This Secret We're Keeping (47 page)

Twenty-three years
ago this weekend, a girl tapped on my back door in the middle of a snowstorm, asking to be let in. And now, I had returned to North Norfolk with a plan to do the same.

As if to mark the occasion, the snow was back.

I’d heard about a great little Italian trattoria that had opened up close to the coast. It was getting rave reviews and, by all accounts, the chef had talent. I was keen to try it, find out what all the fuss was about.

La Piccola Trattoria was tucked away near to Carafe, the French wine bar. From the not insubstantial amount of time I’d committed to online research, I already knew the restaurant would be snug and intimate, its tables crammed closely together, the ambience cast in candlelight. It had a reputation as somewhere special, and you generally had to book ahead. On a night like tonight, I was expecting it to be packed out.

But as I crunched up towards the entrance, heart pounding, snow in my hair, the place looked eerily still. The lights were on, but … anyway. I cupped my hands and pressed my face against the front door, peering through the glass.

It was at this point that someone thought it would be an intelligent move to tug the door open sharply from the
inside. I stumbled forward, forced to grab on to the door handle to stop myself from falling over and braining myself on the flagstones. The momentum sent the door swinging forcefully round on its hinges with me still attached, gripping on to the handle with my arms straight and knees bent like I was learning to waterski.

‘Oh my God! I’m so sorry! Are you okay?’

It was a young waiter with plentiful facial acne and a voice that was probably a third of the way to breaking.

‘Yeah,’ I said, straightening up and clearing my throat, as if I routinely entered rooms like I was auditioning (badly) for an action film. ‘I’m okay.’

‘That would have been a mistake,’ the boy said, passing me a menu as if he hadn’t just nearly killed me. ‘We’ve only had five covers tonight.’

I shook out the collar of my woollen coat, sending snowflakes drifting down on to the flagstones. ‘Snowstorm,’ I said, stamping my feet on the coir mat.

‘Yup,’ the boy replied. ‘You can sit where you like. We’re really quiet.’

He wasn’t joking, and there wasn’t even any sappy faux-Italian music being piped in from behind the bar to fill the void. (Personally, I considered this to be a good thing – in my mind, authentic trattorias relied on their clientele to provide the sound system. Tonight being the exception, obviously. The only noise we could hear right now was the drip of gathering snowmelt in an outside gutter.)

Disconcerting silences aside, the room itself was impressive: a single-storey converted barn that had all the irregular features preserved, like the bowing end wall and wonky ceiling beams. The tables were styled with red-and-white checked tablecloths, glassware sparkling in the candlelight, and I was pleased to see a row of wine barrels lining the far
edge of the room. I smiled, raising an imaginary toast to Brett in my mind, before attempting to refocus on what it was I had come here to do.

‘Actually,’ I said, swallowing, my heartbeat gathering pace, ‘I was hoping to see Jess Hart.’

‘Oh,’ the waiter said, looking slightly flustered. ‘I’m afraid she’s not working tonight.’

His words were like water to the little blaze of hope that had so far been keeping me warm. ‘Oh. Okay.’

‘Was she expecting you?’

I shook my head. ‘No. I wanted to surprise her.’ A thought occurred to me. ‘Would you happen to know if she’s at home?’

‘Sir, I’m sorry, but I can’t give you her home address,’ the boy said gravely, like I’d just pulled on a knee-length mac and whipped out a pair of night-vision goggles.

‘It’s okay, don’t worry,’ I told him, handing back the menu as I prepared to leave. ‘I’ve already got her address.’

‘Would you like to buy some arrabiata sauce while you’re here?’ the boy asked me, suddenly uplifted by the opportunity to do some cross-selling.

‘Er, no,’ I told him. ‘But thanks.’

‘
Aperitivo?
Antipasto?
’

‘
No, grazie. Sei stato molto utile
,’ I muttered, hoping that might shut him up. It did. But then I had an idea. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’ll take a bottle of champagne.’

He sold me a bottle for forty-five quid, so I gave him fifty and told him to keep the change. I didn’t have a clue if the stuff was good or bad, but it came with gold foil round its neck and a bottle shape that said
this sparkles
, so as far as I was concerned, it was perfect for the job.

I pulled up my collar and strode out again into the cold, cradling the bottle against my chest to guard against a smash
if I slipped on ice, crunching the five minutes or so it took me to get to Jess’s cottage.

I knew some of the detail. We’d exchanged a couple of texts soon after Natalie and I had fled back to London, and shortly before Christmas Jess had written me an email. Her plan, it transpired, had been to bide her time with Zak until the inevitable happened – which was that living on top of each other in a poky terrace masquerading as a mews house worth a couple of million quid had finally served to underscore their fundamental differences, to the point where even Zak was forced to stop pretending they didn’t exist. Only a short time after that, he’d been fortuitously required to assess the hip injury of a semi-famous lads’ mag model who had toppled off her high heels while staggering out of a nightclub close to his hospital. Ever the committed professional, Zak had popped back to see her at the end of his shift, whereupon she’d handed him the latest edition of
Maxim
and he promptly forgot he wasn’t single. Just a few weeks later, Jess had packed up and moved back to Norfolk, renting her cottage again from the buy-to-let investor who’d bought it from her sister.

She’d posted my bracelet back to me too, having discovered it lying underneath Zak’s sofa after my pounding, which was how she’d managed to work out what he’d done.

Jess also informed me that Anna Baxter had finally confessed to being the architect of our demise all those years ago, which wasn’t entirely surprising, given that I’d always felt about as comfortable in her presence as a pacifist ringside at a boxing match. Unsurprisingly, the news had not been received well by Jess – but since then, the two of them had managed to meet up for a few tentative discussions, so I assumed a reconciliation would be on the cards at some point. (Several months after Jess’s email, Anna began to
unnerve me once again by cropping up in various media outlets as some sort of clean-living fertility guru with a book to promote, having recently become a mother to triplets. I’d seen her in the
Guardian
and the
Mail
, and twice on breakfast television – but thankfully she’d not yet used the opportunity of national airtime to out me as a convicted sex offender. Though never say never.)

But the best bit about Jess’s email was the part where she modestly related to me the news of her own success. She’d worked hard to secure sufficient funding to open her own restaurant from some investors she’d met during her brief stint catering in the Hampstead area. She said she hoped I’d visit as soon as it was open and tell her what I thought of the food.

And then she apologized to me again about the baby.
I hope that one day you’ll forgive me
, she wrote,
but I really would understand if you feel you can’t.

She’d sent me that email at about three a.m. one Saturday morning. I was awake too, suffering from my usual insomnia and staring out at the stars from the window of my attic room in Chiswick. So I’d emailed her back by return because I didn’t want her feeling needlessly guilty for a second longer than necessary. I told her I loved her and always had, and that I would never blame her for what happened. There was only one person who should be shouldering the full weight of that responsibility, I insisted, and that was me.

I also opted to clarify, in case she hadn’t already worked it out, that Natalie wasn’t pregnant, and that Zak’s little
Sopranos-
style mob threats were the only reason I’d been forced to pretend otherwise that morning at her cottage.

It took me a long time to decide how to sign off that email to her. Eventually I opted to say simply that I wouldn’t be
back for a while, as we were putting our holiday home on the market (Natalie having been shamelessly seduced by the valuations she’d requested on a whim soon after we’d finished the renovations). I told Jess I hoped she would find happiness – I’d wanted to give her the chance to move on from me, have the opportunity to meet someone special who could commit to her in the way she truly deserved. I knew I had to step back – as I had tried so hard to do over all the years that had gone before – and let her recover from the heartache I had brought her.

Ironically enough, it was Natalie’s distinct lack of pregnancy that had eventually inspired her to leave me. My replacement’s name was Henry (inventive nickname: Henners, which basically told you everything you needed to know). He was something very big in financial auditing and the only man I knew who wore his real hair like it was a wig. Apparently, at the time he met Natalie he’d been desperate for children, having missed out the first time round with a wife who turned out to be chronically frigid. Natalie naturally saw this as an enormous selling point, so Henners moved into our house in Chiswick while I moved into a box room in Wembley with a selection of people from various jurisdictions of Europe. As it turned out, Henners was not one for wasting time, because Natalie was now five months pregnant, less than a year after they’d first met. Thankfully, it seemed that Charlotte was more excited than the rest of us put together.

Henry was okay, even though he wore deck shoes at the weekends and bought his shirts from a taylor. He’d managed to talk me into letting him pay for Charlotte to attend private school as a day pupil, where she was just nearing the end of her first term. She loved it there, and she was thriving – I could see that for myself.

Somewhat generously, given the extortionate fees, Henry had also let me go to Charlotte’s first parents’ evening in his place, which had been quite entertaining – mainly because it took me back to Hadley and my very last parents’ evening as a teacher. Just as we’d been about to start, I’d happened upon Josh and Steve in a cloakroom, illicitly off their faces on the lager they’d managed to smuggle past Mackenzie, which – combined with the fact that as Hadley’s IT technician, Steve was not even supposed to be there – had led me swiftly to the conclusion that Josh’s job was well and truly on the line. I’d spent most of the evening trying to coax the pair of them unseen out of a fire exit between my various appointments, while insisting solemnly to Mackenzie whenever I bumped into him that Josh had been looking decidedly peaky earlier in the day.

I’d understood back then what a child’s school days meant to their parents, and I understood it even better now – because to see Charlotte in her uniform, flushed from a hockey game or beaming at me because she’d just attended her first ever flute lesson, brought a swell of pride to my chest every single time.

Helpfully, Charlotte attending school had also freed me up to get a job, since I now had rent to pay. So I’d started delivering flowers for a living, which was actually okay, because in general it seemed that people were pretty happy to be presented with a bunch of flowers they hadn’t been expecting. Sometimes they would open the little card before they signed for them too, and then I’d get the back story. And I loved to listen – it was the best part of my day, to hear those stories.

Wembley wasn’t bad. It was the right side of the river for seeing Charlotte and I’d also learned a lot about Andorra from my new housemate Vincent, who kept me in cheap
booze and didn’t seem to mind when I drunkenly referred to him as Vinnie.

Jess’s cottage was swathed in darkness but all the downstairs lights were on, so I could see in. Everything looked exactly the same as it had the last time I’d been there, right down to the fairy lights that were strung around the fireplace, lighting up the brickwork like contented little glow-worms.

There was no sight of anyone inside, but her car was parked out the front. She was home.

I needed to take five minutes, because I was shaking, and not from the cold. So I brushed some snow from the low stone wall on the opposite side of the road from Jess’s cottage, and took a seat. My jeans soaked instantly through to my boxers, but I figured that once I was in Jess’s living room I could angle my backside to the open fireplace while I was talking to her, and hopefully speed up the drying process.

I’d been months building up to this moment. It was my first time back in Norfolk since Natalie and I had left a little over five years ago. In my mind I had committed to staying with Natalie until Charlotte was at least sixteen, but then Henners pitched up in his Porsche Cayenne, which threw me slightly (and not in a horsepower kind of way). Because, four years earlier than expected, I was finally free to think that, maybe, now could be the right time for me and Jess.

I’d conducted some basic research from Vinnie’s laptop, which had told me that her surname was still the same; and I hadn’t found any references to a live-in boyfriend mixed in with all those restaurant reviews either, so after everything had settled down with Natalie and my life seemed to have arrived back on an even keel, I decided to make the trip.

I would never find anyone else like Jess, that much was clear to me. I’d loved her from the very beginning, and that
was really it. Because for the rest of my life, whether in my head or by my side, I just knew she would always be there.

What I’d felt for her had invariably seemed – to my mind at least – like the simplest thing in the world. It was – for reasons I had finally come to respect – everyone else who had made it all so very complicated.

I didn’t have a plan at all beyond knocking on her front door. I’d stood here enough times over the years to know that if there was one girl with the ability to render me instantly amnesic, it was Jess.