Secret Keeping for Beginners

by Maggie Alderson

  As she climbed the last flight of stairs up to her attic office, she checked her phone and saw that the texts she’d heard beeping earlier were from her sisters, each asking her to call them. That was a pleasant surprise – much better than the furious messages from Simon she’d feared – but her siblings would have to wait until later. She had way too much work to do on this brilliant opportunity she’d just landed. She was determined to make him see how indispensable she was.

  Much as she loved her sisters, neither of them had to worry about supporting their kids the way she did, and they couldn’t possibly understand how focused she needed to be that morning.

  Her older sister, Tessa, had three boys, but with a very successful husband, she didn’t have to work at all, lucky her. She just seemed to waft around their lovely big house all day obsessively painting murals. Practically every wall in the place was covered with her whimsical depictions of plants and wildlife.

  At the other extreme, Natasha, the youngest, worked madly hard, constantly globe-trotting with supermodels and movie stars as a very high-end make-up artist. She’d made a mint for herself, but she didn’t have kids or a husband – or even a boyfriend – to worry about, so she could dedicate her time entirely to her career. And herself.

  Natasha’s main worries, as far as Rachel could make out, were that she might have accidentally eaten some carbohydrate, how best to store all her free designer handbags, and deciding which celebrity friend’s invitation to accept.

  She adored both her sisters, but their ideas of ‘stressed’ and ‘busy’ did give Rachel the pip sometimes. So, she decided, she wouldn’t call either of them just yet. She knew it would only irritate her to talk to them before she’d got some solid work in.

  The most recent text, however, did demand an immediate reply. It was from her nine-year-old daughter, Daisy, sent from the au pair’s phone.

  ‘Please ring me Mummy,’ it said, ‘I’m desperate. Ariadne won’t stop playing One Direction and it’s affecting my mental development.’

  Rachel laughed. Daisy. Never was a child more inappropriately named. Rachel hadn’t been able to get anything past her since the moment she could speak. Just the week before she’d had to do a deal with her not to tell her six-year-old sister the truth about the Tooth Fairy. A pound coin under the older girl’s pillow had secured her silence.

  She was more of a Venus Fly Trap than a Daisy, thought Rachel, settling at her desk and turning on her computer. But then she hadn’t had a say in it.

  She’d still been recovering from a traumatic labour followed by an emergency C-section when her then husband, Michael, had chosen the name, registered it and sent out a group text announcing the birth of Daisy Elizabeth.

  When Rachel eventually felt strong enough to protest, Michael had come over all hurt, saying he thought she’d be pleased he’d taken care of it for her so she wouldn’t have to worry about anything while she recovered.

  So typical of him, thought Rachel, skimming down her emails and marking the important ones with a priority alert. Simultaneously controlling and guilt-tripping. How glad she was she didn’t have to be around that on a daily basis any more, even if it did mean negotiating her current terrifying financial tightrope walk.

  But she’d chosen to marry him, she reminded herself, nobody had forced her. She had loved him once – or thought she did – and he’d given her two beautiful daughters, who he was still a good father to in his own way. Two beautiful daughters she was now going to treat herself to a quick chat with.

  Branko, her Serbian manny, or bro pair as she preferred to call him, answered. How lucky that the disastrous school run had happened on the one day a week he stayed at the house doing the laundry and cleaning, rather than going out to the various courses and other jobs he did.

  Along with collecting the girls from school and looking after them until she came home, that one day of domestic chores was the full extent of his formal duties in return for meals and a nice place to live. With no contract and no hourly rate, the simple barter set-up had been his idea and it worked brilliantly for both of them.

  ‘Are you surviving?’ Rachel asked him.

  ‘Very nice time,’ said Branko, in his strong accent. ‘I much prefer these girls than ironing.’

  ‘Are you managing to keep them off the iPad and away from the TV?’

  ‘Yes. I hide pad and pull out plug.’

  ‘Daisy texted me something about One Direction …’ said Rachel.

  ‘Yes, these pretty boys on all the time. I like it too, we tell Daisy majority rule. She make earplugs out of kitchen roll. All good.’

  ‘What are they doing at the moment?’ asked Rachel, wanting to picture her darlings.

  ‘Ariadne make castle out of pink marshmallows, she say is school project. She eat many marshmallow. Daisy ask me to teach her Cyrillic alphabet.’

  ‘Really?’ said Rachel. ‘I didn’t know she knew what that was.’

  ‘She call it funny writing, same thing.’

  ‘So are you teaching her Serbian?’

  ‘No,’ said Branko. ‘Russian. She say more useful for job.’

  Rachel laughed. Daisy had so clearly inherited her brain – and her attitude – from her grandfather, Rachel’s late father, who’d been a minister in Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the 1960s. Rachel had been very young when he died, so what she knew of him was mostly from old TV clips she’d found on YouTube, but Rachel’s mum had also often commented how like her grandfather Daisy was. He’d been famous in the House of Commons for his smart comebacks.

  ‘Can you put the future prime minister on?’ said Rachel.

  Cranbrook, Kent

  The phone calls started before Tessa even had time to put the kettle on.

  She saw it was the business number which was flashing and only answered it because she thought it might be the customer who had promised to call back first thing about a rare Regency chimneypiece. Normally she would have let it go to a message for the manager to deal with when he came in later, but it was a big price-tag item.

  ‘Hunter Gatherer Reclamation,’ she answered, using her best sing-song staff voice from when she used to answer all the business calls.

  ‘Is Tim there?’ asked a woman.

  Late forties, Tessa guessed, her heart sinking. Could be younger. Lovely northern Irish accent, which at least added a touch of novelty. Her eyes flitted automatically to the piece of paper she’d stuck on the wall by the phone. Her script for these calls. To stop herself from just hanging up. Or bursting into tears.

  ‘No, I’m afraid he isn’t,’ she chirped. ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’

  She’d had to put that in, on the off chance the caller might be a crazed fan who wanted to buy something, as opposed to just a crazed fan.

  ‘Can you give me his mobile number?’ asked the woman.

  Tessa kept her eyes focused on her typed script.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to disclose that. May I ask …’

  The woman interrupted her.

  ‘Can you give him a message for me?’

  ‘If it’s a business enquiry,’ Tessa continued, determinedly keeping her tone even, ‘I’m probably the best person to help you at the moment, or you could ring back in a couple of hours and speak to the manager.’

  Tessa paused for a moment, really hoping the woman might ring off. They often did at this point, but not this one.

  ‘I just need to speak to him,’ she was saying, a slightly desperate tone creeping into her voice.

  OK, there was no choice, it would have to be the full cruel-to-be-kind flick-off. Tessa hated doing that, but it had to be better than giving someone false hope.

  ‘Or if it’s to do with Tim Chiminey,’ she said, pasting a false smile on her face, to try to keep her voice sounding friendly, ‘then the best thing would be to go to the program’s page on the Channel 4 website and send an email with your enquiry to the address you’ll find there.’

  And if it i
s to do with Tim flipping Chiminey, Tessa pleaded in her head, can you please get a life and stop harassing me at home at such an ungodly hour on a Monday morning about my husband?

  My husband Tom, who’s been randomly turned into this Tim person, which has somehow made him the property of every lonely woman on earth with a tradesman fetish. And boy, were there a lot of them. Who knew?

  The woman finally hung up, without saying thank you or goodbye. Bloody rude really, but Tessa couldn’t feel angry with someone so pathetic they’d ring up a total stranger they’d only ever seen on television, yet really believed they had a special connection with. It made her feel like crying.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, holding the phone in her hand, trying to put the sadness out of her mind, before she put the handset back on its wall mount. If she let it get to her she’d spend the whole day feeling that woman’s loneliness trailing around with her.

  But still, ‘Tim’ … She shook her head at the thought of it, putting slices of bacon into a frying pan and turning on the burner. She would never get used to it. Tom. His name was Tom, he’d always been Tom, but all it had taken was one smart TV producer and a vowel in his name had suddenly changed – and their entire life with it.

  The producer had spotted Tom when the architectural salvage company he and Tessa had started together over twenty years before was featured in a show about renovating old houses with leftover bits of other old houses.

  Tom had been recommended as a vintage-fireplace expert when they were planning an episode that involved putting all the open fires back into a grand Georgian townhouse they’d been stripped out of in the 1970s, and he was definitely the right man for the job.

  Not only had Tom supplied and fitted all the elegant and historically appropriate mantelpieces, grates, marble hearths etc., talking about them with great knowledge and enthusiasm as he went, he’d then climbed up on the roof with his sweep’s brushes and liners and made sure all the chimneys were working safely. By the end of the filming there were glorious log fires blazing in four rooms – but even that wasn’t the defining moment.

  The producer had looked at the footage of Tom skimming down a vertiginous ladder at high speed, grinning, his face covered in soot, and that was it. From an unknown junk merchant called Tom Chenery, suddenly Tim Chiminey the television show – and Tim Chiminey the heart-throb – had been created.

  Tessa had objected strongly to the awful name change but the producer was adamant, insisting Tim Chiminey was a brilliant name for a show about putting open fires back into old houses. And Tom had just gone along with it, laughing off Tessa’s protests, seeing the whole thing as a bit of a lark and free publicity for their business.

  The show was an instant hit, with its rather thrilling element of derring-do adding a new twist to the tired home renovation format, as Tom shimmied up and down his rickety ladders and skipped about on the endless roofs of stately homes. In one particularly memorable episode, he discovered three grisly mummified cats in the chimney of a former coaching inn.

  Suddenly Tessa’s junkyard husband was everybody’s property. He’d even been on the cover of the Radio Times: ‘Tim Chiminey – sweeping us off our feet’ read the headline. It was framed in the downstairs loo and Tessa cringed every time she saw it. As she did at all the other cheesy publicity his agent, Barney, insisted he did, to boost his profile.

  Turning the bacon in the pan, Tessa groaned inwardly at the thought of him. Why Tom had signed with such an old-school ‘entertainment’ manager she had never been able to understand. But Tom insisted Barney’s decades of experience and contacts were exactly what he, a total TV novice, needed. Tessa called him Barney the Dinosaur and dreaded his phone calls almost as much as those from the fans.

  The last time he’d rung was to ask her to take part in a reality show called Real Housewives of TV Celebs. He’d been amazed when she told him a flat no.

  ‘But Tessie, sweetheart,’ he’d said. ‘They really want you, darling. They love your look, and you’d be famous too, if you did the show. Then you and Tim would be a golden couple, which would give you both much more traction. Think about it, the next stage could be Strictly …’

  Tessa shook her head at the memory, which pretty much summed up her very worst nightmare. She found it insulting that he would even think she’d consider doing something like that. She didn’t need to be a television personality. Even apart from the salvage yard, she already had a profession she was proud of, as a highly regarded mural artist. There was a time when London’s top decorators had fought over her.

  She didn’t make a living from it any more, but Tessa had never stopped painting. Now she used the talent that once embellished the drawing rooms of some of London’s grandest houses on her own home. She was passionate about the murals that now covered practically every wall in the place, and it was pretty big, a detached Victorian house with seven bedrooms and a rambling ground floor.

  It had been featured in Interiors, which must count for something. They’d used a shot of the staircase on the cover. Quite a few years ago, admittedly, but she still considered her mural painting to be work, even if her ambitious younger sisters made it clear they didn’t.

  Tessa had learned long ago never to refer to it as ‘work’ in front of them. She’d seen them exchange knowing looks, so better not to use the word, because she was aware that she was privileged to have the time to do it, without having to worry about finding money to pay bills and all that. And that was one upside of Tom’s new life – and it had only been a little over two years since the crazy celebrity circus had begun – that she did have to acknowledge was good; they were much better off than before.

  There was the money from the show and a lot more from the various guest appearances and deals Barney brokered. Plus, the salvage business turnover had nearly tripled since he’d been on the telly, as Tom always reminded her when the stalkers got her down, but she still couldn’t quite get used to her new role as a celebrity’s wife. And the occasional hate mail didn’t help.

  She’d had to come off Instagram for a while, after a nasty trolling on there by a jealous fan. That was when the TV production company had sent someone down to advise Tessa on how to cope with it all, because it didn’t help living in a very small Kent town where the only other famous person was the crossword compiler for a broadsheet newspaper.

  Staring out of the window over the cooker, she was transfixed by the effect of the late-spring morning light on the glazed terracotta vintage chimney pots they used as planters in their herb garden. She was about to grab her phone and take a quick shot of them, when the Radio 4 pips heralded the turn of the hour and here he was, the man himself – Tom, or Tim, depending on how long you’d known him – raking one hand through wet hair, the other reaching immediately to take the pan of bacon, which Tessa had entirely forgotten about, off the heat.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said, stepping out of his way, ‘the phone rang earlier – one of your adoring fans. It put me off … I forgot about the bacon.’

  ‘That’s all right, my dippy darling,’ he said, sliding an arm around her waist and kissing her full on the mouth, ‘I like it crispy.’

  Tessa smiled back at him, taking in with a wonder that had never lessened in nearly twenty-five years together, how he had flipped over all the half-incinerated rashers with one flick of his wrist, filled the kettle and was now putting water in the bottom of his old stove-top espresso maker, without letting go of her.

  Tom – not bloody Tim, Tom – was just like that. The quintessential practical man. He could make things, mend things, do anything with utter confidence. No wonder women found him so attractive. He was good with his hands. And not just his hands, thought Tessa, smiling to herself.

  Leaning against the kitchen counter, she watched him as he cut bread, poured boiling water into the teapot, laid the table and put the plates to warm, seemingly in one movement, and remembered the moment she’d first met him.

  His dark hair was grey at the temp
les now, there were deep laugh lines around his eyes, but he was still as straight and slim as he’d been that day.

  Just a year out of art school, she’d been painting a mural in the dining room of a house in Belgravia and had answered a knock on the front door to find a man about her age, maybe a little older, standing there, wearing blue overalls and a big open smile.

  He was a good-looking chap, not film-star handsome, but well above average, with one detail that had made Tessa catch her breath – a smudge of black coal dust on his nose. It was irrationally attractive.

  ‘I’m here to do the chimney,’ he’d said, and Tessa couldn’t help bursting out laughing.

  ‘I can see that,’ she’d replied, just stopping herself from asking him where Dick Van Dyke and the other chimney sweeps were.

  ‘I’ve got coal dust on my face, haven’t I?’ he’d said, rubbing at his cheeks and making it worse.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tessa, ‘and please don’t wash it off until I’ve drawn you.’

  She broke from her reverie as Tom touched her arm.

  ‘Hey, dozy,’ he said, ‘can you go and shout at the boys, it’s nearly eight.’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said.

  ‘You looked like you were a million miles away,’ he said, ‘I didn’t want to disturb you. Thought you might be having one of your big ideas.’

  ‘I was,’ she said, pinching his bottom as she went past, ‘I was thinking about you.’

  She heard him laughing as she went out to the hall.

  ‘Breakfast!’ she yelled up the stairs. ‘You’ve got two minutes to come down or we’re going to eat it all and there’s absolutely no other food in the house … Not a scrap.’

  She heard two bedroom doors open immediately, but the third one she knew might need a threat even more terrible than the thought of missing out on food to make the person inside get up.

  ‘Finn!’ she called out, going halfway up the stairs. ‘Time to get up. You’ll miss breakfast …’