Secrets We Keep

by Faith Hogan

  They soon became used to seeing activity up at the tower. Colin arrived one morning with news of the buyer and he was greeted with hardly a glance.

  ‘Well that’s okay if you don’t want to know. Let me just say this; you’re going to have a bona fide celebratory next door…’ Colin poured tea from the pot before him. ‘And, if you believe what the Weekly Chronicle has to say, you might have a full-blown celebrity wedding here by the end of the year.’

  ‘I suppose it’s some movie director shacking up with wife number six?’ For one with thirty years of marriage under her belt, Rita cast a very cynical eye upon the institution, hardly unexpected though – she was married to Duncan.

  ‘No, I think all the movie types are getting sense and heading to Lake Como and places with guaranteed sunshine,’ Kate said absently. ‘Mind you, it’d be good for Ballytokeep to have a bit of glamour; certainly the shopkeepers and the Hartleys would be glad of the extra business.’ If they got any busier in the bathhouse she would have to take on more staff, and to be truthful, Kate liked things just as they were.

  ‘Well, obviously rock stars are not casting their nets that far afield.’ Colin’s voice dipped now; perhaps he was bored because no one much wanted to play his guessing game. ‘Give up?’ he looked at them both and then opened the paper to show a grainy photograph of Rock Castle. ‘It’s Todd Riggs and that model he’s going out with.’ Colin didn’t notice Kate’s reaction.

  ‘Oh, I always liked him, what did he sing again? “Thunderstorms” wasn’t it, or something like that?’ Rita started to hum the broken melody of one of Todd’s biggest hits. ‘He’s around a while, a real jack the lad,’ she said absently, popping a piece of fruit scone into her mouth.

  ‘Can I see it?’ Kate whispered, taking the paper in her hands. She felt as though she was operating from outside herself. It was as though, somehow, she’d left her body and floated to a place where her emotions were padded out. She felt a rising sickness in her stomach. She held the paper before her eyes, her hands shaking, so she placed it on the table to look at the article and there was Todd, a recent photo of him, walking on some street in London. The better part of London, perhaps Kensington? He looked older, tired, and thinner than she ever saw him before. As though, someone had come along and shaken the vitality from him overnight. His eyes no longer sparkled, his cheekbones jutted out, a little too starkly. His smile had softened, but his jaw was slack – he looked worn out and far more than the age she knew he was.

  ‘Kate, are you all right, you look like you’ve seen a ghost?’ Rita said softly.

  ‘Oh, it’s just…’ She could tell Rita, of course she could. You couldn’t keep something like this a secret for long in a place like Ballytokeep. She would tell her and Colin too, just not yet. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  Kate scanned through some of the feature, drew out the pieces that were of interest. They could confirm that Todd Riggs had purchased the castle in Ballytokeep, a small village in the west of Ireland. There was a reference to Claudia Dey, who had fallen in love with the place, and a picture of her impossibly beautiful face staring coldly from a shoot taken earlier in the year. There was mention of Todd’s heart attack, of Claudia’s successful campaigns and finally whispers of wedding bells before the year was out for the happy couple. At first, Kate thought she might be sick. In quick succession, that feeling was replaced with something deeper: anger. How dare Todd Riggs come and spoil her lovely life? How dare he hijack her happiness now that she had finally found it? Maybe there was some resentment too. At the end of the day, she wasn’t entirely sure that she could wish him well with Claudia. After all, she still had a broken heart to mend.

  *

  It took almost two weeks before she could face up to the fact that Todd Riggs could be arriving on her doorstep someday soon.

  ‘You’ve been very quiet lately,’ Colin said one evening; he called in as she was closing up for the day.

  ‘Have I?’ she said absently. Colin was her friend, and she could see in his eyes the genuine worry for her. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be, it’s just that things have been so busy.’ She was lying. It was a small white lie, but when she looked into Colin’s face, it wasn’t one she was comfortable with. ‘Fancy joining me for a glass of wine?’ she asked as she cleared away the last of the tables.

  ‘Well, I do have a lot of sheep to count…’ he smiled at her and reached behind the counter for two large red wine glasses. ‘Outside?’

  It was a lovely evening. The warm summer sun was still full and orange in the evening sky. It basked the front of the bathhouse in a deep amber glow. Kate took two large cushions from the bench that ran along the walls of the tearooms and popped them down on the wrought-iron seats outside. Colin followed with the drinks. They sat in silence for a long while, staring out into the waves that flashed up foamy white in the evening sun.

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ Kate said finally, ‘you know, when I sat here for the first time I thought I could live and die in this place.’

  ‘I’ve always known that there’s nowhere I’d rather be. Even when I was younger, I travelled, you know, to see the world!’ he grimaced slightly. ‘I knew I would come back here, wasn’t sure when, but I knew that this place was always pulling me back to it. It’s the silence, I think.’

  ‘Maybe, but for me, it is the people too. Everything and everyone is so different to what I knew in London.’

  ‘It is that, I’m sure all right.’ Colin did not like cities. The image of Colin in London just didn’t fit; he would be like Crocodile Dundee in New York. He just suited here. He fitted, just as Kate felt she fitted too. ‘Something has changed for you? Here?’

  ‘You could say that,’ she smiled what she hoped was a smile, but behind it she could feel a huge ball of emotion pound steadily up through her.

  ‘Can you tell me?’ Colin leaned forward, covered her hand with his own. ‘You’re cold. Here.’ He took his jacket off, placed it gently around her shoulders. She hadn’t eaten properly in days, hadn’t slept. Feeling cold was just one more thing now. ‘Seriously, maybe there’s something we can do to…’

  ‘Make everything better?’ she whispered the words and looked into his eyes. Suddenly, she felt a huge tear roll from her own. ‘Sorry, I’m just…’

  ‘You’re scaring me,’ he said, trying to keep his voice light. ‘I didn’t know that legal people cried.’ He moved nearer and put his arm around her. It felt nice, strange but nice. ‘You have to tell me what’s upset you, Kate, if I can help, you know I will.’

  ‘I know that, Colin. But…’ she wiped a tear from her eyes. ‘There really isn’t any helping this. It’s all and nothing, and really, it’s something I probably have to make peace with or just move on.’

  ‘Well, you can’t move on, you’re making a life for yourself here, you’re part of us now,’ he whispered the words, but beneath them, she felt there was so much more.

  ‘It’s the castle,’ she nodded up towards the huge structure that seemed to loom larger with every passing day. ‘You know, Todd Riggs? Who has supposedly bought it?’

  ‘Yeah, the singer?’

  ‘The one and only. You haven’t followed his career, I suppose?’ Of course, he hadn’t. Colin read the papers daily, but celebrity culture or trivia was his weakest subject in the local pub quiz.

  ‘No. Should I?’

  ‘No, but…’ she searched for the words. ‘I knew him, in London. Years ago now, we were…’

  ‘Seeing each other?’ Colin’s eyes had grown a little wider now.

  ‘We were engaged. Getting married.’

  ‘Kate, it was him? You were the girl he left at the… He was your bloke?’ He shook his head sadly. ‘His bloody loss, that’s what it was. I always knew he was a plonker, but what a rat?’

  ‘You could say that. We had it all planned, down to the last detail. Then, on the morning of the wedding, Todd skips the country with some bimbo and calls the whole thing off. He left it to his manager to tell
me. I never…’

  ‘Got a chance to tell him he was a swine? Sorry.’

  ‘That too. It was a nightmare. I’ve spent a decade, afraid to open a newspaper because I felt like half my life was a byline. It’s hard to forgive and move on when you keep seeing your humiliation played out in the national press. Then I moved here and I thought I had closed that chapter for good.’

  ‘You’re not looking to have a reminder of that time on your doorstep?’

  ‘Yeah, something like that. I…’ Kate took a deep breath. ‘I suppose, I never really got over it.’ She felt new tears fill up her eyes. ‘I never really got over him. My life in London was,’ she searched for the word; there was only one, ‘empty.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, it must be terrible.’ Colin sat back in his seat, pulled his heavy jumper up about his neck to shade off the chill that was creeping steadily into the evening, now the sun was fading.

  ‘There’s no need to be sorry. That’s life, right?’ She shrugged, knowing that she had genuinely felt like this when she arrived in Ballytokeep. It was just a bad hand of cards. Everyone gets something in life, and Todd Riggs was her joker in the pack. ‘Anyway, I came here; fell in love with this place. Maybe it is the first time I have been in love since that time, who knows? It took a decade, but I felt I was healing, you know, finally.’ She looked at him now and he was nodding, he understood. ‘Then a few weeks ago I had the strangest feeling.’

  ‘Go on.’ Colin topped up their glasses needlessly.

  ‘It was an evening like this, perhaps a little colder. I was planting the hydrangeas, when I happened to look up at the tower. I don’t know why I looked up. There wasn’t any reason to draw my eyes up there, but I looked and then I felt like I couldn’t look away. In that moment, I felt like I was back there. Back in that time, before the hurt and the pain when there was so much to look forward to. Then I saw people up there.’ She pointed towards the uppermost window that looked back across the beach. ‘I couldn’t tell you what happened in that moment, but I felt a sense of complete panic overtake me. As if I’d left a frying pan on full heat and it could explode at any moment.’ She shook her head, still trying to comprehend the feeling. ‘It was as though…’

  ‘You have things to do – you’re not over him yet, that’s what it was telling you, Kate.’ Colin’s voice was cold, emotionless almost. For a moment, it felt like the sun had been swallowed by the sea, because the whole place seemed to grow dark.

  ‘I didn’t think that was what it was at the time, but then, when we found out that he’d bought the tower, I understood. There’s half-finished history, and I guess the world, this place, has thrown us here to put a close to it.’ Colin was right, she needed to tell Todd Riggs that he was a nasty brute and that what he’d done to her was unforgivable; then she could finally move on.

  ‘Hmm.’ Colin looked out to sea, sipped his drink thoughtfully, ‘I hope so, Kate.’ He looked at her now, his eyes steady. ‘I hope so, because you deserve so much better than Todd Riggs.’

  *

  It was a shock of course, but seeing Todd Riggs sitting in the bathhouse had not been nearly as awful as she had expected. She fled – obviously, fight or flight? It was a gut reaction. She ran upstairs, up to the large drawing room that looked out on the harsh sea beneath. Some might say the past surrounded her here. Robert Hartley gazed back at her from the silver frame she picked up off the writing desk. He was standing on the brow of a boat, the sun in his eyes, a Cary Grant expression on his face. He exuded masculine elegance that had not survived the decades. It was that, timeless, endless quality that was everything she loved about Ballytokeep that grounded her that day. She was part of something. It had taken a decade, but her life had moved on. She was not sitting in that London flat waiting for Todd to knock on her door. She wasn’t spitting out spurned spouses so she could make a cynical living. Kate hugged the photo to her, not because she was in love with Robert Hartley, but rather because in some ways this place had pulled them together and if she wasn’t a Hartley exactly, she certainly felt she belonged here. That day, the day Todd was sitting in the bathhouse – that day, this place had steadied her. The bathhouse and all of the connections she’d made around it made her feel the world would not subside. She was exactly where she was supposed to be. If Todd Riggs was supposed to be here too, well good for him.

  *

  The following afternoon she noticed Rita looked a little peaky. The bathhouse was busy all morning, but Rita was normally in her element, the busier things were. She offered to bring her home earlier, but Rita had turned on her.

  ‘That’s her.’ She nodded towards a corner table where a young couple were whispering conspiratorially, their heads close, their attraction unmistakable. ‘That’s Duncan’s floozy, out here with some young fella, as if she hasn’t a care in the world.’ The girl was hardly twenty, a tanned skinny blonde with ripped jeans and a fresh face, her designer handbag sat in a heap on the floor at her Converse-clad feet.

  ‘Perhaps it’s all off with Duncan, I mean, for all we knew, it was all gossip anyway, who’s to say there was ever anything in it,’ Kate soothed; she didn’t want Rita to have a meltdown here, not in front of this girl, so the whole village could talk about it. ‘I’d say Duncan has been well and truly dumped, young love, eh?’

  ‘Young love, my soda bread.’ Rita huffed and she picked up her rolling pin.

  ‘Whoa, hold on.’ Kate guided her back towards the safety of the kitchen. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Rita dropped the rolling pin. ‘It’s a long story.’ She turned to grab her coat. ‘But taking the rolling pin to her,’ she pulled the coat around her, ‘that would be unforgivable. I’ll go.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing.’ Kate knew a broken heart or at least a broken woman when she saw one. Generally, they were not carrying rolling pins with intent to use them for purposes other than baking, but they wore the same expression. ‘Tell me, come on, we are friends, aren’t we?’

  ‘We are.’ Rita sighed, as though the admission was almost too much. ‘It’s my Duncan, well; he’s more like her Duncan now. He’s been carrying on with that wan. I thought it didn’t bother me. Then, in she walks and I’m mincemeat. I swear. I hardly know my backside from my elbow. It makes me so mad. And there she is, smirking at me, as if she knows something I don’t. It makes me want to…’ she took up the rolling pin to demonstrate, but there was really no need. ‘In my head, I had a plan, you see.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do see.’ Kate flicked the kettle. Stories like these, whether they were in the middle of London or in the west of Ireland, required tea. Lots of tea. ‘Do you still love him?’

  ‘Hah.’ Rita shook her head. That was an emphatic no. It did not come as a great surprise to Kate. ‘My Duncan has always been a weasel. You know what they say, if it looks like one, acts like one and smells like one…’

  ‘Indeed.’ Kate had met plenty of cheating men in London; thankfully, they were filling her pockets, not breaking her heart. Once was enough for that. ‘So he’s been having this affair? Is it love or just…’

  ‘I don’t know, I assume so. I mean, have you seen the state of him. Of course, it’ll be his money and that flash car he drives about in.’

  ‘It generally is. Amazing how stupid they can be, isn’t it?’

  ‘I never thought he was, but there you go.’ She nodded towards the coffee shop. If Duncan was cheating on her, there was no doubt he was being cheated on too. ‘It’s nearly worse that she thinks I’m doubly stupid. Not alone that I wouldn’t know she’s cheating with Duncan, but it’s almost twice as insulting to think she’d trail her fancy piece in here before me. She must really think I’m thin on top.’ Rita shook her head.

  ‘Isn’t that a good thing though?’ Kate asked. ‘I mean she obviously thinks you have no idea. You certainly have the element of surprise on your side.’ Years of experience had taught Kate one thing and that was that nothing worked to your advantage in these things so well a
s having caught the cheater on the back foot. ‘So your plan?’ Kate loved a plan.

  ‘I’ve set up a direct debit on his business account to go straight to the dog refuge, give some other poor blighters a chance,’ Rita smiled, it was a little wobbly, but behind it Kate could see the triumph in her eyes. It seemed to Kate that the bathhouse had given Rita something too, she’d changed since that first time they met. Like Kate, she’d finally taken the steering wheel of her own life.

  ‘It’s very noble to give it to the rescue centre but don’t you think it would be good to make sure that you’re secure? You know, with the house and all that.’

  ‘I didn’t think I could do that, I mean, it would feel like stealing if I was taking money out just for myself.’

  ‘No, most women, when this happens, it’s not the first thing they think of. First off it’s the hurt. Next up, it’s revenge, or the kids. You have to hit rock bottom before you actually think about taking care of yourself and by then, unfortunately it can be too late. The really smart women get a good lawyer in the beginning.’

  ‘Well, we have a solicitor. She takes care of the business for Duncan, but,’ she leaned conspiratorially towards Kate, ‘I’ve always been the one who sends her cakes when she’s not well, or when her kids are having birthdays, you know the little things. I’m pretty sure she thinks Duncan is a creep too.’

  ‘That may be the case, but, Rita, if he’s paying her bill; she’s going to be looking out for his interests.’

  ‘So, I need to get someone else? I know a fella from school. He’s in Galway now, I suppose I could…’

  ‘Yes, you could, but will he be the best you can get?’