This Secret We're Keeping (15 page)

‘Forget about me, do you understand?’ I told her. ‘I’m the worst kind of bastard.’

She shook her head. The trails from her tears were snaking all over the smooth, plump skin of her cheeks. ‘I don’t think you are.’

‘One day you will. Believe me. One day, you’ll get what I’m talking about.’

There was a long pause as she stared into her lap. ‘That’s really patronizing, Mr L,’ she said eventually with a sniff, and then raised her head slightly to look at me again. ‘I know how I feel.’

Her expression was so earnest that my heart could have ripped in two. ‘You think you do,’ I told her, with some determination, ‘but trust me. You really don’t.’

After that, we didn’t speak again. I just watched as she stood up, adjusted her scarf and bag, and slid me one final, tearful sideways glance before picking her way back through the shrubbery and padding off down the path towards the school gates.

I remained where I was in the mud, literally unable to move. I stayed there until it was dark, knees in the dirt, shivering my bollocks off.

Monday
morning, and Jess awoke to an interesting soundtrack of vigorous whisking and the Stereophonics. Upon further inspection it turned out to be Zak downstairs at the Aga wearing tracksuit bottoms and her ancient Blur T-shirt, scrambling eggs and humming along to the music.

They’d rowed bitterly the previous night. Jess’s christening had overrun, thanks to a frustrating little domino of disasters that had kicked off with a long delay in getting everyone to sit down for dinner, whereupon some of the guests then forgot they were not at a wedding and kept standing up to make speeches during the main course. Fortunately, the final (interminable) discourse had been brought abruptly to a halt by a lengthy scuffle between two opposing branches of the father’s family, most of whom were apparently not even supposed to be there. But by the time everybody had calmed down and was seated for dessert, it was gone seven, at which point she’d already missed four calls from Zak, who was sitting in the Brancaster White Horse with his parents, waiting to order.

When she finally arrived back at the cottage, it was late, and Jess was half asleep with exhaustion. Zak, however, was wide awake, having spent the past few hours at a steady but furious simmer. His parents, apparently, were not the sort of people who indulged weak excuses like running late at work, a trait which was obviously genetic, because neither did Zak. His main line of argument seemed to be that Jess was inherently disorganized. Hers was that she wasn’t, plus he was
being an unreasonable dickhead. Zak had responded to this by swiping his arm along the length of the mantelpiece, which turned out to be an efficient way of dispatching some of the junk he despised so much.

Eventually they had made it up in the early hours of the morning in the same way they always did, and now Jess was battling waves of deep confliction over her kiss with Will on Saturday night. Despite it having been only the briefest of moments, it had left her feeling something that was obviously incompatible with Zak being in the room next door, arranging rashers of bacon in a frying pan on her behalf.

When the knock on the front door came, she only just registered it over the music and sizzling pan. Smudge scampered through from the kitchen to alternately bark at the intruder and wedge his nose against the bottom of the door, inhaling for clues. Jess set down her coffee and fiddled with the latch before swinging the door wide and locking eyes with Will.

In dark jeans and a fitted shirt, sunglasses perched on top of his head, he looked like something out of
Esquire
or an advert for an urbane brand of denim. He was jangling his keys in his hand and, stupidly, Jess glanced past him to scan the road for Matthew’s car, before remembering with a jolt that it was crushed years ago.

‘Morning,’ he said with a smile, and then hesitated. The kitchen could be seen from the front door and, straight away, he clocked Zak at the Aga. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be …’

It was at this point that Zak seemed to sense the air change, and looked over his shoulder.

Please stay where you are
, Jess begged him silently.
Just stay in the kitchen
.

But Zak cherished all opportunities to assert himself,
especially when it came to strange men turning up at his girlfriend’s front door. He set down his wooden spoon and wandered through to take up position directly behind Jess, slinging one arm up against the door frame and extending the other, palm open. ‘Zak Foster.’

He shook it. ‘Will Greene.’

Jess felt a flash of anger towards Zak for behaving as if both she and the house belonged to him. ‘Will’s a client.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Will said. ‘I’ve caught you at a bad time.’

‘No, no,’ Zak said firmly. ‘You’re fine, mate, absolutely fine.’ The way he said ‘mate’ was passive-aggressive in the same way that warring females called each other ‘sweetheart’ in city-centre bars. ‘Come in, come in.’ Zak put an arm round Jess’s waist and pulled her close to him, giving Will space to pass.

Jess caught Will’s eye as he hesitated. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it’s not important. I’ll catch you another time.’ And then he turned and began to head off.

She couldn’t just let him walk away. ‘Won’t be long,’ she said quickly to Zak, wriggling free from his grasp. She pulled the door firmly shut behind her and headed across the front lawn after Will, Smudge at her heels, though he quickly became distracted by the scent of bonemeal at the base of her hybrid tea rose.

It couldn’t have been much past ten a.m., and the sun was already warm and high, forcing her to squint into it. Will had pulled his sunglasses back down on to his face. Through the open window of the living room the music drifted out to them, sentimental and melodic.

‘Hello. That was awkward,’ Will said as they faced one another at the foot of the lawn.

Jess recalled their split-second kiss in the garage on Saturday night, and how great it had felt. As she batted the thought
away, she felt a wave of guilt over Natalie and Charlotte. Because he was no longer hers to kiss.

She looked over her shoulder to see if Zak was watching them. He was, steadily, through the living-room window.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Now’s probably not the best time.’

‘No, you’re right.’ He hesitated. ‘Are you okay, though?’ It seemed for a moment as if he might have wanted to take her hand, before deciding on the safer (wiser) option of maintaining his distance.

She nodded. ‘I’m okay. You?’

Taking a breath to speak, he let it go again. ‘Christ, this is –’ He gave a barely perceptible head tilt towards the cottage. ‘I feel like I’m on stage.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, shaking her head in mild frustration. There was so much she wanted to say, so much she wanted to hear.

He smiled faintly at her. ‘I was sort of hoping we could talk, but I’m not sure it’s an
ideal
three-way conversation.’

‘Later?’

‘Natalie’s out tomorrow night. I could call you.’

‘You could come over if you like.’

‘Ah.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Not sure it’s quite the conversation for a seven-year-old, either, actually.’

‘I keep forgetting,’ she said, embarrassed. ‘Sorry.’

He shook his head with a hazy, forgiving smile like,
Don’t
. ‘What’s your number?’ he asked her. ‘Natalie tends to deal with all the road-traffic accident admin in our household.’

She gave it to him and he tapped it into his phone.

‘Out of interest,’ Will said, his face tightening slightly as he slid the phone back into his pocket, ‘does he always watch you this closely?’

‘Zak’s just like that,’ she said lamely, resisting the urge to look. ‘He doesn’t really mean anything by it.’

‘Sorry. Don’t want to cause you problems.’

‘You haven’t,’ she said quickly. ‘I can handle Zak.’

Will cleared his throat pointedly then and nodded towards the cottage. Jess turned to see Zak striding across the lawn to join them. Clearly, he’d got bored of waiting.

Slinging a possessive arm round Jess’s shoulders and delivering a patronizing peck to the top of her head, Zak started talking loudly at Will. ‘You know, I can’t quite place you, but you look very familiar.’

Jess was stunned. It would have taken nothing short of a forensic mind to match Will Greene with Matthew Landley purely from sight. She was sure – almost beyond doubt – that he couldn’t possibly know.

Unless someone’s told him
.

Above their heads, a trio of wood pigeons cooed softly from their perching place atop the pantiles as if expressing their fascination for the dangerous little drama playing out beneath them on Jess’s front lawn.

‘I don’t think so,’ Will said brusquely, matching Zak’s tone.

‘No, you do,’ Zak needled. ‘You definitely do.’

‘Zak, Will needs to go,’ Jess said quickly. ‘I’m sure it’ll come to you.’

‘Okay, baby,’ Zak said with a shrug, and Jess could almost see Will mouthing
Baby?
at her in disbelief. ‘I’m sure Will and I will have the pleasure of meeting again soon. You know – this village being the size that it is.’

Jess rolled her eyes. Will smiled tightly, and with dignity said, ‘I look forward to it,’ before turning his back on them both and heading for his car. Zak’s arm remained firmly clamped round Jess’s shoulders as the car roared off.

‘For fuck’s sake, Zak,’ Jess couldn’t help but mutter at him, swatting away a kamikaze fly.

‘Don’t tell me
you’re
annoyed. Who the fuck is he, standing out here like he owns the place?’

‘I could say the same about you.’

‘Come on, Jess, I’m serious!’ He looked down at her. ‘Who the fuck is that guy?’ His eyes were simmering with something that definitely wasn’t love.

‘Well, why don’t you tell me?’ she said, her voice trembling with anger as she shrugged his arm from her shoulders. ‘You were the one going on and on about him seeming familiar.’

Zak let out a puff of frustrated half-laughter. ‘Come on, Jess. I saw him whip his phone out. What is he, your secret shag?’

The sunlight was hot, and she was starting to melt standing still in it. ‘I think you should go home, Zak.’ And then she steamed past him back into the cool gloom of the cottage, where for want of anything obvious to vent her frustration on she grabbed the abandoned egg pan from the hotplate of the Aga, discarding its contents like vomit into the bin before slinging it in the sink. She wanted to insist that he leave, but she couldn’t handle a screaming match right now. She rested both hands against the worktop and attempted to steady her thoughts.

‘You’re welcome for breakfast, by the way,’ Zak said behind her from the doorway. ‘Oh, and while we’re on the subject of withholding the truth, I think you should tell me what the fuck you’ve done to your leg.’

Jess stayed where she was. ‘We’ve been through this. It’s nothing.’ She had initially intended to tell him, but after much agonizing had been unable to think of a way of explaining it all that wouldn’t have resulted in Zak hot-footing it to the nearest police station – or, even worse, Will’s front door. So she’d opted instead to meticulously
keep the bruising covered up, even insisting on having sex with all the lights off, much to Zak’s displeasure.

‘Oh, really? Then why does your thigh remind me of roadkill?’

‘It looks worse than it is.’

‘That wasn’t the question.’

‘I knocked it.’

‘Against what, traffic on the M25?’

‘I fell into a creek, out on the marsh.’

He gave a contemptuous little laugh. ‘Sorry – which is it? Did you knock it or did you fall into a creek?’

She turned round to face him then. ‘Both, okay, Zak? I knocked it as I was falling into the sodding creek!’

He let her defence hang weakly in the air for a couple of moments before turning the screw a little tighter. ‘Oh, that’s strange,’ he said, all sarcasm and upper hand, ‘because that type of bruising is actually more consistent with a road traffic accident than it is with a fall.’

She swallowed, all out of ideas.

‘If there’s one thing I hate,’ Zak said then, ‘it’s lying.’

There followed a pause that lasted long enough to make Jess feel really uncomfortable.

‘Just go home, Zak,’ she said softly, eventually.

‘Oh, really? Just go home?’

‘Yes, go home! I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.’

‘I think as your boyfriend I’m within my rights to ask why you look as if you’ve been hit by a fucking freight train!’

Like a firework, Zak’s temper had a definitive trajectory: in the wake of the initial explosion, it was generally best to regard him from a safe distance until he burnt out. Asking him to stay calm was about as effective as pleading with a Catherine wheel to slow the fuck down.

‘IF YOU WON’T TALK TO ME, JESSICA,’ he
shouted, ‘THEN WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING HERE?
¡Joder!
’

Smudge padded quietly up to Jess and positioned himself at her feet in a silent show of solidarity.

‘Please just go,’ she said again. ‘You’re scaring the dog.’

He was evidently angry enough by now not to care about her leg any more. ‘Jesus. Fuck the fucking dog.’ He left the kitchen and steamed back into the living room and up the stairs, cursing heavily in Spanish as he went.

Jess sank down on to the sofa and put her head in her hands, waiting for him to come back down and deliver his final shot.

He reappeared quicker than she’d expected. ‘By the way, if I find out that prick on your doorstep had anything to do with that mess on your leg, I will fucking kill him.’

The following evening, as daylight faded, Jess used one hand to dig fervently into a bowl of milk chocolate mousse left over from the christening and the other to clamp a bumper bag of peas to her elevated leg. She was sitting with Smudge, watching a gaggle of grocery-wielding suits rampaging up and down the streets of central London in the opening episode of
The
Apprentice
, seemingly to do little more than ambush unsuspecting City workers with inedible makeshift lunches that they didn’t actually want.

Her phone buzzed.

‘Are you watching this? It’s like the world’s weirdest lunch break.’

She laughed. ‘I know! It’s compulsive though. What exactly is it they’re supposed to be doing again?’

‘Haven’t got a clue. I don’t think they do either.’

There was a pause.

‘So, any thoughts on the other night?’ Will said carefully, like he thought it was a topic that might need easing into.

‘Well, I should apologize. For kissing you. I’m not normally like that. You’ve got a girlfriend and …’

‘Come on, Jess,’ he said softly. ‘Hello? It’s me.’

Relieved, Jess attempted a silent spoon-lick.

‘So how did it pan out with your boyfriend yesterday?’ he asked her. ‘I sensed an imminent threat to my kneecaps.’

She frowned. ‘Sorry about that. Zak’s … you know. Very passionate. He says what he thinks. He’s half Spanish.’

There was a short pause. ‘Not that Spain’s not one of my favourite ever countries, Jess,’ Will said eventually, ‘but I find that to be a bit of an odd logic.’

Jess agreed, actually. She was never quite sure why she used Zak’s Hispanic roots to excuse the worst of their fights.