Seven For a Secret

by Judy Astley

  What was it that was terminally wrong with Uncle Edward? Heather hadn’t thought to ask. He and Uncle Harold had been strange, occasional presences throughout her childhood, the only links with her long-dead and never-known father. As his brothers, and as Heather’s godparents, they’d done their duty by joining her and her mother two or three times a year for an unusually formal Sunday tea. Ham and salmon, she remembered, vinegary cucumber and gold-backed doilies. They must have visited over a period of at least twelve years, that she could remember, but she’d had no impression of them ever changing or ageing. Harold always had the same tortoiseshell-framed glasses, Edward had the same thin grey-and-white moustache.

  Oily Uncle Eddy, as she’d thought of him, used to stare at her in mock amazement and exclaim unfailingly, ‘And what a big girl you’re getting’, before passing her a pair of sticky half-crowns. She remembered how she’d tried not to shudder as his leathery fist burrowed the money into her reluctant palm and he’d whisper closely, with too much flying spit, ‘Just our little secret, eh?’ Even worse was Uncle Harold, who liked to measure how much she’d grown from knees to knickers by squeezing his overheated hand none too gently up and down her inner thigh. She remembered wondering, interestedly, if he’d left damp fingerprints, and dashing up to the bathroom to check. She never reported him to her mother, that sort of thing came under the heading of rude and unmentionable, with the highly likely danger that her mother would dismiss it scornfully with, ‘Don’t be so silly, you’re imagining things’ – but after the age of twelve or so, it was tacitly acknowledged that Heather was never left alone with him, not even for a minute, somehow being called out to the kitchen to butter bread or fetch plates. When he’d died suddenly and unexpectedly, she’d briefly wondered if it was God’s sympathetic judgement, and worked extra hard to come top in RE at school that year out of gratitude.

  ‘Can I run down to Margot’s and see about the job?’ Kate’s face appeared around the row of bean poles. ‘Perhaps she’ll let me do some dog-walking now. And pay me,’ she said hopefully. ‘And if I take them the other side of the rec where the woods are, do I still have to collect up the shit in little bags?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Heather told her, ‘but you’ll never get them to last out that far, you know dogs. Why don’t you wait till tomorrow when Simon gets back, then you can negotiate a good deal together?’

  Kate thought for a long moment, her wet hair trailing across her face as she used her purple-varnished thumbnail to slice open a ripe bean pod. ‘I’ll do better on my own. Simon’s too drippy to battle about money,’ she decided. ‘He’d end up doing it for nothing – Margot would persuade him to do it out of mummy-love.’

  Heather watched Kate’s long tanned legs striding towards the gate and thought, probably accurately, that Margot could persuade Simon to help with the dogs just for a chance to gaze at Kate. I’ll go round and see Margot later, she thought, after a swim.

  Kate, in a tiny black dress no bigger than a man’s vest, ambled along the main road towards Margot’s house, reaching up now and then to strip leaves off overhanging branches. Men in cars slowed and gave her low, appreciative whistles as they passed. And so they should, Kate thought, treating them all to scathing glances of teenage disdain. She was aware of a vaguely tense feeling of waiting for something momentous to happen. She’d left her school, exams were over, and the dreaded results were weeks away. Something had finished, so something else had to start. What was finished had been awful, so the next thing had to be brilliant. It was owed to her. Seven weeks of freedom just had to contain some thrilling event, especially now she was sixteen. Sixteen was what you waited for, the special age.

  At the stifling end of the hot afternoon, Kate could feel her blood tingling all over the surface of her skin. She wondered if what she was feeling was connected with sexual desire, and if this summer would come up with any chances to find out. She did hope so; it was time. A hundred yards or so ahead she could see the school bus dropping off the village children who went to the comprehensive in town. The teenagers among them looked a more knowing lot than Kate and her own artistically fey friends. These girls wore short skirts which revealed firm and sturdy thighs. They dawdled around the bus shelter munching crisps and flicking their hair, posing with their trainered feet at challenging angles. Home-bound boys sidled past nervously or bantered flirting aggression. One of the girls was Lisa Gibson, daughter of her mother’s cleaning lady. She was Kate’s age, and had a reputation for certain oral skills, which was explicitly recorded (‘Lisa G. sucks cocks’) in red spray paint in the bus shelter. Kate only half regretted that she didn’t know her well enough to ask if it was true, and what it was like.

  ‘Grandma’s coming to stay. Did you know?’ Suzy yelled to her over the squealing of her mountain bike brakes, and Kate jumped nervously into a gateway.

  ‘God, Suzy, stop creeping about like that! You almost scared me under a car.’

  ‘Good,’ her little sister said, satisfied. ‘And I wasn’t creeping. Well, did you know she was coming? And who is Uncle Edward? Have we met him?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. Why, is he coming too?’

  ‘No. He’s waiting to die. But he’s doing that somewhere else. I’m coming to Margot’s with you so I can see Tamsin.’ Suzy started to pedal away fast ahead of Kate then looked back over her shoulder and called with a sly grin, ‘You should have put make-up on, Simon’s home a day early. He must have passed you in his taxi.’

  Kate scowled, picked up a handful of stones and hurled them at the bicycle’s back wheel. The clattering sound as they hit mingled with Suzy’s high-pitched giggle. Kate walked on and chewed the side of her thumb angrily. Suzy was getting so silly, so girls’ school. Why ever would she imagine that Kate, who’d known Simon since they were both seven, would suddenly want to go out of her way to look extra-attractive for him? He was so clean, so nice-boy – she was pretty sure that she just couldn’t fancy someone who smelt constantly of shampoo. Margot’s pet dab-chick, she’d thought of him, ever since they were about ten and he had fallen out of his tree house in the orchard, landing surprised but unhurt on his back. Margot had rushed at him, flurried like a panicked hen, wailing, ‘Oh darling angel baby! Is he hurt then?’ Kate, from up in the ancient apple tree, had peered down at her in amazement. Privately the DAB acronym had stuck in her astonished mind – never had her mother or father called her or Suzy ‘darling angel’ anything. Just let them try, she’d thought, with an unusual stirring of appreciation for her parents.

  Margot’s house was the grandest in the village, with a garden almost big enough to be called ‘land’. It had once been the rectory, built at the elegant end of the eighteenth century by a local overlord, who must have felt either a conscience-driven need to appease his God or that his personal clergy had appearances to keep up. Village opinion was that Margot and Russell were not (and never would be) the right people to own the house. Russell sold things for a living – the worst things imaginable – used cars. He sold a lot of them, almost every elegant local car had been through one or other of his many dealerships. This particular house, it was generally felt, needed the kind of traditional, discreet good taste that had evolved over generations rather than Margot’s enthusiastic hobby of constant expensive refurbishment. Its panelled rooms, ornate ceilings and galleried hallway required heirlooms, furniture that wasn’t simply shop-bought in the ordinary handing-over-of-money way, just somehow filtered in by ancient family osmosis. Julia Merriman, who chaired the Parish Council, had once claimed (wrongly) that she could smell Habitat in Margot’s drawing-room, making it clear that an aroma of genteel decay and two-hundred-year-old woodworm would have been infinitely preferable to huge, lavishly squashy sofas covered in pale-flowered chintz, so indecently new it still had an unworn sheen on the fabric.

  Heather liked visiting Margot. Fresh from her swim and only half an hour behind Kate and Suzy, she wandered along the road and in through their ever-open gate. The garden cottage, a house mo
re than big enough for a good-sized family, into which Margot was about to move her own for the summer, was in the final throes of redecoration. Two battered vans stood by its door and the smell of fresh paint wafted out and mixed with the full-blown, early-evening glory of the honeysuckle that tangled its way to the cottage roof.

  ‘Are you in there Margot?’ she called, hearing a peal of cheerful laughter from somewhere inside.

  ‘Come on in, I’m just having a chat with the lads!’ Margot called back.

  Heather carefully picked her way past the cans of paint, dustsheets and paint charts, evidence of more than one room’s-worth of work. ‘You’re surely not re-doing the whole thing?’ she asked Margot, whose generous-sized body was perched rather precariously on the new kitchen worktop.

  ‘Might as well, while they’re here,’ Margot replied happily, grinning at her team of three workmen who, the day being just about over, were leaning around the walls swigging bottled beer. ‘Wouldn’t do to waste your talents, would it?’ she said to the nearest painter with a naughty wink.

  Heather flicked through a heap of fabric swatches and said, laughing, ‘Any excuse, Margot – that “Inside Story” design place in the village must run entirely on profits from you.’ She looked around and sniffed the paint-filled air appreciatively. ‘I love it when you’re re-decorating, it feels like I’m doing my own house by proxy, all the fun and no mess.’ She held up a square of yellow-and-white checked watered silk. ‘Wouldn’t mind some of this for cushion covers in the sitting-room,’ she said, then turned it over and saw the astronomical sum written on the ticket. ‘Second thoughts, yes, perhaps I would mind.’

  Margot jumped down from the work surface and led Heather towards the door. ‘You’re priceless, you know that?’ she said, both laughing and telling her off. ‘You spend an absolute fortune on best quality freshly-rotted horse-pooh for your precious roses and then quibble about the price of a couple of metres of material! Let’s go up to the house and have a drink on the terrace, and I’ll tell you all about my summer lodger and the megabuck movie.’

  Simon, wondering in the rectory kitchen if his mother would miss a couple of bottles of beer from the gigantic back-up fridge in the larder, heard approaching footsteps, grabbed four bottles in panic and slid out through the French doors and past the pool to the orchard, where Kate was waiting for him. Under the trees at the far side was the row of kennels, each with its individual run, where Margot fondly and efficiently boarded a steady turnover of dogs whose owners had gone for holidays, or bitches whose on-heat rapaciousness was easier dealt with by paying someone else to take care of it. Simon stalked softly across the grass, carrying his bottles, looking at Kate as if he was seeing a stranger. He slowed down and stopped under a plum tree, enjoying the moment, briefly fantasizing that she was waiting for him with passionate anticipation, waiting to fold her long limbs round him, inflamed by their term’s separation. If only, he thought.

  She hadn’t seen him, and was pacing slowly up and down by the kennels, deciding which dogs would be least trouble to take out first. Her hair was longer than at Easter, almost to her waist, even more gloriously barley-blonde than before, and it was a whole year, nearly, since he’d seen this much of her everlasting legs. The summer before, perhaps even up to the spring, she’d just been Kate the neighbour, just the always-there girl up the road. Now she was suddenly Kate the Beautiful, Kate the Desired, Kate, God willing, the Holiday Project. She felt him watching, looked up and waved to him and he smiled his lovely mouthwashed smile rather sadly. Probably to her, he was still Simon the Stupid, Simon the Boring.

  Overhead, peering silently down from the treehouse, sat Tamsin and Suzy, still and alert as wary rabbits. Neither knew quite what they waited for, but like little girls who’d absorbed too many mystery stories, they trusted that careful observation would unfailingly lead them to adventure: something to be solved, secrets to be stored and savoured. They watched Simon watching Kate and privately hoarded away the scene for later, with Suzy feeling, as well, her first tender tweak of adolescent envy.

  Margot put the tray of drinks on the poolside table. The jug of Pimms was deliciously crammed with ice and fruit and hunks of mint. Heather kicked off her espadrilles, relaxed into the deeply cushioned swing-chair and wished that her own swimming pool changing room wasn’t simply a garden shed with a bench, but like Margot’s, a spectacularly vulgar, temple-like building with full central heating, two showers and practically a health club’s-worth of warm fluffy towels. Bacchus and Pan watched over the pool’s deep end like tall marble lifeguards. She smiled to herself, thinking again of the past twenty-five years of the kind of marriage she’d almost had. Iain wouldn’t have approved at all of this kind of flamboyant opulence. He’d absorbed half a millennium of an inbred Scottish-aristocratic distrust of luxury. The small stone castle had been comfortless and, disappointingly after the one hot day of their hasty wedding, freezing even in August, and Heather had soon learned not to bother mentioning the dank mist that lurked below over the lake and shimmied in through the stone wall. That kind of complaining had been simply incomprehensible to him. Sometimes the air was so damp, she’d wondered which way round it really was, whether the mist was actually coming in, or if it started way down inside the castle and seeped out over the land. How she’d shivered in her tiny, thigh-chilling dresses and skimpy, skinny little tops. The only room with any real warmth had been Iain’s study, book-lined, tobacco-tinged and leathery like an ancient headmaster’s den. A sooty fire was lit there every day by the doting Mrs Kirby, and Heather remembered tingling with embarrassment that a grown man not that far off thirty could still shamelessly call someone ‘Nanny’.

  ‘Not in here, Heather-Feather,’ Iain had told her with babying firmness, when she’d crept into the study to get warm. ‘This is the boy’s room, for the boy’s work.’ His tiny red Olivetti Valentine typewriter, perched on the paper-strewn desk, had looked too like a toy for her to take seriously as the source of his work. Somehow she’d imagined his novels full of murderous horror (books for men, of course) came from a much more industrial origin than this cosy room and the pretty little machine. By now, judging by his major successes she occasionally read about, and could see for herself on any bookstall, he was probably well into the latest state-of-the art Apple Macintosh byte-blaster, and had become the sort of man who sat zapping out a couple of chapters on a Powerbook while waiting for the Edinburgh Shuttle. She took a long, luxurious sip of her drink and thanked Margot’s statue gods for the sinless warmth of the Thames Valley.

  ‘He’s been expelled,’ Margot told Heather, jerking her head to where Simon was disappearing into the orchard. ‘Can you believe it, on the last day of term? Drinking in the dorm or whatever they sleep in. Good God, who doesn’t drink after their exams? I bet the teachers do. Boarding schools, I ask you, they’re on another planet.’ Margot lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘Bet you anything we get a letter, come September, saying something like,’ she pursed up her lips and put on a mock-snooty voice, ‘“On further consideration we have decided to overlook, on this occasion . . .” etcetera. That’s because they’ll be wanting his sixth-form’s worth of money out of us.’ She stubbed the barely smoked cigarette out vigorously. ‘Well they’re not bloody getting it. He can go to the college with your Kate.’ She chuckled knowingly and added, ‘I’ve got a feeling he won’t mind that at all. Another drink?’

  ‘In a sec, when I’ve eaten all this fruit. Do you think the alcohol gets absorbed into it like a sponge?’ Heather picked out a dripping slice of orange and chewed at it. ‘It always tastes so deliciously over-strength. Tell me about the film. Is it a sort of historical drama? Is that why they need this kind of house?’

  Margot thought for a minute. ‘Not really, I gather they just wanted it because it’s big, to be honest, the sort of place that could be an important embassy in the middle of a London park. It’s a spooky spy thing I think, lots of dead blondes and Middle Eastern intrigue.’

&nbs
p; ‘Not our sort of thing, really then. No laughs, no posh frocks, no witty repartee,’ Heather said, laughing. ‘More of a boy’s film.’ Even as she said the words, Iain, his lurid paperbacks and her banishment from his toast-warm study came straight back into her head. It was starting to get cool, she noticed, her toes were feeling chilled, and the shadows were dappling the pool’s surface as the sun slid behind the clematis-twined head of the statue of Bacchus down by the temple changing room.

  Margot continued, ‘And it’s not just the filming. The director or writer or someone is staying in Simon’s rooms for the duration, which I don’t at all mind. I’m happy to have someone on the premises during the nights,’ she giggled. ‘Russell would be hiring security guards otherwise. Even now he’s talking about getting Harrods to store his precious model soldiers.’

  Heather wasn’t really listening, but waiting to ask, as calmly as she could, her next question, so she could get past hearing Margot’s inescapable answer. She could feel her scalp tingling. ‘So who is he, this writer, director, whatever? Have we heard of him?’

  Margot reached forward and picked up the jug of Pimms, sloshing more, fairly accurately, across into Heather’s glass on the table. ‘Shouldn’t think so, he’s some Scottish laird or other, writes enormous blockbusters, horror numbers with death and derring-do. Ivan someone could it be?’

  ‘Iain,’ Heather corrected, voicing the inevitable, ‘Iain Ross MacRae.’

  Chapter Three

  It was a terrible thing, to wish a hasty death on poor old Uncle Edward just so that Heather could see her mother away as speedily as possible on to her homebound train. It was hardly the old man’s fault if she and Delia were bonded by little more than an accident of birth. ‘Do you know,’ she told Margot on the phone, just before leaving to collect her mother from Reading station, ‘I think that when God was dishing out the Things in Common between mothers and daughters, the two of us must have been gazing out of the window, having a serious lapse of concentration.’