Seven For a Secret (29 page)

‘And Iain says they might be going to film a fake wedding and he says if they do I can be a guest . . .' Kate could hear her voice rattling on like a toddler who's just been to the circus. She hoped they wouldn't guess how much she was exaggerating; the day had been filled with too much hanging about, boredom and the dreadful suspicion that she was doing everything wrong. Every time the director had roared ‘Cut!' she'd been sure it was her fault. She didn't want to admit that in front of her family – her grandmother would be sure to say ‘Nonsense, why ever do you think they'd be looking at
you
?' which was probably just the sort of thing she would have said to Heather years ago. The other actors hadn't exactly been over friendly, and she was pretty sure that when the film came out any possible view of her would be obstructed by a particular plump gingery woman in a feathered hat, who'd elbowed everyone out of the way so she could hog the camera. She never thought she'd be so glad to have Simon around. She'd have preferred to have Iain to talk to, but he'd only arrived just as they were all packing up. She'd pouted and been cross at him for abandoning her to all these people and he'd merely laughed infuriatingly and kissed her on the top of her head like some uncle. Not, she was having to admit to herself, the way she wanted him to kiss her at
all
.

‘And Iain says I can meet him and some of the crew in the pub later, so if that's all right . . . ?' Kate started collecting plates together hurriedly, crashing them about rather too much and endangering their wholeness.

‘Iain says, Iain says,' Delia twittered mockingly. ‘He
has
made an impression on you, hasn't he? Isn't there a nice boy in the village you could be friends with?'

Kate froze and stared at her grandmother, looking, Heather thought, quite stricken, even shocked.

‘That's enough Mother, leave her alone.' Heather slammed a dish down on the table, hard enough to crack it. ‘Kate, leave the dishes, Gran and I will deal with them. You go and get ready.'

‘Thanks Mum,' Kate said softly, leaning across and kissing her swiftly. Heather caught her radiating a glance of pure hatred at her grandmother, who had the grace to look down at the remains of her fruit salad.

‘How could you do that? Whatever made you speak to her like that?' Heather demanded the moment Suzy, rightly sensing an atmosphere to be avoided, had gone outside to tend to her pony.

‘You're right, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything. I just felt, I don't know,
angry
that she seems to be as much smitten by him as you were at her age,' Delia replied. The two of them were going through the motions of tidying the kitchen, running taps, opening cupboards, moving out of each other's way in a complicated dance so that they wouldn't actually come too close.

‘Oh don't be ridiculous. He wasn't even thirty then, now he's well past fifty, for heaven's sake. What on earth do you imagine Kate's going to see in him?'

‘Yes I'm sure you're right, it's just that it only seems like yesterday,' Delia sighed deeply.

‘Well it wasn't. It was half a lifetime ago, over and done with.' Heather was shaking with rage. ‘And it was something that happened to
me
. Not to you.
I
ran off with him,
I
married him,
I
got pregnant and lost
my
baby. It's about time you stopped pretending that it was all done just to spite you, and that you were the person most affected by it.' Heather could feel that she was close to tears. She wished that when Iain had phoned her, car to car, she'd said yes, she'd love to go out to dinner that very night. They could be out somewhere now, laughing over a bottle of something delicious and lazily eating their way through that day's menu-special. They could be in a pub garden, wondering if it was going to get too cold to eat outside, or in a hushed and horribly empty restaurant laughing at the too many hovering waiters.

‘I'll be going home straight after the funeral,' Delia was saying with a sniff. ‘And don't worry, I won't say anything else to Kate, not if you don't want me to.' She had her wronged face on, Heather recognized.

‘You
know
I don't want you to,' Heather said with exasperation, wondering if anything at all had been achieved. It so rarely was between generations, she thought.

Kate went into the pub and hoped Iain would have got there first. She felt so geed up, she wondered if she might have to sit near the door in case she felt sick. It wasn't like anything else she'd done, not like meeting any of the boys she and Annabelle had picked up when they were out clubbing, or at parties. It felt
beyond
, in the same way that leaving school had felt.

‘Hello, Star,' Iain greeted her from the bar, drink already in his hand.

Kate assumed he expected her to smile cutely, so she didn't. Her grandmother, formerly so doting, had put her in a contrary mood.

‘Oh, too grand to talk to me now are we?' he teased.

She glared, staring at his teeth which, although she felt so cross, were nevertheless fascinating her. They were so big and white and even, not like old people's usual graveyard teeth that seemed to lose brightness like the rest of their bodies, but like teenage polished ones, freshly released from orthodontic hardware. They looked dangerous, in the same way that even stupid Little Red Riding Hood should have sensed, the moment she saw the wolf in the forest. What took the girl so long to catch on? Kate wondered.

‘Please don't wind me up,' she said forlornly. I'm not in the mood.'

‘Let me get you a drink. White wine and soda? Or does the barman know you're still a
minor?'
He leaned forward to whisper the last word, his breath grazing her ear.

‘White wine will be fine,' she told him, finding a smile at last.

‘Now tell me what's bugging you. Didn't you have a good day?' he asked, as they sat at a corner table close to the dartboard that only rainy night teenagers ever used.

Kate sipped her wine and then dabbled her fingers in it, playing with the ice and stirring the lemon round. ‘I had
quite
a good day. Everyone seemed to know each other except me and Simon.'

‘Well at least you had Simon. Don't think I don't arrange these things for a purpose,' Iain said.

‘Yeah, but
Simon
,' she said, pulling a face. ‘He's nice and that, but you know, I've told you before. Too young.'

‘And I'm too old,' he said, as a statement, not a question.

‘No,' she replied. ‘I think age is a weird thing. Some people you can't imagine ever being young. Like my grandmother.' Kate stopped and sighed gently. ‘Do you know my grandmother told me off tonight for talking about you?' She gave Iain a fierce look, as if searching in his face for a possible reason for Delia's hostility.

He looked down at his drink and swirled it round the glass. ‘Well perhaps it depends what you were saying,' he told her.

‘Not much,' she shrugged. ‘Not enough to fuss about. I expect it's because you're
old
,' she giggled. ‘Mum got angry with her. When I left I think they were having a row.'

‘Didn't you creep up and listen?' he taunted.

She elbowed him hard in the ribs. ‘Certainly not. That's the sort of thing Suzy might do.'

‘Oh you mean
you're
too old for that sort of thing?'

‘Oh well, yeah I suppose so. But you know what I mean about age, don't you? I mean, take Tamsin, Simon's little sister. She can't
wait
to be about twenty-seven. It's her mental age, and probably always will be. She's desperate to dress up in clingy lycra frocks and red high heels and have a corkscrew perm with a slide through the back of it that looks like a dagger. She'll probably work in a travel agents and absolutely
love
it. She'll always be the same, a version of the same thing even when she's seventy.' Kate hesitated and then added shyly, ‘And then there's people like you.'

‘Go on.' Iain was looking at her more seriously than she'd seen before. He idly stroked her hand with his finger, which she watched. The last boy who'd held her hand, she suddenly remembered, had had ground-in grey nails. She'd known, deep down, that it was probably from playing rugby or something, but somehow she had thought instead about surreptitious nose-picking and felt slightly sick. Apart from Simon who took it too far, you couldn't really trust them to be clean. You had thoughts about where their unwashed hands had been, whether they'd decided that yesterday's, no, the day
before's
socks were just about all right. Iain's nails were short, square and perfectly clean. She didn't have to have those teenage suspicions about him. She wondered what it looked like to other people, this man, this man of
his
age playing with her fingers in a way that would tell anyone watching that he certainly wasn't her dad, or her grandad even. Up at the bar there were loud laughing people, balding men with big blowsy women whose flesh overhung the bar stools. One of them was wearing a low-cut pink T-shirt, leaning forward and showing cleavage like a crêpey canyon. Kate couldn't imagine her own sheeny-sheer skin ever looking like that.

‘I think that with people like you it's not really anything to do with how many years you've had,' she said to him, ‘it's probably about not getting stuck, and about letting new thoughts have space in your head.'

Iain was smiling sadly at her. ‘It isn't as easy as that, you know. Some new thoughts, well, one day you'll find they can be quite a problem.'

Heather lay awake worrying, and blamed her mother for it. Kate hadn't come home yet and it was well past pub closing time. She imagined her daughter in various scenarios, the most likely, she decided, being that she'd gone back to the rectory with Simon and Iain and a rowdy collection of technicians, where they would be working their way through a crate or six of lagers, and skinny-dipping in Margot's pool. Other, less crowded, more unnerving scenes also made their way into her head, ones in which Iain and Kate were alone. She placed them in various locations – in Russell's boat chugging in the dark up the river; up in Tamsin's treehouse discussing the state of the world; in Simon's bedroom where Simon currently wasn't. Here her mind tried to select something else. She turned over in bed and tried to dismiss the thoughts as being quite ludicrous. It was all Delia's fault, perverse old woman even
thinking
about it, warning about it. How could she? It was almost as if she was willing the worst, whatever that was, to happen.

Downstairs the front door was slammed with Kate's usual carelessness. Jasper barked dutifully but without enthusiasm, so she knew Kate had come home alone. She pulled on her dressing-gown and tiptoed down the stairs making Kate, whom she found gazing hungrily into the fridge, leap with fright.

‘Why are you creeping around like that Mum?' she demanded, grabbing a lump of ancient cheese from a plate at the back of the fridge.

‘I'm not,' Heather told her, walking over to switch on the kettle as if all she'd come down for was a cup of tea. ‘I'm thirsty and I'm wearing no shoes, that's all.'

‘Hmm,' Kate mumbled, through a mouthful of cheese. She perched on the edge of the kitchen table and inspected her mother, waiting for questions.

‘Nice evening?' Heather enquired.

‘Not bad. Just the pub, you know.'

‘Anyone there?'

‘Not many. Bloke from “Inside Story” rabbiting on about how his cat shredded his seagrass carpet or something. Some people talking about the robbery at the hi-fi shop. The whole village thinks Shane Gibson did it, which isn't fair. I mean, they don't know, do they, and it's just because he did something
before.
If this was the old mid-west they'd probably hang him from a tree on the rec.' Kate finished the cheese and jumped down from the table.

She's waffling, Heather thought, and then felt angry with herself. She was truffling out deviousness just like her mother did, and she wasn't being either straight with Kate or fair. ‘All that cheese, you'll have nightmares,' Heather commented as she poured boiling water into the mug.

‘Not me. I'm going to have
wonderful
dreams. G'night,' Kate said, whisking out of the room and taking the stairs three at a time.

Heather drank the tea and then continued to lie awake, this time blaming the caffeine. She gave up at about 2 am and started leafing through
Gardeners' World
magazine, trying to get terrifically interested in the various forms of euphorbias available. She thought about making notes towards planning the new client's shady garden, but couldn't make her hand reach out for a pencil and notebook. She did, though, make her hand reach out for the phone the second it rang.

‘Heather? Hi it's me. How are things?'

‘Tom? “Things” are fine. Apart from Uncle Edward dying, but that wasn't unexpected. Things with you aren't so fine, though, I gather,' she said, wondering if this was the moment at which she'd be told she was about to become a lone parent. Surely he wouldn't, not over the phone, not after all these years. Just let him dare.

‘Aren't they? Oh.' Silence followed, which Heather refused to help him with.

‘Oh you mean Hughie,' Tom continued eventually. ‘Well he's got things all wrong, the silly sod. That's all I can say. I'm really sorry. He shouldn't have phoned you. I did tell him.'

‘Things' again, Heather thought, nothing specific. She sighed wearily.

‘I'll be back next Thursday night,' he said, recovering some of his usual cheerfulness.

Heather laughed softly. ‘Well that's good, just in time for the funeral.' Jetlag was not going to be an excuse for getting out of it, she decided, replacing the receiver. If Tom wanted to come home and be remorseful, he would have to do a bit of joining in. She couldn't recall the last time they'd both chosen colours from a paint-chart, or gone together to a parents' night. Perhaps she should encourage him to do more of it, she thought as she switched off the light; perhaps he felt, perhaps he'd felt for years, that he was too much a visitor in his own home. No wonder he had found it so easy, when working, to behave as if he hadn't really got one.