Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  He set the burglar alarm, picked up his overnight bag and left the flat, giving the brass cage lift a miss and walking down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor. It was an old-fashioned mansion block, five storeys of red brick solidly constructed in the 1930s. He liked its old-fashioned feel: the heavy mahogany banister of the stairs, the thick if faded carpet soft beneath his feet, the burnished brass bowl of dried roses in the alcove on the landing.

  He passed the flat of the poet’s widow and came down the last short flight to the long hall. Unusually for the neighbourhood, the residents were almost entirely English – most very old, all older than Renoir or Kate, who felt a little like teenagers when they encountered their seniors on the stairs or in the foyer.

  Outside, he walked past the blue plaque proclaiming that the famous poet had lived in the building for twenty-seven years. Winter had pushed autumn out of the way two months before, but there was still not the faintest hint of a lift to the envelope of grey he had come to recognise as England post-Christmas. Back in San Francisco, he would by now have been watching the early flowering of japonica and western redbud.

  Even in mid-afternoon, the traffic on Kensington Gore was stuck, and he worked his way around opposing taxis and crossed into Kensington Gardens where suddenly he felt the homey cosiness of the mansion block desert him and England became a strange country again. He always felt this way when Kate travelled, as if only her presence drew him into the Englishness of a city that otherwise struck him as entirely international. Like the Venetians, so keen to hide their lives from the tourist circus around them, the English in London were starting to seem submerged in a polyglot stew of other nationalities. And their society was penetrable only to outsiders who, like Renoir through Kate, had a proper introduction. Remove the link, Renoir had discovered, and you were an outsider again.

  As he walked past Kensington Palace, its ornamental grace subdued in the unwelcoming gloom of the winter light, he thought again of the postcard he’d received. He had been threatened many times in his professional life, more than once quite seriously, but for some reason the mild unpleasantness of the postcard made it more rather than less disturbing. He didn’t have any particular enemies that he knew of in this country, not that he had that many friends. ‘That many’? Who was his friend? Of his new English acquaintances there were a few he liked, but there wasn’t enough shared experience for them to become friends. For the English this seemed the prerequisite for adult friendships: shared experience of school, or the army, or university. Which kept Renoir outside the loop and without intimates. Except for Kate, the only certainty he needed and the only certainty he had.

  Or did he?

  There wasn’t any real reason to think anything was wrong. But it – that trivial ‘it’ – nagged at him nonetheless.

  That Thursday she had rung to say she’d be late – Carlisle needed her help on a conference call with Venezuelan producers and a Santa Barbara investor. When she’d got home a little after eight Renoir cooked rump steak and chips to fuel her late-night session attacking the proofs of the next issue of the newsletter she and Seymour Carlisle produced twice a month. She seemed preoccupied as he made small talk – reporting on the progress of the gatehouse they were renovating, telling her about a deal he could get on the T-Tape which he would use to water the eight thousand trees he hoped to plant in Burdick’s Field. Then, feeling he’d gone on too much, he’d asked how her conference call had gone.

  Almost imperceptibly, she was startled; he half expected her to say what conference call? Then he watched as memory clicked, and she nodded slowly, smiled broadly and said, ‘It was fine, absolutely fine, thank you.’ And twenty years’ experience kicked in automatically. Bells rung, hard as he tried to still them. Tells – famous now, thanks to poker’s popularity, but long known to Renoir, since so much of his career had been spent spotting them. Tics and verbal patterns, hand against the nose, undue formality of speech and laboured explanations – all indicators of mendacity.

  And the smile. How liars liked to smile. Not understanding that there was a physiological difference between the posed grin of the phoney and the spontaneous flash of the sincere. The false smile used only the muscles below the mouth; the authentic one involved an involuntary creasing of the lines beneath the eyes. A distinction that might sound like hogwash to the outside observer, but one which in twenty years of spotting liars Renoir found virtually infallible. So that evening, when Kate seemed to catch herself, speaking very slowly in reply to his innocuous question, and though her jaw moved and her lips spread in a smile, the telltale muscles higher up in her cheeks stayed absolutely still, Renoir thought instinctively, She’s lying.

  Which he had tried to ignore, losing himself in television and two more than usual glasses of wine while Kate worked in her study on the proofs. It must be harmless, he told himself, or maybe he was wrong – after all, he was out of practice, it had been over a year since he’d left his job and moved to London. And Renoir was in any case determined not to bring home his former working skills. He would be a fruit grower now, concerned with aphids and hectare yields, the cost of irrigating new trees and the best way to prune a Bramley in wintertime. Not a digger into people’s secrets.

  It would all be fine, he had told himself not for the first time, when the land sale finally went through, the Gatehouse was finished and their new life began. He had taken such a gamble that he simply wasn’t prepared to contemplate the possibility that what he had done might be going wrong.

  That night, Kate crept into bed in the early hours of the morning, proofs finished, still keyed up rather than exhausted by her all night work. She moved over underneath the sheets and nudged him once, twice until he turned and slowly worked off the old army shorts he sometimes wore in bed, and he found she herself had nothing on, and they made slow love until the sky outside turned a slightly lighter shade of dark as the winter day broke, and as they finished she whispered love you love you and he pushed the unprecedented sliver of doubt like a fistful of pennies into the back of his mind.

  And let it stay there, he told himself now, eight days later, as he left the park on its Bayswater side and moved west into Notting Hill. There, in a side street, he came to the underground garage, and the manager came out of the subterranean office to greet him while someone fetched the car. The manager was Greek, and they made small talk about how nice it would be in the islands (though Renoir had never been there), certainly when contrasted with this wintry grey of London. When the car pulled up sharply beside them Renoir took the keys from the attendant and tipped him. He found the car a little embarrassing, but Kate had taken such pleasure from giving it to him that he had never said a negative word about it. An Audi cabriolet, the darkest blue with vanilla leather inside. Powerful and easy to drive, it looked as if it belonged to a Hollywood divorce lawyer. Conspicuous wasn’t his style, so, in every kind of weather, he kept the top up.

  Now the manager himself looked a little embarrassed, hesitated, then spoke. ‘When you get a chance, could you ask the missus about something for me please?’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Renoir, mystified.

  ‘We haven’t had this quarter’s rental payment.’ He added hastily, ‘It’s not a problem. It’s just she’s usually like clockwork. I thought maybe it’s gone astray in the post.’

  ‘I’ll check it out,’ he promised, surprised.

  ‘Thanks. Drive carefully, Mr Palmer.’ Which wasn’t his name. It was Kate’s name and Kate they knew best, for it was Kate who paid the garage rent. Only not recently it seemed, which was unusual – Kate was beady about money, and paid her bills promptly. Though he tried to keep his distance from her dough.

  In his rearview mirror he could see as he drove off both manager and Nigerian minion look at him with the mix of admiration and smirk that, after over a year of living with Kate, he was almost getting used to. What had Gram liked to say? It’s just as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor one. In his case, she’d have been
right – if he’d let it happen.

  But he hadn’t married Kate Palmer for her money because he hadn’t married her at all. Too easy; it would be like a cat who got the cream by living with the owner of the dairy. Call it pride, or some residual machismo hang-up, but he found it easier to be a kept man if he were not legally a husband as well. He knew Kate wanted children with him, and, in the vaguest way, he did too – but not yet. Did other people wonder why they hadn’t married? Probably, though in this age of ‘partners’ it would only be an older generation who really cared. And they probably thought it was Kate who resisted, seeing the disparity in money and class between Kate Palmer and her American. Nice enough bloke, then a knowing laugh, but you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry one.

  What was he supposed to do? Pretend he was rich in his own right? At least by the comparatively low standards of his upbringing, he had some money of his own: he could pay for groceries, settle a hotel bill, purchase (though not impulsively) a long-distance airplane ticket in economy class. He wasn’t dependent on anyone, even after he’d resigned his job and come here. He’d converted his pension, cashed in his company shares and taken out all his savings from his army years, bringing half in cash over with him to the UK. He paid his own way, or at least the fees for his ‘mature student’ courses in horticulture; he would pay for the eight thousand little apple trees. Yet there was no denying the financial disparity between them, and he could imagine pretty well what was said behind his back. But should he leave the woman he loved rather than suffer embarrassment? Or force her to live differently from what she was used to? For the sake of what? His pride? What would be the point of that?

  Usually a zippy driver, Renoir had slowed down since coming to England, more worried by the prospect of driving on the left-hand side of the road than by any actual difficulty in doing so, though sometimes he found roundabouts confusing and on motorways he had to remind himself which was the fast lane. What he couldn’t do at all was combine the system: the summer before in France, driving this right-hand drive car on left-hand roads, his adopted side coping with his native one, he grew so confused that Kate had to take over.

  Now he fought his way down to the Hammersmith roundabout, then got onto the A4 out of town, sat in the middle lane, and relaxed. He turned on the CD player, finding Fleetwood Mac already ensconced there. A favourite of Kate’s. She loved the folky rock of the West Coast – the Eagles – which he, the Californian, should have liked. But he liked singers pure and simple instead, wanting character in a voice, which meant he liked as many ‘impure’ singers as not – Bonnie Raitt, Joe Cocker. Better them than smoothy metro crooners, though he liked the retro velvet of Dean Martin, and even rated Barry Manilow – which led Kate to declare, ‘I am continually amazed and admiring that you are willing to admit you like his music.’

  He put on Joss Stone, latest white aspirant to the Aretha crown, and drove quickly out through the pleasant western suburbs. He would happily move from Kensington to the soft comforts of, say, Richmond and its deer park any time, but Kate loathed the suburbs. Class again, thought Renoir, wondering if he was being drawn into the unilluminating English obsession – spoken and unspoken – which he had never given any thought to in the United States. You’re just an ordinary Joe, he reminded himself, then thought again of the creepy postcard he had received that morning, telling him to go home. Somebody out there didn’t think him unexceptional; somebody out there didn’t like him much at all. Proving Kate’s own point, he supposed, which she had made only a week or so before. He forgot the catalyst but remembered her words very clearly: ‘You always think everybody’s going to like you, don’t you? You’re just an easygoing guy.’ Then she added in a parody of his own American voice, ‘“I’m just an ordinary Joe, whom everybody loves.”’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ he said. ‘It’s just that most of the time people dislike other people because they don’t know them.’ He was thinking of the reflexive anti-Americanism he sometimes encountered, which he never thought had much to do with him, Renoir the person. It was about his nationality, something that seemed to Renoir as far away from his character as, say, the kind of socks a man wore.

  Kate scoffed gently. ‘Oh, so you think if people get to know you they’ll automatically like you?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  She ignored his reply. ‘Because the point is, maybe some people don’t want to get to know you. Perhaps some people are perfectly happy to dislike you on the basis of entirely superficial acquaintance. That doesn’t lessen the fact of the animus.’

  Further out of town, the urban sprawl grew less attractive, and he thought, with a slight ache, of how dramatic the exit had been from San Francisco, crossing the Golden Gate north and plunging immediately into a national park in west Marin, where there were deer, bobcats, even the odd mountain lion. Or east, quickly passing Berkeley, with Mount Diablo looming. Here, as soon as countryside seemed to appear, Heathrow intervened, followed by the septic reservoirs of Slough.

  But comparisons no longer seemed so inevitable, or constant. And in any case the San Francisco of celebrity – of hazy sunshine and pastel houses, gorgeous food, scenic hills, friendly and attractive people – was not his town, that city where most people’s alternative had become the norm: middle class, Democrats, radical feminists, lesbians and gays, website designers. Sometimes Renoir felt he had been raised in San Francisco’s true alternative culture – working-class Irish, the Sunset District of morning fog, afternoon rain, which left him with a view of the city as emotionally overcast, enclosed and cool. It was the greyness of England – all that rain, the almost soot-like darkness of the winter months – that felt most familiar.

  So he didn’t romanticise the reality of where he now was. Far from it. Anglophiles always boasted about England’s greenery, how a country the size of Minnesota had assiduously preserved its countryside, throwing green belts around even small conurbations to check urban sprawl. But Renoir didn’t see much sign of that; if anything, he noted the propensity for American-like growth of exurban constellations of shopping malls and service industry parks, forcing people into their cars, putting pavement and asphalt down willy-nilly when space should have been at a premium.

  He saw that the GPS light was on and switched it off impatiently. The world viewed by satellite. While television or radio or computers or mobile phones facilitated global communication, GPS’s goal seemed to be exposure, down to a frighteningly precise level: it could pick out a lamppost in a minor village lane, or tell a mountain climber to the exact yard how far he was from a summit four miles high. All this through a penetrating satellite eye that to Renoir seemed the ultimate Orwellian overseer, reducing the physical complexity of the planet to the simple status of a surveillance target. GPS was inescapable, all-seeing.

  But Kate loved gizmos, gadgets, executive toys – duty-free was never safe from her, on the prowl for the latest anything which took a plug or battery. He had teased her about the GPS system, how expensive a precaution it was – It won’t stop them from stealing the car, you know. And she retorted, But it will help me get it back. She rented space in the Notting Hill garage nonetheless.

  An hour later he got off the M4 at the Newbury exit and headed north on the A34, exiting from the highway as it climbed to the top of the Downs, while he drove at their feet, moving west until he came to Wantage, an old market town he liked for its failure to come up much in the world, despite its situation among the affluence of the Thames Valley. He parked just short of the old central square, which had largely local shops. A few were smart ones (ladies’ lovely leather shoes; an Indian interiors shop full of teak), but most were mildly dilapidated. In the market itself cheap clothes and produce predominated, with ‘bargains’ that went unappreciated when brought home, like the rugs from a Moroccan honeymoon when the couple returned to England. In a side street there was a mixed garden tools and hardware shop which Renoir favoured enough to pay over the top for a pair of lopping shears he needed.
He meant to pay with his own debit card – that was the arrangement he had insisted upon with Kate – but discovered he’d left it on the chest of drawers in the London flat. Supplying the card for their joint household account instead, he was surprised (and embarrassed – there were two women queuing behind him) when the card was rejected by the processing machine and he had to pay cash.

  What’s going on? he wondered as he drove out of town, since despite the distance he tried to maintain between his money and Kate’s he did know that her salary, bonus and profit share from Seymour Carlisle’s business the year before was a little over £317,000.

  Driving south, rising into the Downs, he was soon in stud country, with long rolling hills, richly grassed and neatly fenced. Few houses, and the villages mainly hamlets, without post offices or shops. He drove in the dark through the soft carving of the mild escarpment, small stands of second growth woods interspersed amidst the prevailing sweep of the grass slopes, pocked white in their thinner rooted parts by the underlying chalk of the Downs. Past Uffington, then climbing high into a small pocket of the Downs towards the land of Kate’s family’s estate.

  Not a holding; not a farm; not even a large farm, as it would have been in Northern California. Here it was an estate.

  He stopped two villages short at a pub, since he didn’t want supper with the family – there would be meals enough with them this weekend. It was called the Fisherman’s Arms, though there were no rivers nearby and no fishermen, but the walls were dotted with photographs of famous trout streams and framed mounts holding ancient fly patterns. In their very early days, he and Kate would come here like furtive lovers, happy to find a hideaway of their own so close to Belfield.