Seven For a Secret (6 page)

‘Nigel from the nursery phoned, said your camellia order was in!' Kate called to Heather as she got out of the car, then she added, welcomingly, ‘Hi Grandma, you're looking very summery.' She was at her smiling teenage best – clean hair, ripless dress, a faint fresh perfume of Body Shop roses.

Delia beamed at her and stretched out her arms for a hug as Kate strolled across the gravel from the front door. ‘Lovely Kate, getting so beautiful. How were the O-levels?'

‘It's GCSEs now, Gran,' Kate corrected gently. ‘And they weren't as bad as I'd expected, which probably means I'll have done really terribly. I think they're meant to be hard.'

‘Nonsense, clever girl like you . . .' Delia was saying as they all went into the house

Suzy, glad to be left alone now her grandmother's attention was on the adored Kate, dashed into the kitchen and pulled her new oil lamp from its box. Tamsin would be so jealous, it looked just like a real hurricane lamp. She held it up and swung it, imagining it hanging and swaying from a tree above their camp, lamplight flickering wildly and making lurid shadows in the bitter wind, wind that was blowing harder, much stronger, swirling the water and whipping up waves – impossible and too dangerous now to row home . . . She shivered and prayed quickly for a still, calm night for their camping. It was such a curse, always imagining the worst.

Her mother's head was this way and that, Heather could see from behind her on the stairs, taking in the new pink paint – National Trust's Ointment Pink, on strict ‘in keeping with the property' instructions from Marco at ‘Inside Story' – that had been chosen to warm up the hallway, and she wondered how long it would be till she caught her peeking under the Kelim rug to see if something had been fixed to stop it sliding on the dangerously polished wood floor. I don't like myself thinking like this, Heather realized, trying to see objectively that the person she'd brought to her house as a guest was not just a parent with a lifetime's excess baggage of wilful misunderstanding, but an ageing, slightly nervous woman, becoming frailer and reluctantly conscious of it. If we don't resolve the past soon, though goodness knows how, it will be too late, Heather thought sadly as she carried her mother's case into the spare room.

‘Not too much sun in the morning I hope, dear,' Delia said, looking anxiously out of the mullioned window and searching the sky for the direction of the sun.

‘Same amount as last time, Ma,' Heather told her. ‘You said you liked it then.'

‘It wasn't high summer then. It's been quite a time since my last visit,' Delia countered. ‘Still, these curtains are properly lined, I expect I'll be all right. You don't sleep as well when you're older. You'll find that yourself one day,' she predicted, not without satisfaction.

Tom walked into the kitchen during supper, not particularly surprised that he didn't seem to be expected. ‘I left a message on the machine,' he told Heather as he kissed her. ‘Any lasagne left?' he asked, suddenly starving for real home cooking. That was another thing he was tired of: flavourless hotel steak with shake-on Bar-B-Q essence. Airline dinners reminded him, even the first-class ones, of mini-portion baby food. He picked at Heather's salad: the homegrown rocket, mange-tout and cucumber.

‘You didn't say Tom was coming home,' Delia accused Heather, as if she might not have come to stay if she'd known.

‘Well he does, you know, most weeks, if only for a couple of days,' Heather told her patiently, just as she had many times before.

‘Hong Kong and back doesn't take that long. We've come a long way since eighty days was a fast time for round the world, and everyone sat in wicker chairs and got put to bed on the upper deck with pure linen sheets,' Tom joked, unsuccessfully, at his mother-in-law who stared coolly back at him.

‘Did you bring me anything Daddy?' Suzy cut in, smiling at him, then prodded at his guilt as the constant family absentee, ‘Seeing as you missed Speech Day.'

‘I heard you got a prize. Well done Suze. I've got a couple of those baggy silk shirts you like in my bag – you and Kate can squabble over which ones you want.'

Heather relaxed, started to enjoy her food and let Tom take over as the centre of the family. Her mother brooded over her supper, picking the mange-tout out of her salad, saying had she meant to include a vegetable that should be served hot with butter, not cold with vinaigrette?

‘Tell me about Uncle Edward. What exactly is wrong with him?' Heather asked.

‘Age, I suppose. He had a bit of a stroke and recovered quite well about a year ago. I rang and told you, remember?' Heather did, but only vaguely. She'd have sent a get well card for more than ‘a bit of' a stroke, so it couldn't have been too bad. ‘And now he's got a collection of various ailments. With leukemia on top. There's no treatment of course, not at his age.' Delia sighed, perhaps feeling too uncomfortably close herself to ‘his age'.

‘Why not?' Kate, who had been dreamily munching her food suddenly demanded. ‘Surely they can do something? Has he told them not to?'

‘He's not really in a position to tell them anything,' Delia told her. ‘You aren't, with doctors, are you? Besides he doesn't really know what he's got, what's the point at . . .' she sighed again, ‘at his age?'

Kate was frowning, trying to work out what she'd heard, if it was as bad as she imagined. ‘He doesn't know? Has no-one told him? Why not?
I'd
want to know.'

‘Well not everyone's like you, Kate, perhaps Uncle Edward would prefer just to slip away without a whole lot of drug side-effects to cope with,' Tom explained to her quietly. Delia was getting twitchy, twisting her fork round and round, and her eyes flickered quickly from Tom to Kate.

Heather felt grateful to Tom for his unusual gentleness – it had taken him years not to rise to Delia's baiting antagonism which mostly stemmed from her being simply unaccustomed to sharing a house with a man. ‘I've never remarried,' she would state proudly to uninterested bus queues, post office counter staff, and anyone else who'd listen, when Heather was a little girl. ‘It wouldn't be right,' meaning it wouldn't be convenient, unconsciously way ahead of her time in deciding men were nuisances round the house, making the lavatories smell, folding the newspapers the wrong way and polishing their shoes with the newly-washed dusters.

‘And if he
did
get better, who is there to look after him?' Delia went on. ‘I can't, I've done my best, visiting him on and off, and bringing him pies and casseroles. The best I could do was get him into this clinic.' She looked at Heather, appealingly. ‘It's what your father would have wanted for him, I'm sure.'

Kate, feeling there was an issue here worth wrestling with, couldn't let it go. ‘Have I got this right? You mean he's going to die because he'd be a problem if he lived? And because he's old he's not allowed to make his own decisions about treatment? Is that it?'

Delia thought for a moment and then squared up to Kate with the defiance of long experience, ‘Yes, if you put it that way, that's about the size of it. And you know, one day you'll be saying all this about me. I shan't mind.' A note of challenge was rising in her voice.

‘Uncle Edward might though,' Suzy said quietly.

Heather, rather hot from her shower, opened her bedroom window wide to the late night sounds and the soft cool air. Out on the river, ducks and moorhens scuttled, splashed and squawked gently, settling and roosting. ‘Stay safe,' she whispered to them, fearful of prowling foxes and hungry water rats stealthily creeping up on the floating nests, vulnerable among the reeds and bank-grasses.

‘What are you gazing at out there?' Tom asked, coming quietly into the room. She listened to him fussing about behind her, unpacking his ever-present flight bag. It occurred to Heather that he had clothes that seemed to be permanently in transit, either between continents or between the bag and the washing machine. At least the clothes didn't get jet-lag, she thought, remembering Tom on his last trip home: he had decided it was high noon at 3 a.m., just the moment for cooking a much-missed full English breakfast, complete with toast burnt enough to set off the smoke alarms. She wondered if she should worry that, for her, Tom occasionally resembled a rather difficult house guest. Perhaps, though, it was a good sign that, so far, she wanted to resist that feeling. The thought of what it would have been like still being married to Iain crossed her mind. Presumably he had, as he had then, an office wherever he was living, so that, in a sense, he'd always be ‘home'. She'd never get to sleep blissfully alone, never have to deal completely by herself with frozen pipes, blocked drains, garage mechanics who tried to con her that it would cost her at least
this
much for new brake pads. How peculiarly alien such cramped togetherness would seem.

‘I'm not really looking, just listening,' she told Tom. ‘I can hear family life out on the river – the wildfowl kind, not human, though somehow it doesn't sound that much different. Parents worrying about their children's safety, the getting comfortable for a peaceful night, if they're lucky.'

Tom went into the bathroom to make space on the shelves for the contents of his sponge bag. Mrs Gibson always reshuffled everything during his absences, spreading toiletries over the shelf-space as if he was unlikely ever to return. There followed the sounds of brushing teeth, the downpour of the shower and the loo flushing, and still Heather leaned on the window frame, inhaling honeysuckle scent. Lucky plant, she thought, to be blessed with two such lovely names: honeysuckle
and
woodbine. She smiled as she thought briefly of Nigel from the nursery, who saw plants in terms of italic-script Latin tags. ‘Oh yes,
Lonicera caprifolium
– perfoliate woodbine or goat-leaf honeysuckle to the
hoi polloi
,' she could hear him declaiming, reducing the magic to the level of an index.

‘I suppose their family structure is just like ours really.' Tom, Asia-bronzed and naked, joined Heather at the window and peered out through the blackness towards the river. Flashed glimmers of reflected light showed its progress past the end of the garden.

‘What? Oh the birds. Yes, except we don't starve our weakest ones.'

‘I mean they breed, worry about their babies, fuss over them and then trust they'll survive when they've flown the nests.'

‘Big difference, though.' Heather turned back into the room and peeled off her satin robe. ‘Their young don't seem to turn full circle in middle age and start worrying about their parents.'

Tom lay heavily on the bed, frowning. ‘I never realized before how much you and your mother were two of a kind. You complain she's always wanted to know what you were up to so that she could have a managing stake in your life, and now you want to interfere in whatever deal of death she's got going with your Uncle Edward. Don't forget you probably don't even know the half of it, just like you've always said about her.'

She regarded Tom coolly. Her own body, reflected in the mirror on the open wardrobe door, looked as if it still wore a light-coloured swimsuit. Tom's was evenly tanned all over, as if he'd been turned slowly on a spit. He had a very grown-up body, long and solid and well-covered, with large, confident movements. Last time she'd seen him, it had been English-pale and a little flabby, but now he looked as if he'd been making good use of the hotel gyms and tennis courts. It was such a pity he'd made that pompous little speech, just when the surprise of how attractively unfamiliar his body was looking had started to interest her.

‘Mind you,' he went on, ‘I wouldn't like it. We should promise each other that if we ever get anything terminally awful wrong with us we'll
tell.
I think we'd both rather make our own informed decisions about the end, wouldn't we? God, no wonder they call it the second childhood, all your hard-earned adult rights taken away.'

Heather relaxed and snuggled next to him on the duvet, watching with slightly less distant interest as his penis started to uncurl like a waking animal. She wished, suddenly, that it didn't remind her of a David Attenborough wildlife programme she'd once watched about the rather repulsive underground life of the naked mole rat, a wrinkled, bald, ugly creature with loose pink skin just a couple of sizes too big, that squirmed blindly but with fervent purpose in tunnels beneath the earth.

Tom reached across and put a heavy arm around her, stroking her left breast quite tenderly, though she knew he'd rapidly move on. The mole rat was livening up, quietly expanding to fit its skin. ‘Of course we're not like that generation,' he murmured into her neck. ‘We don't keep secrets from each other, do we?'

Something invasively loud, ducks squabbling on the river, or the approaching careless racket of distant dustmen, woke Heather at about 6 a.m. and she got up and went outside to water the herbs before the scorching sun got to them. Silver slug trails patterned the path, twined and twisted like Spaghetti Junction viewed from the space shuttle. Heather checked quickly that they hadn't been feasting off her sorrel, then wondered what it was, this time, they had decimated. She fixed the sprinkler in place, glanced up at her mother's window and noticed that the curtains were firmly hauled together, blocking out even the tiniest intrusion of light, then she took off her robe and slid quietly into the swimming pool. Silently, in the steam that wafted gently up from the water into the cool air, she breast-stroked up and down for twenty muscle-toning lengths, thinking about the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In her head was a nagging little refrain from the first days when she'd met Tom: ‘You don't have to tell him everything about yourself, you know,' her mother had hinted heavily.