by T. M. Logan
‘You looked as if you were waiting for someone?’
‘Me? No, just getting my breath back after that climb up from the gorge.’
‘I know what you were doing,’ I said tonelessly. ‘You were looking for Sean.’
She looked nonplussed, her brow furrowing.
‘Sean? No. I thought he was up at the villa?’
‘He was,’ I said, crossing my arms. ‘He is, I mean.’
‘So I wouldn’t be seeing him down here then, would I?’
‘Apparently not.’
She was giving absolutely nothing away. Not a flicker. Not even the tiniest hint that I had caught her in a lie.
‘Are you all right, Kate?’ she said.
‘I saw you stop in the clearing and assumed you were looking for someone.’
‘Looking for my lost youth, maybe.’ She took her hat off and fanned herself with it. ‘Twenty years ago I could have skipped up that cliff path without breaking a sweat. But now I feel like I might need CPR – the path’s a killer on the way back up. Absolutely beautiful rock pools at the bottom of the gorge, though. Have you been exploring yet?’
‘Not yet. I thought you were with Jennifer and Alistair and the boys?’
She nodded, gesturing down into the gorge with a thumb.
‘I was. Volunteered to come back early to make a start on getting tea ready.’ She checked her watch. ‘You can help me if you like.’
I held her gaze.
You’re not going to admit it, are you? Then I will confront Sean instead.
‘Of course.’
She looked over my shoulder to see if there was anyone else with me. ‘Are you on your own?’
‘Left Sean with the kids. I don’t suppose you’ve seen Rowan in the last half hour, have you?’
‘I thought she was up at the villa with you?’
‘She went off somewhere.’
We made our way back up towards the villa, through the vineyard, the ground hard and uneven under my sandals. Izzy was chatting, talking about everything and nothing in a constant nervous stream, but I couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying.
A moment ago I had been sure. But now certainty had fled.
Izzy was there. Izzy came to the rendezvous. She responded to a message she thought Sean had sent. Or was it just coincidence? Had she really left the gorge early to make tea? It was the kind of thing she would volunteer to do. And where had Rowan disappeared to?
We were halfway back to the villa when Izzy put a hand gently on my arm and gave me an inquisitive look.
‘Don’t you think, Kate?’
‘Think what? Sorry, I was miles away.’
‘That Jennifer’s eldest is a bit of a strange one?’
‘Jake?’
‘He just seems a bit . . . out there. Like he’s operating on a different plane to everyone else.’
‘That’s teenage boys for you.’
‘Do you think he realises that Lucy is out of his league?’
I turned to her in surprise, not sure if this was just another way for her to divert attention away from her secret meeting with my husband.
‘Lucy?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t think . . . I’ve always thought of them more like siblings.’
‘Kate, haven’t you seen the way he looks at her?’
‘How does he look at her?’
She laughed.
‘With his tongue hanging out, mostly.’
‘Really?’
‘Totally understandable, of course. I would be exactly the same if I was a teenage boy – you just have to look at her. It would be kind of cute if he wasn’t such an – well, an oddball.’
It was true, Lucy had blossomed in the last couple of years, from a pretty girl into a heart-stoppingly beautiful teenager. But to Sean and me it had been a very gradual, incremental change – day by day, week by week – and so we were less aware of the startling effect she had on people who saw her less often. Particularly boys.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘I still think of them from when they were tiny, her and Jake and Ethan playing in the paddling pool, the three of them starkers, running around the back garden.’
‘Believe me, he’s crushing hard on her.’ She picked a bunch of grapes from a vine as we passed, putting one in her mouth. ‘He’s been showing off to try and impress her since we got here. Climbing onto that rock face at the Gorges d’Héric? That whole standing on the edge of the cliff thing, the day we arrived? He was trying to impress her. Why else would he do something like that?’
‘He’s always been a little bit strange, I suppose.’
‘And letting Daniel tag along with their little gang?’
‘I thought that was quite sweet of them, allowing him to join in.’
‘But you know they’re only doing it to get in Lucy’s good books, right?’
‘Oh.’ I felt a protective pang for my son, always the last to be picked for every team. ‘I thought they were just being nice.’
‘Afraid not.’ She popped another grape into her mouth. ‘It’s all about the hormones.’
46
I thought about that for a moment, fanning my face with my straw hat.
‘She doesn’t fully realise it yet, you know. The effect she has on boys.’
Izzy turned to me with a raised eyebrow, chewing a grape.
‘You sure about that?’
‘Yes,’ I said, with more conviction than I felt. ‘She’s still only a couple of years on from being a little girl. My little girl. People look at her now – the way she looks now – and tend to forget that.’
We separated when we got to the arched gateway that led from the vineyard into the gardens, Izzy heading straight up to the villa and the kitchen. I promised to join her after checking on Sean and the kids and took the white gravel pathway to the right, towards the pool. I had been gone for more than twenty minutes and no doubt my husband would be wondering where I had got to.
He was in the pool, splashing around with Daniel, Lucy and Odette plus an assortment of inflatables, the kids squealing and laughing as they played a game of piggy-in-the-middle. I took the long way around the infinity pool, to pass by where Russ was stretched out on a lounger with a John Grisham novel and a small green bottle of French beer.
‘Nice to see the kids playing so well together,’ I said.
‘Hmm,’ he said, taking a swig from his bottle.
‘Oh, where’s Rowan? I was going to ask her something.’
‘She went to make some calls, I think.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of the house. ‘Work stuff.’
I went back to my sunlounger on the other side of the pool. Sean surfaced from the deep end, brushing his hair back off his forehead.
‘You were gone a long time, Kate,’ he said, batting a beach ball back towards the children.
‘Had a bit of a lie down in the bedroom. To cool off.’
He eyed me for a long moment, neck-deep in water.
‘You still look a bit hot, love.’
I put a hand to my cheek, feeling the heat radiating from my skin. I was still hot from hurrying back up the hill. But I knew now what I was going to do, what I should have done days ago, when I first saw the messages on his phone: I would make him show me. And tell me everything.
As calmly as I could, I said, ‘Where’s your phone, Sean?’
Daniel clambered onto his back, hanging on with one hand and slapping the water with the other.
Sean said, ‘My what?’
‘Your phone.’
‘Why?’
‘Thought I heard it ringing.’
He looked at me again, with something in his eyes I couldn’t quite work out.
‘Dunno. It’s there somewhere. Underneath the lounger?’
I looked.
‘Nope.’
‘Is it under my book, on the table?’
I moved his book, hat and T-shirt from the table.
‘It’s not here, Sean.’
> ‘Uh-oh,’ he said, an undertone of regret in his voice. ‘Oh no. What an eejit.’
‘Who’s an idiot?’ Daniel said indignantly.
‘I am. You’re never going to guess what I’ve gone and done.’
Still standing in the deep end of the pool my husband reached down into the water, into the side pocket of his swimming shorts, and pulled out his phone.
*
‘It says here,’ Daniel said, studying his iPad, ‘that if you put it in a bowl of rice for eighteen hours, then it will come back to life. The rice takes all the water out of it, or something.’
Sean’s mobile phone lay, lifeless, on the kitchen table next to him. It had refused to switch on since being submerged in the pool, refused to power up, refused to do anything. He picked it up and pressed the power button again. Nothing.
‘I think it’s a bit beyond that, Daniel.’
‘Have we got any rice, though? Says here it has to be uncooked rice. Or you can use,’ he hesitated over a word, “cows-coss”, whatever that is. Is that from cows?’
Sean looked over his shoulder at the iPad’s screen.
‘Couscous,’ he said. ‘Nah, I think Mr Samsung is properly done for, mate.’
‘And you need to get a vacuum cleaner and suck out the water from the charger hole and the headphone jack and all the other holes. And a hairdryer. We could borrow Mummy’s hairdryer?’
Sean shook his head.
‘Not to worry, Daniel. I’ll be all right without it.’
‘But you need a phone, Daddy. You can’t not have a phone.’
‘I didn’t have a phone when I was your age. I survived.’
‘Yeah, but that was like the olden days.’
‘The eighties.’
‘Was that before or after the Vikings?’
‘The New Romantics, you young whippersnapper.’
‘Oscar in my class dropped his phone in the toilet once and he made it work again with rice.’
‘But I bet it was only in the water for a few seconds. That’s a bit different to me being underwater and swimming around with the phone in my pocket for like ten minutes.’
‘Can’t believe you jumped into the pool with it.’ Our son turned to me, smiling. ‘Can you believe it, Mummy?’
I knew why Sean had done it. He knew, too. But it didn’t matter. This charade of ours was all for the kids’ benefit.
‘It is a bit of a Daddy thing to do,’ I said, as cheerfully as I could manage.
We both knew it wasn’t an accident – I couldn’t ask him about the messages now, and that was that. Now that his phone was broken, I couldn’t access them unless I could get his login and password for Messenger online, and that was never going to happen. My guess was that after I left the poolside he’d checked his phone and seen the message. It seemed that he’d not been in time to warn Izzy off, though.
But I didn’t want Daniel to be exposed to the corrosion that was eating away at his parents’ marriage. Not yet. He needed to be protected for as long as possible.
47
Sean
‘How long have you got?’ Sean said, looking over his shoulder.
‘Not long. Keep your voice down.’
‘I wanted to—’
‘Not here,’ she said softly. ‘Where’s Kate?’
‘Busy with the kids.’
‘We can talk downstairs in the wine cellar. Follow me.’
She led him across the kitchen to an alcove lined with jars and tins of food, with a door at the end. She went to it and pulled the door open, switching on the light and gesturing to him to follow.
A flight of concrete steps led downwards into the bowels of the villa, the air cool and earthy away from the fierce heat of the evening. They walked side by side, hands almost touching, down a long passage carved out of the rock, lined from floor to ceiling on one side with rack after rack of dusty wine bottles.
She stepped back into a shadow, beckoning to him.
‘So, how are you doing?’
He moved towards her, closing the distance between them. He put a hand on her arm, the skin warm and smooth beneath his fingers.
‘Kate knows,’ he said.
She shook her head.
‘No. She doesn’t.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I just know.’
‘She’s convinced herself that something is up.’
She moved closer, lowering her voice.
‘That’s not the same thing as knowing. Not by a long way. What has she said to you?’
‘It’s just getting more and more complicated. I constantly feel like I’m going to fuck up and it’s all going to come crashing down.’
‘That isn’t going to happen.’
‘I don’t know how much longer I can do this for. I feel so guilty about it.’
‘You think she’s never kept secrets from you?’
‘No. Not like this.’
‘Really?’ She took his hands between hers. ‘This is not your fault, Sean.’
‘That’s not strictly true, is it?’
‘We’re human, you and me. Just like they are, just like everyone else. Humans make mistakes. We just have to decide how we’re going to deal with this one.’
‘You think this is a mistake? What we’re doing?’
She smiled up at him.
‘This? No.’
‘I think we should come clean. Work out a way forward that involves the least pain for everyone involved.’
‘We’ve talked about this already. This is the best way.’
‘Keeping her in the dark like this,’ he protested, shaking his head. ‘It’s not fair. It’s not right.’
‘Fair? Who said life was fair?’
‘We can’t keep it secret for ever.’
‘Why not? Why shouldn’t we?’
‘Because sooner or later she’s going to find out. Someone’s going to find out, and when that happens it will only be a matter of time.’
‘She can’t ever find out. And she won’t if we’re careful.’
‘I’ve told you, I’m no good at lying. Especially not to her.’
‘It’s all about practice, Sean.’ She smiled. ‘The more you do it, the better you’ll get.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘Why should we tell her? It just complicates everything. We should carry on how we are. We’re fine, it’s all good.’
‘Carry on for how long, though? Until she works it out for herself?’
‘There’s no reason why she should.’
‘I’m just not sure how long I can keep going on as if everything’s normal. I’ve never done this before.’
‘I don’t exactly make a habit of it, either.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
She moved closer, placing a hand on his chest, feeling the muscle hard and flat under her fingertips.
‘Let’s just keep on doing what we’re doing,’ she said. ‘There’s too much at stake to do anything else. Surely you must see that, Sean?’
‘I do,’ he said quietly. ‘Absolutely.’
Four months earlier
It was stupid, really. She knew it was stupid. It wasn’t how things worked.
But she couldn’t stop thinking it a hundred times a day. Couldn’t stop imagining it when she was with him, visualising it when they were together and he had his arm around her and pulled her into him. When he held her close against his chest. When he kissed her and it felt like a crackle of electricity going up and down her spine.
If her mum saw him, she’d understand. She’d get it. But it’s better that she doesn’t know anything, not now, not after all the lectures on staying focused and school getting real as GCSE exams get closer and closer. And she doesn’t mind keeping a secret. It’s kind of cool, actually, to have a proper secret, like a secret room in your house full of secret stuff that no one else knows about. It’s not like she’s actually banned from having a boyfriend, just that her mum and dad have quite specific ideas about
boys.
But he’s not like most boys; he’s much more mature. She can talk to him about anything. School, exams, family, brothers and sisters and mates and the real reason they call him B-Boy at school. About how she’s going to be a doctor and how he got talent-spotted by Saracens at the age of eleven and wants to go professional when he’s eighteen and play rugby for England one day. Win trophies.
There was one thing she didn’t talk to him about.
The stupid thing.
It was stupid. On one level, she knew that.
But she still couldn’t stop thinking it: she was going to marry this boy.
WEDNESDAY
48
Daniel
Mum was right, Daniel thought. It was good to play with the bigger boys.
Jake was tall – nearly as tall as Daniel’s dad, who was more than six feet – and his brother Ethan wasn’t far behind. They seemed like mini-adults to Daniel, huge boy-men as big as teachers or parents. The only other kids on the holiday were his sister Lucy, who wouldn’t be seen dead playing with her brother, and the little girl Odette, who had already told Daniel to his face that she didn’t like boys. She seemed a bit mad.
But Jake and Ethan: they didn’t send him away. And they were cool. Like the cool boys at school, the ones everyone wanted to hang with but everyone was a bit scared of too, the ones who were good at football and funny and wanted to talk to girls.
Daniel wasn’t into football. He liked Minecraft, and Lego Star Wars, and funny videos on YouTube.
But Jake and Ethan still didn’t mind him tagging along while they went exploring the grounds of the holiday house. They had been everywhere, down to the games room, and the gym, out to the garage, the sauna, the woods and the little gazebo. They were good at exploring. They had found a secret room under the pool with loads of pipes and barrels of stuff, and they had eaten grapes off the grape plants (even though Daniel said they shouldn’t) and then Ethan had almost caught a lizard but its tail had come off in his hand and it was disgusting but also funny. He ran around with it, waggling it in their faces like it was still alive. Daniel laughed along, but he didn’t really want the lizard tail to touch him.
