold-shoulder him out loud.

  Cradling a glass of red, Zak took a seat next to Jess, flexing his jaw and running a hand over his dark graze of stubble as he sensed her coolness towards him. ‘Bank holiday. I’m here all weekend.’ He took a chance and slid his hand on to Jess’s left knee. ‘So, tell me. What have you two girls been talking about all this time?’

  Forcing herself to nudge Matthew Landley from her mind, Jess met Anna’s eye, upon which Anna started gabbling across multiple fertility-related topics, from the benefits of acupuncture to her husband Simon’s sperm count. Jess remained quiet, happy for Anna to do the talking as she tried to ignore the intermittent squeezes Zak was applying to her thigh, though admittedly she was grateful he’d selected the leg without the automotive injury.

  By the time Anna’s soliloquy had arrived at a natural pause some minutes later, Jess’s glass was empty. ‘Good girl,’ Zak murmured approvingly, grabbing the champagne and topping Jess back up before moving the bottle across to Anna, who shook her head.

  ‘Thanks, Zak, but I should go,’ she said, swigging back the last of her drink. ‘Told Simon I’d be back by ten. I’m literally ovulating as we speak.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Zak said encouragingly, like she’d just announced she was off to scale Everest, but Jess caught him glancing slightly reproachfully at the array of empty glassware on the table.

  ‘Nice to see you, Zak,’ Anna said. ‘Make sure Jess gets home safely.’

  Zak squeezed Jess’s leg again. ‘Oh, I will.’

  Jess only just held back from smacking his hand away like a secretary from the sixties being groped by her boss.

  ‘Call me tomorrow,’ Anna said to Jess, then got up and click-clacked past them, blowing a kiss in the direction of Philippe on her way out.

  Zak swivelled instantly round to face Jess before leaning in and kissing her. It was a slightly insistent kiss, the sort that suggested he really thought they should be heading off to locate the nearest mattress. ‘So am I a good surprise?’

  Without really meaning to, Jess turned her gaze away from him to the row of cherry trees outside the window, their blossom turned dusky pink in the gathering gloom. For some reason, an image of Matthew floated gently into her mind. With some effort, she blinked it away.

  ‘Baby, what’s up?’ Zak was whispering, his hand against the back of her neck, his mouth close to her ear. ‘You literally haven’t said one word since I sat down.’

  Jess swallowed and attempted to focus, reluctant to spoil their anniversary with an argument but too upset to discount what she’d heard. She looked across at him properly for the first time that evening. ‘I found out what really happened with Octavia,’ she stated flatly.

  Zak frowned and sharply exited her personal space by leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms. ‘What?’ he snorted, to buy himself some time.

  ‘They weren’t irreconcilable differences. She cheated on you with your brother. That’s why you divorced her.’

  There was a short pause, during which Zak appeared to waver over continuing the pretence or saving himself the trouble and dropping it. Never one to make unnecessary work for himself, he opted for the latter by trying to evade the issue entirely. ‘Really? We’re doing this on our anniversary?’ He glared meaningfully at the champagne bottle, as if to suggest that Jess was not being sufficiently respectful of the occasion. Zak took celebrating seriously, and tended to become indignant when people chucked curveballs at his forward planning.

  ‘Zak, how could you have not told me this?’

  Zak hesitated, his expression betraying nothing, before shrugging defensively. ‘I didn’t want the sympathy vote. Oh, poor guy – wife shagged his brother. Maybe I’ll go over and cheer him up.’ He made what Jess had come to think of as his horseradish face, the one he usually pulled over beef wellington in gastropubs. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘But we’ve been together a year,’ Jess reminded him quietly. ‘You could have told me at any time.’

  Zak shrugged again, arms still folded to defend him against low-flying pity missiles. ‘Well, we reached that point, Jess … where it was too bloody late to say anything.’

  ‘So that’s why you don’t speak to your brother,’ Jess concluded. Zak rarely even made reference to him, something she’d naively attributed to sibling rivalry. ‘I thought you just didn’t get on.’

  Zak’s face clouded over slightly. ‘Yeah. We don’t.’

  A tension hung between them now, a palpable patch of cool air in the corner of the crowded bar. ‘So the real story is, Octavia broke your heart,’ Jess said quietly.

  Zak arched his back uncomfortably and looked away from her. ‘Yes, Jessica, she broke my heart. Can we talk about something else now please? It doesn’t matter how it ended with me and her if the outcome was exactly the same.’

  ‘It does matter,’ she countered.

  ‘Why? What I told you was true,’ Zak clipped, throwing back another slug of wine. ‘There were irreconcilable differences.’

  ‘You mean adultery,’ she corrected him.

  He lowered his glass. ‘Is that not the same thing?’

  Jess swallowed. ‘So … do you still love her?’

  Zak’s expression of distaste quickly darkened to become deep offence. ‘Is that a serious question?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly, though the chill of his stare was making her suddenly doubt herself.

  ‘Wow,’ he said then, leaning back again in his chair and running a hand through his mop of brown hair like a Wall Street trader being caught red-handed with his fingers in the Forex. ‘I did not see this coming. So much for the champagne.’

  Zak’s scant reserves of patience rarely held firm under pressure, so Jess decided not to push him on the love issue. ‘I just can’t believe you would hide something like that from me,’ she said, a final attempt to dismantle his obstinacy.

  ‘Okay, Jess,’ Zak countered in a tone of mounting exasperation that implied there was something she was failing fundamentally to grasp, ‘if you really want to know, I never considered it to be that relevant, okay? I still don’t. It’s in the past.’

  Punctuating this by slinging back the last of his wine and setting down the glass with only slightly less force than he’d have needed to smash it, Zak chose to close their debate with a form of ultimatum.

  ‘Look, are we going to forget this now and celebrate our anniversary? Because, if not, I’ll piss off back to the beach house. It’s been a long week, Jess, and I was sick enough of discussing Octavia when we were getting divorced, let alone twelve sodding months later.’

  Though still unsettled by his deception, there was a tiny part of Jess that was beginning to wonder if perhaps he was right. Maybe it wasn’t relevant. Hadn’t everyone had their heart broken, in one way or another? Did it mean he loved her any less?

  But by the time she’d remembered that Zak had a particular talent for making her question herself, he was on his feet and waiting for her to choose: traditional anniversary as observed by functional couples or sullen celebratory stand-off?

  So with some effort – given that her leg felt like it had been force-fed through a meat grinder – Jess got to her feet and made her way through the bar towards the door, Zak at her shoulder. But she’d only managed to take two steps on to the gravel outside before he reached for her arm and pulled her to a halt.

  ‘Jess, what the fuck is up with your leg? How pissed are you?’

  For a brief momen
t, she felt relieved. Clearly he had not yet been privy to any local gossip about the accident and, with a bit of luck, it wouldn’t be long before her ageing collection of witnesses began to confuse it with something they’d seen on Midsomer Murders.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said, wincing as she took the weight off it, though the pain was actually starting to feel worse.

  Zak frowned and stared down at her thigh like he had X-ray vision. ‘Hang on, you’re not fine. What have you done?’

  She hesitated, but the thought of his reaction if she told him exactly how it had happened deterred her. ‘Just bruised it,’ she mumbled eventually. ‘Nothing serious.’

  ‘Baby,’ he said, more softly then, ‘I’m a doctor, remember? I can tell when something’s wrong.’

  This was true, and was one of the arguable downsides to dating a medical professional. (Another was the impromptu requests for medical advice Zak often received from friends-of-friends while out and about. They’d been at lunch a fortnight earlier when a middle-aged female acquaintance of his former best man had approached their table and virtually moonied him to get a second opinion on an arse boil that had gone septic.)

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she insisted, praying he wasn’t overly adept in hands-off diagnoses.

  He slid an arm round her ribcage to support her, putting up a hand to sweep the hair from her face with a tenderness that made her shiver. Clearly thinking they had reached that point of the night where he could attempt to disguise contentious issues as seduction, he put his mouth close to her ear. ‘Have you had any more thoughts,’ he murmured, letting his voice go gruff, ‘about moving to London with me?’

  For a moment, she didn’t attempt to speak, just allowed herself to feel the heat of his breath on her skin as his lips moved down to gently graze her neck.

  ‘I’m sorry about all that Octavia stuff. I’ve thought about you all week,’ he whispered. ‘You keep me going when things get shitty. Tú me alegras el día.’

  He did this occasionally – swapped over to Spanish when he thought he might need a little help in winning her over. His success rate with it to date was fairly low, in ratio terms of smile to shrug; but tonight Jess was particularly tired, in addition to which she appreciated the fact that he was holding her up and taking the weight off her bad leg.

  ‘I’m sorry I never told you about Octavia,’ he insisted then, lowering his head to kiss her. ‘I want to be with you, cariño. I want you to move to London with me. Happy anniversary, baby.’

  Then his lips were on hers and, just like always, the taste of him shot straight to her groin, a sort of erogenous equivalent to mainlining class-A drugs. And as she found herself pressed up against a patch of nearby brickwork, Zak’s hands running all over her and their kissing becoming more and more urgent, Jess resolved – as she did every time – that tomorrow she would make her mind up about London once and for all.

  3

  Matthew

  Wednesday, 22 September 1993

  It was the start of a new school year and, to mark the occasion, I’d been entrusted with teaching the first year of the GCSE maths syllabus to a portion of the lower fifth. Admittedly it was the portion at the base end of the ability spectrum, but that didn’t faze me – I loved a challenge and didn’t feel in the least bit intimidated. In fact, if you set aside the fact that the sadist in a boiler suit whom some people referred to as the school caretaker had cranked up the central heating to a temperature formerly unique to the equatorial tropics, I was about as cool and collected as it was possible to be when autumn blew in.

  At the end of last term, my ageing predecessor had been sacked for creative expense claiming, so it was now my job to turn this sorry ship around. I was determined to succeed, promising myself that in two summers’ time my class would ace their GCSEs and prove to the Hadley Hall staffroom that being sour, middle-aged and a big fan of diarrhoea-coloured knitwear were not, in fact, prerequisites for being a good teacher.

  Oh, I was well aware that my habit of dressing for work like I was heading to a rock concert wasn’t exactly popular among my colleagues. I wore my dark hair long, cultivated my stubble and never tucked in my shirt; sometimes I’d even team my cords (no jeans allowed) with cowboy boots to really stir things up and get them talking. I saw it as doing them a favour, in a sense, because they needed something to gossip about other than the growing non-attendance at the sixth-form choir rehearsals or the German exchange student who’d been caught dealing weed when she was supposed to be playing rounders.

  But in my quest to work hard, I’d somehow, conversely, become lazy. Too tunnel-vision. Obsessed with grades and neglecting to observe behaviour.

  We were only two weeks in, and halfway through simultaneous equations, I realized someone was crying. At first the sound came at me like the intermittent buzz of an insect, a mild irritation. This was the start of the GCSE syllabus – important stuff. Why can’t they just pack it in?

  Eventually my eyes followed the noise towards the back of the room, where the Witches sat. (That was my own private term for them, not something I would be sharing around the staffroom over coffee and Dundee cake any time soon. In the year since I’d started at Hadley Hall, I’d worked out that you were allowed to moan about bad behaviour, pierced ears or unfulfilled academic potential, but you weren’t allowed to take the piss out of them. That, apparently, was taboo in the manner of mentioning periods or hormones, or commenting on their legs.)

  The crying girl wasn’t one of the Witches, I knew that much. She was new to the school this term, and I was annoyed with myself for not being able to instantly recall her name. (I’d not taught this year group before, but that didn’t mean I was planning on walking around with a register permanently appended to one hand like most of my colleagues. I was happy with my own personal system – individual pupil ability mapped out on a mental seating plan – but admittedly I probably did need to expedite the addition of other identifying features, such as their names.)

  ‘Get on with your work,’ I barked at the rest of the gawping class. The Witches obediently and predictably lowered their heads too, a cheap trick to demonstrate their innocence: clearly, the crying was nothing to do with them. It was the oldest, most transparent ploy going, which on the plus side made it relatively easy to sidestep.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I strode purposefully forward, mainly because a bit of well-timed striding was sometimes all it took to get them to shut up.

  The Witches twittered. The girl shook her head.

  It was then that I noticed a clump of auburn hair lying on the desk behind her. One of the Witches tried too late to brush it away, and my gaze travelled down to the polished parquet floor, where an entire ponytail – a good eight inches of hair – had been shorn clean away from the girl’s scalp with a pair of craft scissors.

  Actually, my first reaction was one of dented pride: I couldn’t believe they had been so fearless as to do this in my class. I could have understood if it had happened under the watch of Mrs Witts (English literature, walking stick, virtually deaf – great combination, the girls got away with murder) or Miss Gooch (Latin, nervous, blushed way too easily and over-sweated). But I hadn’t been expecting them to behave so brazenly in this class, my class – and to realize that the bullying had been going on under my nose came as a humiliating shock.

  There were five Witches in total, and four of them were laughing, hard. The fifth one looked slightly pale and sick: it was perhaps not a testament to my fair-handed approach that I decided to start with her. I was furious, my supervisory competence was hanging in the balance and I wanted to get to the truth as quickly as possible. She looked like she would be the easiest one to break.

  ‘Out,’ I told the five of them. They scuttled past me like cockroaches, all still twittering except the fifth, who paused as she reached the discarded ponytail but appeared to decide against saying anything when she came under the heat of my glare.

  ‘Aimee,’ I said, addressing the desk partner of the cry
ing girl, who looked about as stunned as if someone had taken a brick to her head, ‘would you two please go together to Mr Mackenzie’s office and wait for me there.’ And then I strode from the classroom.

  As Aimee and her shorn friend made their way past us down the staircase, I turned to face the offending rabble, who had lined themselves up against the thick brick walls of the corridor, all short skirts and sardonic expressions. The blonde girl, the quiet one, still looked like the easiest target, so I pulled her aside into an empty classroom and barked at the others not to move.

  She blinked at me as I shut the door behind us. ‘It wasn’t me,’ was the first thing she said.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I snorted. ‘You’re going to have to do better than that. I’ve been a teacher long enough to know when someone’s lying.’

  (That wasn’t strictly true. I’d only started teaching three years ago, but I was well aware that in the eyes of a fifteen-year-old, three years probably counted as a lifetime.)

  ‘I didn’t want her to do that. I told her not to. I tried to take the scissors.’ She opened her right hand then and my jaw dropped. It was an absolute bloody mess, quite literally: a deep red gash had been sliced across the pale flesh of her palm. She was holding a pool of blood in her fist and, as she unfolded her hand, it began to drip horrifically through her fingers, turning the carpet crimson at our feet.

  I wasn’t great with blood at the best of times. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Don’t say anything!’ she said, her eyes wide with fear. It was only then that I registered how white she’d become. ‘Don’t say anything, Mr Langley, please.’