This Secret We're Keeping

by Rebecca Done

  ‘So, go somewhere next summer,’ she said. Her teeth were chattering now, though she hadn’t seemed to notice. ‘You get long holidays. There’s nothing stopping you.’

  I looked across at her, trying to recall at what point the focus of our conversation had shifted from her alcoholic mother to my motivational shortcomings.

  ‘Where would you go?’ she pressed me.

  ‘Italy,’ I said, without hesitation. ‘It’s not exactly exotic, but … my grandmother’s Italian. We’ve got family out there.’

  ‘You’ve never been?’

  ‘Well, for holidays and stuff when we were kids. But I always sort of promised myself I’d go out there one day, maybe do some teaching. Learn the language. I mean, I know a few words and phrases, but it’d be great to learn properly.’ I rubbed my hands together and blew into them, briefly envisaging Italian sunshine.

  She brushed her hair from her face and looked into my eyes then, like she was about to make a confession. ‘I’ve always dreamed of having my own Italian restaurant. You know – a little trattoria.’

  That was a good dream. ‘Yeah?’ I said, leaning forward.

  ‘Yeah. Mr Michaels was telling us about this amazing little place in Puglia.’ She became animated, her eyes widening. ‘They built it into a cave, but there’s no signs, and they don’t have a menu, and it’s all lit up with candles inside. And they serve you wine straight from the barrel. I mean, they actually have the barrels in there.’

  (I had to smile. On the one hand, it was encouraging to hear that Brett Michaels, Hadley’s head of languages and long-time advocate of Kentucky Fried Chicken, had updated his definition of a good dinner spot to include whether or not it sold wine by the vat. On the other, it was mildly concerning. I liked the guy a lot, but if there was ever the embodiment of a functioning alcoholic, he was it.)

  ‘Have you ever been?’ I asked her. ‘To Italy?’

  She shook her head. Her teeth were chattering more sharply now.

  ‘Well, what about the Venice trip in February? Mr Michaels is running it. There’s still spaces.’ (Hadley Hall pupils didn’t go to Stonehenge or Hadrian’s Wall for their field trips. Oh no – they went to the Dolomites, Barcelona, Stockholm, New York. And now, it seemed, Venice.)

  ‘I’ll be living in London by February, Mr L,’ she reminded me with a sad smile.

  I must have sighed then, because my breath became a fleeting patch of fog in front of my face. ‘Oh, yeah.’ I frowned. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said mildly. ‘My mum would never pay for me to do something like that anyway.’

  I’d overheard talk in the staffroom before about Mrs Hart’s substantial inheritance, a portion of which had apparently been ring-fenced for the children’s school fees. Much of the (admittedly rather presumptuous) conversation had then proceeded to centre on why the woman was still so bloody tight with money. I could only assume that having a full-time drinking habit left one with very few available hours in which to generate a stable income – as well as an accumulation of ruptured facial capillaries that no amount of charm or foundation could make up for at interview.

  ‘Are you going?’ Jess asked me now.

  I shook my head. ‘There’s enough teachers already signed up.’

  ‘Well, you should go to Italy by yourself. Next summer. Find your family.’

  I glanced over at her, feeling strangely grateful that she was so willing to share her optimistic outlook. In truth, I was mystified as to where she found the strength for it. Most girls in her situation would have been arrested by now for shoplifting and dabbling in recreational drugs. ‘Yeah,’ I told her, feeling suddenly inspired. ‘Maybe I will.’

  She smiled. Her lips were beginning to tinge blue from the cold. ‘Well, don’t forget to send me a postcard.’

  I almost said it. Ridiculously, in that moment, I almost said, You should come with me.

  Fortunately, a small but crucial cluster of my brain cells kicked in just as the words were leaving my mouth. ‘You should get home, Jess,’ I ended up mumbling without conviction. ‘It’s freezing out here.’

  But instead of nodding and leaving, she reached out and placed a hand on my leg. It was the softest and lightest of touches, but – whoosh! – I felt exactly the same as I had on Saturday night.

  You’ve not been drinking, Landley. There was no excuse then and there’s even less of an excuse now.

  It shocked me to realize I could do this sober.

  ‘Jess,’ I said, but my voice caught clumsily in my throat. I moved my hand down to gently brush her fingers from my leg but I ended up just taking her hand and holding it. Our fingers were squeezed tightly together: hers felt marginally warmer than mine, which were ice cold. I closed my eyes.

  ‘This stops now,’ I whispered.

  ‘I like you so much,’ she breathed, reaching up with her other hand and placing it against the back of my neck, her fingers through my hair, sending unbelievable little waves of something electric down my spine. I thought about gabbling some further protest, but I knew by then that it was pointless. I shut my eyes.

  If she kisses me, I’ll kiss her back, just to let her know I like her too, but after that, it stops. I don’t know how, but I’ll make sure it stops.

  Just as I was coming up with this remarkably shoddy action plan, I felt her mouth against mine. Her lips were shaking with the cold. Straight away I dropped her hand and took each side of her face between my palms, just as I had done on Saturday night, and kissed her, hard. Our tongues began to do battle, a fierce friction that got more intense by the second. Her hands slid inside my jacket, ran over the ridges of my ribcage, worked down to the small of my back. I pulled her in tight, mouth still locked on to hers, and then even tighter, until finally she hooked a leg over my thigh and eased herself quickly on top of me. She was so light I barely realized she had done it until I felt the rub of her crotch against my own.

  The sensation was incredible and alarming all at once.

  I pulled back urgently from her then, ashamed to discover that I was on the verge of tears. ‘No! This is wrong – this can’t happen.’

  I shifted sharply underneath her and she slid off me. With some effort and an amount of inelegant reorganization, I managed to get to my feet.

  ‘Okay,’ she nodded. ‘Okay.’ And now she was actually crying, whereas I was just scuffing round the edges of it, almost numb with shock that I’d just been kissing one of my own pupils behind the drama studio while all her classmates were doing shuttle runs around plastic cones. How did I let this happen? What sort of guy have I become?

  I ran a hand through my hair. ‘Jess, I like you a lot but this has already gone way too far.’

  She nodded, doing her best to stem her tears with her fingertips. ‘Okay. I’m sorry.’

  I shut my eyes briefly, tried to gather myself. ‘Please don’t say that,’ I told her. ‘This isn’t in any way your fault.’

  Jess picked up one edge of her scarf and quickly wiped her mouth. That small, self-conscious movement finally did it. I started to cry. ‘I’m so sorry, Jess,’ I said, crouching down and kneeling in the mud, taking her hands between my own. She was shaking, and trying not to; sobbing, but attempting to stop. Even now, she was being braver than I was.

  ‘Forget about me, do you understand?’ I told her. ‘I’m the worst kind of bastard.’

  She shook her head. The trails from her tears were snaking all over the smooth, plump skin of her cheeks. ‘I don’t think you are.’

  ‘One day you will. Believe me. One day, you’ll get what I’m talking about.’

  There was a long pause as she stared into her lap. ‘That’s really patronizing, Mr L,’ she said eventually with a sniff, and then raised her head slightly to look at me again. ‘I know how I feel.’

  Her expression was so earnest that my heart could have ripped in two. ‘You think you do,’ I told her, with some determination, ‘but trust me. You really don’t.’

  After that, we
didn’t speak again. I just watched as she stood up, adjusted her scarf and bag, and slid me one final, tearful sideways glance before picking her way back through the shrubbery and padding off down the path towards the school gates.

  I remained where I was in the mud, literally unable to move. I stayed there until it was dark, knees in the dirt, shivering my bollocks off.

  11

  Monday morning, and Jess awoke to an interesting soundtrack of vigorous whisking and the Stereophonics. Upon further inspection it turned out to be Zak downstairs at the Aga wearing tracksuit bottoms and her ancient Blur T-shirt, scrambling eggs and humming along to the music.

  They’d rowed bitterly the previous night. Jess’s christening had overrun, thanks to a frustrating little domino of disasters that had kicked off with a long delay in getting everyone to sit down for dinner, whereupon some of the guests then forgot they were not at a wedding and kept standing up to make speeches during the main course. Fortunately, the final (interminable) discourse had been brought abruptly to a halt by a lengthy scuffle between two opposing branches of the father’s family, most of whom were apparently not even supposed to be there. But by the time everybody had calmed down and was seated for dessert, it was gone seven, at which point she’d already missed four calls from Zak, who was sitting in the Brancaster White Horse with his parents, waiting to order.

  When she finally arrived back at the cottage, it was late, and Jess was half asleep with exhaustion. Zak, however, was wide awake, having spent the past few hours at a steady but furious simmer. His parents, apparently, were not the sort of people who indulged weak excuses like running late at work, a trait which was obviously genetic, because neither did Zak. His main line of argument seemed to be that Jess was inherently disorganized. Hers was that she wasn’t, plus he was being an unreasonable dickhead. Zak had responded to this by swiping his arm along the length of the mantelpiece, which turned out to be an efficient way of dispatching some of the junk he despised so much.

  Eventually they had made it up in the early hours of the morning in the same way they always did, and now Jess was battling waves of deep confliction over her kiss with Will on Saturday night. Despite it having been only the briefest of moments, it had left her feeling something that was obviously incompatible with Zak being in the room next door, arranging rashers of bacon in a frying pan on her behalf.

  When the knock on the front door came, she only just registered it over the music and sizzling pan. Smudge scampered through from the kitchen to alternately bark at the intruder and wedge his nose against the bottom of the door, inhaling for clues. Jess set down her coffee and fiddled with the latch before swinging the door wide and locking eyes with Will.

  In dark jeans and a fitted shirt, sunglasses perched on top of his head, he looked like something out of Esquire or an advert for an urbane brand of denim. He was jangling his keys in his hand and, stupidly, Jess glanced past him to scan the road for Matthew’s car, before remembering with a jolt that it was crushed years ago.

  ‘Morning,’ he said with a smile, and then hesitated. The kitchen could be seen from the front door and, straight away, he clocked Zak at the Aga. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be …’

  It was at this point that Zak seemed to sense the air change, and looked over his shoulder.

  Please stay where you are, Jess begged him silently. Just stay in the kitchen.

  But Zak cherished all opportunities to assert himself, especially when it came to strange men turning up at his girlfriend’s front door. He set down his wooden spoon and wandered through to take up position directly behind Jess, slinging one arm up against the door frame and extending the other, palm open. ‘Zak Foster.’

  He shook it. ‘Will Greene.’

  Jess felt a flash of anger towards Zak for behaving as if both she and the house belonged to him. ‘Will’s a client.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Will said. ‘I’ve caught you at a bad time.’

  ‘No, no,’ Zak said firmly. ‘You’re fine, mate, absolutely fine.’ The way he said ‘mate’ was passive-aggressive in the same way that warring females called each other ‘sweetheart’ in city-centre bars. ‘Come in, come in.’ Zak put an arm round Jess’s waist and pulled her close to him, giving Will space to pass.

  Jess caught Will’s eye as he hesitated. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it’s not important. I’ll catch you another time.’ And then he turned and began to head off.

  She couldn’t just let him walk away. ‘Won’t be long,’ she said quickly to Zak, wriggling free from his grasp. She pulled the door firmly shut behind her and headed across the front lawn after Will, Smudge at her heels, though he quickly became distracted by the scent of bonemeal at the base of her hybrid tea rose.

  It couldn’t have been much past ten a.m., and the sun was already warm and high, forcing her to squint into it. Will had pulled his sunglasses back down on to his face. Through the open window of the living room the music drifted out to them, sentimental and melodic.

  ‘Hello. That was awkward,’ Will said as they faced one another at the foot of the lawn.

  Jess recalled their split-second kiss in the garage on Saturday night, and how great it had felt. As she batted the thought away, she felt a wave of guilt over Natalie and Charlotte. Because he was no longer hers to kiss.

  She looked over her shoulder to see if Zak was watching them. He was, steadily, through the living-room window.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Now’s probably not the best time.’

  ‘No, you’re right.’ He hesitated. ‘Are you okay, though?’ It seemed for a moment as if he might have wanted to take her hand, before deciding on the safer (wiser) option of maintaining his distance.

  She nodded. ‘I’m okay. You?’

  Taking a breath to speak, he let it go again. ‘Christ, this is –’ He gave a barely perceptible head tilt towards the cottage. ‘I feel like I’m on stage.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, shaking her head in mild frustration. There was so much she wanted to say, so much she wanted to hear.

  He smiled faintly at her. ‘I was sort of hoping we could talk, but I’m not sure it’s an ideal three-way conversation.’

  ‘Later?’

  ‘Natalie’s out tomorrow night. I could call you.’

  ‘You could come over if you like.’

  ‘Ah.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Not sure it’s quite the conversation for a seven-year-old, either, actually.’

  ‘I keep forgetting,’ she said, embarrassed. ‘Sorry.’

  He shook his head with a hazy, forgiving smile like, Don’t. ‘What’s your number?’ he asked her. ‘Natalie tends to deal with all the road-traffic accident admin in our household.’

  She gave it to him and he tapped it into his phone.

  ‘Out of interest,’ Will said, his face tightening slightly as he slid the phone back into his pocket, ‘does he always watch you this closely?’

  ‘Zak’s just like that,’ she said lamely, resisting the urge to look. ‘He doesn’t really mean anything by it.’

  ‘Sorry. Don’t want to cause you problems.’

  ‘You haven’t,’ she said quickly. ‘I can handle Zak.’

  Will cleared his throat pointedly then and nodded towards the cottage. Jess turned to see Zak striding across the lawn to join them. Clearly, he’d got bored of waiting.

  Slinging a possessive arm round Jess’s shoulders and delivering a patronizing peck to the top of her head, Zak started talking loudly at Will. ‘You know, I can’t quite place you, but you look very familiar.’

  Jess was stunned. It would have taken nothing short of a forensic mind to match Will Greene with Matthew Landley purely from sight. She was sure – almost beyond doubt – that he couldn’t possibly know.

  Unless someone’s told him.

  Above their heads, a trio of wood pigeons cooed softly from their perching place atop the pantiles as if expressing their fascination for the dangerous little drama playing out beneath them on Jess’s front lawn.
>
  ‘I don’t think so,’ Will said brusquely, matching Zak’s tone.

  ‘No, you do,’ Zak needled. ‘You definitely do.’

  ‘Zak, Will needs to go,’ Jess said quickly. ‘I’m sure it’ll come to you.’

  ‘Okay, baby,’ Zak said with a shrug, and Jess could almost see Will mouthing Baby? at her in disbelief. ‘I’m sure Will and I will have the pleasure of meeting again soon. You know – this village being the size that it is.’

  Jess rolled her eyes. Will smiled tightly, and with dignity said, ‘I look forward to it,’ before turning his back on them both and heading for his car. Zak’s arm remained firmly clamped round Jess’s shoulders as the car roared off.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Zak,’ Jess couldn’t help but mutter at him, swatting away a kamikaze fly.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re annoyed. Who the fuck is he, standing out here like he owns the place?’

  ‘I could say the same about you.’

  ‘Come on, Jess, I’m serious!’ He looked down at her. ‘Who the fuck is that guy?’ His eyes were simmering with something that definitely wasn’t love.

  ‘Well, why don’t you tell me?’ she said, her voice trembling with anger as she shrugged his arm from her shoulders. ‘You were the one going on and on about him seeming familiar.’

  Zak let out a puff of frustrated half-laughter. ‘Come on, Jess. I saw him whip his phone out. What is he, your secret shag?’

  The sunlight was hot, and she was starting to melt standing still in it. ‘I think you should go home, Zak.’ And then she steamed past him back into the cool gloom of the cottage, where for want of anything obvious to vent her frustration on she grabbed the abandoned egg pan from the hotplate of the Aga, discarding its contents like vomit into the bin before slinging it in the sink. She wanted to insist that he leave, but she couldn’t handle a screaming match right now. She rested both hands against the worktop and attempted to steady her thoughts.

  ‘You’re welcome for breakfast, by the way,’ Zak said behind her from the doorway. ‘Oh, and while we’re on the subject of withholding the truth, I think you should tell me what the fuck you’ve done to your leg.’