This Secret We're Keeping (22 page)

‘Odd jobs?’

‘That was how I paid my rent before I met Natalie. You know – painting, putting up shelves, trying my hand at plastering. Which is harder than it looks, by the way.’ He smiled. ‘Some people are definitely born to be teachers, Jess. Turns out I’m one of them.’

Jess looked down at her coffee, suddenly overcome with memories of Matthew scrawling frantic formulas across the blackboard at Hadley Hall, shouting them out as he wrote, jabbing his stick of chalk to emphasize each point, so passionate that his class should grasp what he was telling them. It made her want to weep with regret.

‘Where were you living?’ she asked him. ‘When you met her?’

‘Converted cupboard in Bethnal Green. I had to go with the first landlord who didn’t want to check if I had a criminal record. So when Natalie asked me to move in with her, it felt like …’

A relief
, Jess thought.

‘… everything was going to be all right.’

There was a pause.

‘So she fell pregnant –’ Jess prompted him.

‘Oh, yeah. Well, we were living in Camden back then and … you know, ever since leaving prison I’d had this craving for outside space. It was a bit of a compulsion. I did it all the time when I was single – just took myself off to the nearest park to look at the sky, feel the air on my face. So whenever me and Natalie had a fight I’d head out on to Primrose Hill and sit there on the grass, thinking about … everything.’

‘Everything like what?’

He sipped from his coffee. ‘You. Us. Prison. Whether I should stay with Natalie.’

‘You really think she did it on purpose? Stopped taking the pill?’

He nodded. ‘Well, that was part of the reason we were fighting. You know, I’d make accusations, she’d deny it and start crying – and then I’d look at her standing there in front of me all hysterical with her little baby bump sticking out over the top of her trousers, and I’d feel like the world’s biggest bastard. And then I’d remember how she’d rescued me from that cupboard in the East End and … you know. There was give and take on both sides, Jess.’

Jess swallowed away a surge of some very acidic thoughts about Natalie.

‘Anyway, a few years ago, she got really pissed on her
birthday and admitted it. Said she’d done it to keep me, because she thought I seemed a bit twitchy.’

‘Shit.’ Jess shook her head. She looked down at the contents of her bowl, a little autumn rainbow topped off with the yolky yellow remains of a perfectly fried duck egg. Her hunger had suddenly evaporated. She felt almost nauseous.

‘She tried to make me feel as if the whole thing was my fault for not wanting a family with her in the first place,’ Will continued. ‘Anyway, the next morning I got up and looked at Charlotte across the breakfast table and … well. Let’s just say it’s impossible to have any sort of valid regret when your three-year-old takes your hand in hers, squeezes it really tight and tells you not to be sad.’

From somewhere in the corner, a baby began to wail. Jess felt entirely sympathetic.

‘Fucking hell,’ she mumbled. ‘She really did trap you.’

‘Yeah, but if she knew the truth about me …’ He trailed off, his face folding into a frown. ‘She would say that my dishonesty is worse than hers ever was.’

Jess shook her head. ‘You’re just too afraid to tell her. That’s different to –’ she hesitated – ‘deliberate deception.’ She leaned back in her chair again as the mother with the wailing baby passed their table and headed out of the door in an attempt to placate him with some fresh air.

‘Anyway, I’ve got Charlotte now,’ Will said eventually. ‘She makes up for most things. To be honest, Jess, I live for her now. I don’t have a job, I have no means of really supporting myself … All these years, without Natalie and Charlotte, I would have had nothing. And I don’t just mean financially. They put purpose back into my life when every last shred of it was gone.’

Jess finished her coffee and tried to pretend she wasn’t experiencing fierce stirrings of resentment towards Natalie.

He observed her for a couple of moments. ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you angry before.’

‘It has been known.’ But then she found herself unable to meet his eye, so she glanced over at the counter instead. ‘Let’s get the bill.’

They wound their way back up Elm Hill and along the end of Princes Street towards the city centre, meandering slowly, not wanting to rush. Though Will had his sunglasses on again, she sensed somehow that his eyes were scanning the street as they walked, like he was half expecting a paparazzo to hop out from an innocuous doorway and have them plastered all over the front page of the
Sun
by tomorrow morning.

‘But you’ve managed to avoid marriage, so far,’ she said as they crossed at the lights opposite the church. From somewhere behind them, the cathedral bells began to chime, a heavy, comforting clunking of timeless song.

‘Well, that’s not difficult. Natalie’s been married before – she was young, only eighteen – and I made it clear from the start that I wasn’t keen. I mean, she can engineer a pregnancy, but she can’t exactly frogmarch me down the aisle.’

Jess became momentarily distracted by a horrifying vision of Natalie crushing narcotics into Will’s cornflakes so she could drag him unimpeded to a registry office and elicit his dribbled consent to a lifetime of sham marriage. By the time she had reached the top of Bridewell Alley and Will had haplessly slurred his way through the wedding vows, Jess realized he was no longer at her side. Turning to look for him, she saw that he had been chatting to a
Big Issue
seller and was now jogging to catch up with her, magazine in hand.

‘I feel bad,’ she said. ‘I never stop.’

‘Force of habit. We do the soup kitchen thing each Christmas.’

She looked across at him. ‘Seriously?’

He laughed as they began to walk again, deep in the channel of winding, medieval streets where ancient buildings bowed towards one another above their heads. ‘Well, it’s like a White family tradition. Natalie used to do it with her mum every year. I always get goats for my birthday too – you know, like for a village somewhere in the depths of Burkina Faso.’

Jess wrinkled her nose and said nothing. Right now, she wanted to despise Natalie, not hear Will eulogizing about her philanthropic charms. Arriving at the top of the hill, they headed straight on to Back of the Inns, past all the clothing retailers, before turning right through the Royal Arcade.

‘This is going to sound really lame,’ Will said, ‘but spending time inside really does make you appreciate the little things. It brings you a bit closer to people who have nothing.’

She looked across at him. ‘But Natalie doesn’t know that.’

‘God, no. She just thinks I’m really into swapping goats for birthdays.’

She laughed. ‘And what does Charlotte get?’

‘Oh, all the same old plastic tat as the other kids. Especially at Christmas, to bribe her into the soup kitchen with us. Seven’s a bit too young to force selflessness on her.’

They emerged together on to the bustle of Gentleman’s Walk. The street was noisy and hot, packed with tourists and insurance workers on lunch breaks and shoppers stamping sweatily from one store to the next. There were dogs on strings, girls in hot pants handing out money-off vouchers,
boys crouched down low on BMX bikes, weaving their way through the crowds. It was a good day for basking at a pavement table outside a coffee shop, for sitting in the square under the shade of the lime trees, for heading up to the castle to dangle bare feet into the cold water of the fountain.

‘So what do you want to do now?’ Will asked, turning to face her.

‘Let’s go back to the car,’ she said.

He hesitated, and winced. ‘Can I be stubborn and say I really don’t want to go home yet?’

‘Me neither. I’ve got this crazy idea.’

He smiled. ‘Excellent. It’s been a long time since I had one of those.’

They drove to a budget hotel in the south of the city.

Will checked them in, paying with cash and mumbling something unnecessary to the receptionist about coming back down for their bags. Then he grabbed Jess’s hand and gripped it tightly as they moved wordlessly through carpet-freshened corridors, their eyes flicking from door to door to identify the right number.

Eventually, reaching their room on the second floor, they faced one another. ‘You okay?’ he asked her, because it was obvious that once they were the other side of that door, there would be no going back.

She nodded, and he turned the key to let them both in. The space inside was gloomy and stale, the watered-down sunlight filtered by net curtains and dust motes thrown around by some poorly executed vacuuming.

They sat down together on the edge of the bed. The sheets on the thin mattress were stiff and off-white, a row of
mismatched coat hangers was dangling half-broken from an open rail and a yellowing notice slapped wonkily on the mirror above the television reminded them bossily to neither smoke nor expect breakfast. The whole place felt devoid of soul; perfect, then, for an act of ill-judgement.

Jess edged a nervous smile at him. ‘Did we really just do that?’

‘Check into a dodgy hotel mid-afternoon?’

She winced and nodded.

Will looked down at his hands, resting chastely in his lap. ‘We’ve done worse before now.’

She thought about it. ‘No, that was good,’ she said. ‘This … this is bad.’

He laughed softly and looked across at her. ‘I love that you think it was good. You know we’re the only ones in the world who think it was anything other than completely despicable?’

‘We were also the only ones there.’

‘Truth,’ he said thoughtfully.

Jess hesitated. ‘Look, just so you know, I don’t normally behave like this,’ she said, at exactly the same time as Will said, ‘So on a scale of one to ten, how obvious do you think we were back there?’

‘Ten being obvious?’

‘You’re right. Probably about eleven. Oh, and by the way, I’m hardly sitting in judgement over how you behave. Hello? It’s me.’

‘For the record though,’ she said, ‘this is probably the worst thing I’ve ever done.’

He rubbed his jaw. ‘Budget hotel with wipe-clean curtains? You’re right, this is all a bit crime-against-culture.’

She rocked into him with her elbow. ‘No. I didn’t mean that.’

‘What did you mean then?’ he asked, reaching out to brush the hair from her face.

Briefly, she let her gaze travel the room. The brown bloom of a water stain decorated the ceiling, and a cobweb laced its way from the bedside lamp to the MDF headboard. The place was grubby and suggestive all at once, and it struck her that maybe they had rooms reserved especially for a certain category of guest. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘checking into a hotel with someone else’s boyfriend.’ She failed to mention Zak, though he was as heavy in her mind as Natalie.

By now Will’s hand was resting gently against the back of her neck. ‘Seriously, Jess – we don’t have to do this.’ As he paused, his fingertips felt like little electrodes against her skin. ‘Honestly – we can go right now, if this isn’t what you want.’

Even as he was speaking, Jess’s heart was pounding, and she already knew that she didn’t possess the willpower to leave. ‘Wouldn’t that count as the shortest-lived clandestine affair in history?’

Will frowned. ‘Oh, yeah. Well, in that case, we’d better stay for a bit. You’re right, I don’t think my ego could quite handle walking back into reception after only –’ he glanced at his watch – ‘four-and-a-half minutes.’ He exhaled, steadily. ‘Maybe we should find something to do. You know, to fill the time.’

‘Um, like what?’

‘Um, like this.’ He leaned across, taking her face between his hands, and in the next moment they were kissing urgently, their mouths all over one another, starting where they had left off the other day – or was that the other decade?

Will saw fit to skip the introductory chapters they already knew so well, and Jess wasn’t about to protest. He unzipped
her dress at the back with one hand and she lifted his T-shirt up over his head. She was surprised to see that his torso too was now covered with tattoos, but had zero inclination to stop and remark on the fact. He was tanned and muscular, but not overly so – just perfect.

He pulled the straps of her dress roughly down over her shoulders, before unsnapping her bra as she unbuttoned his flies. Groaning as she took his cock in her hand, he responded by reaching down and slipping his fingers between her legs. She let out a cry of pleasure, coloured by all the years that had gone before. They kissed and touched one another like that for what seemed like hours, hands and legs and mouths everywhere, their bodies starting to gleam with sweat, before Will finally pushed her on to her back, straddling her with jeans around his knees. Moments later he was finally inside her once again, moving quickly and vigorously, the muscles in his arms and torso pumped. She shut her eyes and abandoned herself completely, feeling only delirium. ‘Look at me,’ he growled, lowering his face so his breath brushed her neck. ‘Don’t shut your eyes. Look at me.’ So she did, and even as they both began to lose control, their gazes remained locked tight until eventually came the sweetest relief of all.

They spent the rest of the day in that strange little room, the semi-plastic curtains shutting out the sunshine as they alternated between talking, laughing and fucking each other sore.

It was different to how it had been before. It had always been passionate – their own private thrill – but this time there was an edge to it, something raw and rough and seemingly uncontrollable. She had always remembered Will as sexually confident, but this time he almost overpowered
her. It excited her: she felt a hunger for him that made sex with Zak feel like taking afternoon tea at Beelings.

They opened the curtains again, flung open a window and basked like cats in the sun as the breeze rushed in and tickled their bare skin. Rush-hour traffic began to build – always gridlock on a Friday in Norwich – and they listened to the sound of the everyday, gears crunching and engines revving as office workers inched their way homewards, the occasional blast of music drifting out of car windows.