The Darkest Secret

by Alex Marwood

  ‘Mila,’ I say. ‘I’m a designer.’ I always say I’m a designer. You say you’re an artist and everyone immediately thinks ‘Trustafarian’. Say you don’t do anything much and they look as if their heads are about to come off with the effort of trying to think of the next question. And besides, I have done a few logos for my friends’ various businesses. Mostly importing knick-knacks and sustainable clothing from places they think of as spiritual, like Indonesia, or things to do with hemp. God, I despise my friends.

  ‘A designer!’ she says. ‘What sort of design?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ I say airily. ‘Corporate branding, logos and the like, mostly. And labels. I’m good at labels.’

  I could do you a few labels, I think. You certainly use them enough.

  ‘Oh, great,’ she says. ‘You always were creative. Are you with a company?’

  ‘Self-employed,’ I tell her. See the ‘ah’ cross her face. Oh, well. I never really wanted to impress you anyway, Claire. You’re just a secretary who shagged my father.

  ‘Ruby wants to go to art school,’ she says.

  Ruby blushes.

  ‘Art’s your thing, is it?’ I ask.

  ‘I like it,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if I’m any good or not.’

  ‘Oh, pooh,’ says Claire. ‘She got an A at GCSE last year. And English, and French.’

  ‘Wow.’ Where did those brains come from? ‘Where’s school?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t go to school,’ she says.

  ‘I home-school her.’

  ‘Home school? I thought that was for Christians and stuff? Have you gone Christian? How do you square it with the council?’

  I realise once it’s out of my mouth that I’ve been blurting. Claire looks slightly annoyed. ‘Quite easily,’ she says. ‘I’d have thought that three GCSEs at fourteen wasn’t a bad reflection of whether it works, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘And I go to tutors for the things she doesn’t do,’ says Ruby. ‘I do maths and physics in Lewes and philosophy in Hove.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Claire, and raises an eyebrow.

  But don’t you worry, I want to ask, that she’s going to end up completely handicapped, stuck up this hill with you going on about additives and nobody else to talk to? Because trust me – she’s not going to make friends talking about Wittgenstein until she’s at least seventeen, and then only in a six-month window.

  ‘She goes to the youth club in the village,’ says Claire, as though she’s heard my thoughts. ‘And people have her over all the time. And we go out, a lot. To galleries and the theatre and the cinema and such.’

  Ruby’s eyes flick between me and her mother repeatedly. But she doesn’t say anything. I decide to change the subject. ‘So when did you move here?’

  Claire breathes, goes with the change. ‘When Ruby was five. We went to Spain for a year, but… you know. It was lovely and sunny, and people left us alone, but it felt like being in exile.’

  You are in exile, I think. You’re still hidden away where no one can find you, sticking to a tiny village where the big house clearly rules the roost. ‘And then Tiberius saved us. Literally,’ she continues. ‘I knew him when we were young, and he tracked me down at my lowest point. It was a complete lifeline, this place. I don’t know what I’d have done without it. He said he was having trouble letting it because of its position. I’d been thinking about Wales at that point. Somewhere in Snowdonia or something. Where it’s cheap. But here is better. I don’t want Ruby growing up with no access to the world, even if I don’t send her to school.’

  There’s an edge to this last remark. I guess I know what she means, really. My last three years at school were fairly much a living hell, after the Coco thing; every experimentation with the way I looked resulting in a trip to the counsellor, people’s parents shying away from having me over because – I don’t know what? Scared I’d steal their younger children? Or scared I’d find their copies of the Sunday Times lying around, with its lengthy editorials about me and my family?

  ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘I must get on with supper. We eat early around here. Go to bed early, get up early. It’s the healthy way to live. Are you sure I can’t tempt you to a glass of rhubarb wine?’

  Me and Ruby alone again. She scratches the back of Roughage’s neck and Roughage grunts approvingly.

  ‘She just wants to keep me safe,’ she says. ‘The Coco thing – she’s scared, you know? She doesn’t want to lose me too.’

  I take my time about answering and my eyes drift over to the Coco wall. A lock of blonde hair tied up in a ribbon. A battered Barbie that looks as though she’s had her face chewed off. A christening shawl, framed and hanging on the wall beside the shelves. Handprints in a lump of plaster of Paris. She’s not got over it, not at all. How could one?

  ‘Modern food is full of nasty stuff,’ says Ruby, as though she’s reciting a mantra. ‘People get cancer from it all the time. She’s just looking out for us.’

  It’s a modern disease, this neurosis about being poisoned by your food. We’ve never had a diet this healthy, food so readily available, medicines so effective, and people are giving their kids rickets by deciding they’re lactose intolerant. Has Ruby been deprived of all the vaccinations too?

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘As long as you’re happy.’

  She doesn’t reply, just bends down and kisses Roughage’s snout repeatedly. Jesus. I wouldn’t let my face anywhere near those teeth if I were her.

  ‘How are you feeling about this weekend?’ I ask.

  She sits up and looks at me again. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s going to be tough.’

  ‘I know that. But I want to do it.’

  ‘I’ve got to do the eulogy,’ I tell her. ‘Can you help me with that?’

  She brightens. ‘Of course!’

  ‘Some – an anecdote or two, maybe? Something a bit poetic about how you felt about him?’

  ‘Feel,’ she corrects, and her face starts to crumple again. Oh, Ruby, I think. What am I meant to do? You so clearly need a cuddle, need someone to put their arms round you and tell you it’ll be okay, and I’m so not the person to do that for you. And nor is your mother.

  ‘Are you packed?’ I ask. ‘We should get off at a decent hour. It’ll take five hours or so, plus finding the place.’

  ‘Finding the place? Don’t you know where it is?’

  ‘I know the address,’ I say.

  ‘Haven’t you been?’

  ‘No. I – Simone, you know…’

  She look surprised, then relieved. ‘Oh. I thought it was just me,’ she says, and looks away.

  ‘No,’ I tell her, ‘not just you.’

  Supper is pork chops with kale and quinoa. ‘I didn’t ask if you still ate meat,’ says Claire, and places a glass of rhubarb wine firmly by my tablemat. The table is long and sturdy, a big lump of roughly hewn something that would be quite beautiful if you could see it. But it’s piled high with stuff. Papers and unopened envelopes and tools and folded clothes and shopping bags full of empty jars and a couple of dozen schoolbooks. She’s cleared an extra space for me by shifting some things up, put a couple of candles on saucers in between us all in an attempt to make it look pretty. The kitchen surfaces are cluttered too. There’s a space a foot square by the stove where I guess she crams in a chopping board. When she opens a cupboard to get me the salt I see her automatically put a hand up into it to stop the contents cascading on to her face. On the fridge, more childish drawings, held on with magnets, yellow with age and curled at the edges.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, ‘I love meat.’

  ‘This one was Blossom,’ says Ruby, with a gloomy glee.

  ‘I told you not to give them names,’ says Claire. ‘Haven’t I always told you not to?’

  ‘She was a particularly nice pig,’ says Ruby, ignoring her. ‘She liked apple cores and a good hard scratching behind the ear.’

  I cut off a slice of Blossom and put it in my mouth. It’s quite dry, grilled
without fat, but beautifully tender. ‘She clearly had a happy life,’ I say. ‘It shows in the meat.’

  Claire goes to the sink to fill the water jug and I surreptitiously scatter salt over my plate. The kale is steamed, naked, and the quinoa is boiled, unbuttered. How has Ruby put on so much weight? I wonder, when they live on a diet that’s entirely devoid of pleasure? Ruby puts a finger to her lips and reaches for the salt pot. ‘No, Ruby,’ says Claire, her back still turned to us. She must have been watching our reflections in the window. ‘Salt’s just for guests, remember?’

  Ruby subsides and goes back to poking her kale.

  ‘There’s plenty of salt in veggies as it is,’ declares Claire. ‘No need to fur up our arteries.’

  I wonder if I should tell her that only ten per cent of the population is actually responsive to salt, but I decide to let it lie. I learned a long time ago that once someone’s adopted a belief there’s little point in trying to argue them out of it. And besides, I’m trying to train myself not to be a pedant.

  She comes back to the table and fills our water glasses. I half expect it to be some exquisite peaty well water, but it’s just plain old tap. She sits. Takes a mouthful of quinoa on her fork and chews it for about twenty minutes.

  ‘Gosh, it’s nice to see you,’ she says.

  ‘And you,’ I reply politely. I’ve never unlearned the family training. I lie reflexively when manners are at stake, but I can never keep the lack of enthusiasm out of my voice.

  We go to bed at ten o’clock and I’m already dropping. The strain of trying to keep up conversation with someone you’ve hated all your life sucks the strength from you. My bedroom is at the end of the landing, next to a tiny bathroom with fixtures that look as though they were put in in the 1940s. There’s a single bed and a tea-chest covered with a piece of batik that clashes with the floral wallpaper, a lamp on top, a stand for a suitcase and a couple score more boxes piled three deep against the walls. I’m tempted to look inside and see what it is she’s keeping up here, but they’re sealed up with masking tape and I don’t trust myself to reseal them well enough that she wouldn’t be able to tell I’d been in there. No labels up here. Just blank cardboard and a layer of dust on the windowsill. I content myself with quietly opening the wardrobe door and looking inside. It’s ram-full of rolled-up clothes, stuffed like a mattress. They bulge at me, threatening to explode out into the room never to return, and I hastily latch the door shut before they can escape.

  I brush my teeth in the bathroom, give myself a speed wash in my nightie, because it’s absolutely freezing up here. I can’t imagine that anyone ever has a long bath in that tub with the shower hose draped over the back of the taps, at least not in winter.

  How has this happened? Dad muttered several times over the years about how she’d taken him to the cleaners, so how come they’re living so poor now? Mind you, I remember him saying the same thing about my own mother, when she wanted a share of a fortune that had been seeded with her own inheritance. Sean was always a bit ‘what’s mine is mine’, I guess. And what’s yours really wants to be mine, too. That’s how the rich get rich, and why they’re so suspicious of benefits claimants.

  There are radiators in every room, but each one is turned down to the anti-frost setting, no more. Dominated by an ancient Aga, the kitchen was warm, and the scented heat of the sitting room wood fire at least kept the chill from the downstairs rooms, but up here I can imagine that I’ll wake tomorrow to find frost on the insides of my windows. The bed itself feels slightly damp, but that could just be the long-term cold leaching itself from the springs into my body. I put a jumper on over my nightie and retain my socks, and huddle under the duvet, wondering how many other people have slept in this room during Claire’s tenancy, if any. I don’t even know if she has any family, apart from Ruby. Certainly there was no sign of them during the Coco era. It’s a cheerless sort of room, not designed to encourage guests to linger. The lining paper is beginning to peel in a high-up corner and the carpet is threadbare.

  I know it’s hardly an underfilled space, but what happened to all the stuff? I remember her as the Constant Shopper, filling her houses with bits of formless ‘modern art’ in chrome and glass and fol-de-rols for tables, lining up pair after pair of unworn stilettos in her walk-in wardrobe as though they were precious evidence of her very success at life. ‘It’s for your father,’ she would say, fingering a piece of embroidered satin, a swatch of pleated Lycra, a sheath dress with some long-retired Italian’s name emblazoned on the neckline. In a way it was a form of hoarding, I suppose. Just… one approved by society, where accruing a collection of rusty car parts or feral cats is not. There was far more in that walk-in than she could ever hope to wear in a year, but she added to it constantly with near-religious zeal and had the staff swap everything in and out of a storage unit in Battersea with each change of season. The hoard here is just as regimented, kept hidden from prying eyes by its obsessive use of containers, but I know from looking in that cupboard that inside those cardboard boxes is a wormhole to a world of chaos.

  That was what she was always like, I suppose. Rigid control on the surface and the howling void beneath. That’s why so many people cling so fiercely to their semblances of discipline: their habits, schedules, routines, diets, personal trainers, personal grooming, theories of morality. It’s all about the fear of the chaos beneath.

  It’s certainly true of India. Nothing in her life is real unless it’s been ticked off on a list. For us, the recognition of the void came so early that we were always going to go one of two ways: spend our lives fighting valiantly to hold back the tide the way she does or, like me, accept the truth and let the chaos reign.

  Chapter Fourteen

  2004 | Thursday | Charlie

  ‘Why can’t we get the girls to do it?’

  Claire Jackson rolls her eyes. ‘Which girls? Because if you mean my husband’s, good luck finding them.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Charlie, his heart sinking. ‘Gone off-piste, have they?’

  ‘You could say that. Linda saw them heading for the chain ferry half an hour ago. In mini-skirts.’

  She’s cutting up vegetables. Halving cherry tomatoes, julienning carrots and celery and steaming cauliflower. Supermarket packs of anaemic cooked organic chicken, ham the colour of a bridesmaid’s dress and wholemeal pitta breads sit on the counter next to the chopping board. Imogen is laying the table with miniature cutlery and plastic plates, filling sippy cups with juice diluted with water and gathering what seems like an endless stream of toddlers to strap into chairs. Do all of these even belong to us? he wonders. There seems like such a lot of them. Did Imogen collect a couple on the way down without my noticing, just to keep up with the general fecundity? That Linda woman can’t possibly have produced three, can she? Her stomach’s as flat as the Norfolk Broads.

  ‘They can’t have got far, surely?’ he asks, hopefully.

  ‘Don’t kid yourself,’ says Claire. ‘If I know anything about the sort of mini-skirts those two were wearing, they’ll have had no trouble thumbing a lift. They could be anywhere on the peninsula by now.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried?’ asks Imogen.

  Claire shrugs. She’s never made any great secret of her distaste for Sean’s first family. ‘It’s Purbeck, not Peckham. And they’re Sean’s children, not mine,’ she says, simply. ‘Besides, they’ve got phones.’

  Wow, thinks Charlie. You really are a piece of work, aren’t you? No wonder he’s getting tired of you.

  ‘Well, what’ll we do?’

  Claire pulls a face. ‘I daresay we won’t do anything,’ she says. ‘I should think you will take your cue from my husband and go and drink champagne in the garden while the women feed the children and put them to bed.’

  He draws breath to reply, but catches Imogen’s eye before he does so. Don’t, says her look. Don’t even think about it. Charlie has been with Imogen for enough years, has looked to check her expression at enough parliamentary cocktail pa
rties, to ignore her judgement on all matters social. He looks at the children. En masse, with their staring eyes and their open mouths, the snail trails running from nose to upper lip, he finds children quite frightening, like a herd of tiny zombies. He’s secretly quite glad they never had any themselves, though Imogen’s liking for involving herself with them suggests that she might be more conflicted. He takes the prompt to leave.

  Beneath the gazebo by the pool, Sean has gathered his party on the Indonesian teak benches. The strange doctor, Jimmy, is already skinning up a joint; Robert and Maria Gavila are holding hands; Linda the interior designer is curled up like a Siamese cat, somehow both decorous and faintly obscene in a tight little dress that shows off every hour she’s put in at the gym. Strange little Simone, having changed out of the frankly terrifying hot pants she was wearing when he arrived into a turquoise maxi-dress, gazes at Sean the way a rabbit gazes at a snake. Or is it the way a snake gazes at a rabbit? Either way, Sean at least gives the impression of being unaware. She’s been staring at him like that since she was ten, thinks Charlie. That monumental crush she’s got would be embarrassing if he gave it even the slightest moment of acknowledgement.

  Sean has lit a cigar. He sits back against the cushions like a pasha in a harem. ‘Ah, Clutterbuck!’ he cries. ‘About time! Glass of fizz, old boy?’

  ‘I should coco!’ he says, and flings himself into a seat. This weekend has taken far longer to get started than he would have liked. It’s the last weekend of the parliamentary recess, and he’ll be back at his desk on Wednesday. And with an election next year it’ll be all hands to the pumps. He feels a bit end-of-school-holidays-ish and wants to make the most of the time he’s got left.

  Maria pours him a glass of Veuve and he downs half of it in one, lets out a hearty sigh of contentment. Sean and Robert are his oldest friends. It’s rare for him to get the chance to be this much at his ease. ‘Ah, that’s more like it,’ he says. He really fancies a line of his namesake pick-me-up, but with Simone there he supposes he’ll have to wait.