Secret Keeping for Beginners

by Maggie Alderson

  He even thought she was managing to service the bike herself, when in fact the only times she ever got on the thing was when she spent weekends at his place and they’d ride down to Richmond together. She would have to tell him the truth sometime, but when she was with him she never wanted to spoil the moment.

  She glanced at her watch. ‘I’d better head off,’ she said, pulling him towards her for one last hug, so she could remember the feeling of his strong, hard body next to hers.

  He pulled her closer, breathing into her ear. She could feel his hard-on pressing tight against her stomach. She groaned slightly.

  ‘Oh, you’re making it difficult for me to leave,’ she said.

  He chuckled and nibbled gently at the lobe of her ear.

  ‘Just a reminder to sort that weekend out, OK?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll sort it,’ she said.

  And then with a final quick kiss on the lips, she forced herself to walk out the door.

  Cranbrook, 9.48 a.m.

  ‘Tessa! Tessa! Where are you?’

  Natasha had searched every corner of the house for her sister and was now looking in the garden. Tom had no idea where she was either. There was less than fifteen minutes until the crew from the magazine was due to arrive and Natasha really wanted to have Tessa’s hair done before they showed up. The make-up could wait until they’d chosen clothes and locations, but with the state of Tessa’s roots, she needed to get going on her head as soon as possible.

  Irritation was setting in. Natasha was delighted to be able to help out doing her sister’s hair and make-up for this shoot, but she didn’t think it was fair that she should have to track her down first. Tessa was the one who was going to benefit from it, so she could at least make a small effort to cooperate.

  It just went to show how detached from the realities of making a living Tessa had become, thought Natasha. Most people she knew would have been sitting in a chair ready ages ago. Rachel would have approached it like a military campaign, with a clipboard and a meticulously timed action plan.

  With no sign of Tessa in the front or back garden, the greenhouse, the orchard, the vegetable patch, the garage or the potting shed, Natasha headed over to the salvage yard.

  It was pretty amazing, the stuff they had there, she thought, picking her way through a maze of red and slate roof tiles all neatly lined up. She stopped for a moment to take it all in. There were ranks of old stone garden statues covered in lichen, doors of many vintages, copper tanks in various stages of verdigris, a regiment of old radiators. It would all go for a fortune in New York.

  ‘Tess!’ yelled Natasha, tripping over an old watering can and starting to feel properly grumpy. ‘Where the heck are you?’

  The burly young man who had helped with the furniture the day before came out of one of the sheds, a pile of long floorboards balanced on one shoulder.

  ‘Are you looking for Mrs Chenery?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, hi, Jack,’ said Natasha. ‘Yeah, I am. Have you seen her?’

  He smiled, a rather insolent look in his eye suggesting he was used to the boss’s wife wandering about the yard vaguely and found it amusing.

  ‘The last time I saw her, she was heading towards the big barn at the back over there,’ he said, gesturing with his head.

  ‘Recently?’ asked Natasha.

  ‘About ten minutes ago. I reckon she’s probably still there. Sometimes she’s in there for hours.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Natasha, walking in the direction he’d indicated, picking her way across the rough ground, skirting around a herd of claw-foot baths, and serried rows of pottery chimney pots. They made her think of the terracotta army.

  It was dark in the barn after the bright morning light outside and Natasha stood just inside the entrance for a moment while her eyes adjusted, wondering what the varied dark shapes would turn out to be.

  She couldn’t see Tessa, but she could hear someone moving around on the far left-hand side.

  ‘Tess? Is that you?’ she called out.

  ‘Oh, hi, Tash,’ Tessa’s voice answered. ‘I’m just coming.’

  Natasha headed towards the direction the reply had come from, past what she could now see were old mantelpieces. Further on it changed into ranks of cupboards, shelves and dressers and at the very back she found Tessa, crouching on the ground going through a pile of dirty-looking, chequered nylon storage bags.

  ‘Hi,’ she said nervously, looking up at Natasha, who burst out laughing. Tessa was such a mess she practically had bits of straw sticking out of her hair.

  ‘Look at you!’ said Natasha. ‘Have you forgotten you’re having your picture taken in …’ she glanced down at the chunky diver’s watch on her left wrist, ‘well, under five minutes, they’re due to arrive. They might be here already. You look like you’ve been helping Tom sweep some chimneys. What are you doing down there?’

  Tessa looked apprehensive, as if caught in the act, a frown line appearing between her eyebrows.

  ‘I’m just looking for some hessian feed bags I know are in here somewhere. They’ve got really good typography on them and I’m going to put cushions in them and place them in the hammock and on the chairs. It just all looks too much like a John Lewis catalogue the way it is. I want to help Rachel out, but the way it looks at the moment, it’s just not us. We don’t do new here, Tash.’

  ‘The way you look right now, darling, no one’s going to doubt that. You’ve got to get tidied up, Tess, and fast. I need to get your hair done. I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Come on.’

  She put her hand out and after one last regretful look at the bags, Tessa grasped her sister’s fingers and rose to her feet.

  When they got back near the house they could hear Tom welcoming the photographic crew at the front door.

  ‘Quick,’ hissed Natasha, hurrying Tessa through the rear courtyard outside the kitchen, ‘get inside and upstairs before they see you. I’ll go and tell Tom I’ve found you – he was beginning to freak out a bit – and I’ll meet you in your bedroom in two minutes. And wash your face.’

  They both dashed into the kitchen through the back door, Tessa making a left towards the back stairs and Natasha heading in the other direction to the hall to let Tom know she’d found his wife.

  Joy watched them with amusement from her post at the kitchen sink, where she was rinsing chickpeas under the tap. She always soaked and cooked them herself, but Tessa had bought them tinned. They’d have to do.

  What were those two up to now? she wondered. She’d always been happy to see how close Natasha and Tessa were, considering there was nine years between them. Rachel quickly got impatient with Tessa’s vagueness, but there was still an element of lingering hero worship in Natasha’s attitude to her big sister.

  How different her three girls were, thought Joy, cutting a cauliflower into small florets. Tessa probably was the beauty of them, she didn’t have to make any effort; with her tumbling dark hair and those dreamy eyes, she had always turned heads, while being completely oblivious to it.

  Rachel was more conventionally pretty, with the blonde hair and blue eyes which appealed to more conventional men, like her former husband, Michael.

  Joy had been rather amazed, at the time, that one of her daughters was hitching up with a man with a good job, his own house and even a pension plan.

  It had been especially surprising that it was Rachel who’d made such a sensible choice, as all the young men she’d run after in her youth had been artistic types: dishevelled art students, or in hopeless rock bands. Although they were the sort who were generally more attracted to romantic-looking women, like Tessa, so Rachel had endured a lot more disappointments than a girl with her looks might have expected to. Joy had always felt protective of her middle daughter over that.

  But while he hadn’t been madly exciting, she did still wonder why Rachel had ended her marriage to Michael quite so rashly. He wasn’t dashing like Tom, but he was a good-looking man and, more importantly, a kind and reliable on
e, qualities never to be taken for granted. The split had been very hard on Daisy and Ariadne, and Rachel having lost her own father so young, Joy couldn’t understand why she had put her own poppets through something similar.

  Not to judge, not to judge, Joy reminded herself, bringing the hand holding the paring knife up to her heart chakra. She held it there and released her negative thought about her daughter. Her journey, her karma. Not to judge. And, of course, it’s never easy to be the middle child, although with Rachel’s quick wits she was more up to it than most. She’d find the right man one day. Either someone as strong as she was, or someone willing to be dominated by her – it was anything in between that was a disaster.

  Then there was darling Natasha. She needed a good man too, her precious autumn crocus, born from Joy’s later life passion. Such a gift to have met Tony at an age when she’d thought intense love – physical and emotional – like that was behind her forever. It didn’t matter that it hadn’t lasted, because it had been so wonderful while it did.

  And how lovely that although she and Tony hadn’t felt able to stay together as a couple, they were still on good terms. She sent him birthday and Christmas cards every year and he sent her postcards from wherever he travelled. It was their way of acknowledging that there had once been a connection between them too special just to forget. No point in holding on to hurts, just remember what had been good.

  Which made it seem even more of a shame that Natasha wasn’t on better terms with him. They met up occasionally when his work took him to New York, or hers to Australia, but Joy kept trying to persuade her to go out there for a longer visit, to stay with him and patch things up properly after that terrible time, when his new partner had made Natasha so unwelcome and she’d blamed her dad for it.

  Scraping the cauliflower into a bowl and putting it to one side, Joy paused for a moment before starting on the onions. Was that why Natasha was still single? she wondered. She was so striking looking, you’d think she’d be fighting them off, but whenever Joy asked her if she’d met anyone, she just dismissed it, saying she was too busy with work to bother with all that.

  Joy had asked Rachel once what she thought the problem was and she’d said it was famously tough to find a decent man in New York, and it would take a very confident one not to be intimidated by Natasha. Her stellar career, her independence and even her height could daunt the best of them, Joy could see that, but did those unresolved issues with her father play a part too? Did she give off a vibe of not trusting men?

  Blinking from the sting of the chopped onion, Joy remembered how her own heart had broken when Natasha had insisted on going back to Brisbane with Tony, after he’d come over to England to see her for her fourteenth birthday. It had all happened so suddenly. Natasha had been vehement that it was her natural right to spend some of her upbringing with each of her parents and Tony seemed keen, so Joy had felt she couldn’t object.

  If only Tony had been able to be more honest regarding his new partner’s feelings about having a sulky fourteen-year-old move in with them. It had been a very unhappy time for them all and after a little under two years Natasha had come back. That had been wonderful for Joy, but Natasha’s relationship with her father had been pretty strained ever since.

  Joy grasped her crystals and sent up a prayer that Natasha would soon find a partner worthy of her. For the good of all. And so mote it be.

  Tessa was sitting in front of her old French dressing table, looking at her reflection in amazement. Her terrible grey re-growth had completely gone and all those frizzy old-lady hairs that stood up around her head like antennae were smoothed down, but it wasn’t clinging-to-her-head artificially straight, as hairdressers on these wretched shoots had done to her in the past. It was her hair, long, dark, wavy, a little wild, flowing down her shoulders the way it used to.

  ‘What did you do, my darling sister?’ she asked, squeezing Natasha’s hand, which was resting on her shoulder, as she leaned in looking at Tessa’s reflection.

  ‘Just a little trick of the trade,’ she said, holding up something that looked like an eye shadow compact. ‘Make-up’s not just for faces, you know.’

  ‘Whatever that is, can you leave it behind?’ asked Tessa.

  Natasha laughed. ‘I’ll get them to send you a lifetime’s supply. I’ll just put a very light pre-shoot make-up on you for now and then we can go down and show off Tim Chiminey’s beautiful wife.’

  Five minutes later, they headed down the stairs to find a flurry of activity, with what seemed like hordes of people carrying photographic equipment in through the front door. Tom came out of the sitting room and was clearly very relieved to see Tessa making an appearance at last.

  ‘Ah, great,’ he said, trying not to sound as though he’d been ready to put out an APB on her. ‘There you are, Tess, come and meet the crew – and you, Natasha.’

  He went over to the stairs and as he put his arm around Tessa, to escort her over to meet the photographer, he reached over and gave a little tug to the sleeve of Natasha’s T-shirt to get her attention, then spoke quickly and quietly behind Tessa’s head, so they could both hear.

  ‘They’ve brought a make-up artist with them. I’ll do my best, but you’ll have to smooth it out, Tash. Sorry.’

  She nodded to let him know she’d got the message. Tricky. She had strong principles about never cutting in on another make-up artist’s gig, but this was a special case. It was family and she was going to do her sister’s make-up. Final.

  Tom performed the introductions with his usual easy charm, so everyone was smiling and nodding and shaking hands.

  ‘And this is my wife’s sister,’ said Tom. ‘Natasha Younger. She just happens to be over from New York and the thing is, Tessa would like her to do the make-up, if that’s OK … she’s a make-up artist,’ he added by way of explanation.

  The photographer opened his mouth, clearly about to explain that they’d brought their own hair and make-up person, thank you very much, when a woman came out of the sitting room, her eyes open wide.

  ‘Did you say Natasha Younger?’ she asked.

  Natasha laughed. She could tell with one look that this small and slight blonde woman was the make-up artist. Civilians didn’t have eyebrows like that. Strong and defined, but not overshaped. Just a little pencil for definition, possibly powder shadow. Nicely done. A good no-make-up make-up generally.

  ‘That’s me,’ she said, doing jazz hands.

  ‘Oh, wow, I’m so excited to meet you,’ said the woman, in an Australian accent which made Natasha smile. ‘I follow you on Instagram. I saw those great pictures you did in a garden yesterday and I’ve just realised it was here. It’s so amazing to meet you. I love your work.’

  Natasha went over and shook her hand. ‘Well, it’s great to meet you. What’s your name?’

  ‘Mattie Sturton,’ said the woman, still looking a bit starstruck.

  ‘Are you an Aussie?’ asked Natasha.

  Mattie nodded. ‘I’m from Melbourne, I moved to London five years ago.’

  ‘I’m from Brisbane,’ said Natasha.

  ‘You are?’ said Mattie.

  ‘Well, I was born there and spent quite a lot of my childhood there, on and off. My dad’s Aussie, he still lives there.’

  And I really should go and see him sometime soon, but I won’t think about that right now.

  ‘I had no idea you were Australian, that’s so cool,’ Mattie said. ‘We should claim you more. My dad’s English, which is how come I can live here.’

  ‘So we’re both mongrels,’ said Natasha, relieved the make-up artist she was about to usurp was so nice. It was time to sort that situation out.

  ‘The thing is, Mattie,’ she said, moving closer towards her and steering her out of the photographer’s earshot with a gentle pressure to her elbow, ‘we didn’t know you were coming today and Tessa would really like me to do her make-up. She’s really not very comfortable with this whole photography thing and she’ll feel much more relaxed
if I do her face, but I’m not going to steal your job from you. I’ll do it, but you get the credit and of course the fee. Is that cool?’

  ‘Can I assist you?’ asked Mattie.

  Natasha laughed. She was a smart cookie, this Mattie. She was clearly well beyond the assistant stage if she was booked for a shoot like this, but she’d seen an opportunity and grabbed it.

  ‘Sure you can,’ said Natasha. ‘I’d like that. And you can put it on your resume.’

  Mattie smiled at her and they shook hands on the deal.

  Sydney Street, 10.33 a.m.

  Sitting at her desk, waiting for Simon to bring his car round, Rachel sent Natasha a quick text to say she would be arriving earlier than she’d thought and her boss was coming too, because he wanted to check out the furniture, so please could she tell Mum there would be two more people for lunch?

  She deliberately hadn’t rung Tessa to tell her the night before, because she knew her older sister would be in a right old tizzy about the shoot and the thought of more people turning up might push her over the edge.

  Then, after a moment’s thought, Rachel quickly sent Natasha a second text explaining that Branko was bringing the girls down after school, so she wouldn’t fret about that. She felt as though she needed one of those battle plans you saw in old war films, moving ships around on a table to keep track of it all, but she was fairly sure she had it covered. Then Simon rang to say he was waiting outside the building and she should come down.

  When she stepped out of the front door, Rachel was glad she already knew he drove a ridiculous car. What a ludicrous vehicle, she thought, climbing into the enormous black four-wheel drive.

  Talk about Arthur or Martha, even his bloody motor didn’t know if it lived in Chelsea or Chipping Norton. It was the worst of both, she decided, putting on her sunglasses, in case they passed anyone she knew while they were still in slow central London traffic.