Family Secrets

by Liz Byrski

  ‘You’d have to kill me,’ Brooke jokes.

  Connie smiles. ‘Well, not exactly, but I’d have to make you promise not to tell anyone else, not Andrew or Kerry, no one.’

  ‘Then don’t tell me,’ Brooke says, angry now, standing up again. ‘Don’t tell me because I’m sick of things that can’t be talked about. I’m sick of whispered arguments that I’m not supposed to hear. I’m sick of Dad telling me stuff that I can’t tell you or Mum, and Mum telling me stuff I can’t tell Dad, and Dad and Auntie Kerry telling each other stuff that no one else is supposed to know. I’m sick of all those things we couldn’t say in front of Granddad in case he could still possibly hear and understand, and sick of Granddad’s secrets, whatever they are. Why couldn’t we have known about Auntie Flora years ago? How cruel was that, sending her away from her family, letting everyone believe that she’d done something terrible? And, Nan, don’t think that I don’t know that you used me to tell Dad and Auntie Kerry about that so you didn’t have to tell them yourself. Well, thanks very much for that – I really walked into it, and it turned out okay, but you really shouldn’t have done it.’

  Connie sits upright on the couch, frozen. She feels weak and nauseous, but daren’t relax in case she falls apart. She sees Brooke bite her lip, and she comes over to sit beside Connie on the chaise.

  ‘I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have said all that but it’s true, and I’m sick of it, sick of adults telling me how important it is to be open and honest, and that if you are everything can be sorted out sensibly, but doing exactly the opposite. I’ve had a horrible time – Mum and Dad arguing or not speaking then splitting up, and Mum having an affair, and having to live with that toad for weeks, then moving house, and then finding out he was a pervert and not daring to say anything and him trashing the house, and the accident. It’s been awful, Nan, and I wasn’t even allowed to tell you about Dad nearly breaking his neck. And while all that was going on I was expected to do my exams and behave as though nothing had happened.’

  Connie manages to reach out an arm and put it around her shoulders, silent still, not knowing where to start. ‘I’m so sorry, darling,’ she says eventually. ‘You’re quite right, it’s not the way to do things. It’s Granddad’s way. I think it made him feel in control of things, but it’s divisive. I suppose I learned it from him, but it’s not how I want to do things now. I’m really sorry about my part in that, particularly in what you said about my telling you about Flora. It was a very wrong thing to do. I’ve been having a bad time myself, but that doesn’t change anything. You’re so mature and sensible, Brooke …’

  ‘No,’ Brooke cuts in, ‘don’t say that. I’m sick of being told that, too. I’m still a kid … sometimes I just need to be a teenager. I’m sick of having to be a grown-up for adults who are behaving like children.’

  Brooke lets out an enormous sigh and leans against Connie and they sit there in silence. Then Brooke gives a stifled little snort of laughter.

  ‘What is it?’ Connie asks.

  ‘I was just going to say, please don’t tell Dad how rude I was to you, but that doesn’t really work with what I was saying before, does it?’

  Connie laughs. ‘No it doesn’t, but you weren’t rude. You were honest, so there’s nothing to tell. But there is a lot for me to think about, more than you could possibly realise.’

  Brooke brushes strands of hair back from her face. ‘I won’t delete those photographs, Nan, because I think whatever it is that happened probably affects all of us, otherwise you wouldn’t want to hide them. And you might get over it, and then you’ll wish you had them.’

  Connie relaxes with a sigh, and leans back, shifting her position on the chaise and encountering the broken spring. ‘Shit!’ she says, moving again. ‘Shit, that hurt.’

  Brooke laughs. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear before.’

  ‘Oh, I can do much better than that,’ Connie says, ‘as you’ll soon discover now you’re going to be here more. You’re right about the photographs, about everything, really.’ She gets up and heads for the door, then pauses. ‘This morning I was going to do something I should have done before I went away, reply to all those lovely messages people sent me about Gerald, but I don’t feel I can start on it now. D’you fancy coming for a walk with me and Scooter, going for coffee somewhere and eating something that’s really bad for us?’

  Brooke gets up, puts her arms around her, and hugs her. ‘Sounds like heaven,’ she says. ‘Let’s do it.’ And she follows Connie down the stairs.

  *

  It’s later that afternoon when Connie remembers the book and at first pushes away the thought. But she doesn’t like the way she left things with Phillip, and can’t stop worrying about what he must think of her. Perhaps it’s a legacy of her life with Gerald, the need to please a man and have him think well of her, but she is uneasy with the way she behaved toward him that last evening. He was, after all, there at her urging, and was trying to help, even if his basic loyalties lay elsewhere. She should at least send him an email to thank him for the book, but she’ll have to read it first – she doesn’t even know the title and can’t remember whether he had told her who the author was.

  Upstairs she retrieves the package from the drawer and removes the gift-wrapping. It’s a paperback, the cover background a blurry black and white photograph of some trees and a hedge and superimposed over it the back view of a woman in a dusty rose tinted coat and matching broad brimmed hat. Very 1930s. All Passion Spent it’s called, and Connie tries to remember what she knows about Vita Sackville West, which is not much at all. She sits down on the edge of the bed and sighs. Maybe she could send the email without reading it, but then he’d made such a thing of it she can hardly mention the book without reference to its contents.

  Connie kicks off her shoes and swings her legs up onto the bed, leans back against the pillows and begins to read. Lady Slane’s husband, an eminent statesman, has died and her adult children are arguing bossily about how she should spend the last years of life. Connie’s mouth twitches in a smile, and she settles herself more comfortably against the pillows. But Lady Slane, who long ago sacrificed her dreams of an artistic life to marry and have children, has plans of her own. She takes a lease on a small house in Hampstead that she has admired since her youth and ignores the disapproval of her family. Connie scrunches her toes in delight as this unlikely eighty-eight-year-old heroine moves in with her maid, sets up her easel in the garden, and variously takes afternoon tea with her landlord, a builder and another tradesman, each in his own way devoted to the practical and visual arts.

  At this point, Connie reluctantly puts the book aside. Time has flown without her noticing and she goes downstairs wondering where everyone is and then remembers that Brooke and Andrew have gone to buy blinds and other bits and pieces, and Farah is meeting the girls from school and taking them on to dancing class. She sighs with pleasure at the stillness, the lack of need to hurry, the sudden delight of having the house to herself, something she has, until now, wanted to avoid. And she fills the kettle and stands by the window waiting for it to boil, thinking of Lady Slane freed in her old age to do whatever she wants.

  Connie makes herself some tea and carries it back upstairs, trying to remember what it was that Phillip had actually said about the book – something about a tree, wasn’t it? She picks up the book and begins to read again and then she remembers. A man from the past turns up, a man Lady Slane had met only a couple of times during her life as a diplomatic wife in India, a man who has admired her greatly. Lady Slane takes tea with Mr FitzGeorge, a friendship starts to grow, they talk of many things, they walk together on Hampstead Heath. They talk of the past, the occasions on which they met, they speak of her husband and family and how she abandoned her desire to become a painter in order to marry. ‘I remember looking at you and thinking, that is a woman whose heart is broken,’ he tells her.

  Shocked, Lady Slane assures Mr FitzGeorge that she has had everything tha
t women want: a husband, children and a comfortable position in life. ‘Except that you were defrauded of the one thing that mattered,’ he says. ‘Nothing matters to an artist except the fulfilment of his gift … he grows crooked like a tree twisted into an unnatural shape … life becomes existence – makeshift.’

  Connie puts down the book and stares at her reflection in the mirrored door of the wardrobe facing her. Makeshift? A tree twisted into an unnatural shape? Is that who she is? Is that what she has let herself become? And, just like Lady Slane, she puts her hands over her eyes, to shield herself.

  Thirty-three

  Andrew is lying in bed trying unsuccessfully to go back to sleep. Outside in the passage Farah is whispering to Lala and Samira to be quiet, but they’re having trouble containing their excitement about going on a ferry trip. He hears her hurry them down the stairs, their excited voices rising as they head for the kitchen. He closes his eyes and considers going back to sleep, but his mind has started buzzing again. Being here in the house with Gerald gone is so very different, he feels free at last from the constraints of the past that stopped him from venturing along paths that attracted him. The past is peeling away, pushing him towards something new and, most of all, towards a new sense of himself. There is a tap at the door.

  ‘Are you awake, Andrew?’ his mother calls, and comes in with a cup of tea.

  He sits up. ‘Tea in bed, what a treat. What have I done to deserve this?’

  ‘Nothing yet,’ she says. ‘But I’ll think of something.’ She sits down on the edge of the bed. ‘You haven’t got plans for today, have you?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No, just going to see if Ted is around to help me move the furniture down from the study.’

  ‘Well, Chris could help with the furniture. They’re coming down for the day. They’ll be here mid-morning.’

  ‘Really? They were here just a week ago, taking Erin to the ship.’

  ‘Yes, but I called them yesterday evening and asked them to come. I need to talk to you – all of you together.’

  ‘About what? Is anything wrong? You’re not sick, are you?’ He puts down his cup and leans forward to peer into her face.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Connie says. ‘Just been doing some thinking and now I need to act on it. And don’t bother asking me; I’ll tell you all at the same time and not before. Drink your tea, dear, and maybe you could pop out for some milk and perhaps some Danish pastries for when they get here. Take Brooke with you, she’ll be better at choosing them.’ And she pats his arm, gets up and disappears down to the kitchen.

  *

  ‘So what’s going on?’ he asks Brooke later as they drive to the bakery.

  ‘Er … we’re buying Danish.’

  ‘I meant what’s going on in a macro rather than a micro sense,’ Andrew says. ‘Seems we’re having a family meeting.’

  ‘Mmmm, seems like it.’

  ‘Okay,’ Andrew says, ‘you know something, don’t you, so tell me.’

  ‘Dad, I don’t know anything, honestly. I have a thought but I’m keeping that thought to myself.’

  ‘So you definitely know something – it’s about Flora and those other people, isn’t it, the ones in the photograph?’

  ‘I don’t know, but that’s the thought. All I know is that Nan wants to tell us something and we all have to be there.’

  ‘So it must be something important for her to get Kerry and Chris to drive down here again so soon.’

  Brooke’s phone rings and she pulls it out of the pocket of her anorak. ‘Hi, Mum … Oh, nothing much, just in the car with Dad going out to buy some Danish … what? Oh yeah, I know, he’s not allowed to choose them … Nan told me … yeah, he always gets the ones that have been in the display cabinet too long … dry, yeah, I know … well, men don’t see those things, do they? So how are you, Mum, did you get some new furniture yet?’

  Andrew rolls his eyes. ‘What’s so special about choosing pastries?’ he mumbles, but Brooke ignores him. He drives on, wondering about Connie and this meeting. What could be so serious that she would destroy photographs, and what’s it got to do with Flora?

  ‘Mum says hi,’ Brooke says, pointing at the phone.

  He waves at the phone. ‘Hi from me. Tell her I’ll be back at the end of next week if she needs any help at the house.’

  Brooke passes on the message and hangs up.

  ‘I don’t like this secrecy,’ he says.

  Brooke bursts out laughing. ‘That’s just what I told Nan the other day. Too many secrets, too many people deciding what other people can or can’t know.’

  ‘You told Nan that? What did she say?’

  ‘She said I was right and that she’d think about it.’

  Andrew nods. ‘So you do know something after all.’

  ‘Stop hassling me, Dad, I’ve told you, I don’t know what’s going on.’

  ‘Stone the crows,’ Andrew says, banging his fist on the steering wheel. ‘Well, it’s obviously something serious, something big.’

  ‘Yep,’ Brooke nods. ‘She probably discovered Granddad had a love child.’

  He laughs. ‘Now you’re just being ridiculous,’ he says, pulling up outside the bakery.

  *

  Connie steps out of the shower, drags a towel off the rail, and walks back into the bedroom drying herself. The luminous numbers on the bedside clock say it’s nine-thirty; not long now. She’d woken at six and was up, dressed and walking Scooter vigorously along the footpath by twenty past, desperate to do something to take the edge off her anxiety, trying instead to concentrate on the conversation she’d had yesterday about the choir that was being started at the university. ‘I’d love to be involved,’ she’d said, ‘and I do have some experience …’ and by the time she put down the phone she’d agreed to join the organising committee as well as being part of the choir. But even this couldn’t hold her attention or calm her nerves this morning. Back home from her walk she’d made tea for everyone and, despite Farah’s protests, breakfast for her and the girls, and then for Brooke and Andrew. Now they’ve all gone for a while and she has time to spare, which is the last thing she needs. She sits down on the bed, wrapped in the towel, and ponders whether to check her email now or leave it a little longer.

  Since that confronting conversation with Brooke, and then her encounter with Lady Slane, Connie has been in a spin cycle of anxiety and indecision. Time and again she has gone over everything that both Flora and Phillip said to her, and as she has done so her image of herself has taken a beating. The more she chewed on the bone of her discontent the more her sense of righteous hurt and anger began to wither, so that now it seems just selfish and inconsiderate. She doesn’t like the picture of herself that now runs through her head like a movie on constant replay. She sees that none of what happened at The Ivy was directed at her. She can understand Bea’s dilemma over whether or not to tell her, and Flora’s overwhelming desire to embrace her niece. The situation was of Gerald’s making, and it throws new light on his motives and his behaviour both then and in their life together. She’s not yet sure what that actually tells her about him that is new, rather, it seems that she must open her eyes to what she has always known but had chosen not to see.

  Connie wants reconciliation but the price seems so high, for the price is telling Andrew and Kerry and the impact that the news of a half-sister might have on them. Andrew, she thinks, will be shocked to find he is no longer his father’s eldest child, but he will probably take it in his stride. But what about Kerry, who has spent so much of her life craving her father’s attention and approval? What about the hurt and anger, which has now transformed into something more peaceful – contentment, perhaps, or acceptance? Connie’s head spins with possible disastrous scenarios, but time and again she returns to Brooke’s words, her frustration over secrets and lies, and the duplicity that creates among people who should be able to trust each other. I no longer need to do things his way, Connie tells herself, I have to find my own way.

 
; Finally, late yesterday afternoon, she had taken the plunge and emailed Flora, then called Kerry and asked if she and Chris could drive down this morning as she had something to tell them. They are already on their way, and now more than ever she needs to hear from Flora. She takes a deep breath and opens her iPad. The little white envelope icon has a small red circle beside it with the number 1 in it and Connie’s heart does a somersault. She steps away from the bed and finishes drying herself so fiercely that it hurts, then turns her back on the screen, and stands in front of the open wardrobe searching for something to wear, anything to postpone the moment when she must open the message only to discover that it is just a message from someone else. Her email to Flora had been full of apologies, of explanations, of ramblings about what had happened and her own part in it, and when she’d read it again before going to bed she’d cringed at its excess, but it was gone by then, too late to do anything about it. All she could hope for now was that Flora would take time to read it, see honesty and genuine regret and forgive the rest. The wardrobe does not distract her, and dragging on her dressing gown for warmth, she clicks the envelope.

  ‘Dearest, dearest Connie,’ Flora begins, ‘What a joy and a relief it was to get your message …’

  Connie flops back on the bed with something between a sigh and a sob. Then she hauls herself up to a sitting position to read the message that is as long, if not quite as emotional and rambling, as her own had been. It is filled with Flora’s pleasure in hearing from her, there are no recriminations, just news of the house in Shepherds Bush, of the longer term house-hunting, of life in the bookshop and, of course, the visit to Cornwall.

  And yes, I do have pictures of them all and am attaching them, as you asked. I can’t tell you how good it feels to know that you’ve found the courage to do this. I know it’s been incredibly hard for you but I’m sure you’re doing absolutely the right thing now.

  Connie opens the photographs and stares into the faces; first Geraldine, so uncannily like her father, although her smile has an unmistakable trace of Bea about it. The two older children are like their father, and the youngest girl is, Connie thinks, a miniature version of Bea, plump and dark haired with a devilish glint in her eye. She reads Flora’s message again, wishing she could call her, speak to her now, but it’s the middle of the night in London so that will have to wait.