A Hidden Life

by Adele Geras

  ‘And that’s how I’m going to publish it. You’ll be the one, as you’re the copyright holder and a lot prettier than your dad, who’ll answer any questions from the press.’

  ‘Will there be any, d’you think?’ This hadn’t occurred to Lou. Well, she wouldn’t mind. She’d spend some of the advance on a few new clothes. That remark about her being prettier than her dad didn’t mean he thought she was actually pretty, did it?

  ‘I hope I can drum up some interest. I’ll do my best. There,’ he finished his coffee in one long gulp. ‘I should go now. It’s getting late.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll come and see you out. It’s a bit tricky reversing down that drive.’

  The house was silent as they walked through the hall and out of the front door. There was a three-quarter moon in the sky and the air was quite warm. Jake opened the car door and turned towards her.

  ‘I’ll come by and fetch you and Poppy tomorrow – if you really want to go back to London. It’s so pleasant here. I think I’d spend every weekend here if I could.’

  ‘No, I have to get back. A friend of Poppy’s from nursery is having a party. Can you believe it? A birthday party for a one-year-old!’

  ‘Start as you mean to go on. When is Poppy’s birthday?’

  ‘She’ll be two just after Christmas.’

  ‘Right. I’m going now, Lou. I’ll see you tomorrow. It’s been great, really. Thanks.’

  He took a step towards her, and before she’d understood exactly what was happening, his arms were around her. He didn’t say a word, but kissed her. Nothing about this kiss reminded her of Harry, and how she’d felt about him. This was something completely different. It was over too quickly, before she’d had time to process what it had been like, how she felt about how it felt, what she thought about Jake … Fragments of incoherent ideas chased one another through her head during the few seconds that she’d stood there with his arms around her, and she could smell his skin, and taste his rather cool lips and most of all, be aware of his hands, one on her neck, holding her face close to his, the other on her lower back, caressing her as they stood there.

  Then he was gone, with a grin and a wave and she was left on the drive with the honeysuckle that grew in profusion against the garden wall spilling its fragrance into the air, and making her feel a little drunk. I am a bit drunk, she told herself. Maybe it was a thank-you kiss. Thanks for inviting me down to your parents’ house. Here’s how I do thanking. I don’t, she reflected, know anything about Jake’s love life. Perhaps he’s got someone, just as Harry had, and this was just … just something that might have been a handshake, if she’d been a man. For her part, she thought her relationship with Jake was a bit like the ones she’d had with her tutors at uni – the younger ones at least: a mixture of awe, deference, friendliness and admiration for their intellect. The ones who were fanciable she’d sort of fancied at a distance, without ever considering that anything might come of it and that was the way she’d been with Jake. Until tonight. Now she’d have to think again.

  She turned to go into the house and was suddenly overcome by tiredness. Better get to bed fast. Poppy would be up no later in the morning than she normally was. Play it by ear, that’s what I’ll do, she decided. She would pretend it hadn’t happened till she saw an indication from Jake that it had. But it had. She was still aware of how it had been, to have his hard, slim body touching hers. What was he thinking about now, on the way back to his hotel? And how old was he? Suddenly, it became important to know.

  *

  Phyl was snoring slightly and Matt got out of bed as quietly as he could. He stood at the window, looking out at the drive. The moon was not quite full, but he could see Jake’s car clearly. He and Lou were in the kitchen, probably having a cup of tea. He wished he could go and join them, but knew it was out of the question. That crab sauce of Phyl’s was delicious but it did seem to raise a thirst. There was a bottle of water on his bedside table and he fetched it. As he drank, he heard footsteps crunching in the gravel and returned to the window. Jake was kissing Lou. Had he been expecting that? Were they involved? The thought had crossed his mind a couple of times tonight, when he’d intercepted a smile between them at the dinner table, and once when he’d noticed how Jake was looking at Lou while she was talking to Nessa: intently, with a kind of wonder on his face. What about Lou, though? How had she been with Jake? Matt hadn’t spotted anything he could have put his finger on, but he had seen that she was comfortable in his company. If they did have a relationship, was that a good thing? Would he hurt her?

  The car had gone now and Lou was still standing there in the drive, staring after it. Matt looked down at her. He would, he knew, do anything, anything at all to guarantee her happiness. If he could be assured of that, he’d want nothing else in the world. The conversation he’d had with her and Jake about his own father’s novel came back to him, and he wondered if John Barrington had ever felt about him as strongly as he felt about Lou. Certainly, he’d never shown it, but then he was a reserved man and Constance had been so much more in evidence as a parent, so much more there in his life that it had scarcely ever occurred to the young Matt to wonder whether his father really loved him.

  Children – even when they weren’t your own flesh and blood – never stopped worrying you. There was never a time when you could relax and say let them get on with it, it’s nothing to do with me. Look at bloody Justin – what he’d allowed to happen to Milthorpe House, to his mother’s money – and the ghastly provisions of that last, mad will Constance had seen fit to draw up without consulting him: these things were still robbing him of sleep. No sooner had he more or less got used to a status quo he found hard to bear than something else happened.

  What had irked him more than anything was the notion of Justin strutting around in possession of that property. Matt hadn’t approved of the sale of the house, but at least it had meant that, in future, there was no chance of Lou having to visit her brother there as some kind of poor relation. So he’d made the best of the sale and after that what annoyed him was the fact that Lou was barely scraping along while Justin had millions in his bank account.

  He wondered why he wasn’t rejoicing now. He should be, by rights. Justin was no longer a millionaire, even though he wasn’t quite down at Lou’s level of income, so there was some justice in the world after all. And yet Matt found that he couldn’t be happy about it. There was something stupid and wasteful about putting your money into something that went bankrupt. It showed exactly the sort of financial carelessness that he deplored. Never mind – Justin would have to work his own way back from that debacle.

  His thoughts turned to what Jake had asked him about his own grandmother. He’d told Lou that he intended to go back and read Blind Moon, even though he often wondered what it was about fiction that got people so involved with it. The few novels that he’d read seemed to him to take a long time saying things which could have been conveyed in half the time. He knew this was a failing of his, but he couldn’t help it, any more than one could help colour blindness. Factual matters were different. If something was true, then it was worth learning about, worth consideration. Now that he had learned that his father was no more than a reporter, Matt could read it to find out what actually happened in the prisoner-of-war camp. Perhaps he could ask Lou to help him; ask her to find the specific pages about Rosemary and the death of his real grandmother – save him the trouble of reading the whole thing. No, that was cowardly. He needed to read every word. He sighed and contemplated getting into bed again and then decided against it. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep, and he didn’t want to sit here in the dark. He left the bedroom and tiptoed downstairs. He noticed as he passed that the light was still on in Lou’s room and almost knocked at the door, but then thought better of it. She’d be getting ready for bed and Poppy would doubtless wake her in the early hours. Better let her get some sleep.

  In the kitchen, he helped himself to a glass of milk and sat at the table to drink it. He
tried to recall his early memories of Rosemary Barrington but nothing very interesting came to mind. She was a bossy woman, rather boring to a small boy, and she seemed always to be at odds with Constance. He remembered a row between his parents which was about Rosemary, and the reason it stayed in his mind was because it was so rare for them to shout at one another in front of him. He hadn’t thought about it for years, maybe not for decades, but tonight’s conversation had brought it back to him. Generally speaking, the Barringtons had managed to keep their discord to themselves, hissing at one another behind closed doors, leaving Matt holding his breath in the hope of overhearing something. He rarely did.

  This was the fight he remembered because they’d been in the car. There was no way they could have avoided Matt overhearing what they said and, looking back, it seemed to him that they’d forgotten about him altogether. His father had been driving and his mother’s sharp profile was turned towards him so that she could lambast him more easily. Dad had failed to do something – what it was Matt had no idea – but it was clear that his mother had objected strongly to something Rosemary had said to her.

  ‘You never stand up for me,’ she shouted. ‘You’re always so preoccupied with her. With your mother. I’m sick to death of it. You have a duty to me. Whether you agree with me or not, it’s your business to defend me from Rosemary, not go along with her version of events.’

  ‘That’s not what I did,’ Dad had replied. ‘I just …’

  ‘You shut up! You said nothing! That’s what you always do. Just my luck to be married to someone so spineless that he can’t even utter a squeak when his mother launches into one of her tirades …’

  ‘She is NOT my bloody mother!’ Dad was shouting, and Matt remembered shrinking back against the leather upholstery, praying for him to shut up. His father rarely raised his voice and hardly ever swore, so the effect of this fury was enormous. Matt almost stopped breathing. His father went on, ‘She’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘She is to do with you,’ Constance shrieked. ‘She might not be your birth mother but she’s brought you up since you were eight. And in any case, her relationship to you or the lack of it has absolutely no bearing on what you should have done when she attacked me. You should have told her what you thought of her behaviour. She is your mother to all intents and purposes. She’s brought you up since childhood.’

  ‘She took my mother from me.’ Matt could see from his seat in the back of the car that his father’s neck was red. It always went red when he was angry: scarlet patches covered the skin from his collar to his hairline. His voice rose to a shout as he went on speaking: ‘She robbed me of my mother … robbed me.’

  ‘What nonsense!’ Constance laughed. ‘Your mother died of starvation, and probably malaria and God knows what other ghastly illnesses, in a prisoner-of-war camp. It’s frightfully sad and all that, but you ought to have got over it by now. It was years and years ago, John. Talk about living in the past! You’re a real expert at doing that, aren’t you? Well, I’d be grateful if you stopped worrying about your mother, who’s been dead for donkey’s years, and took a little more notice of me.’

  Matt drank the last of the milk. His father hadn’t answered, or if he had, the memory of what he’d said had gone. What remained, what came back to him now as he sat in his own kitchen, an adult, well able to deal with unruly emotions, was the utter misery he’d felt then in sympathy with his father. He’d recognized – how old had he been? Not much older than ten, certainly – the depth and complete hopelessness of his father’s sorrow. I knew, Matt thought, even at that age, that he and Constance were always going to be at odds with one another. They ought to have separated. There were some boys at his school whose parents were divorced. It wasn’t completely unknown, but Matt dreaded it more than anything. For years and years he’d gone to bed praying that his parents would stay together and his prayers had been answered. He should have specified some happiness in his fervent, whispered chats to the Almighty. For someone who didn’t know whether he believed in God or not, he did make a lot of demands on His time. Just in case …

  Matt rinsed his glass and left the kitchen. She robbed me of my mother. The novel was a truthful account of what had really happened and remembering those long-ago words of his father’s made Matt believe this properly for the first time. Until now he’d been uncertain, but that memory had returned unbidden to convince him. He would tell Lou about it tomorrow. The light was out now in her room and he offered up another prayer, for his daughter’s happiness. And Poppy’s. Their health. Lou’s success. He wasn’t going to take the risk of leaving anything out.

  *

  Without curtains, without carpets, Milthorpe House was echoey and cold. Jake had picked her up early and here they were, walking round a place which Lou thought she knew better than anywhere, but which suddenly looked like nothing so much as a stage set waiting for scenery, props and, especially, actors to come and make it live again. The house felt dead. There was nothing in it that Lou could point at and say, I used to love this when I was small …

  ‘It’s horrible,’ she whispered. ‘I wish you could have seen it when Constance was alive. She wasn’t a nice person, but she did know how to make a house beautiful.’

  ‘I just feel so – well, it’s good to see where he used to live. Can we go and look at his study? Will it worry you? You can stay down here if you like and just give me directions …’

  ‘No, I’ll come too. I haven’t been in there for years. Without Grandad there, I never wanted to. Constance didn’t change anything about the room but it wasn’t the same after he died.’

  They went up the stairs together, Lou leading the way. She’d not slept well: a combination of Poppy and then being unable to fall asleep again, and part of that disturbance was to do with Jake. That kiss last night … he’d made no reference to it this morning and Lou interpreted that as meaning it was due to the lateness of the hour, the scent of honeysuckle: whatever. When something caught his attention, he focused on it completely. Now, he was totally absorbed with John Barrington, trying to imagine how it was for the writer to sit in this room and put down the words that would become his novels.

  ‘Tell me how the room was arranged,’ he said.

  ‘The desk was here. Grandad didn’t like looking out of the window while he worked. He told me once that the blank wall was like a screen and he could see the scenes unfolding on it – like a movie. We loved movies. We used to watch them together all the time. There was a sofa there, and a small television over in the corner and they used to show old black and white movies in the afternoons sometimes. The curtains were tobacco-coloured – velvet I suppose they must have been, but they were very worn and old. I don’t know how Constance allowed it. She wouldn’t have stood for worn curtains in any other part of the house …’

  Suddenly, there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lou,’ Jake said. He looked stricken. ‘I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I’d known it’d be so hard for you. Let’s go, I’ve seen enough.’

  ‘No, no – I’m fine. Really. I just felt sad for a moment, that’s all. Not about Grandad. Or not really. Just a sort of regret that he couldn’t be alive to see his book reissued. That’s all it is. And tiredness. Poppy woke up last night. She mostly sleeps through these days but last night, well, sod’s law, isn’t it? Kids always wake up when you go to bed late. Let me tell you about the desk. He had a rolltop desk which I loved. He let me keep my pencils in one drawer. My grandmother got rid of it when he died, and that makes me so angry whenever I think about it. I’d have loved that desk …’

  ‘That’s too bad. That kind of thing really gets to you, but it’s so cool. To be here, I mean. To look out of his window. I really get off on stuff like this, you know. Writers’ houses. I love them. I did all the tourist things when I first came over here. Stratford, the Lake District, Hardy’s Dorset, even Brontë country. And modern writers … it’s harder with them, so I’m lucky to know you. And very
lucky to have got here before they turn it into something else.’ He smacked his hand against the wall. ‘It makes me mad, to think this is disappearing. How can you stand it? A health club!’

  ‘Grandad’s not famous enough for anyone to turn this place into a shrine.’

  ‘I know. It’s sad, that’s all I’m saying. I’m glad your brother didn’t run his cockeyed idea past me. I’d have been – well, I’d have found it hard to be polite to him. It’s … I dunno … Philistine, I guess.’

  ‘Justin does his own thing. He always has. He never thinks about anyone else, and he’s so good-looking that people don’t seem to mind. They indulge him.’

  Jake smiled. ‘I’ve noticed that. The beautiful get away with stuff, that’s true.’

  The study seemed crowded all of a sudden. Jake was leaning against the wall by the door. Lou was on the other side of the room. Suddenly, he came towards her, holding out his hand. ‘Come on, Lou. We’re out of here.’

  He held her hand as they walked downstairs. She felt as though she were being led out of a dangerous maze. He knows the way out, she told herself and that thought was followed by another: you’re mad. You know the way out. You’re the one who’s been here before, not Jake. Still, the feeling persisted that he was looking after her; guiding her out of somewhere that used to be a happy place and wasn’t any longer. She’d been about to cry, about to sink into memories that made her sad, and Jake had been there to take her back into the sunlight. The study had always been on the dark side of the house, and the sun never reached it till late in the afternoon, but now, coming out at the front, there was the warmth and brightness of a clear August morning and her spirits lifted.