Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘When?’ Roddy shouted.

  Renoir paused. ‘In due course,’ he said, using an English phrase he loathed for its bogus precision.

  Kate answered the phone in the flat on the first ring.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Renoir. ‘I’m at the Gatehouse. Along with your brother, though sadly he can’t come to the phone right now.’

  ‘What have you done to him? Did you hurt him?’

  ‘No. I resisted the temptation. Even though he seemed more than willing to try and hurt me.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. Just fine. And so is your brother – I put him in the larder. You always said it would make a good gaol. This way you’ll know where to find him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m leaving it to you to let him out. I’m not going to risk opening the door; he’s got his shotgun with him. As for Acer Oil, don’t worry about me. I’m not interested any more in getting in the way. It’s up to you now.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ She sounded almost childlike, bewildered, and scared. For a brief moment he wanted her there with him so he could take her in his arms and comfort her.

  Instead he steeled himself. ‘Just what I said. The decision’s all yours. I’m out of it.’

  ‘But where will you be?’

  He hesitated. ‘Far away,’ he said at last, and the words came back to him, sung so lightly as he lay on the back seat of his uncle’s car, trying to choke back his tears:

  Far away but gentle now,

  Let me show you how to love.

  ‘Far away,’ he said again, abstractedly, though he knew exactly where he was going next.

  Sonoma Farewell

  WHERE THE BUS had once set him down so long ago, fresh from San Francisco, there was now a restaurant, which looked fashionable, with a solid mahogany bar and light oak floor. Across the square there was a bookstore and a fancy coffee shop next to it, and at the corner a small boutique hotel. Surprisingly the square seemed bigger than his memories of it.

  From the address he expected her to be out of town, since it was the road that wound east, through a ravine, a stone’s throw above the Russian River. But she was in a white clapboard house just a few blocks from the square, on one of the lots of the town’s old original grid.

  He parked now across the street and waited, taking out the letter he’d received that morning.

  Dear Renoir

  I was very cross to hear you have gone alone without me but Mummy says there is a reason and that either you or she will explain to me when I am older. How much older, Renoir? If you say sixteen I will be really cross. Thirteen seems fair to me since it is over a year away and you have to admit that is a long time at my age.

  I hope you will bring me back some apple butter. And photos please, especially of the places you promised to take me. Why is it called the Russian River by the way?

  Now, just to fill you in. Mummy and I went to the White Horse first thing on Sunday morning and all is unchanged there I can report – Surprise! And Belfield should be sold by autumn. Everyone is sad about it, but Mummy says it was time to move on anyway. She never said that before. We’ll live in London for a while but Mummy is looking for a place in the country – If, well you can guess what the If is, Renoir. You are the If.

  And Mummy says that maybe next year I could weekly board. Could you put up with seeing me every weekend? I hope so.

  Oh and Granna had a cold but is better now. And Uncle Roddy is moving to France and Granna may go with him. Mummy says we can visit him during school holidays and I can get to know my cousin there, though she also says we are not going there for a while.

  I hope you are 100 per cent A-okay as you would say and the aeroplane ride was a good one. Will you see Will after all these years and why are you staying in a hotel? Will you take his picture for me please? And send him my best wishes. Is that okay?

  Mummy will not say when you are coming back, Renoir, and she seems sad. Most of the time actually. I asked her if she missed you and she got cross. Though then she said do fish swim? I miss you anyway, Renoir, and you know this fish can swim.

  xxx

  Ems

  He’d flown out of London telling himself he didn’t care what Kate decided to do, yet reading Emily’s letter he realised there was no point hiding behind a front of indifference. Her news did not exactly make him happy, but the regret he felt at the prospect of Belfield’s sale was rapidly overtaken by his relief that Kate had not gone through with her plan. Contrary to all his fears and expectations, Kate had done the right thing. How often he had misjudged her in their time together. Part of him wanted to tell her this, although he doubted that she would believe him – unless this doubt was just another instance of his misjudging her.

  He had in any case unfinished business of his own. Sure enough, within a few minutes she came out onto the front porch, sweeping it with a broom, then watering the flower pots with a shiny aluminium watering can. He watched her for a while, then drew on some sense of resolution and got out of the car. She glanced at him, but only momentarily, then resumed her watering, and it was only as he came up the walk to the house, with neat lawn on either side (though it was yellowed from the California sun), that she gave him her attention.

  ‘You looking for someone?’ she asked, and he knew now for sure it was her. There was that same tone, not impolite or aggressive, but blunt.

  ‘Maris,’ he said quietly, and he could see her examining his face as he approached, trying to determine if she knew him. ‘Maris,’ he repeated, ‘it’s me.’

  ‘What?’ she said slowly.

  ‘It’s me. Jack.’

  She put down the watering can without taking her eyes off him. He was at the porch now but stopped at the bottom of the three steps, waiting and unsure. And then she said, as if acceding to the inevitable, ‘I guess you’d better come inside.’ And he followed her into the house.

  The living room was tidy and simply furnished: an old large television, a sofa with plumped pillows, a recliner and an oak rocking chair.

  ‘Should I be expecting any other visitors?’ she said. Her tone was laconic rather than worried.

  He shook his head. ‘Only me.’

  She had him sit down in the rocking chair and asked if he wanted something to drink. ‘I’ve got coffee or tea, or herbal tea. There’s some orange juice too if you want it. I haven’t got anything stronger.’

  ‘I’m fine thanks,’ he said and she sat down on the sofa.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said with an awkward laugh. ‘It would seem a little peculiar after all these years to ask, “So what have you been up to?” On the other hand, I’d like to know. What have you been up to all these years?’

  So he told her what he’d done with himself, and what he’d done for a living – this without the usual amusing asides. She looked at him impassively as he recounted his years in the army, then the short stint in security firms, and then his move into HR and security clearance. He left off the years in England, the years with Kate. When he’d finished, she shook her head in wonder. ‘I never imagined any of that.’

  ‘Really?’ he asked. What did she expect? A lawyer? Or ‘my son the doctor’ – only it was really ‘my dead boyfriend’s nephew the doctor’? Was she disappointed that he hadn’t flourished in conventional terms? Well, he’d done what he felt he had to do. Whatever that meant.

  ‘I thought you’d work outside,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, farming or become a gardener. Anything outside. I never saw a boy take to the country the way you did. I’ve seen lots of city kids come up here – their parents decide to move out to the country, especially if they’ve made a pile in Silicon Valley. They buy some place up in the hills,’ she said and paused, and he knew they were both thinking of the farm, ‘and all their kids end up doing is sitting inside watching cable TV. You were never like that.’

  How did you know? he wanted to say, stunned that she had sensed the lifelong impact that
his twelve months in Sonoma had made. She said, ‘Did I say something wrong? Sorry – I guess I haven’t changed.’

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ he said and smiled. ‘But funny you should think that. Eighteen months ago, I left my job and moved overseas. I was hoping to farm there – apples, you won’t be surprised to learn.’

  And Maris looked at him for a moment and then she laughed out loud, her two front teeth moving slightly in front of her mouth with the same ungainly awkwardness he remembered.

  He waited for a moment. ‘I kept your secret, Maris. I mean our secret.’

  She nodded slowly and looked away. She was only twenty years older than he was, but from his viewpoint he was still ten years old and Maris – look at her! – Maris must have now been over sixty. On the phone the school had said she’d retired.

  She gave him a look of sour appraisal. ‘So why have you come to see me? To tell me that?’

  ‘I thought it was about time,’ he said, forcing a smile. ‘I’m sorry, I should have given you warning.’

  Maris didn’t reply. She sat down suddenly at one end of the sofa and fished a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table. Lighting it, she sucked it in intensely, then blew the smoke out fast in a long burst. ‘Do you know how often I’ve imagined this? You sitting there, talking to me?’

  He shook his head. ‘I assumed you didn’t want to see me.’

  ‘Because you never heard from me?’ When he nodded she said, ‘It seemed best for us both. Safer too. Let’s face it: what good would it have done you to be reminded of what happened by seeing me?’

  ‘You could have kept in touch somehow.’

  ‘I thought it best not to,’ she insisted. ‘The first couple of years I moved away. Went up near the Oregon border, where my family’s from. I taught school in the back of beyond and just tried to get hold of myself.’ She looked at him sternly. ‘I wouldn’t have been much help to anybody then. I knew I’d been wrong.’

  ‘To shoot that man? He killed Will and he would have killed me too.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. You were right to do what you did. You told me exactly what happened – I was digging and you couldn’t stop talking. If you hadn’t killed that man what do you think he was going to do? Kiss you?’

  He felt they were talking at cross purposes. She sat there with a challenging look on her face and he didn’t say anything. She stood up and walked to the kitchen door. ‘I’ll fix you something to eat,’ she said, and when he started to get up she added, ‘Stay put. I won’t be a minute.’

  He came to the door anyway, and watched her as she filled a bowl from a large crock pot on the stove. ‘You still eat chilli?’ she asked.

  ‘I do. You still say “Lordy” when you’re worried?’

  She smiled. ‘Only when Albert’s not around. He’s a believer.’

  ‘Do you have kids?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Albert had two little boys already,’

  ‘Good kids?’ he asked, feeling a twinge of jealousy. How bizarre to feel this way, he thought.

  She chuckled. ‘Not exactly kids any more. Jerry, that’s the eldest, he’ll be thirty-five next week. He works for the gas company. The other one doesn’t seem to know what he wants to do – that’s Billy, he’s three years younger. “Still finding himself”, whatever that means. But they’re good kids.’ She put something in the sink. ‘Not as quick as you though.’

  ‘I was quick? You had to tutor me, remember?’

  ‘That wasn’t because you were slow. That was to get you going, that’s all. There were no flies on you.’

  They sat at the dining room table to eat. On the sideboard there was a china figure of the Virgin Mary. She asked, ‘So do you have somebody in your life?’

  ‘I thought I did,’ he said, tasting the chilli. She still made it spicy. ‘Now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ she said, with the same easy command that thirty years before had made him want to win her approval.

  So he did, describing Kate and the set-up over there, explaining at length what had gone wrong, and what he had found out.

  When he finished, Maris pushed her upper lip over her two front teeth and grimaced slightly. She asked, ‘Does what she planned to do bother you that much? I mean, the fact she was going to break the law?’

  He shook his head at once. ‘Not once I learned why she was going to do it. It wasn’t for herself. It was for the place, and her mother, and her sad sack brother. And, most of all, though I didn’t see it when she told me, I guess it was for me.’

  ‘And are you bothered that this little girl has this man Benedict as a father?’

  ‘A little,’ he admitted. ‘Though it wasn’t as if I ever thought she was my own daughter. Then it would have bothered me a lot more.’ He thought for a second. He didn’t really mind that Emily had Benedict genes, provided she didn’t grow up with Benedict morals.

  ‘So it was the fact she didn’t tell you that really got to you?’

  ‘Yes. It was the lies.’

  ‘Lies? I wouldn’t call it that. She just didn’t tell you the whole truth about herself.’

  ‘Comes to the same thing.’

  Maris’s eyes widened. ‘Maybe you ought to think twice about that. What is there you haven’t told her?’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ he said, reddening.

  ‘You sure of that?’

  And he didn’t say a word as he sat and thought about this. Then she said, ‘So have you got what you wanted?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  She leaned forward from the end of the table, put her hand on his arm. ‘Jacko, listen to me.’ And as she spoke, her voice lowered to a whisper, gentle and confiding but somehow honed. ‘You and I got thrown together by accident, when your mom got sick and I was with Will. If you wonder sometimes if I ever really cared for you, the answer is I did.’

  She looked at him and he saw that her eyes were wide and wet. ‘But honest, Jack, I truly believe I was right to take you back to Gram’s. As for the other,’ she said slowly, ‘I just don’t know. Call it shock, call it whatever you want – I made the wrong call. When we drove south that night I kept thinking, “Turn back and head straight to the Sheriff’s office in Healdsburg now.” But I didn’t. Because once we’d buried them, there wasn’t any going back. How was I ever going to explain that? I couldn’t.’

  He spoke up, finding it difficult to ask questions he had wanted to ask for thirty years. ‘What did Gram think? I never knew how much she knew.’

  ‘She was horrified, of course, and also horrified I hadn’t called the police. She wanted me to. But when I explained why Will had been killed – that it was over drugs – she wasn’t quite so sure. It’s not as if calling the cops would have brought her son back. And there was no one left to punish. His killers had been killed; if anyone got punished it would be me. I think she was worried about your having to testify. She wanted to spare you that.’

  ‘Did she know I had killed one of the men?’

  Maris looked him in the eye. ‘Yes. Otherwise I think she would have made me call the police regardless.’ She was still staring at him and paused before continuing. ‘I know I was wrong to do what I did, but I like to think I did what I did for the right reasons. Otherwise, I couldn’t have lived with myself. It wasn’t easy anyway. The dreams, Lordy, the dreams I used to have.’ She smiled wanly. ‘Sometimes I still have one every now and then.’

  ‘Me too,’ he said quietly, and they both sat in silence.

  ‘But anyway,’ she said at last, ‘I guess what I am trying to say is, it’s been thirty years. Lots of people only live that long. The farm’s not even there any more; it’s part of a big vineyard – they bought Truebridge’s and the farm and the acres on the far side of the Valley Orchard. You wouldn’t recognise the place – the house is long gone and the pond was filled in years ago and they even chopped down the wood where you had your tree house. The farm you knew doesn’t exist any more.

  ‘And that’s true o
f everything, Jack, and everybody. Whatever person called Maris you’ve had in your head all that time just isn’t there any more.

  ‘So go back to England, Jack. You’ve gone and built a life for yourself over there – only you don’t seem to know it. You should see it through; it sounds like that’s something you’ve never done before. Go find this woman Kate.’ She hesitated. ‘And tell her everything. Tell her about Will and how he died. Tell her about the men, and how they died, too.’ She stopped, and he saw she was close to tears. ‘But tell her also about the good times we all had, Jack. Tell her about Ellie and your tree house and the Valley Orchard and learning how to swim and Will’s dumb jokes and how I made you do your homework before you could watch TV. Tell her all of that, too.’

  She stood up and took away their bowls, as if part of a normal routine. In the doorway to the kitchen she stopped and turned around to look at him, still sitting at the table. ‘Jacko, I don’t think you should visit back here again. It isn’t going to do you any good.’ She smiled gently. ‘It isn’t going to do me any good, either. I’m not being unkind and no, it doesn’t mean I didn’t love you like a mother once. But it was long ago, and the future, well your future is now and it isn’t here.’

  And five minutes later he left her house, and when he said goodbye to her he did so almost absent-mindedly. For already he was looking ahead: to the check-in at the airport; the flight which with this new impatience of his would seem interminable; the landing in grey fog at Heathrow; the taxi to Kensington. He could see himself in roughly twenty-four hours as he took the stairs two at a time, past the poet’s widow’s flat and the burnished bowl of roses, until he was knocking on the door of the flat upstairs – he wouldn’t use his key. And readying himself to say, Kate, I want to tell you about my Uncle Will and his girlfriend, Maris. I lived with them for a while when I was a boy, and then something happened . . .