This Secret We're Keeping (46 page)

And there they were: words that should have been happy, possibly even life-changing. Yet all Jess could do was watch them go by, carried away on a tide they’d both missed.

Because it was too late for them to love one another now. For the briefest of moments they had been hand in hand on the same little patch of their past, and now they were divided once again.

Eventually Will straightened up and faced her, and from across the room she could see that he was fighting the urge to step into the space between them, to reach out and take her hand.

‘So, look,’ he said, his agony as visible as an open wound. ‘I think we’ve firmly established that I’ve fucked up your life in every way imaginable.’

She shook her head at him, muted now by grief.

‘And I should tell you that I’m really sorry. I’m more sorry for that than I can put into words, Jess.’

Finally, she had to speak. ‘Please stop saying sorry. I wish you wouldn’t. Please.’

He looked her in the eyes, and she felt his confusion and anguish as if it was her own. ‘What should I say instead, Jess? That I wish more than anything you’d made a different choice? That if you had, we might be together right now – married, kids, living somewhere fucking spectacular? That I wish you could have found a way to tell me – to somehow let me know? That if you had, I would have begged you like a selfish bastard to keep the baby, because I would have loved the
bones
of you – both of you – for the rest of my life?’

She shook her head again, releasing a thick rush of hot tears.

His voice was raised now, strung out with pain. ‘But I can’t tell you any of that, Jess, because it’s not fair! It’s not fair! You were fifteen years old!’

There followed a long, agonizing pause, broken only by the sound of Will’s tormented breathing as Jess fought the urge to sink to her knees and sob.

Eventually he managed to speak again, his voice steadier. ‘I was the lowlife who got you pregnant, and you were the one who had to deal with it. And that’s why I’m sorry.’

There was time, she hoped, for one final attempt to absolve him. ‘Don’t say that,’ she whispered through her tears, though it sounded more like a shudder than a sentence. ‘Please. You were the best thing that ever happened to me.’

He flinched slightly as she said it, as if her words had cleaved open some tiny part of him deep inside, a sharp incision he could feel but not see. Only the shake of his jaw gave
him away – the rest of his face he succeeded in holding precariously together, though it was threatening to fall apart on him at any moment.

‘Actually,’ he said after a few moments’ pause, ‘I think I was probably the worst. You know – all things considered.’

He moved past her then towards the front door, only pausing briefly to touch her shoulder with his hand, like they were distant dysfunctional relatives having a moment, or colleagues calling it quits after a bout in the boardroom.

And just like that, he was gone.

A few moments later, there came the sound of his car pulling away from the kerb. She listened numbly to it from where she was standing motionless in the middle of the living room, like she’d just borne witness to a suicide-by-shotgun.

It had a similar effect, in the end, because she had an overwhelming urge to lean over and throw up all over her shoes.

That is the thing about
doctors of emergency medicine. They really know which bits of your neck to press on to make you feel like you’re about to suffocate. They also know what body parts are the best for kicking so that nobody knows you’ve been on the receiving end of a really good pounding.

I’d never seen his friends before – I assumed they were from London. It was funny, in a way: they looked as if they hung out at Ascot in their spare time and they spoke like Old Etonians, but they punched like they came from Walthamstow.

Anyway, after I’d been half throttled and beaten into submission (which was how they finally got me to confess to having run Jess over with my car), Zak deposited me on the sofa in his weird upside-down warehouse-style beach house and made me repeat the little script he’d prepared for me, word for word. Clearly a details man, he’d thought of everything, right down to a phantom pregnancy for Natalie.

He managed to make me feel like I didn’t have a choice about the whole thing by threatening to have me framed for further sex offences. He had a consultant friend, apparently, who was more than happy to claim he had ‘suspicions’ about
the way I was behaving around my daughter at the hospital following her anaphylactic attack (fast-tracked, too, if any of them got wind of me telling Jess about this particularly vile brand of bullshit).

‘Nice touch,’ I muttered, when he dropped that one in.

‘Well, don’t be a dick about it, Will,’ Zak said, as if we were arguing over a car-parking space and I was frankly being wholly unreasonable. ‘We all have our flaws, don’t we? Yours is, you like to have sex with schoolgirls. Mine is, I get very angry when people lie to me.’

‘Yeah,’ I managed, though as I spoke I was starting to suspect that my ribcage was no longer fully intact, ‘I’m getting that bit.’

Privately, I was pleased that he had called me Will. It felt like a small victory. He thought he was sodding Poirot but he’d failed to dig down beyond even the most basic of details.

It turned out that Zak and I had met before, at his old place of work, where I’d apparently blabbed about my conviction in between rounds of upchucking. Zak claimed that he never forgot a face, which was annoying because neither did I, except when I’d drunk my own body weight in vodka and punched through the recommended limit on white-label paracetamol. Happily, though, our hospital encounter happened long before Jess had the distinct misfortune of bumping into him under a portico in Holkham park, so her name – and therefore my real one – appeared to have passed him by.

This was of some comfort to me as they dumped me back outside Carnation Close, rolling me out of the four-by-four in the manner of Latin American drugs barons. Jess and I would always have what came before, and nobody – not even Dr Zak Foster – could take that away from us.

I just needed time to think. I could sort this whole mess out, I was sure of that. I’d always thought of myself as a bit of a pessimist, but where Jess Hart was concerned, I could in fact rival the most nauseating of carol singers with my levels of inner cheer.

For now though, to buy time, I would have to go along with Zak’s plan. It would be brutal, but I’d do it.

I would go and see her at once, just like he’d said.

Jess’s
head had been pounding since the moment Will walked out, so eventually she opted to manufacture her own brand of analgesic by way of some ancient diazepam and a brand-new bottle of gin, resourceful in the manner of an agoraphobic making supper from couscous and a gravy cube.

Five missed calls from Anna and a text from Debbie to say an offer had been made on the cottage only accelerated her descent towards gin oblivion, but no sooner had she arrived there than her haze began to be obliterated by waves of crippling stomach pain. Suspecting this to be the downside of mixing different toxin groups in large quantities, Jess thought momentarily about calling Anna back – if only to demand an explanation again for why she’d done what she did – but she swiftly became swamped with remorse once more over Smudge, and Will, and the baby. There were easier ways to make herself feel worse than she did already.

Like, maybe she’d go down to the beach and cast free her things, watch them get carried away on the water. Smudge’s name tag from his collar. Those designer shoes from Zak that would probably result in broken bones if she ever attempted to walk in them. Will’s necklace. She could do it all now – the tide would be high.

And while she was at it, she would try very hard to lose the chattering sound inside her mind too, because it was really starting to irritate her. It was mechanically repeating just one thing, over and over again.

Natalie’s pregnant. Natalie’s pregnant.

‘What?’ said a male voice.

She definitely recognized the touched-with-amusement scoff. She was sure that she’d heard it somewhere before – maybe when she’d been trying to speak in Spanish and failing to correctly conjugate her verbs. And then she realized that, without noticing, she’d managed to pick up a call from Zak.

Her hand was shaking like the phone was on vibrate. She hadn’t even heard it ring. ‘Yes,’ she said, swallowing back tears and staring blankly at the trinkets on the mantelpiece, the ones that Will had so admired the first time he’d been here. When had he first been here? She could hardly remember. ‘What is it, Zak?’ At least, that was how it sounded in her head. Zak had a different perspective, specifically that she was slurring incoherently like a tramp on a park bench.

‘I’ve got stomach ache,’ she told him then, sadly. At which point she hung her head, dropped the phone and noisily discharged vomit all over her knees.

‘Stay there, baby. I’m coming to get you.’

Zak was supposed to be waiting in for the delivery of a cast-iron chimenea that would allegedly add ambience to his devoid-of-life garden, and was insisting on bringing Jess back to the beach house with him so he wouldn’t miss his time slot and end up having to pay £200 to collect it himself from Solihull or similar.

He’d brought along a specially designed hospital-issue vomit bag, which he looped around her neck before helping her into the four-by-four. Jess felt momentarily inclined to make a dash for the open road, but something about the way that Zak was having to angle her into the car head first while her eyes rolled and her mouth produced strange noises made
her think that perhaps an impromptu run was a touch ambitious.

The sick bag came complete with a drawstring and reinforced gusset, but that didn’t stop Zak from hitting the handbrake and ejecting her from the vehicle as soon as she began to heave again. He was clearly a bit paranoid about vomit fumes pervading the car’s leather interior trim of his Range Rover, in the manner of a taxi driver on the graveyard shift over-zealously chucking people out of his Vauxhall Insignia the minute they asked if he wouldn’t mind opening the window.

Once she’d finished throwing up, Jess found herself weeping weakly into the verge, the pattern of Zak’s flashing hazard lights adding an unfortunate end-of-disco feel to being sick on all fours in the middle of the pavement. She started telling Zak about Smudge, but she realized that she was crying more loudly than she was talking, so she abandoned the effort and then couldn’t find a way to stop sobbing, let alone get to her feet.

By the time Zak had scooped her up, wiped her down, put her back in the car and attached a fresh bag round her neck, she was beginning to think that, on the plus side, today was unlikely to get much worse.

Slumped on the sofa with her head in a bucket, Jess wished Zak would take a short intermission from his lecture about stomach linings and delayed-onset multiple organ failure to hold her hair back for her. They’d established an hour ago that she hadn’t taken anywhere near the required quantity of assorted toxins to cause any real damage, and she’d already assured him she wasn’t attempting an overdose, merely anaesthesia.

‘Fuck,’ she groaned as the room bulged and slid about, a
sensation that wasn’t much improved by Zak chiding away in her ear. ‘Fuck.’

‘And what the hell are you doing stockpiling diazepam anyway?’

My mother shot herself in the face and I found her
, she wanted to say to him.
They give you a lifetime’s supply of tranquillizers when that happens.

‘Just leave me alone,’ she whimpered, dipping her head to retch once more, wishing that Zak would for once cooperate and turn out to be a stockbroker or a Rolls-Royce salesman as opposed to a bloody A & E doctor.

He paused then, probably thinking she was approaching contrition. ‘Look, I wouldn’t normally recommend this, but I think you could do with a coffee. It might perk you up a bit. You look exhausted.’

Just the mention of something as foul as fresh coffee was enough to elicit another bitter stream of vomit from Jess’s gullet. As she heaved, the violence of her physical reaction reminded her without warning of morning sickness, and she was besieged by grief all over again.

Zak made a sound like he’d just seen a flasher in a park. ‘Urrrgh, Jess, that is grim.’

‘You don’t have to stand there and watch,’ she gasped, stomach acid running down her chin. She groped wildly to her left for tissues.

‘I’ve got to keep an eye on you,’ he admonished. ‘If I let you in the bathroom you’ll probably never come out again.’

Another sour river of sharp bile rose. Her head thumped like her brain was trying to make an escape, like it was hammering on the inside of her skull, trying to tell her something.

‘This is exactly why we’re going to London, Jess,’ Zak was
saying. ‘You need to sort yourself out. I mean, look at the state of you. You’re a mess.’

He seemed as smug to see her like this as if he’d mixed up her little cocktail of gin and diazepam himself.

Trying not to remember how he’d goaded her over Will, and resisting the urge to ask him why he’d bought a second home here if he thought the place was so crappy, Jess concentrated on aiming her surging stream of puke in the right direction. Finally, it subsided, and she sat breathless and shivering, her arms round the bucket in the same way as she used to wrap them round the dog. She began to cry, but was still too woozy to think lucidly about Smudge – all she knew was that she missed him, and she wanted his head on her lap as opposed to Zak’s self-satisfaction in her face.

Sensing her lack of desire to engage in a debate on her various shortcomings, Zak buggered off to clatter about in the kitchen with his over-engineered coffee machine. ‘I know a removals guy,’ he called through to her after a few moments, ‘who can do all your stuff. He’s good. He won’t break your piano.’

Zak had a habit of seeing as selling points what most people would think of as standard service, which frequently made Jess feel indignant in the manner of a budget airline passenger.

Before she could respond, there was a noise from the kitchen that sounded like he’d dropped a full bag of coffee beans. ‘Fuck,’ she heard him exclaim. Then louder: ‘
Fuck
it.’

Something compelled her to stand up and wobble slowly over to the kitchen, where she saw him lifting his foot in hesitant distaste like a cat attempting to navigate a puddle. He’d somehow managed to fling a giant bag of frozen peas all over the room.

It was odd. They’d clearly been defrosting for a while,
because most of them were neon green and soft enough that he’d already mashed a fair portion of them into the soles of his socks.

Looking up, he registered her presence with a wince of irritation. ‘Go away, Jess,’ he said sharply. ‘I’ll clean this up.’

She nodded. ‘What were you doing with them?’

He paused for longer than seemed natural. ‘I was going to make soup.’

‘Soup?’

‘Yeah, as in … pea soup.’

Zak was no chef. He barely knew how to reheat soup, never mind make it from scratch. He was also not a man known for storing value bags of anything in his freezer, let alone choosing it as the base ingredient for impromptu home-made soup in the middle of summer.

None of this made any sense.

‘Soup for what?’ she asked him with a frown.

‘To eat! Go away, Jess.’

As he spoke, he reached over to pick up a sopping wet tea towel from the sideboard, tossing it quickly into the sink as if he was trying to conceal the evidence of something.

‘Jess, please just go and sit down while I clear this up,’ he said, as if she was a toddler he’d just caught flinging biscuits around his house.

So she sat back down on the sofa and listened to him faffing about locating errant peas, cursing and slamming things like this was all the cleaner’s fault for being off-duty. And she wondered again why the hell he would be making pea soup, desperate all the while for her head to clear so she could work out what was going on.

She leaned back and shut her eyes. Five or ten minutes later, Zak emerged with the coffee and no socks on. She
took the cup from him, although she wanted it even less now than she had before, and as he passed it to her she noticed that his knuckles were the colour of pulped strawberries.

She was about to say,
Jesus, Zak, what did you punch?
but something stopped her. Her brain was slowly starting to grind into action, halting and juddering as it tried to move forward in a way that was not dissimilar to Debbie attempting to drive a car that came with gears.

Zak perched on the edge of the coffee table and waited for Jess to be appreciative, so she took a sip from her cup. Predictably, it made her stomach recoil, which meant she’d have to tip the rest of it on to his yucca while he wasn’t looking.

‘You made the right decision,
cariño
,’ he told her then, watching her steadily, and she knew he wasn’t talking about the coffee.

She didn’t bother pointing out that there hadn’t really been a decision on offer, because Debbie had already sold her cottage and Zak had been threatening to break Will’s legs. The intended outcome wasn’t too hard for anyone with a basic grasp of how blackmail worked – which was everybody – to decipher.

But she knew it was easier to let Zak think he’d won.

The smile he shot her was laced with triumph. ‘Sleep this off tonight. We’ll go to London first thing in the morning. I’ll get my guy to bring over the rest of your stuff next week.’

Then he put a hand on her leg, but – entirely out of instinct – she jerked away from him.

There was a tense pause.

‘You need a shower,’ he said eventually. ‘You smell like a Saturday-night stomach pumping.’ And then he got up and left the room, presumably to fetch her a towel (or, if he really
wanted to hammer his point home, a mirror), and it was then that Jess registered something solid on the floor, underneath her bare foot where she’d jolted it backwards.

The object was dark, half hidden under the edge of the sofa. She bent over shakily and picked it up.

It was Will’s bracelet, broken once again at the glue join.

The feel of the leather against her fingers as she stared down at it and recalled the colour of Zak’s knuckles brought a fresh tide of nausea to her throat. This time, she was careful to miss the bucket, and on Will’s behalf left her mark indelibly in tones of bile and jaundice all over Zak’s made-to-measure bamboo silk rug that had always been, in hindsight, a very vulnerable shade of cream.

Jess gained some minor satisfaction from watching Zak gabbling and swearing in Spanish, crawling about on his hands and knees and rubbing at her puke with toilet paper, turning his knuckles from red to orange. He had his phone on hands-free to the emergency rug people, who seemed to be saying that the earliest they could come out would be next Monday and under no circumstances should he attempt to rub the stain.

The following morning, Jess waited outside the front door of the beach house for Zak, having showered, Alka-Seltzered and ingested vast quantities of aspirin and caffeine for breakfast. The chimenea was outside in the back garden looking bizarre, the cleaner had promised to locate all the remaining peas before they rotted, and now they were locking up and preparing to head to London. Jess breathed in the smell of the salt air for the last time.

‘This is the best thing for us,’ Zak said to her as they walked across the gravel together towards the waiting car.

She nodded. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’

He bent down and delivered a kiss to her cheek. ‘Baby, I’m always right.’ And then, with a smile, he opened the car door.

Will’s bracelet, at least, was safe. As Zak turned up the music and pulled out of the driveway, Jess slid her left hand into her pocket and let her fingertips rest on the snapped scrap of leather, just so she could feel it there.