Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Steady, he told himself, do not go there. For here in England – here with Kate – he had changed. And he did not want to revert. Time was, being paranoid was a necessary tool of his trade; it made him better prepared. But in a normal life – the life he’d made here in England with Kate – the tension was pointless; it made life unnecessarily exhausting. There were no real threats; enemies didn’t lurk; precautions were utterly unnecessary. Turn off the alarm bells.

  ‘Renoir, my boy, come and have some food,’ a voice said gently, and he came out of this reverie to find Alastair smiling down at him and everyone getting up. He went and stood with the other men while the women served themselves from the sideboard, underneath the portrait of Wilberforce, of whom, as she was always happy to explain, Beatrice was a direct descendant. He helped himself to lamb cutlets with mint sauce and redcurrant jelly, peas, mashed potato, gravy. It wasn’t terrible food at all, even if it reminded him of eating in the Presidio canteen during his army days.

  As he sat down again, Roddy was still talking with Julie, who was saying with a certain strain to her voice, ‘Surely we’ve got to choose one or the other. Either stand by Europe or stick with America. Nobody thinks we should go it alone.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. If that makes me unfashionably right wing then there we are.’

  ‘But even Oswald Mosley was pro-Europe.’

  ‘Ah, but that was fifty years ago. He saw the battle – rightly in my view – as against communism. The war was just a diversion. And in that kind of fight you have to have allies. Not America; if push came to shove they’d have sold us down the river.’

  ‘Like they did in the war?’ Renoir interjected mildly.

  Roddy shrugged. ‘If Pearl Harbor hadn’t happened, Europe would be Nazi today.’ He said Nazi with a long drawling ‘z’. ‘The Soviet Union would have fallen apart long before it actually did.’ He turned back to the woman named Julie. ‘But the point is, we don’t need Europe any more as a bulwark. Russia’s no threat. If any country is, it’s the US of A, though it’s our culture they want to destroy. So the argument is overwhelming for staying strictly on our own. Not part of Europe, and not attached like an imploring, dependent limpet on the fat rear of America.’

  Julie seemed a little embarrassed by the vehemence of this. She said to Renoir, ‘I take it you’re American. What brings you over here?’

  Roddy interrupted. ‘Money!’ he exclaimed, waving a hand over his wine glass. ‘That’s what brings him over here. It’s like the Gold Rush in reverse.’

  Renoir forced himself to grin, since failing to rise to the bait wouldn’t please Roddy at all.

  Sarah leaned across the table towards Julie; Renoir hadn’t realised she was listening. ‘Jack lives with my sister Kate. He’s her partner.’

  ‘Terrible word “partner”,’ said Roddy after a pause.

  ‘You would prefer “husband”?’ asked Renoir, and Roddy winced dramatically.

  ‘So what do you do?’ asked Julie. She was struggling to ignore Roddy now, though once started, Roddy didn’t like to stop.

  ‘I’m hoping to farm,’ said Renoir.

  ‘Crops?’ she said, with a citified air, as if she were describing a wild animal.

  ‘Fruit.’

  ‘Don’t look surprised,’ Roddy piped up. ‘He’s from San Francisco, so he knows all about fruits.’

  Sarah looked at Renoir from across the table and rolled her eyes in sympathy.

  ‘What did you used to do?’ asked Julie.

  ‘I worked for a high-tech company in Silicon Valley.’

  ‘I better leave it at that then,’ she said with a self-deprecating laugh. ‘It wouldn’t mean a thing to me.’

  ‘We all think he was a spy,’ said Roddy. ‘A master of industrial espionage.’

  ‘How exciting,’ said Julie, though her eyes betrayed this, since they were darting around nervously. ‘So you live here then?’

  ‘No, in London,’ he said, not about to explain his imminent move to the Gatehouse and draw yet more fire from Roddy.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, obviously puzzled. But her face brightened at the chance to change subjects. ‘So are you going to the Cézanne exhibition?’

  But Roddy couldn’t resist. ‘Of course he is,’ he almost shouted. ‘He’ll probably claim he’s descended from him as well.’

  When Julie looked baffled, Renoir explained. ‘My surname’s Renoir, one of Roddy’s little jokes.’

  ‘But are you French?’ The poor woman was working hard.

  ‘A little French Canadian on my father’s side. But no relation to the painter. None at all.’ Which was true as far as he knew, despite Kate’s half-hopeful suggestion that there must be some link.

  Roddy poured himself more claret. Renoir was intentionally drinking very little, sensing it would merely aggravate the irritation he was starting to feel, for with Roddy he felt handcuffed. The men he’d known all his life – at school, in the army, the workplace, socially – didn’t act like this. If they did, they were confronted – in the playground and in the army, confronted physically – or avoided. But Renoir could not, alas, avoid Roddy altogether, and he couldn’t confront him either. For Kate’s sake, he ate crow, and doubtless, however putatively separate their lives would be in the Gatehouse, would in future get to eat lots more.

  Now Roddy moved onto farming, with a long speech about the mistreatment of landowners by what he called ‘this Metropolitan government’. When he paused to drink from his glass, Julie asked, ‘Can’t anyone live off the land any more?’

  Roddy shook his head. ‘Not without thousands of acres. Of course, we once had that here,’ he said, as if this had been twenty rather than a hundred years before. He called down the table to Benedict, who broke off from his conversation with Alastair’s colleague. ‘Conrad, I was just saying it’s impossible to make a living farming. As a new landowner, would you agree?’

  ‘I’m happy to own the land,’ said Benedict dryly, ‘so long as I’m not expected to make money owning it.’

  ‘At some point something’s going to have to give,’ declared Roddy. ‘There are too few houses in this country and too much unprofitable farm land. A genius is not required to see the solution.’

  To his left, Renoir found that Benedict’s wife – she was called Helena – had turned his way. Close up she looked older than her husband, who like Renoir seemed forty-ish; she was quite darkly tanned and heavily made up, and wore an elegant dress of grey wool. She had on a Mediterranean amount of jewellery – heavy earrings, a gold necklace, a bracelet and on her hand both a thick gold wedding band and an engagement ring of diamond clusters. She looked him over, a little glassy eyed. ‘So you are Miss Palmer’s man then?’

  It was the accent of international London – not English, but impossible to trace. The product of years of English at school and some intensive one-on-one tutorials in Istanbul or wherever, followed by X years of an English husband.

  ‘Something like that,’ he said with a smile, and refilled both their glasses. Judging from the decanter, she had already put away several glasses.

  ‘I know my husband was very eager to meet you.’

  ‘Really?’

  She nodded awkwardly while she drank from her glass. ‘Of course. Old habits die hard,’ she said and smiled knowingly.

  He shrugged, not sure how to respond. The woman was drunk. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Belgravia,’ she said provocatively, and laughed. ‘Don’t look so serious,’ she said, putting her hand on his arm. ‘I am from Athens. Have you been there?’

  ‘No.’ He and Kate had been to France and Italy in the summers, but never to Greece, though he wanted to go to the islands some day. He said as much and she nodded approvingly. ‘They are lovely,’ she said, ‘especially for children. You should take yours.’

  ‘Not mine,’ he said. ‘Kate has a daughter. Do you have children?’

  ‘No,’ she said, slightly louder than necessary. The glassy-eyed look had returned an
d he realised he shouldn’t have refilled her glass. Renoir saw Benedict glance at her, not in a warning way, but simply taking note. ‘I can’t have them,’ she said. ‘Sadly.’

  He was a little startled by this – not we can’t have children, but I, as if accustomed to blaming herself. Her bluntness seemed more English than European, something he had needed getting used to. Some of this apparent candour was due to different diction, but some of it was also an unwillingness to coat life in romantic froth: more than once Renoir had been startled to hear English parents declare of their own child, ‘Of course Ivo’ – or Simon or Lucretia or Georgia – ‘isn’t really very clever,’ or good-looking or coordinated, or whatever quality would have American parents reflexively praising their offspring to the sky, however inaccurately.

  In the face of this confession what could he possibly say? Relax, I haven’t got kids either. Anyway, kids are overrated. Just think – you never have to participate in those endless dinner party arguments about private education versus state. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Burdick’s would be a perfect place for kids to grow up,’ she said wistfully.

  Why Burdick’s? He looked at her quizzically and she saw his puzzlement. ‘Do you know it? It’s not very far from here.’

  He nodded. ‘I liked Mr Burdick.’

  ‘We never met him. He had died, of course, when we bought the estate.’

  He was listening carefully now. ‘What estate?’ It came out a little rudely, but he didn’t care – he needed to know.

  ‘Why his, of course. Didn’t you know?’ She pointed towards her husband, who happened at that moment to stare directly at Renoir. ‘We bought it before Christmas. We still have London, of course, but this is our new home.’

  He stayed for lunch the next day, since he had promised Kate to begin moving some of her things from her Belfield room to the Gatehouse – with any luck, on their next visit they would be sleeping there. Beatrice served roast beef and they drank two bottles of very good claret brought down from London by Alastair.

  After lunch he walked around the garden with Beatrice and Julie. ‘It will be very strange when you move into the Gatehouse,’ Beatrice said. ‘Kate’s always been such a part of Belfield. Even when she was in Scotland, we’d keep her room ready.’

  Julie asked, ‘Did your daughter live in Scotland for long?’

  ‘Several years,’ said Beatrice, her mouth making a small moue.

  ‘She was married to a Scotsman,’ said Renoir, and Beatrice’s lips turned down into a frown.

  They walked in silence along the rhododendron walk which opened suddenly to reveal the lake. It was no more than a hundred yards across, with a small island (tiny actually, no more than ten feet across) near the Hall end where the Palmer children and now Emily would swing from a rope on the branch of a solitary willow to land with a splash out in the water. There was a circular walk around the lake and Beatrice struck out along it now, still vigorous in her seventies. On the far side she stopped and they all stood, looking away from the house, down the thin cut which ran between two hills. On the right the rise was gradual and the slope itself was grass with a thin line of trees at the top. This was the drive called Harvest Walk, and the beaters would come across the wheat fields on the top plateau, driving stray pheasants before them until they reached the thin line of oaks and ash, where they would stand and watch the guns fire as the birds flew down towards the lake.

  On the left the hillside was steeper, higher and more wooded, the edge populated by Corsican pines and high firs, prone to high-wind damage and lightning strikes: Treefall Down. Further in, a mix of conifer and oak stretched back until it opened around the Old Orchard of apple trees. Driven from there towards the cliff, the birds would then explode out of cover and fly at terrifically high speed across and above the cut where the guns waited. They would swirl in the wind, twisting and diving, and were famously difficult to shoot.

  ‘I love this view,’ said Beatrice. She turned around and looked back at the house across the lake. Renoir was struck by the simple progression towards rusticity – house, garden, lake, country. Beatrice said as much: ‘From the house you have the same view, but with the things people have made in the foreground – the lake and the gardens.’

  ‘If houses were built,’ said Julie, ‘presumably they’d be out of view.’

  From the pained look on Beatrice’s face, Julie must have realised how gauche her intervention had been. ‘Sorry. It was just that Roddy was saying permission might be given to build new houses.’

  Beatrice shook her head. ‘Not while the land’s farmable. And the woods themselves are listed. Did you know you can have a preservation order put on trees? My husband did it not long before he died.’ She frowned. ‘Honestly, sometimes you’d think my son had been trained as a builder. Well, It won’t happen in my lifetime. I’ll never see new houses at Belfield.’ She smiled with oozing benevolence at Renoir. ‘Except for the Gatehouse.’

  Julie had moved out of earshot to look at the rose beds. Beatrice turned towards him, as if to wrap them both in privacy. ‘Any news of Emily?’

  He shook his head. ‘We were going to take her out for exeat this weekend, but then Kate had to go away. She’s gone to a friend in London instead.’

  ‘I had a letter from her last week. She said she didn’t want to go to Glen Ferban at Easter. She said she hoped she’d spend it here. I was rather taken aback.’

  Renoir shrugged. ‘She’s almost a teenager now,’ he said.

  Beatrice nodded, more out of politeness he thought than assent. ‘She’s never got on terribly well with her father.’ This was true, but Renoir decided to say nothing. After a moment Beatrice said, ‘Not that I ever did, either. But she’s very fond of you, you know.’

  To his relief Julie was coming back to them, but Beatrice said quickly, almost under her breath, ‘Though it might help if you regularised your arrangements with her mother.’

  What? he thought, fighting to stifle his outrage. First they decide I want to marry Kate for her money, then they get huffy when I don’t marry her.

  He found some empty boxes in the stables and filled them with Kate’s books from her bedroom. She had already started and he loaded these cartons as well into the car. One was especially heavy, and as he put it into the car it started to buckle under its weight. He broke its tape seal to lighten the load, and found it loaded with books with a tin box on top. It was the colour of gun metal, old and knocked about, long and light with a locked lid.

  He finished unloading in the dark, then locked up the Gatehouse and drove towards London. Ninety minutes later as he sat immobilised in traffic on the A4 near the Hogarth roundabout, a faint whiff of hops in the air from the brewery up the road, he looked forward to the time when this Sunday evening drive would no longer be a regular part of his life. He thought, too, of his weekend, and the unwelcome news that Kate’s old heart-throb and his peculiar wife would be living at Burdick’s Farm.

  He hadn’t known Burdick very long, since the old man died within six months of Renoir’s arrival in the UK, but they’d once had a walk, after a big Belfield lunch, through this very part of the estate. It was Burdick who pointed out the acreage right beneath the Gatehouse itself, and told Renoir about the green sand and its amazing fertility. ‘But there’s something even more valuable here, and that’s water.’ He gestured to the top corner of the field. ‘There are little springs over there. I know, because I found two of them, when I used to lease the Old Orchard. If you dug out a pond on the hillside, those springs would fill it up.’

  But Burdick’s Farm belonged to Benedict, only now it had apparently been transformed into an estate, at least according to Mrs Benedict. Renoir thought there had been something infinitely sad about her; the failure to have children, yes that was part of it, but some other note of melancholy in her tone, resigned and knowing at the same time.

  What a contrast her husband had been. Renoir hadn’t liked the man, though he admitted to himself tha
t this was one ex-boyfriend he would not have liked regardless. Still, Benedict projected such an air of insouciant arrogance; he seemed almost a caricature hate object from a left-wing polemic against the upper class. It didn’t take a class warrior to see that Benedict thought he was simply better than other people. Better looking, taller, stronger, healthier, braver, even more reasonable (as opposed to more clever; cleverness would not be a virtue in Benedict’s eyes) than run of the mill folk. What had Fitzgerald said, mocked later by his ex-friend Hemingway? The rich are different from you and me. Yes, thought, Renoir, they have more confidence.

  And part of Renoir envied this, since any social confidence he possessed had been laboriously acquired; there was nothing natural about it. People like Benedict made him feel foreign, even at Belfield – perhaps especially at Belfield, which seemed so quintessentially English. Although Renoir was determined to remain grounded in his very Americanness, it was tiring to feel it always constituted a distinguishing mark, and he enjoyed the days when he was allowed to forget about it. Which he could do with Kate, since to Renoir Kate was no longer English, Kate was simply Kate.

  When he parked the car in the Notting Hill garage, the GPS light flashed and the display read History, then listed on its small screen the trips registered over the last few months. Unlike most of these gizmos, this model was designed primarily for tracking purposes rather than as a navigational aid. Companies employed them to check their sales reps’ mileage, parents used them to make sure their little Annabel really was spending the night at a girlfriend’s, private detectives installed them surreptitiously to follow people they were being paid to follow, and rich people (like Kate, thought Renoir) put them in to find their cars when they got stolen.