Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Later, lying in their vast new bed, he looked out down the slope of Burdick’s Field and marvelled at Kate’s energy, as she stayed up reading and drinking Ovaltine while he pretended to be asleep, trying not to think about Benedict’s words.

  Saturday was difficult. They spent the day outside, working on the property. Kate was busy planting for their first summer, adding to the earlier flowers and shrubs she’d placed in a large circular bed on the field side of the house. It was too early for the wild-flowers in the meadow there, but already in the bed anemones were in bloom, their round red orbs dotted with black poppy-like seeds, and hyacinths, white and purple, interspersed by brunnera, little blue flowers which Kate said everyone confused with forget-me-nots. She had planted tulips as well, in regular clumps of six, scarlet and purple-black, and a stray dissonant patch of yellow – ‘a mistake’, said Kate, which wouldn’t make the garden’s second year, since there was a more tasteful yellow in a light forsythia bush. At the edge of the house, Renoir had planted both a cherry and an almond tree, but neither was yet in bloom – he had a bet with Kate that the cherry would have pink flowers rather than white.

  Renoir worked in the Old Orchard on the trees he hadn’t pruned earlier in winter. The previous year he had focused on reducing tree heights, since these trees had gone unpruned for over a decade, their leaders useless and the high branches fruit-free. Now he concentrated on taking out large internal branches so the light could work through into interior fruit, since light was as valuable for fruit as water. He cut dead wood and the larger weak-angled branches with a pruning saw, headed back the one- and two-year-old growth with his new lopping shears, and clipped water spouts and young shoots with a pair of double-handed clippers.

  He tended to underprune and was insufficiently ruthless about cutting the lower branches (the process known as ‘lifting’), which slowed the overall growth of the trees. Yet he remained amazed at how much even such old trees could grow in a year, and with the retained new shoots he either headed them back or tied them down to horizontal (to encourage sideways growth) with a roll of yellow nylon netting. He was careful with the ladder – no one would hear him shout if he fell – but liked standing aloft, leaning against the centre trunk of the older, bigger trees, gazing out over the orchard, the trees in neat lines like fattened soldiers.

  Finished now, he unlocked a small hut at one end of the orchard and put his tools on its wooden floor. There had been vandalism the year before, most of it insignificant – initials carved on a few of the trees, trash left around a half-assed attempt at a camp fire – but the kids had broken into the hut, prising its padlock off and throwing the cushions from the bench stored inside onto the floor, presumably to use as a rough mattress for youthful coupling. Renoir had put a stronger lock on, and was happy to see it hadn’t been messed with. He couldn’t get worked up about essentially innocent trespass through the woods and the fruit trees, but he didn’t want to encourage the use of the hut as a local centre of fornication. Why am I deluding myself? He suddenly thought. None of this is going to be my problem.

  They went for lunch at the Hall, where they ate with Beatrice and Roddy, who was in high spirits, lyrically describing his plans for redeveloping the rest of the estate. Over coffee he talked about advertising the shooting – during the past season it had been done by word of mouth – by taking out a classified display in The Field. ‘Who knows?’ he said, putting a sugar in his mug, ‘We might even get a sheikh or two. One of your oil tycoons, Kate.’

  ‘Why on earth would they want to shoot here?’ demanded Kate, unusually snappy. ‘They want grand places, where they can shoot six hundred birds.’

  Roddy seemed unperturbed and tapped his nose significantly. ‘Blue blood, that’s why. They’re all terrific snobs, these Arabs. They like the real thing.’ He looked at Renoir sceptically.

  ‘Don’t worry, Roddy,’ said Renoir. ‘The days they’re shooting here I’ll stay inside.’

  Which made even Roddy laugh, though Kate was unamused. When Roddy started to talk again, she cut in sharply, ‘Oh do shut up.’ Her mother raised her eyes in disapproval, and Roddy started to bristle, then seemed to change his mind and smiled serenely, as if deciding not to inflame the child still further.

  Normally, lunch at Belfield would have made Renoir grateful to be in his own house at last, but he was dreading nightfall, since on Saturday night Kate and he almost always made love. Reading, he would throw a leg over hers, an arm would caress a shoulder, books would get tossed aside, a light turned off, a top lifted, and the casual but accelerating process would begin.

  This night she was reading Harlen Coben; he had started Anne Tyler, but put it down. When she eventually switched off her light and nestled under the covers he didn’t move. ‘You awake?’ she whispered, and he didn’t reply. A hand came over and rested on his shoulder, but still he wouldn’t let himself stir. He didn’t trust himself to make love to her. He could perform all right, since he could subdue resentment with testosterone, but there would be ambivalence and aggression in the act, rather than the assertiveness of undiluted love.

  She sighed audibly, then turned on her back away from him, and within minutes was snoring ever so lightly, while he lay there tense and sad at once, until sadness took over, then sleep.

  He had not had the dream since moving to England. And what was odd about its reappearance now was that it came encased in a self-conscious shell that told him he was dreaming while he did so. He was watching the boy in the dream instead of being the boy, which had the effect of distancing him, the dreamer, without lessening its horror. In the dream, the man in the Stetson had already shot Will, and Will lay by the pond in the background of the dream’s frame, which gave a screen-like constancy to the picture, as if Renoir were viewing a movie. In the foreground, Jack the boy was digging in a hole, as a woman above him was saying, Don’t stop, don’t stop. Suddenly she commanded, so sternly that the spade he held quivered, Don’t tell anyone. You hear? No one.

  He woke wondering at first where he was, startled into consciousness by an intrusion of light. He blinked and saw Kate sitting up in bed beside him, staring at him, with the bedside lamp turned on. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you should ask yourself that question,’ said Kate, and her voice was cold. ‘“Don’t tell anyone.” You said it three times, and you’ve said it before. What’s the big secret?’ He shook his head, and she looked at him wearily. ‘I’ve never pried, Renoir, and I won’t start now, but I wish you’d talk to me. Or if not to me, then to someone.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll see a shrink in the morning,’ he said sarcastically, then he sighed. ‘Listen, it was just a nightmare. Why don’t you turn off the light? You need the sleep.’

  She didn’t reply and looking up he found her gaze steady on him, unappeased. ‘Come on,’ he urged, ‘let’s go back to sleep.’

  And after she seemed to have made some unexpressed decision, she reached over and turned off the lamp. They settled, side by side on their backs, and he lay there trying to sleep, hoping to write off the dream. Then out of the dark Kate’s voice came like an unsettling edict, judgmental and true. ‘I can’t make you tell me, Jack. You have to want to tell me.’ He pretended he was asleep.

  They drove back Sunday after spending the day apart – he worked in the Old Orchard again, and she went through more of her things at Belfield. Again that night in bed, she made advances; this time he did not pretend to be asleep, but pleaded a stiff back from his outdoor work, a manifestly bad excuse since he was playing golf in London the next morning.

  ‘Okay,’ said Kate after this excuse. ‘But we better talk about this.’

  ‘Talk about what? My bad back?’

  ‘Something’s bothering you, I can tell. You’ve been acting very oddly. If you don’t want to sleep with me, you can say so. Though how we’ll ever have children this way is beyond me. I can’t make them myself.’

  Children? He couldn’t believe his ears. He wanted to kno
w, if he weren’t keen on helping right now, whether she’d chosen Conrad Benedict as her back-up supplier. He wanted to say this, and he almost did, such was his sense of breaking point. But by then Kate had turned off the light, ostentatiously hunkered down for sleep and turned her back resolutely against him.

  And the next morning he was glad he hadn’t said a word, as he stood at the fifth hole of Ealing golf club.

  ‘I figured you for a spook right away. I knew it.’ Ricky looked a little ashamed of this confessional rush, which came on the fairway, where they waited for a four ball to clear the green ahead of them. ‘I knew you weren’t just a sponger.’

  ‘Thanks, Ricky,’ Renoir said a little dryly. Was this what the other golfers had made of him? Well, he thought, remembering the snickers of the garage attendants in Notting Hill, they were not alone.

  ‘Though I did think at first that this lady you had me track was just the usual up-to-no-good in the lunch hour and “have we got time for another before I get back to the office?”.’

  ‘Yes, Ricky,’ said Renoir dutifully. He wasn’t really interested in the cabbie’s opinion of what he had been watching, but there was no point being rude. He just didn’t want Ricky to figure out that it was Renoir’s girlfriend he was following; this was a humiliation he wished to be spared, feeling he had enough other ones already.

  ‘It just goes to show what a sly horse you are.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Renoir’s reaction now was sincere.

  ‘She’s working for you, isn’t she?’

  ‘What?’ Renoir seemed unable to learn the politer ‘excuse me?’ of the English.

  ‘I mean, there wasn’t any hanky-panky going on at all. This was business, pure and simple. I went into the hotel to buy a Standard, thinking “they’ll be upstairs going at it or my name’s Jim Davidson” and what do I see in the bar but the lady and the gent sitting at a table, papers spread between them, having a right argy-bargy. And that’s when he mentioned your name, not very politely either. She says, “Leave him out of it. He knows nothing about it.”

  ‘Nothing about what?’ Renoir asked, then realised it was an asinine question. How would Ricky possibly know? But Renoir didn’t care, even when Ricky looked at him dolefully, because Renoir was happy to look stupid, happy to be stupid, if that meant that what Ricky was saying was true. Yes, Kate had gone to the Cavendish Hotel and, yes, she had gone to meet a man. But contrary to all his suspicions, it now looked as if she had gone there to talk with Conrad Benedict. He was almost embarrassed by the relief he felt – but only almost.

  And later that night, after they had made love, Kate whispered into his ear, ‘That was a quick recovery.’

  ‘What?’ he said drowsily, an arm draped lazily on her naked thigh.

  ‘Your back,’ she said. ‘That hurt so much last night.’ She squeezed his shoulder gently. ‘Or were you gritting your teeth just now?’

  ‘I shut my eyes and think of California.’

  So he was freed from the virus of jealousy, though it was replaced by equally obsessive curiosity. For if they were only talking, what were they talking about? Business, he tried to tell himself, just normal business. Think of how many men she talks to each week. How did the jingle go? Fat men, skinny men, men who climb on rocks; smart men, stupid men, even men with chicken pox. Thought of like this – one more business meeting in a swanky hotel – it wasn’t a problem to Renoir. Nothing to worry about.

  But then why had she lied about it?

  His curiosity increased after a boozy lunch with Alastair. They met at a restaurant where they had met before, a large and noisy place, which seemed to Renoir virtually predestined to be located on St James’s. ‘Why didn’t he take you to his club?’ Kate demanded when he and Alastair had gone there the year before for the first of a series of friendly lunches.

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe he was worried I wouldn’t behave.’

  But Renoir hadn’t felt snubbed. He was a fish out of water, and he recognised that his anomalous status – not husband, not public schoolboy, not even Englishman – was more uncomfortable for others than it was for himself. If Alastair found it easier, on the whole, to meet him on the neutral ground of a restaurant, that was fine with Renoir. Especially now that Renoir knew that Alastair’s club was the same handsome building of yellow brick and white stucco which Conrad Benedict had entered on successive Tuesdays.

  He found Alastair waiting in a large armchair of blue dyed leather by the restaurant’s zinc bar. He was dressed for work, wearing a suit which even Renoir’s untutored eye could see was tailor-made, though like all of Alastair’s clothes, it managed to look beautifully cut and yet wonderfully soft. In his blazer, Renoir felt both stiff and under-dressed.

  In some ways, Alastair represented the kind of Englishman Renoir was coming to distrust. He had a confidence that he carried like a birthright, and a first-rate education: like his four brothers, Alastair was an Etonian (‘The fees!’ Kate once exclaimed. ‘Think of the fees!’), and had read Modern Languages at Oxford. Yet the conventionalism of his credentials masked an eccentric intelligence, which itself was disguised by a languid friendliness which made Alastair appealing to women and unthreatening to men. His manners were excellent but not excessive, his urbanity gentle rather than slick. And any resentment his slightly patrician air might have stirred in people (probably a lot these days) melted in the face of his simple niceness.

  They were led to a table in the back of the vast pastel room, which had Art Deco scallops of chrome on its walls, like a designer’s small-scale homage to the Bilbao Museum. Before he’d even settled in his chair, Alastair ordered a bottle of Pinot Grigio.

  As usual they talked about the Palmer family, in the conspiratorial fashion of (almost) brothers-in-law. As they’d got to know each other, Alastair had grown more forthright, as he was today about the shrinking finances of Belfield. ‘It’s getting worse, not better,’ he declared. ‘Roddy spends all his time scheming how to get out of debt, and Beatrice goes on pretending that there isn’t a problem.’

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘The estate loses money, of course. But that wouldn’t matter so much if Roddy had anything to speak of coming in. Kate helps – I’m sure I’m not telling you anything new there – and that’s keeping things afloat. But Roddy’s managed to get himself into all kinds of debt.’

  ‘Do you know how much he owes?’

  Alastair paused and looked at his starter of insalata tricolore. ‘I think you’d find hundreds of thousands of pounds were the order of the day.’

  ‘Holy smokes,’ said Renoir appreciatively. ‘No wonder he wants to build houses at Belfield.’

  ‘I know,’ said Alastair, ‘though it’s not going to happen, not in our lifetimes anyway. It’s all Green Belt, the woods have preservation orders, most of the rest is some kind of special conservation area, and Beatrice wouldn’t tolerate it for a moment anyway. It’s one of those assets which bleed you dry, because it’s only realisable as a whole. You either find enough money to keep it up, or you sell the whole thing. There’s no option in between.’

  ‘Well,’ said Renoir, ‘he’s getting some money from Kate for the Gatehouse.’ From what Alastair said, he wished all the more that the contracts had been signed. What was taking so long?

  Alastair smiled wryly. ‘Hate to say it, but it’s a mere holding action, as far as Roddy’s concerned. The debts are that bad.’

  A little unnerved by this, Renoir shifted the conversation onto less disturbing ground: the standard English topic of conversation in spring – the destination of Alastair’s forthcoming summer holidays.

  ‘La France,’ said Alastair, his eyes misty from the wine. ‘Three magical weeks which I prefer to think of as three months. What about you?’

  ‘We promised to take Emily to San Francisco. Show her old haunts and all that. But I don’t know – we’re only just in the Gatehouse, and there’s still a lot to do.’

  ‘Your new neighbour was saying much the sam
e thing the other night.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Benedict. I saw him at some city dinner at the Guildhall and all he did was complain about how much work there was left to do at Burdick’s.’

  ‘Kate said Burdick had let things run down a bit. From what I gather, he was never one for the high life,’ conceded Renoir.

  ‘Not in the domestic sense at any rate,’ said Alastair with a laugh. ‘A wood fire, bottle of whisky and large game pie, and the man was happy. Benedict’s something different altogether.’

  ‘Do you know him well?’

  ‘Well enough,’ said Alastair, and there was a rueful note in his voice. ‘In fact, I was his stockbroker for a while. Not a long while, I have to say.’

  ‘What happened? Did you fall out?’ Renoir loved the expression, with its associations, to him at least, of friendships collapsing like deck chairs, or Guardsmen fainting in line on parade on the Queen’s birthday.

  ‘Not at all. We are the closest of . . . distant acquaintances now. He explained to me that he preferred to move his assets around – not just in different holdings, but handled by different people as well. I thought this was a bit rum, considering he’s a personal banker. How would he feel if his clients did the same thing to him?’

  ‘How many clients does a personal banker handle?’

  ‘It depends. I wouldn’t think ever more than a dozen. And if the client’s big enough – a Getty, say, or a Rothschild – then it may pay to be full time for the one.’

  ‘Is that how Benedict operated?’

  Alastair sipped his wine, then held the glass and looked at it as he spoke. ‘No, he had lots of clients, though he lost most of them when he got into trouble for trading personally in shares he was recommending.’

  ‘Is that illegal?’