This Secret We're Keeping (19 page)

Yet back then it meant everything.

‘But you have Natalie now, and Charlotte,’ she felt obliged to point out, though the words physically stuck in her throat, coming out only half formed.

He held her gaze for just a second more before looking down at the carpet. ‘Yep,’ he said, his tone now artificially bright as he appeared to collect himself. ‘You’re right. All things considered … I’m actually pretty lucky.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said quickly, her voice rushing out to meet his in alarm. ‘I just wanted to say – you have a family, which …’ But then she wavered, unable to finish.

‘… is an amazing thing,’ he supplied firmly, though his voice was quiet.

She felt a strong compulsion then to bolt over to him and wrap her arms round his waist, bury her face against his chest. But she forced herself to resist, to remain marooned there where she was.

‘I owe her everything I have,’ Will mumbled, like the hasty recollection of a mantra he repeated dutifully into the bathroom mirror each morning.

‘I didn’t mean that you owe her anything,’ Jess said softly.

‘No,’ he said, looking over at her again. ‘But the fact is, I do.’ A couple of moments passed before he shook his head. ‘Hey, let’s talk about something else. Oh – you might like this, actually.’ He moved to his left and opened a wardrobe door. Rummaging briefly, he turned to face her. ‘Ready?’

She smiled, grateful for the distraction. ‘Oh God. Am I? I don’t know.’

He grinned, and slowly withdrew a pair of tan cowboy boots from the back of the wardrobe.

Jess clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Wow.’

‘I know. Weird.’

‘Do you ever wear them?’

He shook his head. ‘Kind of past my cowboy phase now. But … I always knew I’d keep them. They’re my memento of being carefree.’

She smiled, thinking back to all the times she’d seen him wearing them at Hadley Hall and thought how cool he was. If she was honest, she still thought he was pretty cool now.

‘I won’t model them for you. They don’t look quite as good with middle age.’

‘Well, I can remember what you looked like in them as if it was yesterday.’

She noticed him swallow. ‘Anyway,’ he said, looking down at the boots, ‘I stashed them in the car when we moved. I like to keep an eye on them. Natalie’s been trying to smuggle them to a charity shop since the day I met her.’

‘Thanks for showing me.’

‘Any time,’ he said, setting them gently back down on the carpet.

There was a pause so light it was barely there. Will exhaled. ‘We should probably go downstairs.’

She nodded. ‘Okay.’

But neither of them moved.

‘Only because,’ he added, ‘if Charlotte wandered in here now, I’m not sure how I’d explain entertaining you in my bedroom to her mother.’

She nodded, and made to move past him, but as she did he reached out and grabbed her hand. Instantly, her chest cramped with longing, and she wrapped her fingers back round his. His hand felt hot and firm. Her heart began to pound.

Will shook his head as he studied her, like he thought she
might in fact be a ghost, like the very idea of her didn’t make logical sense. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just … weird getting used to being around you, Jess. All the rules are different this time.’ But he didn’t let go of her hand.

They stared at one another for a couple of seconds, a wordless asking of impossible questions.

‘I think about you a lot more than I should,’ Will confessed then, his words catching against the stillness of the room. But before she could tell him,
I think about you too
, he was stepping forward, taking her face in his hands and kissing her, hard.

She felt as if her heart might explode with the familiar, urgent passion she had once known so well. There was no feeling their way here, no waiting for permission, no gentle exploration. In an instant his tongue was in her mouth and his body against hers. The taste of him was hot, intoxicating.

They took a few stumbled steps together until Jess’s back was touching the wardrobe. Now he had her, one hand on either side of her shoulders, kissing her harder, pressing himself against her. ‘It’s you, Jess,’ he mumbled, the words falling from his mouth into hers. ‘It’s always been you.’

And then, from the stillness beyond the bedroom, the sound of thick, urgent shuddering. Instantly, instinctively, Will pulled back to listen. It was the unmistakable sound of a child’s sleep-ridden sobbing.

‘Dad-dy,’ came a thin, confused cry. ‘Dad-deeee.’

‘
Fuck
,’ he groaned.

They stood there, still holding one another, breathing hard but not moving, hoping perhaps that Charlotte might lull herself back to sleep. But the sobbing grew gradually louder.

Will rubbed his face vigorously before pacing a couple of
times across the room as he called out, ‘Coming, sweetheart.’ And then, as soon as he could, he made his exit, footsteps heavy on the landing as he jogged next door.

Jess rested her head back against the wardrobe and shut her eyes, her blood pumping, her underwear damp, her skin flushed. She tried to steady herself.
Oh my God. I cannot be doing this. This cannot be happening.
They were in Natalie’s bedroom, in Natalie’s house, with Natalie’s daughter clearly having some sort of traumatic sleep experience next door. The whole situation was completely reprehensible, yet she wanted him so badly she thought she might expire if he didn’t come back into the bedroom and kiss her again within the next few seconds. She waited and waited, her heartbeat slowly returning to normal. Eventually she moved to the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress, knowing she should feel relieved that the whole thing had been stopped in its tracks before it had got out of hand.

It’s for the best.

It’s for the best
.

After a few minutes, he reappeared in the doorway, looking strained. He put a finger to his lips and came towards her as she got to her feet. Her legs felt as if they might give way at any second.

‘Charlotte’s wet the bed,’ he whispered, so quietly she could barely hear him. ‘I’m sorry.’

She knew what he was saying. Of course, she had to go.

They stared at one another for a few more moments. ‘I’m so sorry, Jess,’ he said, and she didn’t dare to ask him what he was apologizing for because she wasn’t really sure she was ready to hear the answer.

For the faintest of seconds she thought again about making her confession, giving oxygen to the little flame of guilt that flickered constantly inside her. But she had no idea how
to begin; and then she realized he was waiting, in the politest of ways, for her to leave. She forced her face into a smile and made to move past him.

‘Wait,’ he whispered, and for a moment her heart leapt. Then he tilted his head towards Charlotte’s bedroom. ‘I’ll just run some water in the bathroom. I’m … nervous she’ll hear you.’ He left the room and, a couple of seconds later, a tap began to roar.

She cleared her throat, pushed the hair back from her face and straightened her top. Her strapless bra had slipped down partly on one side. She hitched it back up, and in that moment, she felt as cheap as she knew it was possible to feel.

In the whole time she’d known him, he had never once made her feel like that.

Less than a week
after I found myself kissing Jessica Hart in the middle of a laurel bush, the snow began to fall.

I was freezing alone at home in the cottage, the thick skirmish of a blizzard outside. My ancient central heating system just wasn’t cutting it, so I’d ended up in a sort of staring contest with my gas fire as I tried to work out how long it would take for the carbon monoxide poisoning to kick in if I lit it. The thing had recently been condemned by my landlord’s handy man, whom I suspected to be less than qualified and under orders to ingeniously lower the gas bill by way of a fat yellow sticker slapped over the ‘on’ dial.

It turned out to be a winning tactic because, when it comes down to it, nobody laughs in the face of a condemned sticker. So I decided to drink some brandy instead, on the basis that it had warming properties not dissimilar to naked flames, and (if I stuck to my units) came with the added bonus of not being life-threatening.

Some weeks earlier, I’d found an ancient bottle of the stuff hidden away under the stairs, along with some blunt screwdrivers and a length of nylon rope – all of which must have belonged to my landlord. My first thought had been that I didn’t want my fingerprints getting mixed up with any of
that
; but the combined effect of the snowstorm and my
piss-weak radiators was finally forcing my hand. So I wrapped myself up in my grandmother’s old tartan blanket, turned my back on the fraudulently redundant gas fire and cracked open the brandy.

Before I drank it, I had envisioned the taste of a tenant’s sweet revenge. After I drank it, what I actually tasted was the closest I’d ever come to sampling paint stripper. Still, it had the desired effect.

I was halfway through removing my own oesophagus – and feeling considerably the warmer for it – when I registered the sound of tapping on wood. The number-one suspect, as always, was Mrs Parker. We’d recently been having one of those subtly hostile neighbour debates about encroaching tree roots (mine under her lawn), which she liked to kick off a couple of times a week by striding purposefully into my garden and rapping on the back door.

I decided this time to invite her in and show her the gas fire, which I thought would be an easy way of demonstrating that if she expected my landlord to be putting his wallet behind any form of horticulture this side of the millennium, then she was going as senile as the old man five doors down who quite regularly took a turn down the local B-roads stark naked.

I pulled the rug tight round my shoulders and padded through to the kitchen, thinking that perhaps if she saw me wrapped up and swigging from a brandy bottle I might also be able to convince her that I was unwell, and perhaps postpone our little tree-root war until I’d made my (protracted) recovery.

But it wasn’t Mrs Parker who was standing on my back doorstep.

My only contact with Jessica Hart since our tearful kiss on Monday had been yesterday, during double maths. I had
tried and failed to avoid her eye, pushing away any thoughts relating to Venice or Puglia, and sidestepping the topic of homework when it became pretty obvious from her nervous fidgeting that she’d failed to do any.

‘Jess,’ I said, and then – because she already looked as if she was trying really hard not to laugh at me – broke into a bemused smile. ‘What?’

‘You look like a homeless person!’

I glanced down at myself wrapped up in my grandmother’s blanket, brandy bottle swinging from my hand. ‘This isn’t all I do, you know,’ I felt obliged to clarify as I attempted to straighten my face.

‘Okay,’ she said, eyes sparkling, smile still wide. ‘I believe you, Mr L.’

‘It’s snowing,’ I said, as a kind of explanation. Normality went on hold when it snowed, wasn’t that how it worked? The everyday became the extraordinary.

We stood facing one another. Her hair was littered with thick white flakes, and she was quivering against the cold. She wasn’t even wearing a coat, just an Aran-look sweater and some skinny brown cords that had darkened to halfway up her calves with the wet. On her feet was a pair of grey Converse pumps, and they looked soaked through. I had a strong urge to take off my blanket and wrap her up in it but, ungallantly, I stalled.

I couldn’t let her in.

‘I know,’ she said, meeting my eye as I dithered.

‘You know what?’

‘That I’m not supposed to be here. I know I shouldn’t keep turning up, but I just …’ She trailed off, sounding exasperated. With whom, I wasn’t quite sure.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, even though we both knew it wasn’t. I wanted to help her – as her teacher aside from anything
else – but this was one of those scenarios that fell into the surprisingly sizeable grey area surrounding my educational remit like the gloomy chasm of a moat.

I could feel my resolve gradually weakening as I stood there staring down at her, trying to remind myself why Jessica being snowed on in my garden was more sensible than her being two steps further forward in the (relative) warmth of my kitchen.

Her teeth were starting to chatter. ‘My mum and my sister are fighting. I just needed to …’

And then – because she looked sad and snowflakey, and I was full of brandy – I thought,
Sod it
. So I stepped forward and unwound the rug from my shoulders before leaning across to slip it over hers. As I pulled the edges together in front of her she reached up to take them from me, and our eyes met. I swallowed hard, then put a hand to her back and guided her inside.

She knelt down on the doormat to remove her shoes and socks, the blanket covering her back like a cape, and I couldn’t help noticing that she’d painted her toenails. Midnight blue, flecked with glitter. I swallowed again, maybe audibly this time, because something about her bare feet in my house suddenly made everything feel shockingly intimate.

‘So what were they fighting about?’ I asked her as I shut the door. The draught brought with it a final little flurry of snowflakes that wafted delicately to rest on my socks like tiny pirouetting ballerinas.

Standing up again, she shrugged from somewhere beneath the blanket like she was trying not to care. ‘My mum ran out of vodka. And our TV never works when it’s raining.’ She sighed. ‘Or snowing.’

Realizing that it would be inappropriate to continue
casually ingesting biohazards while Jess confided in me, I silently set the brandy bottle down on the countertop.

‘It’s okay, Mr L,’ Jess said quickly, watching me. ‘I’m … unexpected.’

‘Yeah. You are,’ I frowned. ‘You’re completely fucking unexpected.’

She didn’t say anything for a couple of moments, just let her gaze rest against mine while she carried on quivering under the blanket. The silence called for one of us to make a constructive suggestion, and I sensed it should be me.

‘Let me do something,’ I said. ‘About your mum.’

‘It’s not up to you,’ she replied, but in a tone that was matter of fact rather than ungrateful.

‘It is,’ I protested softly. ‘I’m your teacher. I should help.’ I felt this to be true, even if I didn’t know it for a fact.

‘You already do.’

‘How?’ I couldn’t think of anything I did in particular except let her into my cottage after dark on Saturday nights and try very hard not to think of her as anything other than a pupil.

‘You’re always so calm,’ she said simply, like that was the only quality she would ever seek out in someone. As she spoke, she was still wobbling away like an injured animal under the rug.

‘Sit here with me,’ I told her then, remembering a tip from the previous tenant. ‘There’s a hot-water pipe running under this patch of floor. Keeps you warm.’

So we slid down together on to the pitted linoleum, our backs against the kitchen cabinets. It seemed quite natural for me to put my arm round her then, and as she tucked herself comfortably into the crook of my shoulder, I found myself wondering how something so wrong could feel so fucking right. It made me angry, almost. Like someone else
was making up all the rules and the people who really mattered didn’t get a say.

‘I was thinking about Italy last night,’ she murmured then. ‘Tell me what it’s like.’

Her breath made a wistful sigh against my neck as she spoke, and I felt my skin become studded with goose pimples, though not from the cold. I realized then that Jess had become like a tiny shooting star across my black imagination, destined after Christmas to vanish into darkness, leaving only the glimmer of a light stream to mark her path.

I looked down at the top of her head. All the snowflakes had melted into her hair, leaving it flecked with little spots of damp. I thought about telling her what I knew of Italy, which was that my grandmother’s family lived in Tuscany. They were in the alabaster trade, and owned a rolling estate in the countryside stuffed with olive trees and sunshine. Alabaster, apparently, could afford you quite a nice lifestyle if you played it right, and from what I’d heard, my dad’s uncles and cousins had done just that, and now spent most of their time dining al fresco, eating gelato and drinking Chianti. (Quite why my father had opted to stay in England after university rather than head out to Italy was anyone’s guess. For my part, I was convinced that I’d be a lot more suave and a lot less idiotic if I lived in Tuscany and had made it big in alabaster.)

But there was something about describing all this that felt a little too much like telling her a bedtime story. So, instead, I ended up mumbling, ‘It’s just … it’s really hot out there. You’re so pale, you’d burn. You’d need sun cream.’

Jess seemed to think this was hilarious. ‘I thought you were going to tell me all about the wine and the architecture and the language and the history! I can see why you became a maths teacher!’

I smiled. She was right. And then I felt relieved, because it was obvious now that she definitely didn’t think I was trying to be smooth, or charm her. Somewhere along the path of my paternal bloodline, my Italian DNA had clearly gone MIA.

She nudged into me then with what could have been an elbow – though given that all her various body parts had now been welded into one by the blanket, it was hard to tell. ‘So why
did
you become a maths teacher?’ she asked me.

‘As opposed to an English teacher?’

‘As opposed to anything.’

I wanted to say it was because I’d hoped to do some good in the world, but then again, the question was coming from a fifteen-year-old girl who was somewhere in the region of my left pectoral, and with whom I already had two illegal kisses to my name. ‘Well,’ I ventured, deciding to opt for a response slightly lower down the hypocrisy scale, ‘I guess I thought I might be good at it.’

‘You are.’

I looked down at her against my shoulder and smiled. ‘Ha. No offence, Jess, but your grades are fairly consistent in suggesting otherwise.’

She smiled back up at me with her eyes. ‘Well, if I’m going to be a chef, that won’t matter, will it? I only need to be able to cook.’

‘You’ll need maths if you open your own restaurant. Who’s going to do your books?’

‘Well, maybe I’ll just call you,’ she said teasingly, with a grin.

We were quiet for a few moments then, and I tried to concentrate on the sight of the snowstorm beyond the windowpane as opposed to the feeling of Jess beneath my arm, the closeness of her form against me. From somewhere
under the lino, the water pipe was starting to slowly heat the seat of my jeans, and I was about to ask her if she was feeling any warmer when she turned her face up to mine and murmured, ‘What are your parents like, Mr L?’

‘My parents?’ I repeated.

She nodded against my chest. ‘Do you get on?’

I hesitated, but I couldn’t pretend. ‘Really well,’ I told her, feeling almost guilty about it. ‘I mean, they like what they like, but we’re really close.’

‘I’d love to meet them,’ Jess said, but it seemed like less of a request than a modest ambition to one day encounter a real-life family who weren’t all certifiably insane. ‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’

‘One brother. Richard.’

‘What’s he like?’

Ah, Richard.
Where ambition goes for a quick lie-down
, I thought. By his own admission, all Richard needed to be happy in life was a sofa, a TV, the complete James Bond video library and a small circle of like-minded nerdy friends to share it all with. And of these, he already had the lot – so in theory, at least, he was perfectly content.

I probably used to be a bit condescending about the way Richard chose to live his life, until he pointed out to me that I wasn’t doing such a great job of striking out and doing anything particularly awe-inspiring myself. In a way, I realized, it was me who was the loser, because I wanted to be so much more than I was, whereas Richard was perfectly at peace with his own mediocrity (his words, not mine).

‘Actually,’ I said with a smile, ‘Richard’s great. You’d really like him.’

‘Is he younger or older?’ Jess asked me.

‘Two years younger.’

‘Lucky you. Anna’s got younger sisters too. I hate being
the youngest. Debbie’s so bossy. Plus she never got on with my dad. She always said I was his favourite.’

Something about that made me think that discerning an affinity or otherwise with her father had been, until he died, Jess’s quick-fire measure of a person’s character. So far we had her alcoholic mother and slightly strange sister who didn’t get on with him. I was sensing a pattern.

‘What was he like?’ I asked her carefully.

‘Oh, the best,’ she said simply. ‘He was funny. We used to laugh all the time about really stupid stuff. He was so much fun. Wound my mum up something rotten.’

She was speaking into the hem of the blanket, the lower half of her face obscured. Only her nose was sticking out, her grey eyes blinking, like she was hiding from something or someone. But that someone couldn’t have been me, because she wriggled an arm free then and reached out for my hand, pulling it on to hers beneath the tent of the wool.

I turned my head and looked down at her. Her fingers felt icy in my palm. She’d started to quiver with the cold again, shuddering softly against me.