Seven For a Secret (19 page)

He laughed. ‘Haven't you found yourself a lovely rich boyfriend to wine and dine you?'

Kate snorted with delight.‘“Wine and dine”? People like me don't wine and dine, we go clubbing, see bands, have parties. Well sometimes, anyway. Not much happens in a place like this. It's dreadful being a teenager in the country. I can't wait to learn to drive.' She looked sideways covertly, watching to see if Iain gave her the expected sympathy glance. He did, but still seemed to be laughing at her, which was annoying. ‘I need a proper job for the summer really, nothing ordinary of course.'

‘Course not,' he agreed.

She slid her feet back down to the floor and crossed her legs. ‘I'm quite good at acting. I mean if they needed—'

‘This place looks OK, don't you think?' Ian said, interrupting and infuriating her as he pulled off the road in front of a small café half-submerged beneath a jumble of honeysuckle. ‘It says “Cream Teas”. Would you like that?' Iain asked Kate, taking her hand and leading her through a small wooden gate into a shady orchard dotted with benches and tables.

Kate wondered about the hand that was holding hers.
Was
it being fatherly, or even grandfatherly? It was certainly a hand that was taking charge of her as if she was so very much younger than she was. He wasn't quite old enough for grandparent status, or somehow proper enough for a godparent either, she decided, looking at the back of his head as they crossed the bouncy grass. He had too much hair, quite thick and long and streaky, like an old rock star who still expected to have just one more hit; and he wore black chinos, with a cream T-shirt and black linen jacket, like something out of GAP's window. He was more like one of those men who have a series of families – if
she
was his daughter she would probably already have been an aunt from the day she was born. There would be sure to be various older brothers and sisters, some who were long-ago grown-up with jobs as doctors or lawyers, with smart offices and secretaries of their own. The sprinkling of customers looked up from their scones as they made their way to a table under an apple tree.

‘Those women over there are staring at you,' she pointed out to Iain as they sat down. ‘The fat ones scoffing cakes. Look like they're on a day off from Weight Watchers.'

‘Spiteful little girl,' Iain laughed at her, then glanced round and gave the women a half smile, acknowledging their interest. They blushed and smirked like teenagers.

Kate curled her lip with scorn. ‘God, they're like a bunch of Sharons in McDonalds ogling some bloke,' she said. ‘Gross.'

‘What's “gross”? The fact that they're not in the first flush of youth, or the fact that I'm not?' he asked her bluntly.

Kate felt embarrassed and squirmed a bit on the bench. She was facing the sun and it burned on her cheeks, adding to her uncomfortable blush. Opposite her, Iain's clear blue eyes were looking directly and steadily into her face, waiting for her reply as if he really, truly wanted to know. ‘Oh, neither, you know, it's just, just an observation,' she floundered, biting her lip. ‘Sorry, I didn't mean—'

‘Didn't mean what?' he pursued determinedly. ‘That we Aged Adults are all completely past it by the age of thirty? Ought to shut up shop with the first wrinkle?' He was laughing at her again and she smiled with relief. It wouldn't do to get on the wrong side of him, and besides he was nice. He went on, looking intently into her head. ‘Katie, honestly, I know it's something you don't want to hear, but the sexual urge doesn't fade away like old-age eyesight. Most of us don't actually need the equivalent of reading glasses in order to get it up after the age of fifty.'

Kate hid in her hair, giggling with excruciating shame as all around her she could see interested heads turning in their direction. She felt like a small child hearing her father say ‘fuck' in front of the vicar. Iain had spoken out loudly and clearly and emphatically, like a teacher dictating in two write-this-down-and-learn-it sentences the central dilemma of Othello.

‘Sorry,' he apologized gently, reaching across the table and pushing her hair back from her embarrassed face. ‘Didn't mean to sound off at you like that.'

‘It's OK,' she said, wiping away a laughter tear from her eye. ‘It was funny, really.'

‘Funny?' He looked at her with a mock-hurt expression. ‘Funny? That was my very soul speaking, child. Hey look, here's the waitress with your nursery tea.'

Kate watched as the waitress, a plump and pink young girl who was, she guessed, helping out her mother in the holidays, stepped carefully across the grass towards them, carrying a huge and obviously heavy tray. Kate, shocking herself, cast a quick spell of pure nastiness, willing her to trip on a grassy hummock and drop the lot, just to see how far tea for two plus scones, jam and cream could spread. She imagined it like an infant's painting, great sickly splodges of strawberry, streaks of thick gooey cream, sharp-edged chunks of floral crockery, like a nursery-school collage. She said nothing to Iain about this secret vision as the girl laboriously shifted the contents of the tray on to their table.

‘Lucky she didn't drop these,' Kate murmured through a blissful mouthful of scone, thickly heaped with clotted cream and jam.

‘Yes, isn't it,' Iain agreed, in a tone of sly irony that told her he'd clearly read her wicked thoughts.

Later, in the car, as they sped back to Friarsford, Kate wondered if she had been missed at home. She imagined her mother was probably doing something mysterious in the greenhouse, or sitting in her little shed-office working out how much she could charge someone for telling them where their lupins would look best. (Or more likely, she thought, advising them if it was currently OK to
have
lupins.) As they cruised along the village High Street, she could see Darren Gibson leaning against the window of the hi-fi shop, trying to look cool. But
does
he? she wondered suddenly. She had never questioned it before. The fact that he was the coolest boy in the village had automatically meant that he was something special – now it occurred to her that perhaps it meant he was merely the sub-standard best of a thoroughly sad bunch. She certainly couldn't imagine having tea in an orchard and giggling about sex with him.

The last time Delia had bought a swimsuit, Lycra hadn't yet been invented. The blue-and-white striped fabric seemed extraordinarily lightweight, too insubstantial to be holding in her baggy stomach as pleasingly as it did. Her last swimsuit (‘costume' they called them then) had held her in place by some kind of boned rubbery scaffolding, which smelled of old mushrooms if allowed to stay wet for too long. She stood uncertainly by the edge of the pool, wishing Heather would go and play with plants in her greenhouse, and clutched her pink cotton dressing-gown round her body. ‘Haven't you got to do something with the basil?' she asked her, as Heather settled herself comfortably into a padded chair with a mug of tea.

‘Did it before we went shopping, don't you remember? And besides, I ought to be here while you swim, just in case.'

‘I don't see why, I'm not a child.' Delia pouted at her. She dipped a tentative toe in the water from the top step, very carefully, so as not to overbalance.

‘It's nothing to do with being a child. I don't really like anyone to swim alone. Even Olympic breast-stroke champions can bang their head on the diving board and knock themselves out,' Heather pointed out reasonably.

‘I don't think the diving board is likely to be involved,' Delia muttered. The water really was warm. She'd been worried that, in her new enthusiasm, she had overlooked the possibility that when Suzy and Tamsin dived in and came up grinning, using words like ‘bliss' and ‘boiling', they might simply be grateful that there was no ice on the surface to plunge through. They had young, warm bones. She slipped the dressing-gown off her shoulders and walked slowly but determinedly down the steps.

Heather couldn't remember the last time she'd seen so much of her mother's body. She knew Delia would prefer her not to be seeing it at all. Even as a small child, she could remember her mother always locking the bathroom door, and ordering her firmly to ‘wait there' on the far side of shop changing room curtains, which were never quite wide enough. Heather vividly remembered the fussy twitching of the curtains to exclude gaps, and the exasperated tutting as a tug one way left a spying eye-width of a chink on the other. In the chic little High Street boutique where they'd bought the swimsuit that afternoon, Delia had declined to try it on, saying firmly that it looked all right, if it was a size 14 it would be sure to fit, with a small warning glare implying that if it didn't, it was through no fault of her own body.

Delia was making progress down the steps, splashing water over her arms to get herself used to the temperature. ‘You could boil an egg in here,' she commented to Heather. ‘It must cost a fortune to heat this.'

‘The solar's been working overtime. I think the thermostat's a bit wonky,' Heather said. ‘Usually it's about 78 degrees, and actually I don't think it's much more than 82 or so.' She watched as Delia's age-crinkled legs disappeared into the pool. She was touched to see that the front of her calves had a faded honey-combed pattern, mottled from sitting too near the gas fire in her flat during winter. She remembered how her legs had been almost burned scarlet each winter, when money had been too much in short supply to heat more than one room, in their boxy thin-walled house. Small deprivations at the time had been scoffed at, as if a preference for comfort was a sign of moral deficiency. Heather's friend Barbara had possessed an electric blanket on her bed, which Heather had greatly envied. ‘They're dangerous things. And they're not at all good for you,' Delia had sniffed, showing she had more in common with Iain and his family than she would ever have guessed.

Delia was now cautiously making her stately way across the pool, a gentle breast-stroke with her head held carefully clear of the water, well within her depth.

‘Goodness, Grandma's swimming!' Kate flopped down in the chair next to Heather.

‘We are allowed to, you know!' Delia called out to her from the water. ‘Just because I'm old doesn't mean I've forgotten everything I've ever learned.'

‘Sorry! Didn't mean to be rude, just that I've never seen you do it before. You're pretty good at it!' Kate called back, grinning at her. She looked at Heather and smiled. ‘Second time today I've been told off for being ageist,' she confessed, biting her lip and feigning humility.

‘Oh?' Heather said with interest, ‘And who was the other one?'

Kate was gazing into the far distance by now, looking as if she was being easily distracted by the ducks. ‘What? Oh, no-one particular, just this bloke I got talking to.'

‘When you were out with the dogs?'

Kate got up and wandered along the side of the pool, filleting a geranium leaf as she walked. ‘Yeah, sort of. Don't worry, I don't talk to the dangerous sorts of strange men, Mum.'

With parental hyper-instinct, Heather felt she was not getting the whole truth, but put it down to Iain-induced paranoia. Why on earth should Kate report every conversation she ever had? And, contrary to sound mother-advice, if you never talked to strangers, you never met anyone interesting.

‘Your car's back, by the way,' Kate called from her perch on the end of the diving board.

Delia, who was now bravely tackling a full length of the pool, grabbed the end of the board. ‘Who brought it?' she asked Kate, as if she knew (also instinctively) that there was some mystery here that was not going to be satisfactorily unravelled by her daughter.

Kate spoke loudly enough to include Heather. ‘Brian, the one from Margot's who does electrical stuff. Don't ask me how he got here in it though, I couldn't tell you,' she said, shrugging her shoulders in a don't-care, not-interested teenage sort of way.

Heather was not deceived.
OK I won't ask you
, she thought,
not this time
.

Hughie's approach to flying was like that of an overgrown plane-spotter, Tom thought. He found every aspect of the plane fascinating. While passengers dozed or doodled, or stared unseeingly at the film, he hung around in the cockpit asking about this dial and that lever till Tom's co-pilot started making despairing faces at him. ‘I'll bring some tea,' Hughie offered. Tom was happy with that. If Hughie was doing the serving, he knew he wouldn't be on the wrong end of the First Class purser's grudges. He knew what happened to passengers and crew who crossed her, and others. He'd heard them all giggling over drinks in the Singapore hotel about passengers who had dared to click their fingers demanding service. ‘Only wiped the tea bags round the toilet bowl first, didn't I?' one of them had been saying. They'd all shrieked with vengeful laughter, like a coven of witches disguised behind the make-up, sunbed tan and nail polish. Faced with a collection of the women in a hotel bar, assembling ready for a nightclub sortie, he'd find himself sidling nervously past, as if terrified of being grabbed and debagged. No wonder he preferred the company of the boys, he reasoned to himself.

‘One sugar?' Hughie asked softly.

‘Please,' Tom replied. Hughie busied himself with the tray and the tea, looking cosily and contentedly domestic. Tom sighed. He had never expected that he would be in this awkward position. He'd always assumed it was only men who had affairs with their secretaries who had to do the dreadful scene where they gently explained that it was only a bit of mutual fun, surely they couldn't really have been expected to leave their wives. There was something far too adolescent and
girly
about all this painful drama – only one step away from eyeing up diamond-and-sapphire clusters in Singapore's duty-free. However could he have foreseen that Hughie was going to be the type who read the Habitat catalogue in bed, biro in hand, drawing circles round the code numbers of his favourite sofas?