Seven For a Secret (3 page)

Friarsford, arranged prettily between the River Thames and the Chiltern farmlands, wasn't really a village any more. Heather felt conscious of this every time she drove through it; too many little collections of housing, overcoming token resistance from the Parish Council, had been tacked on over the years, to call it anything but a small town. The main road sliced through, dividing a chic and tiny Georgian high street that, unlike most rural communities, had actually added to its range of shops over the past ten years. These were stylish and tempting, but not of much practical everyday use, apart from the delicatessen, the inevitable Spar stores and a wily greengrocer who lured in customers, who'd otherwise defect to Sainsbury's, with six varieties of mushrooms and out-of-season asparagus. With antique shops, a hi-fi dealer, an interior design showroom and an eclectic gift boutique only a hundred yards from her gate, Heather could order from a choice of fifteen styles of sofa in the latest Designer's Guild fabric, but could not buy a leg of lamb. If she needed to, she could also pick up an early Victorian water-colour, a Senseless Things CD, a hand-embroidered Tibetan bathmat or a fringed cushion cover in three shades of unbleached raw linen, but had to drive five miles for a plug for the hairdryer.

Beyond the north side of the High Street was the functional section of the village: the green (with pond), primary school, church, cricket pavilion and recreation ground. A crescent of neat and weathered council houses, now mostly privately owned, faced the far side of the green, giving the inhabitants an enviable view of the weekly summer cricket match, and a less attractive view of the bored and brawling youth of the village doodling obscenities on the bus shelter. Nearer the road, but tucked unobtrusively behind the High Street, was a small development of modern homes built in what Tom described scornfully as ‘architect's rustic', with varying additions of wood cladding, dainty gables, local stone and a hardwood window option. Lonely women, whose fraught husbands commuted to London or Oxford, lived here, disappointed that the sacrifice of urban careers to bring up their children in a rural idyll had isolated them in cosy coffee-morning territory. More than one pined with miserable guilt for the bustle of Notting Hill, for the traffic fumes and multi-coloured people and the chance of a creative job only a couple of tube stops away. Raising funds to mend the roof of a church they did not attend couldn't even begin to compensate. In winter, villagers complained to each other how dreadfully quiet it was, and in summer, that you couldn't get in the garden of the riverside pub for tourists.

Between the road and the river, sheltered by spiky, burglar-resistant greenery and high, defensive gates, were houses such as Heather's – the Desirable Riverside Properties, treasured darlings of estate agents who shamelessly lined the High Street, like gathering vultures, with their BMWs and chattering mobile phones whenever there was a rumour of a potential sale. They would have described Heather and Tom's house as ‘superbly-appointed', trusting that prospective buyers would become instantly besotted with the garden and not inspect the building too closely. The house was large, an overgrown Tudor cottage with sagging floorboards and no right angles, squatting under a huge, ancient roof of patched and creaking thatch, where war was waged on squirrels breeding in the attics. Outside, there was a swimming pool with a sly, untraceable leak and the little riverside dock, where Suzy kept her boat and where Tom intended one day to build a replica Edwardian steamboat. It needed a good deal of expensive shoring up, having been eroded by the wash of speeding hire-launches.

The garden, though, was Heather's exquisite success and obvious delight. It had to be, as she insisted to the family on long summer evenings when supper had to wait till she'd finished the mulching, it was her showroom, her workplace, her sampler. With well over an acre, plus the pony paddock, to play with, and all sloping down to the river, she had created a series of separate gardens-within-the-garden, outdoor room-sets linked by lawn paths. Potential customers, dithering over whether to call in Heather the expert, or muddle around with expensive garden-centre mistakes by themselves, asked around for advice. ‘You should just see her autumn bulb garden' they might be told when wondering what to do when the summer bedding was abandoned to the compost heap. Or, ‘If you're thinking about herbs, look at Heather's chessboard lawn.' New river-frontage residents, eager to make the most of the flood-area alongside the water, once they'd discovered that the river may not be tidal but that wasn't to say it didn't go up and down, were always sent to Heather to marvel at her deceptively wild marsh marigolds, water-buttercups, gigantic gunnera and graceful feathery astilbes. Unless they visited in the sodden, dreary depths of February, Heather didn't find it difficult to persuade them that in the long term, which was the only way, she told them, that gardens should be thought of, they would actually save themselves money by employing her to do their design and layout.

After the stifling formality of the school speech day, she was eager to be out in the garden, busy with harvesting courgettes and peas, not with her memories about Iain. Out in the late afternoon sun, she could hear Kate and Suzy shrieking and splashing in the pool, sounding more like a pair of toddlers than teenagers. She rushed to abandon the silk outfit in the cool, pale green bedroom, quickly pulled on her oldest pair of wash-faded linen shorts and a T-shirt, and strode through the vegetable garden to the home-from-home toolshed where she kept tea-making equipment, a portable phone and her gardening magazines. ‘You look just like an old man on his allotment,' Margot had giggled when she'd come to collect her pre-planted hanging baskets in spring, and had caught Heather, complete with battered hat and old cane chair, taking a break between carrot-hoeing and lettuce-planting. Harvesting her own produce was a thrill that never palled. Somehow she found it was always exciting to dig carefully into the soft earth and find that, as if by nature's magic, at the end of all the plumey stalks there really was a bunch of carrots. Pea-pods always curled outwards slightly at the perfect moment of ripeness, as if offering themselves for the picking, and secretive strawberries always had just a few more fruit slyly hidden beneath their leaves. Courgettes, though, were sneaky, Heather knew as she fetched her trug from the shed and went to inspect the plants. However careful she was to pick them at the perfect, succulent six-inch size, there was always one under the leaves that was quietly escaping, growing secretly to the size of a prize marrow and greedily sapping the energy from the plant. Triumphantly, she bent and pulled one of these out from its hiding place, and was just wondering if there were enough of the flowers to make it worthwhile picking them for frying and then cooking in an Italian omelette, when the phone in the shed rang.

‘You know what day it is?' Heather heard her mother ask.

‘Thursday,' she replied stubbornly. It was years since Delia had mentioned That Date. Heather wasn't prepared to revert to the days of her late teens when her mother had spent that particular day each year in tight-lipped silence and the strenuous revocation of the shame her daughter had once brought her. There was a vivid memory of her indulging in energetic housework, their chilly, thin-walled 1960s house full of the sound of the vicious beating-up of cushions. From every open doorway had flashed the darting, meaningful glances at her wicked daughter and the expectation that she should join in commemorating the great mistake. Heather had soon learned simply to absent herself for as much as possible of each 10 July, even if it meant sitting in the station café for three hours after college, staring at a cold cup of coffee.

‘It was Kate's last day at school today,' Heather continued cheerily, making an effort to deflect her mother on to another topic. She couldn't, surely, have called just to wish Heather a happy silver ex-wedding?

‘Can't think why she won't stay where she is till she's eighteen,' her mother said tersely. ‘After all, it's not as if she's
got
to go to the college for her A-levels, like
you
had to.'

Heather sighed. There seemed to be no re-routing this conversation. It reminded her of other, even more unlucky, teenage brides of her youth, the hushed, delicious gossip – ‘Of course she
had
to get married.' ‘Was there a particular reason for calling, only I'm about to pick some vegetables for supper,' Heather asked, rather brutally.

‘Oh, yes, well. It's your Uncle Edward: he's fading very fast. I've got him into the Millthorpe Clinic near you, so if it's all right, I'll need to come and stay for a little while. You won't mind, seeing as Tom's away.' Tom was always away, she implied, making it clear that this was the most satisfactory arrangement a husband could possibly make. Her own had long ago achieved this by dying. The ‘you won't mind' was clearly an instruction, and Heather was at a loss to come up with a speedily convincing but kind reason as to why she definitely
did
mind. ‘It's not as if you're going away anywhere,' her mother went on with disapproval. In her opinion, the school summer break was the only acceptable time to have a holiday. That's what it was for. Heather and Tom never took one then, there was too much going on in the garden, and generous air-fare concessions meant that Christmas or February in the Caribbean or Australia was preferable. Heather's mother was suspicious about this, considering winter holidays (except skiing, which she thought was healthy exercise, ignoring all the alcohol and the
après
) as somehow undeserved, the over-indulgence of the work-shy, pampered rich.

It was only later, while Heather was hoeing between the rows of strawberries, that she realized her mother hadn't said how long she would be staying. Presumably as long as it took old Uncle Edward to die. Tom, when she told him later, would call that a ‘thin end, as in wedge, situation', and ask if his mother-in-law had put her house on the market and re-organized her pension arrangements for collection at the village post office.

What was it that was terminally wrong with Uncle Edward? Heather hadn't thought to ask. He and Uncle Harold had been strange, occasional presences throughout her childhood, the only links with her long-dead and never-known father. As his brothers, and as Heather's godparents, they'd done their duty by joining her and her mother two or three times a year for an unusually formal Sunday tea. Ham
and
salmon, she remembered, vinegary cucumber and gold-backed doilies. They must have visited over a period of at least twelve years, that she could remember, but she'd had no impression of them ever changing or ageing. Harold always had the same tortoiseshell-framed glasses, Edward had the same thin grey-and-white moustache.

Oily Uncle Eddy, as she'd thought of him, used to stare at her in mock amazement and exclaim unfailingly, ‘And
what
a big girl you're getting', before passing her a pair of sticky half-crowns. She remembered how she'd tried not to shudder as his leathery fist burrowed the money into her reluctant palm and he'd whisper closely, with too much flying spit, ‘Just our little secret, eh?' Even worse was Uncle Harold, who liked to measure how much she'd grown from knees to knickers by squeezing his overheated hand none too gently up and down her inner thigh. She remembered wondering, interestedly, if he'd left damp fingerprints, and dashing up to the bathroom to check. She never reported him to her mother, that sort of thing came under the heading of rude and unmentionable, with the highly likely danger that her mother would dismiss it scornfully with, ‘Don't be so silly, you're imagining things' – but after the age of twelve or so, it was tacitly acknowledged that Heather was never left alone with him, not even for a minute, somehow being called out to the kitchen to butter bread or fetch plates. When he'd died suddenly and unexpectedly, she'd briefly wondered if it was God's sympathetic judgement, and worked extra hard to come top in RE at school that year out of gratitude.

‘Can I run down to Margot's and see about the job?' Kate's face appeared around the row of bean poles. ‘Perhaps she'll let me do some dog-walking now. And pay me,' she said hopefully. ‘And if I take them the other side of the rec where the woods are, do I still have to collect up the shit in little bags?'

‘Probably not,' Heather told her, ‘but you'll never get them to last out that far, you know dogs. Why don't you wait till tomorrow when Simon gets back, then you can negotiate a good deal together?'

Kate thought for a long moment, her wet hair trailing across her face as she used her purple-varnished thumbnail to slice open a ripe bean pod. ‘I'll do better on my own. Simon's too drippy to battle about money,' she decided. ‘He'd end up doing it for nothing – Margot would persuade him to do it out of mummy-love.'

Heather watched Kate's long tanned legs striding towards the gate and thought, probably accurately, that Margot could persuade Simon to help with the dogs just for a chance to gaze at Kate. I'll go round and see Margot later, she thought, after a swim.

Kate, in a tiny black dress no bigger than a man's vest, ambled along the main road towards Margot's house, reaching up now and then to strip leaves off overhanging branches. Men in cars slowed and gave her low, appreciative whistles as they passed. And so they should, Kate thought, treating them all to scathing glances of teenage disdain. She was aware of a vaguely tense feeling of waiting for something momentous to happen. She'd left her school, exams were over, and the dreaded results were weeks away. Something had finished, so something else had to start. What was finished had been awful, so the next thing had to be brilliant. It was owed to her. Seven weeks of freedom just had to contain
some
thrilling event, especially now she was sixteen. Sixteen was what you waited for, the special age.