This Secret We're Keeping (35 page)

Anna gave an affirmative shrug.

‘So is that what you were looking for when you met Simon then?’

Anna snorted. ‘Hardly the same. When you met Mr Landley – aged
fifteen
– I think that’s exactly what you were
looking for. Only the whole thing’s gone too far now for you to tell the difference.’

Jess was starting to feel emotionally wrung-out. ‘The difference between what?’

‘Between someone who’s real and someone who’s just filling a hole in your life.’ Anna paused. ‘Don’t you think,’ she said, more gently now, ‘that Zak’s the one who’s real?’

Thinking this seemed suspiciously like the sort of pop psychology sound bite that Rasleen might impress upon a headstand class, Jess considered Zak, and then she considered Will. ‘By real do you mean better?’

‘Well, yeah. Real’s always better. Zak’s offering you a future. What the hell is Matthew Landley offering you?’

Jess rested her gaze on the horizon and the strip of sea glimmering invitingly in the sunlight. And then she shook her head, knowing in that moment that Anna was never going to understand. Because for Jess, it wasn’t about what someone had to offer her. It was about who they were.

The cafe was starting to fill up with the lunchtime rush as groups of impatient pensioners hovered, ready to swoop for seats. The midday sun had begun to heat Jess’s skin through the glass of the window, making her feel too warm and a little claustrophobic, like she needed to get some air.

Finishing her tea, Anna tipped her head at Jess’s chest. ‘Is that new?’

Jess frowned and looked down, thinking Anna might be about to start reassessing her solar plexus. ‘What?’

‘The necklace.’

Jess swallowed. ‘Oh. No, it’s …’ She’d not yet shared with Anna the story behind it, and felt suddenly disinclined to do so. ‘Just something old that turned up.’

Anna covered Jess’s hand with her own. ‘Don’t be angry
with me, Jess. I’m just trying to look out for you, honestly. Because I really don’t want to see you get hurt again.’

‘If anyone was going to hurt me, Anna, it would never be Will.’

‘No?’

Jess only shook her head as she finished her coffee. Because what she had stopped just short of saying was,
No. I actually think it would be Zak.

It was the last Friday night of half-term and Jess was in my living room. This small fact alone was enough to excite me, given that my cottage had been off-limits for us ever since Mrs Parker had enquired about my young visitor, and pulling off either privacy or romance in a public place was about as achievable as you’d think, in that it wasn’t.

But for the past few nights, the cottage had been back in play, as Mrs Parker was safely over on the Isle of Skye visiting her daughter and son-in-law. Oh yes. I had been receiving the complete itinerary in handy instalments since March.

The timing was ideal, because for a while now I’d been getting this creepy sensation that Jess and I were being watched. At the beach, in the car, by the harbour … I just couldn’t shake the feeling.

Only last week, we’d been parked up in a lay-by on an isolated country lane that led only to a farm, when I’d suddenly been struck by this weird sense that if I turned round I would see a face outside, pressed up against my window. I hesitated for a couple of moments, almost afraid to look – but of course, when I did, there was nobody there.

It unsettled me enough, though, to suggest we went for a
walk. I knew I was probably being paranoid, but it still would have felt a bit dim-witted for the two of us to simply carry on sitting there like unsuspecting wildfowl at the start of the shooting season.

The light had started to soften by then and the temperature had dipped. The sensation of open space calmed me down almost instantly, reassured me that I had to be imagining things. Together we picked up the footpath that transected the vast map of fields surrounding us, but after walking for only ten minutes or so, Jess pulled me to a pause.

‘Listen.’

The sound of music playing somewhere nearby was drifting our way, spilling like birdsong into the stillness of the early summer air.

A short detour from the path revealed the source of our mystery sound to be a complex of converted barns: we had stumbled, as it happened, upon a wedding reception. The grounds were bordered by a patchy hedge of hawthorn, so Jess and I crouched down together behind it, peeking through the gaps in the foliage. The area of lawn and patio surrounding the barns was filled with wedding guests, most of them young, all of them drunkenly exultant. The bride and groom were in the midst of the assembled crowd, and a vast glimmering web of fairy lights hung suspended between the trees over everyone’s heads. Among the branches, strings of paper lanterns were becoming moons in an arboreal galaxy as the light began to fade. A barbecue glowed from the other side of the lawn, and waiters clad in black were gliding about with trays of drinks.

It was a remarkable scene, out there in the middle of nowhere, so Jess and I simply sat together at the edge of our hayfield and watched it all, mesmerized. As dusk began to descend, the lights became even more celestial, a miniature
milky way that swayed and glowed on the breeze between the branches.

It must have been getting late, because a blanket of cold had sunk over the hay meadow and Jess was starting to shiver. I took off my jacket and slipped it across her shoulders, and she shuffled in between my legs with her back to me, leaning on my chest, head against my collarbone. And as we sat there like that together, I’d occasionally move to brush the hair from her face, or plant kisses on the crown of her head as her hand made dreamy sweeping circles over my leg. It was the most magical, perfect pause – just Jessica and me, drinking in the music and the lights and the intoxicating buzz of chatter and laughter close by.

I realized then how I knew I truly loved her. I’d never once taken her to a restaurant, or the opera, or a hotel, or any of those other places that were supposed to prove you loved somebody – yet here we were, in the rapidly cooling air of a hay meadow on a Saturday night, and we were both as happy as it was possible to be. Even just to feel her breathe against my chest sent contentment spreading through me in a way I couldn’t explain.

‘Look at them,’ Jess murmured, squeezing my hand as we watched the bride and groom twirling round together to the music. ‘They seem so happy.’

I looked at her, not them. ‘What about you, Jess?’ I asked her quietly. ‘Do you think you’ll get married one day?’

She tipped her head back to look up at me and nodded – crediting me, to my relief, with the requisite emotional capacity to have a slightly more heartfelt marriage proposal up my sleeve than that. ‘Definitely.’

‘Okay,’ I murmured, my mouth against her hair. ‘So how would you do your wedding?’

She only needed to think about it for a second. ‘Just like
this. I’d want all my favourite songs, and my friends, and a barbecue.’ Then she looked up at me again and smiled. ‘And you,’ she added. ‘I’d quite like you to be there too.’

I let out a short laugh. ‘Ha! Thank you. Guest of honour?’

‘Something like that,’ she murmured dreamily.

We carried on watching the dancing for a few more seconds, before she turned her face up towards me again. ‘You know, before I met you I wasn’t sure I’d ever want to get married.’

‘How come?’ I asked her, though I probably could have had a decent stab at a guess.

A small frown made her forehead crumple. ‘My dad and my mum were so unhappy.’ She paused, and the frown lifted. ‘But now I’ve changed my mind.’

I felt a strong compulsion then to ask her if she’d ever thought about starting a family, but I resisted on the basis that she was still so young. I couldn’t deny it was something that had been on my mind a lot lately – I was growing increasingly anxious to make a proper commitment to her, for us to finally become a legitimate couple. I’d been thinking about her suggestion in Venice that we could move to Italy, and I sometimes found myself picturing our future together in a tumbledown Italian estate, wild-haired blonde children running around, dogs scampering loose as we worked our way through the carafe of red wine on our crumbling veranda, watching the sun set over the hills. I thought perhaps I’d get a job teaching English or hook up with my father’s family and make my long-awaited debut in alabaster.

Or maybe we’d keep it simple and just stay in Norfolk, emerging safely on the other side of Jessica’s final years at Hadley Hall unscathed.

I wanted all of that – or any of it. I wanted to plan and be excited and look forward to whatever was coming next.

‘So what about the future?’ I asked her. ‘What do you want, Jess?’

‘To be with you,’ she said. ‘I want what everyone wants. A husband, children. I want to be a famous chef. I want to write recipe books, own a restaurant. Get a Michelin star.’

Not everyone wants that
, I thought to myself.
You’re different, Jess. You’ve got something about you that none of the others have.

‘You’ll do all of that,’ I told her, entirely confident that this was true. ‘I know you will.’

Pretty soon after that, it became clear that the mother of all firework displays was about to make an unexpected appearance from somewhere behind our little patch of hedge. Forced to flee, we streaked back across the hayfield hand in hand, a thunderous explosion of colour and gunpowder chasing us down, almost but not quite catching us.

After all my paranoia about being watched, I was relieved that Friday night to be safely in my cottage surrounded by four relatively solid walls. I might even have been feeling pretty relaxed, had I not been in the process of marking maths workbooks at the time, identical graph paper with red covers that were all emblazoned with the Hadley Hall crest.

Ad astra per aspera.

To the stars through difficulty
.

Jess was stretched out on my sofa, The Smiths were on the stereo, and tonight all the curtains were firmly closed. Our evening so far had been nothing short of ordinary, but then that was sort of the point. I knew that spending time with me felt like something of an escape to Jess (though I was confident it wasn’t
just
about that). I was protecting her,
giving her a bit of sodding headspace. Wasn’t that the point of a relationship – to shield the other person from all the problems life has to throw at them?

‘Come on then,’ she was teasing me, ‘if you’re not going to give me an A-plus now, I’m never going to get one.’

I looked down at her workbook. It was actually pretty impressive, possibly even worthy of the A grade she so badly craved. Her marks had been nudging upwards over the past few months, and I knew how hard she’d been trying. Anyone would think the girl had been sleeping with her maths teacher.

I pretended to think it over before eventually shaking my head. ‘You’re right,’ I said, striking a thick line of pencil across the page before adding a D-minus for effect (I’d rub it out later). ‘You’re never going to get one.’

She must have already known she’d done a cracking job with it because she grabbed a nearby cushion with a squeal of mock outrage and lobbed it neatly at my head. It missed and knocked over her bunch of carnations, which she had arranged as elegantly as possible in a jam jar.

The jam jar stayed intact but a vast pool of flower water soaked quickly into the carpet. I couldn’t have cared less. Jess was genuinely incapable of doing anything to piss me off. She really was perfect – patient, sweet, funny, thoughtful. I wasn’t even sure she had a bad bone in her body. Whenever we were together, we just had a great time.

And I wanted all that to continue. In fact, I wanted to be Jessica’s boyfriend much more than I wanted to be her teacher, which was why I had decided to leave Hadley Hall at the end of the school year. If we were going to be together, that was the only way it could happen. But I was constrained by my notice period: to be free by the summer, I had to see Mackenzie on Monday.

So I had written out my resignation. It was already in my bag, tightly sealed in a thick white envelope, ready to go.

Jess was panicking about the water on the carpet as if it was some sort of omen that our relationship was doomed. I’d learned that she was pretty big on things like omens and fate – drivel I felt convinced must have come directly from her mother, or her chubby sister, or possibly that weird religious studies supply teacher for whom religion seemed mostly to revolve around telling everybody she was agnostic and hanging dreamcatchers from classroom window frames when she thought no one was looking.

Jess disappeared into the kitchen to fetch a tea towel and then got down on her hands and knees, desperately mopping at the wet patch. ‘It’s going to stain.’

‘Jess – I rent,’ I said, in an effort to regain her attention. ‘Seriously, it couldn’t matter less. The carpet’s been here since the seventies. And anyway – I need to talk to you.’

She rocked back on her haunches and looked up at me. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

‘No, it is. It’s really good. But I don’t know how you’re going to take it.’

She swallowed. ‘Okay.’

‘I … I want to be your boyfriend. Properly.’

She blinked owlish grey eyes at me. ‘But you already are.’

‘No, like, make it official. I want to stop hiding, looking over my shoulder, panicking every time the phone rings.’

She stared at me, well aware of and (to her credit) normally unfazed by my occasional outbursts of paranoid behaviour. ‘But we can’t. Not until I’m sixteen, and even then –’

‘I’m leaving,’ I said quickly, cutting her off. ‘I’m leaving Hadley. I’ve written my resignation letter and I’m speaking to Mackenzie first thing Monday morning.’

She stared at me. ‘What?’ she breathed.

‘I’ve been thinking about it for ages, Jess. I want to be with you.’

‘But you love teaching!’ She looked for a moment as if she might cry – and not from happiness either, which threw me off a bit. ‘You can’t leave a job you love because of me. What would you do?’

‘Well,’ I said carefully, ‘I was thinking about what you said in Venice. Maybe after your sixteenth birthday, we could go to Italy. I could do some teaching. Or get in on all that alabaster.’

Jess’s jaw sort of flapped at me, like it was completely independent of her face. ‘Get in on all that what?’

Maybe moving to Italy was the stuff of fantasies, maybe it wasn’t. And Jess was right. I did love teaching – and Hadley too, come to that. But no matter where we ended up, I knew there were things I wouldn’t miss. Like the staffroom, with its bitchy politics and crappy coffee that tasted and looked as I imagined tarmac would taste and look if it was scraped from a hot road and whizzed up in a food processor. I wouldn’t miss the endless altercations with Lorraine Wecks over who was supposed to sit where in bloody sodding assembly. I wouldn’t miss the feeling of Sonia glaring at me if I dared to open my mouth in the Monday-morning staff meeting. And I definitely wouldn’t miss having to catch my breath with panic whenever I saw Mackenzie striding purposefully towards me down the corridor, half expecting him to slam me up against a wall by my neck and say,
I know your dirty little secret, you filthy fucking pervert
. I had nightmares about this exact scenario maybe two or three times a week, from which I always woke up drenched unattractively in sweat. Sometimes, I even dreamed that Mackenzie was the one with his face pressed up against my car window.

Much of Hadley’s ethos focused firmly around letting the girls know there was a world out there – Mackenzie was a staunch believer in education being as much about shaping outlook as it was about instilling facts, and I totally bought into that. Since getting together with Jess, I’d found myself spending more and more of my time running on about it in class as we paused between the problems I’d chalked up on the board, hoping that at least some of what I said might resonate. But I was beginning to realize that perhaps it was time for me to start following my own advice.

Because I was ready to feel alive. I was ready to go with gut instinct. I was ready to stop feeling like Sonia Laird’s icy glare was right behind me everywhere I went – fuck it, for all I knew,
she
was the one with her face pressed up against my window.

Oh yes. I was definitely ready to kiss all of that goodbye.