Family Secrets

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Bea,’ Brooke says.

  Connie gets up abruptly. ‘I didn’t take any. Silly really, just never thought of it at the time. Anyway, that’s it then. You two can start on the study as soon as you like. It might need a coat of paint, but there’s plenty in the shed.’ She looks at Andrew. ‘How long do you think you’ll stay?’

  ‘The end of the month if that’s okay with you.’

  ‘As long as you like,’ Connie says.

  ‘So, let’s go and see what we want to do with the study,’ Andrew says.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Brooke asks as they make their way upstairs. ‘Why did Nan say that about the photos?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She had photos of Granddad’s friends, she sent me some when she first met them, but she didn’t show us them with the other pictures at the weekend. And now she’s saying she never took any. Why’s she lying?’

  Andrew narrows his eyes. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive. I can show you on the iPad when we get upstairs.’

  ‘Okay, show me the evidence, Sherlock,’ Andrew says, closing the study door behind them, and Brooke sits down beside him on the chaise, flicking through the photo gallery.

  ‘Here we are then, Watson,’ she says. ‘This is the night they first met those people, at a restaurant in Bloomsbury where they were staying. This is Phillip, and this woman here is Bea – Beatrice, I think. They were both at university with Granddad.’

  Andrew studies the photograph. The four of them are sitting at a table, looking towards the camera, laughing. Phillip, lean, grey haired, casually well dressed in a blue jacket and paler blue shirt, and Beatrice, plump, older probably than his mother, and with thick silver hair cut in an edgy style. She is wearing purple and a string of large orange beads. They look as though they are having a great time.

  ‘How odd,’ Andrew says. ‘Got any more?’

  ‘Heaps,’ Brooke says, and together they go through pictures taken in a bookshop. ‘He owns that shop,’ Brooke says, ‘and I think that Bea works there. Yes, look, in this one she’s there in the office at the shop.’

  There are pictures taken outside the shop, in cafés, and in a park somewhere near a fountain, and with each one Andrew feels a growing sense of anxiety. Why is his mother lying about the photos?

  ‘She must’ve forgotten she sent them to me,’ Brooke says.

  The next photograph he’s seen before – Connie in the dark blue dress doing her mock curtsey.

  ‘That’s the night she went to the opera with Phillip,’ Brooke says.

  ‘This is totally weird.’

  ‘Yep, and it’s also weird that while Nan was away she mentioned Auntie Flora all the time in her messages and now she doesn’t even want to talk about her. Just keeps changing the subject.’

  Andrew’s head is spinning. It disturbs him that Connie is lying; she has always been so insistent on the truth. But of course his mother must have lied about lots of things in her life – who doesn’t tell a lie to save someone’s feelings, or to stop oneself looking a fool, or to hide something embarrassing or shameful? So what sort of lie is this? What could be so important, or embarrassing or shameful or whatever, that Connie would lie about the photographs?

  ‘Look, Brooke, don’t say anything about this. I want to talk to Kerry about it, I’ll call her. But not a word to Nan.’

  ‘Of course not, Dad! You know, lots of times when Nan emailed she said Auntie Flora would be coming here – she even sounded as though she thought she’d be coming to live – but now, well, she just keeps avoiding the subject.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed that too. It is a little odd, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘And one more thing, Brooke, while we’re sorting out this room, if you find anything dodgy just … just give it to me and don’t mention it to Nan.’

  ‘Dodgy like what?’

  He shrugs, awkward now, embarrassed that he even has to say any of this. ‘Well, you know, personal stuff, anything that might upset Nan.’

  ‘What, like love letters or porn or something?’

  Andrew gulps. ‘Well, that’s unlikely, I think, but …’

  ‘Not really,’ Brooke says, obviously right into it now. ‘I saw this woman on TV the other night talking about how she found a whole box of love letters when she was clearing out her dead husband’s study and …’

  ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘stop right there. I don’t want to talk about this. Just don’t say anything to Nan about the photos, and if you find anything, anything at all, keep quiet and give it to me.’ He grins to break his own tension. ‘Okay, Sherlock?’

  ‘Okay, Watson. But it would be pretty exciting if we did find something, wouldn’t … ?’

  ‘Brooke! Shut up.’ And he grabs her, claps his hand over her mouth and pretends to strangle her when she tries to speak. ‘If you find anything just keep quiet. It’s our secret and if you tell anyone, anyone at all, I’ll have to kill you.’

  And she nods furiously and collapses in giggles. ‘You’re a weirdo, Watson.’

  *

  ‘We didn’t decide about a room for your friend Flora,’ Farah says as she chops vegetables for soup later in the day. ‘Kerry’s room is the nicest and so you must want her to have that. The girls and I will go back to the flat before she arrives, unless you prefer us to leave sooner.’

  Connie, who has just opened the mail, pauses to read a letter from someone in the nearby university who wants to start a choir. ‘Sorry, what was that, Farah?’ she says, fixing the letter to the fridge door with a magnet.

  ‘Your friend Flora,’ Farah begins again. ‘We should prepare a room for her. You must let me know when she is coming, Connie, and the girls and I will move back to the flat.’

  Connie hesitates. She’s been home almost two weeks and has been waiting to find the right moment and the right way to say this. ‘I don’t want you to go at all, Farah,’ she says. ‘In fact I was going to suggest that you rent out your flat and you and the girls come and live here with me.’

  Farah puts down her knife. ‘Live here?’

  ‘Yes, I think it would be lovely. Brooke will be here a lot of the time now, and she loves Lala and Samira. And it might be easier for you. I could be here when they get home from school when you’re working, be here if you want to go out in the evenings. You don’t seem to have a chance to get out much. You need to make a life of your own here.’

  Farah blushes. ‘But I have made a life here, Connie,’ she says. ‘I have a home of my own, I have my girls and my work. And I help at the Muslim family centre.’

  Connie blushes, her neck prickling with heat. ‘Oh, Farah, I’m so sorry, I put it so badly. It’s just that I remember what it’s like to be a mother; a lot of work and sometimes you need a backstop. I could be that for you, and you for me with Brooke. Maybe it would give you a bit more free time – you work so hard.’

  Farah is silent for a moment, and Connie’s heart thumps hard. She is nowhere near ready to be alone in the house, but this is where she wants to be.

  ‘It’s kind of you, Connie,’ Farah says cautiously, ‘very kind. And it would be a lovely place for us to live. But this is your family’s home, how would they feel about it? Kerry and Andrew?’

  ‘I don’t know, I haven’t asked them, but I don’t think they’ll mind. Why should they? You’re part of the family now anyway.’

  ‘If we were to do this I would pay rent, I would share the cost of food and utilities, and share the work. That is the only way I might be able to do it.’

  ‘Well, none of that’s necessary but if it’s what you want …’

  ‘It is the only way I could agree to it.’

  Connie feels as though the breath has been knocked out of her. ‘Could agree? I actually thought you’d be pleased. I mean, the girls like it here, you’d have much more space, the pool, the garden. I thought it would be easier for you and it would be lovely for me.’

  ‘Connie, I’m honoured that you invite me into your family home like this,’ F
arah says, ‘truly honoured, thank you, but it’s a surprise. I need time to think, to talk to the girls, and both you and I need to be clear about how it would work.’

  Connie nods, looking away out of the window. ‘Yes, yes I suppose you’re right,’ she says. ‘But will you think about it and talk to Samira and Lala?’

  ‘Of course,’ Farah says. ‘I think they would like it very much. But what about Flora? You told me on the telephone that she will come to live with you. How would she feel about me being here, about the girls? Don’t you want to talk about it with her?’

  Connie turns away from the window.

  ‘Connie, what’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘Nothing at all …’ and she drops into a chair, rests her elbows on the table.

  ‘Forgive me but I think it is too soon for you to decide something like this,’ Farah says, sitting down beside her. ‘You need time, now that you are home, to see how you feel, and we both need to think about how it would work.’

  Connie nods slowly, unable to speak at first. ‘You’re right of course,’ she manages eventually, ‘we should think more about it, but …’ she puts her head in her hands. ‘That’s not how it’s going to be, Farah – with Flora, I mean. Things have changed and I’ll tell you but, please, don’t say anything to anyone else … and would you stay, please, in the meantime? Stay at least a little bit longer?’

  Thirty-two

  On a sunny afternoon in the second week of June, in a small terraced house in Shepherds Bush which she is house-sitting, Flora checks her email – again. She’s been doing this with increasing frequency since she got back to London, but day after day Connie’s silence seems to grow in significance. It’s almost two weeks since they parted in the foyer of the Bloomsbury hotel the morning Connie left.

  ‘We’ll email, won’t we?’ Connie had asked, appearing suddenly anxious and uncertain after her rigid stance of the last few days.

  ‘Of course we will,’ Flora had said. ‘We’ll work this out somehow, Connie. We can’t let one disagreement ruin things after all these years.’

  Connie had nodded, smiling a tense smile. ‘No, no we won’t let that happen. I’ll let you know when I’m back.’

  And they had hugged each other, not speaking but holding on tightly, willing each other not to cry. And then Connie had turned away and walked quickly across the lobby to the taxi where the driver was lifting her suitcase into the boot, and Flora stood and watched as it drove away, and then made her way slowly back to her room.

  Two days after she should have got home Connie hadn’t emailed, so Flora had sent a brief message asking if she was home safely, hoping the flight wasn’t too awful. ‘Let me know how you are,’ she had said at the end, but Connie hadn’t replied to that nor to the message she’d sent from France and another when she moved into this house. So what next? she wonders. Does Connie intend to ignore her completely?

  The elderly corgi who lives in the house waddles over to her, leans against her legs and gazes up pleadingly. Flora scratches between her ears and the dog takes this as a signal that a walk is imminent. She grabs Flora’s sleeve, chewing at it in anticipation, and Flora pushes her gently away and goes out to the hall to collect the lead. The house and dog belong to a friend of Bea’s who is visiting her daughter in America, and had been desperate for someone to take care of both in her absence.

  ‘C’mon then, Tinkerbelle,’ Flora says, and the dog yelps with excitement as she opens the front door. ‘Tinkerbelle,’ she says aloud, shaking her head. ‘What sort of person names a barrel-shaped corgi Tinkerbelle? Even if she wasn’t always barrel-shaped it’s still a pretty nauseating name for a dog.’ Tinkerbelle wags her tail furiously as if in agreement and skips nimbly down the front steps.

  The house is delightful, a nineteenth century terrace immaculately cared for and with a glassed extension that makes the most of the sunny walled garden with its patch of lawn surrounded by big pots of red and white geraniums. She has it for four more weeks, by which time she hopes to have found somewhere similar to rent or perhaps buy, if Gerald’s bequest will stretch to that. London feels like home again.

  It seems strange now that just a few months ago she had felt close to despair at the lack of choices open to her, and then, suddenly, everything changed. The only fly in Flora’s ointment is Connie’s silence, and the longer it continues, the more anxious she becomes.

  *

  Connie stands silently in the kitchen listening, waiting for them all to be gone. First Farah, dropping the girls at a friend’s house, and then on to visit patients; then Andrew, following in her car, off to meet an old friend from university days for breakfast. Then silence. She takes a deep breath; how can she have made such a stupid mistake? She has to talk to Brooke while Andrew’s out of the house, and she heads up the main stairs and then the narrow flight to Gerald’s study where Brooke is packing Gerald’s books into boxes, and listening to music on her iPod.

  Connie stops in the doorway, looking around the room. ‘Goodness, you’ve made such a difference already. Where’s all the other stuff?’

  Brooke grins, and turns off the music. ‘Great, isn’t it? Some of the papers took a long time, we did that on Monday. Dad took all of that and the small stuff and the rubbish down to the garage yesterday. Those boxes over there are full of files. Dad says he’ll go through them some other time. He just wants us to get it all out so that he can move the furniture.’

  Connie nods, thinking how much lighter it looks up here now, how, without all the clutter, you can see the charm of the room, the way the light falls, and of course the dust. ‘I haven’t been up here for ages,’ she says, sitting down on the chaise. ‘It needs a good clean. I’ll come and help you with that when the boxes are gone, and you’ll need new curtains.’

  ‘Well,’ Brooke begins cautiously, ‘Dad said that if you were okay with it I could have a Venetian blind, one of those with the wide wooden slats.’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind, that would look lovely. I want you to make it your own, Brooke, and I can see now why you chose it. I’d got so used to resenting it that I had forgotten what a nice room it is.’

  ‘You resented it?’

  Connie nods. ‘Yes, silly, I suppose. How can you resent a room? But I did. Granddad spent so much time here. He used to shut himself away for hours pretending he was working when he didn’t want to spend time with me or the children. He did work some of the time, of course, but a lot of it he’d be reading those …’ she points to the shelf of paperback crime novels, just where Brooke is standing, ‘or listening to the radio or sleeping.’ She shrugs. ‘Anyway, this’ll be a lovely room and, fortunately for you, escaping up here will not be seen as dereliction of duty. Well, probably not anyway.’

  Brooke smiles. ‘I can’t wait to get it done, but then it’ll be time to go home and back to school.’

  ‘The long holidays will roll around soon,’ Connie says. ‘Perhaps we’ll all have Christmas here again this year.’ She pauses – ‘I think there’s an aerial socket in that corner, behind the desk. We could get you a TV, then we won’t have to fight over what to watch.’

  ‘Wow, that would be brilliant,’ Brooke says. ‘Thanks, Nan. Are Farah and the twins staying on?’

  ‘For a while at least. I asked her to move in permanently, but she thinks we both need time to see how it might work – all of us living here – before we decide. I suppose she’s right. Brooke, there’s something I wanted to ask you. The photographs I sent you while I was away, do you still have them?’

  ‘Yes, of course, they’re on my iPad.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Of course not, as long as you don’t delete any.’

  They look steadily at each other and Connie, flushing, looks away. ‘Ah, well, I was hoping to get rid of some,’ she says with an awkward laugh, thinking she must look like a guilty child.

  ‘No, Nan,’ Brooke says firmly, withdrawing the proffered iPad and putting it on
the windowsill behind her. ‘They’re my photos now, you sent them to me.’

  Connie’s face is burning now. ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ she begins. ‘It’s just that … that …’

  ‘That you deleted some of your own, and then remembered that I must still have copies?’

  ‘Well, okay, yes, that’s right, and I just wanted to see them.’

  ‘Oh! Okay,’ Brooke says, ‘I’ll email them to you.’

  Connie feels ridiculous. She gets to her feet and walks around looking at the books still on the shelves, looking at anything to avoid looking at Brooke. ‘I’d really prefer it if you …’

  ‘Why did you lie to Dad about the photographs?’

  ‘Lie?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Nan, you know you did. You wouldn’t show us the day you got back and when you finally got round to it a whole lot of them, the ones with Granddad’s friends, were missing.’

  ‘Really, Brooke,’ Connie says, ‘this is not … this is … for goodness sake, I feel as though I’ve been dragged up in front of the headmistress.’

  ‘Why did you delete them, Nan?’

  Connie sinks back down onto the chaise, shaking her head, putting her hands over her face.

  ‘Oh, Nan, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. I just want to know what’s going on. You really liked those people at first, now you’ve wiped them out, haven’t even mentioned them. And Auntie Flora – you were so excited about her coming to live here and now you don’t even want to talk about her.’ She crosses the room and pulls up a chair facing Connie. ‘Please don’t cry.’

  Connie looks up at her. ‘I’m not crying. It’s not your fault, Brooke, you’re right. But I can’t tell you why. I just can’t.’

  ‘Something happened, didn’t it, in England?’ Brooke says. ‘Something that involves Auntie Flora, and those people?’

  Connie nods.

  ‘So tell me, it can’t be that bad.’

  ‘It is,’ Connie says, fighting the urge to talk about it, to let Brooke know exactly how awful it is. ‘It’s really bad and if I told you … if I told you …’