Seven For a Secret

by Judy Astley

  Heather relaxed, started to enjoy her food and let Tom take over as the centre of the family. Her mother brooded over her supper, picking the mange-tout out of her salad, saying had she meant to include a vegetable that should be served hot with butter, not cold with vinaigrette?

  ‘Tell me about Uncle Edward. What exactly is wrong with him?’ Heather asked.

  ‘Age, I suppose. He had a bit of a stroke and recovered quite well about a year ago. I rang and told you, remember?’ Heather did, but only vaguely. She’d have sent a get well card for more than ‘a bit of’ a stroke, so it couldn’t have been too bad. ‘And now he’s got a collection of various ailments. With leukemia on top. There’s no treatment of course, not at his age.’ Delia sighed, perhaps feeling too uncomfortably close herself to ‘his age’.

  ‘Why not?’ Kate, who had been dreamily munching her food suddenly demanded. ‘Surely they can do something? Has he told them not to?’

  ‘He’s not really in a position to tell them anything,’ Delia told her. ‘You aren’t, with doctors, are you? Besides he doesn’t really know what he’s got, what’s the point at . . .’ she sighed again, ‘at his age?’

  Kate was frowning, trying to work out what she’d heard, if it was as bad as she imagined. ‘He doesn’t know? Has no-one told him? Why not? I’d want to know.’

  ‘Well not everyone’s like you, Kate, perhaps Uncle Edward would prefer just to slip away without a whole lot of drug side-effects to cope with,’ Tom explained to her quietly. Delia was getting twitchy, twisting her fork round and round, and her eyes flickered quickly from Tom to Kate.

  Heather felt grateful to Tom for his unusual gentleness – it had taken him years not to rise to Delia’s baiting antagonism which mostly stemmed from her being simply unaccustomed to sharing a house with a man. ‘I’ve never remarried,’ she would state proudly to uninterested bus queues, post office counter staff, and anyone else who’d listen, when Heather was a little girl. ‘It wouldn’t be right,’ meaning it wouldn’t be convenient, unconsciously way ahead of her time in deciding men were nuisances round the house, making the lavatories smell, folding the newspapers the wrong way and polishing their shoes with the newly-washed dusters.

  ‘And if he did get better, who is there to look after him?’ Delia went on. ‘I can’t, I’ve done my best, visiting him on and off, and bringing him pies and casseroles. The best I could do was get him into this clinic.’ She looked at Heather, appealingly. ‘It’s what your father would have wanted for him, I’m sure.’

  Kate, feeling there was an issue here worth wrestling with, couldn’t let it go. ‘Have I got this right? You mean he’s going to die because he’d be a problem if he lived? And because he’s old he’s not allowed to make his own decisions about treatment? Is that it?’

  Delia thought for a moment and then squared up to Kate with the defiance of long experience, ‘Yes, if you put it that way, that’s about the size of it. And you know, one day you’ll be saying all this about me. I shan’t mind.’ A note of challenge was rising in her voice.

  ‘Uncle Edward might though,’ Suzy said quietly.

  Heather, rather hot from her shower, opened her bedroom window wide to the late night sounds and the soft cool air. Out on the river, ducks and moorhens scuttled, splashed and squawked gently, settling and roosting. ‘Stay safe,’ she whispered to them, fearful of prowling foxes and hungry water rats stealthily creeping up on the floating nests, vulnerable among the reeds and bank-grasses.

  ‘What are you gazing at out there?’ Tom asked, coming quietly into the room. She listened to him fussing about behind her, unpacking his ever-present flight bag. It occurred to Heather that he had clothes that seemed to be permanently in transit, either between continents or between the bag and the washing machine. At least the clothes didn’t get jet-lag, she thought, remembering Tom on his last trip home: he had decided it was high noon at 3 a.m., just the moment for cooking a much-missed full English breakfast, complete with toast burnt enough to set off the smoke alarms. She wondered if she should worry that, for her, Tom occasionally resembled a rather difficult house guest. Perhaps, though, it was a good sign that, so far, she wanted to resist that feeling. The thought of what it would have been like still being married to Iain crossed her mind. Presumably he had, as he had then, an office wherever he was living, so that, in a sense, he’d always be ‘home’. She’d never get to sleep blissfully alone, never have to deal completely by herself with frozen pipes, blocked drains, garage mechanics who tried to con her that it would cost her at least this much for new brake pads. How peculiarly alien such cramped togetherness would seem.

  ‘I’m not really looking, just listening,’ she told Tom. ‘I can hear family life out on the river – the wildfowl kind, not human, though somehow it doesn’t sound that much different. Parents worrying about their children’s safety, the getting comfortable for a peaceful night, if they’re lucky.’

  Tom went into the bathroom to make space on the shelves for the contents of his sponge bag. Mrs Gibson always reshuffled everything during his absences, spreading toiletries over the shelf-space as if he was unlikely ever to return. There followed the sounds of brushing teeth, the downpour of the shower and the loo flushing, and still Heather leaned on the window frame, inhaling honeysuckle scent. Lucky plant, she thought, to be blessed with two such lovely names: honeysuckle and woodbine. She smiled as she thought briefly of Nigel from the nursery, who saw plants in terms of italic-script Latin tags. ‘Oh yes, Lonicera caprifolium – perfoliate woodbine or goat-leaf honeysuckle to the hoi polloi,’ she could hear him declaiming, reducing the magic to the level of an index.

  ‘I suppose their family structure is just like ours really.’ Tom, Asia-bronzed and naked, joined Heather at the window and peered out through the blackness towards the river. Flashed glimmers of reflected light showed its progress past the end of the garden.

  ‘What? Oh the birds. Yes, except we don’t starve our weakest ones.’

  ‘I mean they breed, worry about their babies, fuss over them and then trust they’ll survive when they’ve flown the nests.’

  ‘Big difference, though.’ Heather turned back into the room and peeled off her satin robe. ‘Their young don’t seem to turn full circle in middle age and start worrying about their parents.’

  Tom lay heavily on the bed, frowning. ‘I never realized before how much you and your mother were two of a kind. You complain she’s always wanted to know what you were up to so that she could have a managing stake in your life, and now you want to interfere in whatever deal of death she’s got going with your Uncle Edward. Don’t forget you probably don’t even know the half of it, just like you’ve always said about her.’

  She regarded Tom coolly. Her own body, reflected in the mirror on the open wardrobe door, looked as if it still wore a light-coloured swimsuit. Tom’s was evenly tanned all over, as if he’d been turned slowly on a spit. He had a very grown-up body, long and solid and well-covered, with large, confident movements. Last time she’d seen him, it had been English-pale and a little flabby, but now he looked as if he’d been making good use of the hotel gyms and tennis courts. It was such a pity he’d made that pompous little speech, just when the surprise of how attractively unfamiliar his body was looking had started to interest her.

  ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘I wouldn’t like it. We should promise each other that if we ever get anything terminally awful wrong with us we’ll tell. I think we’d both rather make our own informed decisions about the end, wouldn’t we? God, no wonder they call it the second childhood, all your hard-earned adult rights taken away.’

  Heather relaxed and snuggled next to him on the duvet, watching with slightly less distant interest as his penis started to uncurl like a waking animal. She wished, suddenly, that it didn’t remind her of a David Attenborough wildlife programme she’d once watched about the rather repulsive underground life of the naked mole rat, a wrinkled, bald, ugly creature with loose pink skin just a couple of sizes to
o big, that squirmed blindly but with fervent purpose in tunnels beneath the earth.

  Tom reached across and put a heavy arm around her, stroking her left breast quite tenderly, though she knew he’d rapidly move on. The mole rat was livening up, quietly expanding to fit its skin. ‘Of course we’re not like that generation,’ he murmured into her neck. ‘We don’t keep secrets from each other, do we?’

  Chapter Four

  Something invasively loud, ducks squabbling on the river, or the approaching careless racket of distant dustmen, woke Heather at about 6 a.m. and she got up and went outside to water the herbs before the scorching sun got to them. Silver slug trails patterned the path, twined and twisted like Spaghetti Junction viewed from the space shuttle. Heather checked quickly that they hadn’t been feasting off her sorrel, then wondered what it was, this time, they had decimated. She fixed the sprinkler in place, glanced up at her mother’s window and noticed that the curtains were firmly hauled together, blocking out even the tiniest intrusion of light, then she took off her robe and slid quietly into the swimming pool. Silently, in the steam that wafted gently up from the water into the cool air, she breast-stroked up and down for twenty muscle-toning lengths, thinking about the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In her head was a nagging little refrain from the first days when she’d met Tom: ‘You don’t have to tell him everything about yourself, you know,’ her mother had hinted heavily.

  Heather, twenty-two and still childishly baitable, had risen angrily like a hooked trout. ‘If I ever do marry again, I don’t intend to have any secrets,’ she’d replied loftily. Her mother’s raised eyebrows and pursed mouth had signalled her favourite ‘Well we’ll see about that, won’t we’ expression. Of course Tom had known she’d been married before, Heather had told him quite early on. It wasn’t a problem, just something to report to the registrar’s clerk when arranging the wedding. It was true there hadn’t been any secrets, just maybe a slight omission of the complete facts, which, according to her mother, wasn’t the same thing at all.

  ‘Some things they’d rather not know,’ Delia had insisted, so Heather had decided she was being kind, not dwelling on what was past. If she tried, she could make it entirely his fault that she’d been hazy on the details – he should have shown more curiosity. Her marriage to Iain had been brushed aside as ‘just an early mistake, all over long ago’ and neither she nor Tom had ever mentioned it again. There had been no need. Heather turned over and swam lazily on her back, watching flakes of cloud trail across the blue above her. But why hadn’t he wanted to know more? Why had they never had one of those cosily drunken late-night, true-confessions conversations in which Tom admitted something shocking like catching clap on a school trip to Hamburg and she countered amusingly with a briefly-told little story about being a runaway teenage bride with her school photo in all the papers? Why had she never pointed to the best-seller racks at the airport bookstall and said, ‘Good grief can you imagine, I was actually married to the man who wrote that stuff’? Perhaps Tom had also had a mother who’d given him firm instructions Never To Tell All; there could be so much she didn’t know (perhaps wouldn’t want to know) about him, too.

  While Heather floated, the village seemed to be waking up more busily than usual. From the main road, though still some distance away, she became aware of a rumbling, rolling sound which turned into the steady, slow thrum of an approaching convoy. Probably, nothing more thrilling than an early bulk delivery to the local Waitrose, she thought. She climbed out of the pool and was on her way back into the house, warming herself in her bathrobe, when Kate, who probably hadn’t seen this time of the day since she’d been wakingfor four-hourly feeds, suddenly rushed out of the back door, brushing her hair.

  ‘Kate? Where on earth are you going?’ Heather asked, amazed at the sight of the girl, in full going-out make-up and a wispy metre or so of a silky floral dress. She must have been up at least an hour, Heather estimated – no hint of the puffy-eyed, baby-bird-look that Kate usually presented to the breakfast table. It suddenly occurred to Heather that she couldn’t be a hundred per cent sure that Kate had even been in that night and been to bed. Perhaps teenage girls really did need an armed guard in the corridor outside their rooms.

  ‘It’s today! They’re all arriving today! All the people for the film. I’ve got to get there. They might want extras, Simon said.’

  Heather could hear, no further away than the recreation ground, truck-brakes squealing and huffing, a settling and parking batch of sounds. ‘But they won’t want them yet, will they? These will be just catering and props and things like that, I expect,’ Heather said, not really having a clue whether she was right or not, but with a motherly instinct that Kate should at least have some breakfast before she went to find out.

  ‘Yes but at least if I’m there . . .’ Kate reasoned, backing towards the side of the house and the gate to freedom.

  ‘Go on then, but don’t come back all deflated because there’s no-one there but the equivalent of road crew, will you?’ Heather warned her.

  But Kate was gone, running down the road, chasing an exciting life.

  ‘Ooh you don’t want her getting involved in films, anything could happen.’ Delia, asking about Kate’s absence at breakfast, had expected to be told that she was still lazing in bed, at which she could have tutted contentedly and told Heather the girl was overindulged. This, though, was probably better. ‘Artistic people,’ Delia sniffed, ‘nothing regular in their lives.’

  ‘Surely that’s the whole point,’ Heather told her as she crammed thick wholemeal into the toaster. ‘What teenage girl with any spirit wants “regularity” in her life?’ Except with their periods, she added silently to herself. ‘I expect she’s looking for something more thrilling than walking a kennel-full of pampered dogs for Margot.’

  Delia scowled, expressing deep distrust of anything that might be judged to be ‘thrilling’. ‘Doesn’t she have any school work? Or what about a nice little holiday job in a shop?’

  Heather gave a spluttered laugh. ‘Oh Mother, really! Can you imagine Kate interested in a “nice little” anything? If she was, she’d have stayed at her “nice little” school, with all those “nice little” girls! Some grow up faster than others, some want nothing but a typing diploma and an engagement ring at her age, but most, those with imagination, hope there’s some magical, fantasy life-drama in which they can be the star. In Kate’s case, literally – you don’t think she just wants a spear-carrying part or whatever, do you?’ Delia looked mystified and Heather banged around the kitchen, crashing cups on to the table. ‘She’s probably imagining that the director will be helplessly overcome by her looks and her legs and all that golden fairy-princess hair, and offer her an immediate starring role. In her head she’s not even here any more, she’s probably in Hollywood at the Oscars, wearing a Vivienne Westwood and sitting next to Keanu Reeves.’ She paused for breath and caught sight of her shining eyes in the little star-mirror on the dresser. She’d been shouting, she realized; the kitchen seemed to be full of diminishing echoes. Coffee gurgled in the percolator, an apologetic, rather comic sort of noise, like a nun with indigestion.

  Delia was watching her, bird-like eyes bright and darting, her whole face keyed up to choose the right words. Here they come, thought Heather, reaching thankfully into the cool fridge for milk. ‘I never realized how much she took after you,’ Delia said quietly.

  Heather took a deep and calming breath and forced herself to smile, ‘Well we all take after someone don’t we?’ she said. ‘I wonder who my role model was?’

  She’d gone through a phase in her early teens when she’d wanted, needed, to know about her father. It was a mystery, and she’d hoped there was some glamour attached to this, anything to make her a source of envy to her friends.

  ‘He died. Complications,’ was all she’d been told. ‘Complications’ had sounded enough like a terrible disease in itself to be quite adequate an explanation for a very young child of limited voc
abulary. Heather at eight had been awed by the number of syllables – obviously that made it much worse than mumps or measles. It was as big as the mysterious scarlatina, which sounded as if it should be the name of a dazzling gypsy dancer in a frilled skirt. But by the time Heather had got to the second form at the grammar school, it was nowhere near enough for her to know.

  ‘Complications of what?’ she’d asked her mother over one of their comfortable winter-night casseroles.

  ‘Something he got during the war. He was never the same.’ Delia had looked lonely, suddenly, which alarmed Heather at the time – mothers were supposed to be strong and powerful. Hers was an admired survivor, battling alone with bureaucracy that still, in the 1960s, demanded a father’s, not just either parent’s, signature on a child’s passport application, and a detailed written explanation if that signature was unavailable. At the end of each summer term, when copying her own address on to the large brown envelope that would contain her end-of-year report, Heather had been the only one in her form who couldn’t address it to Mr and Mrs. She sat, now, in her maple and mint-green kitchen, listening to watery sounds overhead as Suzy splashed about in the bath. She’d never found out about those ‘complications’. She’d given up trying after several secret sessions, under the far table in the school library, with her highly inquisitive friend Barbara and a selection of unhelpful history books.

  ‘Trench foot? Mustard gas?’ Barbara had suggested eagerly, flicking through tatty pages illustrated with ancient Punch cartoons.

  ‘Wrong war, I think,’ Heather had told her dispiritedly.

  ‘A lot of them caught diseases of the . . . of Down There.’ Barbara had slithered up close to her and whispered with a sly, giggly grin. ‘Off the French girls. All that can-can.’

  ‘I expect it was shrapnel,’ Heather had replied curtly, reluctant to speculate on her father’s sex life, as well as being pretty sure that if he had been diseased Down There, she herself, who was made several years after the war ended, wouldn’t have been born at all.