This Secret We're Keeping (28 page)

Because that was what was going round my head after Jessica left the store cupboard that afternoon. I stayed in
there alone for a little while longer, attempting to revisit planet earth so I could psyche myself up to act normally on my walk back through the school to the car park – but all I could hear was an unidentifiable voice barrelling around inside my mind chanting:
Pervert. Pervert. Pervert
.

Jess
probably hadn’t spent the whole of Friday night sleeping at altitude, but that’s what her dry mouth and headache were telling her when she woke up on Saturday morning. Smudge was downstairs barking hysterically, the alarm clock said eight a.m., and somebody was under the misguided impression that now would be a good time to repeat-dial her mobile. She had been exhausted last night after spending the afternoon pitching for a slot on the catering roster with three different events venues, which she’d followed up by staying out late in Carafe, gabbling on to Philippe about God-knows-what. She’d finished off the night by climbing into bed still wearing all her clothes.

Jess finally located her phone on the floor and, speech failing her, opted simply to listen.

‘You’re where?’ she croaked eventually.

‘On your front doorstep,’ came the reply.

The two sisters faced one another at Jess’s kitchen table. Jess had run out of Philippe’s Colombian coffee, so they were having to make do with the slightly solidified contents of an ancient jar of instant she’d located at the back of a cupboard. Debbie, who had her arms folded (as far as she could) across her ample chest, was wearing a sour expression.

‘So you forgot.’

‘Not exactly,’ Jess mumbled guiltily, even though of course she had. The entire arrangement had completely slipped her mind. She’d even let both Debbie’s calls go to
voicemail yesterday evening in the bar, unwilling to assign any part of her Friday night to what she’d assumed would simply be another pointless bout of bickering with her sister.

‘Well, I was at King’s Lynn station at the time we agreed, and you weren’t. Flat tyre, was it?’

Jess raised her coffee cup to her lips and sipped. It tasted as good as she expected it to, which wasn’t very. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t bring your key.’

‘I didn’t think I’d have to!’ Debbie’s chin fat quivered with outrage. ‘Shall I send you the bill for the taxi and the Travelodge?’

‘If you like,’ Jess replied, ‘but I’m not really in a position to pay it.’ She’d shoved all her final-warning bills – which normally sat unopened on the kitchen worktop – into a drawer while she was making the coffee. She didn’t need the humiliation of Debbie knowing just how much financial trouble she was in.

‘I’ll subsidize your disorganization then,’ Debbie snapped back. ‘And just so you know, I had a really lovely evening with my McDonald’s Extra Value Meal watching back-to-back episodes of
Ice Road Truckers
.’

Thinking privately that Debbie probably wouldn’t have got much closer to her dream night in if she’d planned it in advance, Jess placed a plate of home-baked coconut macaroons in the middle of the table as a form of truce. But to make her point, Debbie – a woman who had recently admitted to eating fourteen cake pops in as many minutes at a children’s birthday party with the dubious justification of ‘not wanting to appear rude’ – was resolutely refusing to touch them.

‘I don’t like coconut, actually she sniffed, shrugging huffily.

‘What’s wrong with coconut?’ Jess asked, at a loss.

‘Huh. What’s right with it?’ Debbie muttered.

Jess glanced down at Smudge, who was gingerly sniffing the sole of Debbie’s left foot as if he didn’t quite trust her. Admiring his perception, she wondered if perhaps her sister gave off warning fumes in the manner of a skunk or similar.

‘What the hell were you doing last night anyway? You look a state, if you don’t mind me saying.’ Debbie, as always, was impeccably blow-dried and painted-on, as people did tend to be when they had too much time on their hands.

‘Adding “if you don’t mind me saying” to the end of a sentence is not a catch-all caveat to insult someone, Debbie,’ Jess grumbled.

‘Out on the town with that man of yours?’ Debbie ploughed on loudly, like a gossip columnist ambushing a z-list celebrity. ‘What’s his name … Walt? Victor?’

‘Zak,’ Jess replied, to save them both the tedium of exhausting every letter at that end of the alphabet. ‘And no. He’s in London at the moment,’ she added, wishing that the same could be said for Debbie – or at the very least that she was back in the King’s Lynn Travelodge, marooned there indefinitely by gridlock on the A17.

And then, with impeccable timing, came another knock at the door.

While Zak captivated Debbie with heart-warming stories from accident and emergency, Jess tore into a butter-soaked croissant and sipped from a takeaway coffee, both courtesy of Zak. The coffee was at least fulfilling its basic obligations by being fresh, roasted and strong – but Jess still couldn’t help wondering idly at what point of the morning it might be acceptable to sink a quick gin without being classed an alcoholic.

‘So remind me, Debbie,’ Zak was saying, in an apparent effort to charm Jess’s sister, ‘what do you do?’

She’d left them alone together while she was in the shower, trying and failing to wash away her hangover and dark mood.

Debbie pulled her usual martyr’s grimace. ‘Look after two little girls, I’m afraid. Full-time job.’

‘Wow,’ Zak said, as if this were fascinating and nobody in the world apart from Debbie had ever given birth before, ‘and how old are they?’

‘Eight and six. They’re going through a bit of a phase at the moment though. Ooh, these croissants are
amazing
, Zak,’ she added, tearing another chunk from hers while glaring pointedly at Jess’s offending macaroons in the middle of the table.

‘They decorative?’ Zak asked Jess through a mouthful of croissant, nodding at the macaroons.

In Ralph Lauren piqué cotton and slim-fitting beige chinos, Zak was looking particularly like one-eighth of a polo match today, Jess thought. Shaking her head, she resisted the urge to ask him why he thought someone would display platefuls of home baking around the house like ornaments, in the manner of collectible snow domes or crystal figurines.

‘So, what’s this phase your little girls are going through?’ Zak asked Debbie with a smile, clearly expecting her to reel off harmless tales of reading after lights-out or refusing to eat carrots.

‘Biting,’ Debbie intoned gravely. ‘It’s becoming a real problem.’

Zak looked across to Jess for some assistance. She shrugged.

‘Oh,’ was all he could come up with.

Debbie adjusted the waistband of her jeans, which on closer inspection looked to bear a suspicious resemblance to elastic. ‘We were hauled in to talk to the head teacher a couple of weeks ago,’ she said. ‘Me
and
Ian. Like they didn’t trust me to deal with it.’

They probably didn’t
, thought Jess, taking another mouthful of croissant.

‘Anyway, they asked us if we’d considered psychological intervention.’

‘Good idea,’ Zak said quickly. ‘Nip it in the bud.’

Debbie made a face that looked a lot like a simper. ‘I keep forgetting you’re a doctor.’

Jess rolled her eyes.

‘Have you been to your GP about it?’

‘God, no,’ Debbie said quickly. ‘What if he calls social services?’

‘He won’t do that,’ Zak chortled, as if bringing in social services was equivalent to conducting an unauthorized rectal exam. ‘He’ll probably just refer you to a specialist. What does your husband think?’

‘My husband?’ Debbie repeated, like this was the first she’d heard of him.

‘Yeah, Ian?’ Jess prompted her.

There was a short pause. ‘Well, unfortunately Ian has been a bit distracted by his PA recently.
Saskia.
’ Debbie spat the name out witheringly while staring very hard at the Aga, like she was hoping Ian and Saskia might turn out to be slow-cooking inside it. ‘The girl I used to call a million times a day. The girl who is so
stupid
she doesn’t even know what “penultimate” means.’

Jess tried to envisage a phone message from Debbie for Ian that would have necessitated use of the word ‘penultimate’.

When the news of Ian’s third affair had first broken, Jess had responded with genuine sadness, especially on behalf of her two beautiful nieces – but this was now giving way to a renewed sense of guilt over Natalie and Charlotte. How was she any different to Ian’s slow-witted secretary?

‘He’s sacked her now, of course,’ Debbie said briskly. ‘I made him do it.’

‘Er, is that legal?’ Jess said, not altogether supportive of her sister’s Napoleonic tendencies.

‘Of course it’s not. She’s threatening to sue,
of course
,’ Debbie said, with a roll of the eyes like this sort of thing happened to her every day of the week. ‘But I told him. It’s me or her.’ She polished off the last of her croissant, brushing the flakes from her fingers.

Jess pushed away an ungenerous thought that involved Debbie and Saskia standing side by side and the choice being fairly obvious. ‘So what now?’

‘The long and short of it is, I’ve got to sell the cottage, Jess. Affairs cost money. There’s been a lot of wining and dining and hotels and expensive jewellery. And I told you about the sodding convertible.’ Debbie sat back and shot Jess a bizarrely smug expression, like nobody would have believed that Ian had been cheating on her unless he’d given himself away by sticking a soft-top on his credit card. ‘Someone’s got to pay for it all.’

‘Can’t it be Ian?’ Jess asked, wondering why it had to be her.

‘God no, not with the size of our mortgage.’

‘Think yourself lucky you’ve even got one,’ Jess muttered, remembering all her unpaid bills.

Debbie was starting to get snotty. ‘Look, we don’t sell, we go under. All four of us. The girls too: your
nieces
. Is that what you want?’

Jess stared into her cup like a fortune teller into tea leaves, trying to foresee a day when she wouldn’t be trying really hard not to hate her sibling. The croissant had left an oily film on her tongue that reminded her of bacon fat. She attempted to break it up with the last of her cooling coffee, which was a bit like trying to wash up a grill pan with tap water and no soap.

Somehow, despite the words that were coming out of her sister’s mouth, Jess knew that any decision to sell the cottage would always be less to do with Ian’s debts than Debbie’s long-standing resentment towards her.

Zak cleared his throat. ‘I might just take Smudge for a quick stroll.’ He got up and emitted a short whistle, the aural equivalent of waving a steak under Smudge’s nose. ‘Lead?’ he asked Jess.

She came with him to the front door and passed over Smudge’s lead. He clipped it on before turning to face her.

‘Nice surprise?’ He bent down to kiss her.

She nodded limply.

‘Fully recovered?’

‘Yes thanks,’ she breathed, hating herself for the lie.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘when you say you’ve got flu, you probably just mean you’ve got a common cold.’ He smiled apologetically, like he was delivering bad news. ‘It’s not actually the same thing.’

Despite herself, she smiled weakly. ‘My mistake.’

He paused for a moment, hand on the door, seemingly searching her face for something he’d lost. ‘Unusual in summer, though.’ And then he held her gaze for just a moment more before turning his back and exiting with Smudge.

She let her head hang for a couple of seconds, staring down at the floorboards until Debbie’s voice came at her
from the kitchen, shrill like a marauding peacock. ‘I could murder another coffee, Jessica.’

Turning and heading back into the kitchen, she passed Debbie wordlessly and snapped the kettle on.

‘You’ve really done well there,’ Debbie said to her sister as she sat back down. ‘I think we’ve just solved our housing problem.’

Jess felt her stomach lurch. ‘What are you talking about?’ she whispered.

‘Oh, come on,’ Debbie hissed across the top of the croissant bag. ‘You’re dating a man with
two houses
.’

Jess stared at her. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes! He told me that while you were in the shower.’

‘I don’t mean about having two sodding houses, Debbie! I mean are you seriously telling me you think it’s okay to make me homeless because Zak happens to have a bit of spare cash in the bank?’

‘Oh, Jess, for God’s sake. Stop being so dramatic. I sell this house, he’ll look after you – simple. You
know
you’re not going to end up on the street – but I might, if I don’t sell.’

‘Debbie, look at me.’ Jess leaned forward and made a mouth with her hand. ‘Watch my lips, okay? I am not moving in with Zak. It’s not that simple.’

‘Why-ever-the-fuck-not? Belsize Park, isn’t it?’ She cast a disdainful glance around Jess’s ramshackle kitchen. ‘I know which I’d prefer.’

Forced to assume it was moments like this that Anna practised yoga to rise above, Jess struggled to contain her outrage. ‘The point is, Deb, I don’t want to be coerced into moving in with someone because I have nowhere else to live! Do you know how ridiculous that is?’

Debbie shook her head and shrugged at the same time. ‘No it’s not. People do it all the time.’

What people?
she wondered.

‘I’m sorry, Jess,’ Debbie said, and the way she said it made Jess think she wasn’t sorry at all. ‘I have to put the cottage on the market. In fact …’ She took a breath.

‘Oh God. What?’

‘… that’s why I’m here so early. I’ve got an appointment at the estate agent’s at ten. To arrange a valuation.’

Jess put her head in her hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ Debbie repeated, and the words were starting to sound more hollow every time she said them.

Jess looked up at her. ‘Debbie, I know Mum left the house to you, but … please. Just think about this.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve got happy memories of this house,’ Debbie said, her ability to become very quickly affronted never far from her fingertips. ‘The only thing I remember when I sit in this kitchen is horror, pure and simple. I shall be glad to be rid of the place, frankly.’

They sat in silence for a few moments, Jess pushing croissant flakes into little piles with her thumb. ‘Can you at least give me time to find somewhere first?’ she asked, humiliated by having to beg Debbie to take pity on her.

‘We can ask Zak when he gets back if you like,’ Debbie suggested, clearly not quite finished with goading her yet.

‘That’s not funny,’ Jess snapped.