The Summer of Secrets (7 page)

Victoria’s tone was cutting, and Helen felt her face heat up. She went back to the bed and picked up her book, but she’d lost the thread, and the names floated, faceless, on the page. A corner of wallpaper hanging down from the ceiling caught her eye. The twins must be up in the attic, jumping off boxes again if the noise was anything to go by. The hanging paper gave a surprised jerk every time one of them landed.

Victoria added big feet to the figure she had drawn in the condensation on the window before sweeping a palm across it and pressing her face to the glass.

‘I’m so
bored
.’

‘You could start the next book?’

Victoria groaned and mooched across to the bed. ‘No, anything but that! I don’t ever want to read anything ever again.’ She started to flick at Helen’s hand, trying to dislodge her book. ‘Do something, amuse me!’

An extra loud crash from above made them both look up, waiting for shrieks. Instead there was a brief silence, followed by the sound of something heavy scraping across the floor.

Victoria flopped over, letting herself slide off the bed, and crawled on her hands and knees to a pile of boxes stacked in one corner.

‘We always used to make up plays. We could put on a Russian drama.’

Helen let her book fall to her knees as she watched her rummage.

‘Dressing-up stuff!’ Victoria pulled one of the boxes out, making the rest wobble. ‘Come and see.’

Helen went and knelt on the floor next to her. The box held a motley collection. She could see a moulting fox-fur stole tied up with some old dresses, a handful of tangled beads, a pair of satin shoes with pin-thin heels and long pointed toes. It all smelled old and, what was the word her mother used? Fousty. Fusty. Helen fingered a brightly patterned shift, breathing through her mouth to keep out the waft of mothball.

‘Where do you get all this stuff from?’

‘What, isn’t it good enough for you?’

Helen was taken aback by her tone. She hadn’t meant to be rude, and opened her mouth to explain but Victoria had already turned away and was digging into the box. She scrambled to retrieve the situation.

‘I only meant, well …’ She struggled to come up with a better way of saying it. ‘I mean, it’s all really cool, but you have all these boxes of clothes and stuff you have to take with you when you go somewhere new, but you don’t have things like, I don’t know, knives and forks.’

Victoria shrugged.

‘There’s always that sort of stuff in wherever we end up. It’s not important.’

‘Don’t you mind? Having to keep on packing up and starting again?’

There was silence, and Helen held her breath. When she spoke, Victoria’s voice was remote.

‘As long as you can take the important things with you, it doesn’t matter where you are.’ She bent forward, sweeping a hand through a litter of scarves. ‘And are you happy with where you are, even with all your knives and forks?’

Helen let the dress drop. She visualized her home, with its beige walls and blank spaces. Even in her absence, her mother’s sense of order hovered, keeping items in their proper place. At least they always knew where the cutlery was.

‘I suppose I can’t imagine living anywhere else.’

‘Not being able to imagine something doesn’t make it impossible.’ Victoria was ramming the clothes back into the box now. ‘We go where people offer to let us stay, or Piet finds us somewhere. It’s like the universe gives it to us.’ She turned to look at Helen. ‘And we’ve been in some fab places as well, they’re not all like this.’ She waved a hand around the room.

‘No, I didn’t mean …’ Helen tried to find the right words. ‘It’s lovely here, it’s the best house I’ve ever been in.’

Victoria gave a wicked grin, and the atmosphere cleared.

‘It’s a shithole, and you know it. It’s only for the summer, though. We won’t be around any longer than that.’

The words, thudding like rocks into sand, brought Helen to a halt. She split in two, one Helen sitting on the floor being part of Victoria’s world, the other floating above them, knowing she could never truly belong. The summer would end, the Dovers would go, and the new Helen would slide back into her grey life where nothing ever happened. Victoria wasn’t even showing any signs of regret. Helen would be one of those ghosts from the past, a vague recollection half recalled: ‘
Do you remember that girl who never went anywhere?
’ She was nothing but an episode. Somehow, that felt worse than anything. Victoria was staring at her now, but it was all too difficult to explain.

‘Where’s the best place you’ve ever lived?’ Her voice caught in the back of her throat, as if that was where the tears had piled up, taking up all the space.

Victoria pushed on her hands to swing her legs into a squat. That was one of Seth’s tricks, and Helen remembered him doing it in the garden the first day she met him. Victoria’s voice recalled her back to the room. ‘I’ll show you.’

She pulled another box across, this one jammed full of snaps of all sizes. A lot were small black-and-white prints, curling at the corners, although Helen spotted studio portraits of a baby and a serious-faced toddler. Victoria started sorting through a stack of colour ones, each a square with a thick white border. Helen glimpsed pictures of a small Seth standing on an immense pile of sand; Victoria wearing a buttoned coat with a velvet collar, clinging to a hand as a giraffe’s head came down at her over a fence at the zoo. She picked up a few herself, stopping at one showing Seth and Victoria together, older now, standing on a hillside. The sea was ridiculously blue in the background and square white houses were dotted up the slopes. Both of them had sun-bleached blond hair, the strands blowing across brown faces.

‘How old are you here?’ She turned it round so Victoria could see.

‘That was when we were in Greece, so I’d be about six, and Seth’s eight. We were living on Andros.’ Victoria reached out a hand to take the photograph. ‘It’s a Cycladic island.’ She gave it back.

It’s all Greek to me.
Helen laughed inwardly at her silent joke, and put the photo down.

‘Was it a holiday?’

‘No.’

Helen waited to Victoria to go on, but she’d come to a stop, staring ahead, as if her mind was in another country.

‘So, how long were you there for?’

Victoria gazed blankly at her as if she didn’t know who she was. After a moment, she gave her head a shake.

‘Five, six months. Dunno.’ She shuffled through the prints she was holding. ‘It was the last time I saw my dad, actually.’

The words were casual, as if seeing your dad for the last time was a perfectly normal thing to happen, but they couldn’t cover up the tightness of her voice. Helen glanced up at the drummer on the wall, wanting to ask for details but not sure how to start. Then Victoria threw the handful of snaps to one side and reached in the box for more before continuing.

‘We went there with the band, they were working on an album.’ She discarded that pile as well, and grabbed for more. ‘My dad and the other guys were in this villa with a pool, and Alice, me and Seth had a sort of donkey hut.’ She glanced up. ‘Converted, you know, we didn’t sleep in hay. It was brilliant, actually. We had this beach all to ourselves and there were these old ladies on donkeys and they gave us figs and stuff.’ Her voice tailed off. ‘Anyway. We were there, and my Uncle Piet had come out to join us. Then one night there was a massive row.’ She stopped sorting and leaned back against the bed, her eyes closed. ‘Me and Seth, we got up to see what was going on. They were all off their heads, chucking stuff in the pool. And in the morning, they were gone.’

Again, Helen waited for her to carry on, but there was silence. She couldn’t leave it like that. Helen leaned closer and prompted her.

‘Was this when your dad went off to South America?’

There was a pause.

‘Yeah, round about.’ Victoria sat staring at the photos in her hand as if she wasn’t sure where they’d come from. She gave her head an impatient shake and carried on. ‘Though we didn’t know about it at the time, of course. We found Alice in the villa, but we couldn’t wake her up.’

The room seemed to be holding its breath along with Helen. She could feel the heat as the two blond children walked hand in hand through an empty courtyard, a dry wind blowing through the surrounding trees. It made her think of Mary Lennox after the cholera.

‘You must have been terrified.’ Her voice came out as a whisper, but Victoria’s reply was matter-of-fact enough to bring her back to the bedroom.

‘Not really. There was a house down the hill, an old Greek farmer and his wife. They took us in.’

‘And didn’t ask any questions?’

‘They didn’t speak English. Seth showed them Piet’s address, and they fed us bread and olives until he turned up and brought us all back to England.’

Helen picked the photo of Seth and Victoria up again. Behind them, the tangle of shrubbery seemed to shift, sending out a sharp, exotic fragrance. Momentarily, she tasted the sharp juiciness of an olive, felt the heat of the sun against her back. The children looked back at her, their gaze unwavering. No wonder Victoria was a bit odd about her mother. She tried to come up with something neutral by way of response.

‘It’s like something out of a novel.’

‘Better than this Russian crap.’ Victoria leaned sideways to grab at
War and Peace
, lying forgotten on the bed, and held it away as Helen tried to reach for it. Helen lunged at her and they toppled over, Victoria squirming until she was free and scrambling on to the bed. Helen began to make a half-hearted chase but let it go. The photos were more interesting. Victoria came back to join her, and plucked one out of the spread on the floor.

‘Here’s a picture of him, anyway.’

Helen leaned across.

‘Your dad?’

She glanced up at the poster on the wall again before studying the photo. It was definitely him, minus the sideburns. He was wearing a long sheepskin coat, his hair curly and touching his shoulders, like Seth’s did now. On his face was a broad grin, and each arm was wrapped around the shoulders of a beautiful woman. Helen pointed at one of them.

‘Alice?’ She didn’t need to ask. Alice was gazing up, a thick fringe shadowing her eyes, but her mouth full and joyous.

‘Yeah.’ Victoria held out another picture. ‘And here he is again. Daddy Jakob with Uncle Piet.’

Jakob was withdrawing from this shot, his eyes narrowed against the sun. Piet was taller than his brother, leaner, propped against a wall, head tilted towards the camera. Something about him seemed familiar. Helen held the photo away, trying to recall. He should be wearing a cowboy hat. She searched around Victoria’s walls.

‘He’s exactly like him,’ she said, pointing at the poster of James Dean, the shy cowboy avoiding eye contact.

‘You reckon?’ Victoria sounded sceptical. ‘He’s not much like him now.’ She took the photo back and held it up to compare it to the film poster. ‘Must be the way he’s standing.’

She flicked the photo into the box, before suddenly bending to scoop up a huge armful, pressing them down into the box.

‘Careful!’ Helen tried to help. ‘You’re going to crease them.’

‘And that would matter why?’ Victoria turned and left the room. For a while Helen stayed there, cross-legged, re-arranging the pictures in the box so that they all lay flat. There were shots of landscapes, buildings, more and more faces. She stopped at one showing a group of young men on banquette seating arranged around a table. One of them was Victoria’s dad. The other faces were vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t pin down why. One smiled, another had been caught mid-grimace. They had long hair, ruffled shirts printed in floral designs, cigarette smoke coiling up in the air before them. A woman’s hand rested on the table, but her body was out of the shot. Helen gazed up at the poster of the drummer. Where was he now?

She became aware of the silence in the house. She’d felt that she should wait until Victoria came back, but now she wasn’t sure. After returning the rest of the photos to the box, she stood up and went over to the window. A mirror had been propped at one side and Helen bent to look into it. There was a scatter of cosmetics in front of it, and she spent some minutes smudging kohl under her eyes. The faces in the posters on the walls seemed to burn into her, asking what she thought she was doing, and she leaned in again and rubbed it off, until it was the faintest grey shadow. She wasn’t sure she liked how the room felt any more.

Downstairs, the cottage was empty. She crossed through the living room and stopped inside the kitchen door. There was no sound other than the drip of water from the tap, but through the window she could just see the back of Victoria’s head. Holding her breath, she edged around the table, careful to keep out of view.

Alice was sitting in a chair on the patch of gravel that widened out to where the grass began. Her hair and face were wet from the rain, her blouse a clinging second skin. Victoria was standing behind the chair, massaging Alice’s shoulders, but they didn’t seem to be talking. The sun was out now, a swathe of light catching the two of them against the red brick of the wall. The colours around them, on them, were rich and somehow golden. Helen felt her throat close up again. Poor Alice. She was so beautiful, so … other. A picture came into her mind of her own mother, fussing about things being tidy, always asking what she, Helen, had been doing. Victoria was so lucky.

Helen swiped a hand across her eyes, wishing she could go and join them. It would be like breaking through a spider’s web, though. She felt too large, too solid, the sort of clodhopping peasant who crashed into fairy stories and got turned into stone. Instead, she retreated into the sitting room but the front door was locked and there was no sign of the key. The windows were no use to her either, their frames sealed with many years’ worth of thick, white paint. For a brief second she felt a lack of air, the walls closing around her in a dizzy rush. The twins’ voices, floating down the stairs, came from another planet. She tried to think. She could join the twins. She could go back up to Victoria’s room. She could wait where she was, pretending to read or something. Or she could go home, giving a casual wave as she passed by, as if this sort of thing happened every day. There was only one option, really, and she made her way with slow steps back to the kitchen. It turned out that she needn’t have worried. As she sidled down the side of the cottage towards the path, one hand lifted, neither Victoria nor Alice noticed her go.