Seven For a Secret

by Judy Astley

  ‘Oh he had some more drinks and I asked him if he fancied a midnight swim, but he said he couldn’t, he hadn’t brought his stuff, so I said he could borrow Simon’s, but really I thought we could just skinny-dip – Mum and Dad had gone indoors to start on the gin, and then he said no thanks again and went home. I think he took a couple of bottles of champagne with him, but don’t tell Dad.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Suzy put the brush away in her grooming kit and wiped her hands down her T-shirt. ‘Nothing else? No snogging in your changing hut?’

  Tamsin looked a bit disconsolate. ‘Well no, not yet.’ She grinned, recovering. ‘That’ll be next time. When we go camping on the island.’

  ‘They don’t like other dogs,’ Julia greeted Heather before she’d even stepped out of the Renault. The two black labradors bounded around the car, sizing up Delia’s shaggy terrier like a pair of swaggering teenage boys spoiling for a fight.

  ‘I’ll put him on a lead and tie him to your fence under the tree then,’ Heather said, fearful for her car seats as much as for the dog suffocating in the heat. She climbed out and hauled the nervous Jasper after her. It was clear that because she was actually paying for Heather’s presence that day, Julia was going to be slow to treat her to the usual courtesies of friendship. It was the price of getting your hands dirty, Heather thought, knowing that if she was being employed to choose wallpaper (though not to hang it) or to advise on a revamped wardrobe (though not to sew up a hem) both she and Jasper would be immediately offered a cooling drink.

  Julia was carrying a trug and was dressed for the kind of ladylike gardening that she preferred: deadheading the marguerites, collecting sprigs of mint for sauce, in a faded print frock which Heather knew Kate would kill for if she’d spotted it at the Scouts’ jumble sale. ‘They won’t need much attention will they?’ Julia asked anxiously, as Heather lugged the plants out of the back of the car.

  ‘Practically none at all,’ Heather reassured her. ‘Like anything in a pot, water and feeding are obviously important, but other than that,’ and she paused, eyeing the trug full of dead petals and feeling irony creeping on, ‘these won’t even need dead-heading. Now where are the pots and the compost?’

  ‘I had the garden centre boy take them straight through to the courtyard,’ Julia said, leading Heather through her kitchen to a pair of French doors at the side of the house. Beyond was a small sheltered terrace, walled-in and cool, and furnished with five large terracotta pots and several plastic sacks of ericaceous compost.

  ‘Oh good, they sent the right stuff,’ Heather said. ‘Nigel did explain they wouldn’t grow in the chalky earth?’

  ‘Oh yes. But I wanted them here by the kitchen,’ Julia said rather dreamily, ‘where I can see them and think of Italy.’

  ‘Italy?’ Heather started splitting open the first bag of compost, unavoidably picturing Julia engaged in sex that was too debauched simply to require thinking of England.

  ‘Lake Maggiore. Charles and I used to go in the spring to see the camellias on Isola Bella. It’s amazing how much you miss them.’

  ‘Camellias?’

  ‘No, husbands. Cup of tea?’ Julia, at last remembering her manners, dashed around the kitchen filling the kettle and assembling crockery. ‘He’s been dead four years now and there are still little things I can’t quite do, like give his old spectacles to the Oxfam shop. They’re always asking for them for short-sighted Africans. I keep them in a drawer by his side of the bed.’

  Heather managed, just, not to ask if she meant myopic Africans. ‘I imagine that must happen to everyone,’ she told her. ‘I’m sure there’d be loads of things of Tom’s that I couldn’t bear to get rid of if he suddenly died.’ Heather stopped pouring compost into the third pot and thought for a moment. What would she find impossible to part with? Most of Tom’s personal bits and pieces disappeared with him on such a regular basis that if the police came round and asked her to identify him from only his luggage (assuming some awful mishap where his body was distressingly unseeable) she’d probably be quite shamefully unsure of what was his. Even his watches changed frequently, as he picked up irresistible bargains in the world’s best duty-free markets.

  ‘You do too much tidying up after they’ve gone,’ Julia was saying, bringing tea out to Heather. ‘You arrange it so you can manage alone and then find you’ve overestimated what they actually did, because you know mostly when they get older they just sit about in a chair, trying to look important, with a large newspaper. When you’ve realized that then you have to find things to keep yourself busy.’

  ‘Like the Parish Council. You do a lot for that.’

  Julia smiled. ‘It was my way of getting back into being social. People are very kind at first, they invite you everywhere and after a while, when you can face it, you invite them back. But really you are much preferred if you are half a couple.’ She laughed. ‘The English are embarrassed about the solitary ones, in case they need something emotional that partners are supposed to give each other hidden away in privacy. Now I’m part of a committee instead of half of a pair, I’ve regained more or less a safe position.’

  Heather dug and planted and thought about how Julia tended to call for jumble or donations at drinks time. Loneliness, she should have realized. Another time she would try not to see her as a nuisance. ‘What about marrying again?’ she asked.

  ‘Impertinence!’ Julia said with a grin. ‘And how many men in their sixties or thereabouts do you imagine are left freely available for more than ten minutes in this county? Or any county come to that?’

  ‘There’s that writer staying with Margot,’ Heather suggested disingenuously, turning her reddening face down and concentrating on heeling in the third of the plants.

  ‘Oh him. I’ve heard about him. Doesn’t look at anything over twenty. That’s the trouble with men,’ Julia said in disgust, crashing her tea-cup into the sink. ‘One of the troubles, I should say. Now come out to the back and look at my garden.’

  Heather could see what Julia had meant earlier about leaving herself too little to do. Her garden was planted and planned strictly for minimal maintenance, with well-controlled shrubs and large clumps of old-fashioned, sweet-smelling roses that needed little pruning. Where earth showed, a mulch of pulverised bark smothered any possible weeds which saved both time and Julia’s ageing knees.

  ‘There’s not that much to do, you see. I used to have a boy for mowing, but then I bought one of those hover things so at least there’s that,’ Julia said with a slight sigh.

  ‘Vegetables?’ Heather suggested, looking at a rather sparse west-facing bed that cried out for bean poles and cabbages.

  ‘Dogs,’ Julia explained, glancing back to where the pair of labradors lolled on the terrace, ensuring Jasper didn’t dare make free with their territory.

  Heather tidied the little patio, tied pale green name tags to the plants, collected her tools and Jasper, and prepared to leave Julia to think of how to fill the rest of the day.

  ‘I chose those plants very carefully you know. Things that meant something,’ Julia told her as Heather loaded her car. ‘That one called “Charles Michael”, that was his name of course, so lucky to find a camellia called that. And “Coppelia”, we were very fond of the ballet.’

  ‘What about “Donation”?’ Heather asked as she closed the boot. ‘Was that because of doing charity work?’

  Julia chuckled. ‘Only in a manner of speaking. It was my little joke, Charles would have appreciated it. When he died it was very sudden, lots of bits of him were still in working order, so rather than waste them, someone out there has got a kidney, and the corneas went too. Donation, you see.’

  As Tom loaded his bag into the car boot, hung his jacket from the rail over the back seat and settled himself in the car, he felt home life slipping away and work life taking over. The outside shell of home-Tom, the man who lolled about drinking beer in the afternoons, made comfortable love to a warm woman and generally pottered about in an unthinking way,
taking for granted an easy family life, was being sloughed off like a snakeskin as he started the car’s engine. Work-Tom took over. His clean pink hands on the steering wheel looked as antiseptic as those of a scrubbed-up surgeon just about to perform an appendectomy. He was already thinking ahead to the other life, weeks of conditioned air instead of fresh summer garden smells, dull flavourless mineral water instead of fragrant heady wine, but there could also be the rough sexual thrill of a wiry man’s body to compensate for the lack of Heather. Hughie might or might not be on the crew this time. Half of him hoped he wouldn’t be, but only the half that was frightened of aircraft and still wishing he didn’t have to leave Oxfordshire. The other half of him, the bit that thought kerosene on the wind was a better perfume than Chanel No 5, was already mentally in a Singapore Sheraton pretending that he was engaged in nothing more devious than a spot of assisted wanking.

  Heather rushed home, superstitiously eager not to let Tom leave home for work without saying goodbye to her. It was all that talking with Julia about dead husbands. The automatic gates were opening just as she arrived, and Tom was about to pull out into the road. ‘Wait, don’t go yet!’ she called out of the window to him as he waved casually, showing no signs of stopping. Heather gave the horn an urgent blast and she pulled up on the grass verge by the gate, blocking Tom’s exit. As he got out of the car Heather noticed that he didn’t appear too thrilled to be stopped. He looked grouchy and defensive, as if he expected her to be about to ask if he’d remembered something mundane, such as had he put the dustbins out or paid the electricity bill.

  ‘I just wanted to say goodbye properly,’ she told him as she wrapped her arms round his surprised body, and wondered if it was the fact that she smelled of warm compost and sweat that made him seem reluctant to touch her. He was so clean and crisp, as if both he and his uniform shirt had been triple starched together. ‘You will be careful up there in the sky won’t you?’ she said by way of a bon voyage blessing.

  ‘Course I will. Always am, not that much can go wrong.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ Heather laughed and held up her crossed fingers. Over his shoulder she could see a large car slowing as it came out of the centre of the village towards the riverside houses. It was the cherry red Mercedes. She clutched Tom tighter to her and felt him positively twitch with surprise.

  He put an awkward arm round her carefully as if afraid of causing creases. ‘Hey, it’s OK, I’ll miss you too,’ he was muttering into Heather’s hair as Iain, with a passenger, drew level, slowed almost to a halt and grinned mischievously at her. She uncrossed her fingers behind Tom’s back and rearranged them into a rude V-sign. Leery bastard, she thought as he swished past as slowly as a kerb crawler before turning the huge car into Margot’s gateway.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘You know a secret that I don’t know,’ Margot’s voice sang accusingly down the phone to Heather like a child taunting in a playground.

  ‘What kind of secret?’ Heather inquired carefully. It could be anything; it could be that Margot suddenly wanted to be told how to grow tomatoes that didn’t split their skins while they were still green, or to tell her about a diet guaranteed to lose ten pounds in a week without giving up gin.

  ‘I’ll come round and we’ll talk about it. Down by the river with a drink where no-one can hear us.’ Margot’s exaggerated whisper sounded gleeful, and Heather’s spirits dropped. Margot was capable of great excitement about both diets and plants, but not to any extent that required tiptoeing to the river’s edge to discuss them privately.

  From her chair on the terrace, Delia could see Suzy and Tamsin swimming like lithe porpoises in the pool. When she was young, swimmers had breast-stroked steadily up and down and up and down a pool, purely for the exercise, or had rushed in and out of the sea at Eastbourne, gasping at the chill before bravely plunging into the waves for a bracing good-for-you swim. Water had been too cold for playing in then. The two girls lazed, and wallowed in the warm water, luxuriating, twisting, floating and diving like seals under and about wherever they fancied. Delia regretted suddenly that she had never opted to be one of those busy, determinedly athletic old people, the ones she saw from her flat going out after the bus-pass hour in pastel tracksuits and unsuitable tennis shoes that bounced like whitewall tyres, to take part in OAP step’n’stretch classes. She’d always thought they looked so ridiculously, well, American, was the only word that came instantly to mind. They reminded her of Florida, of the old people who banded together to enjoy their Golden Years in hearty packs. What, she thought as she watched the two girls effortlessly flexing their endless strength, was so golden about crinkled skin, muscles that took till lunchtime to regain a full range of movement after a night’s sleep, and an ever-growing list of pleasurahle things that one was sure wouldn’t be done again this side of the next life? I’ll buy a swimsuit, she resolved, and cross one thing off that list.

  Margot wasted no time, Heather thought, as she watched her stride up the drive. For a bulky woman she could certainly get around fast when she chose, and she reminded Heather of a floral carnival float breaking the speed limit on its way to the parade. Her mass of strawy hair was flying around as she walked, and her scarlet silk skirt splashed with yellow and white daisies streamed out behind her, filled with air like a racing yacht’s spinnaker as she bustled across the gravel path.

  ‘Glad I caught you,’ Margot said breathlessly as sheer enthusiastic momentum carried her past Heather and on into the kitchen.

  Heather thought these words were ominous. At what had she caught her? She feigned bewilderment and busied herself with the intricate preparation of a couple of strong spritzers. ‘What’s the great mystery, Margot?’ Then flinging down the lemon she had been slicing, she gasped dramatically, hand to throat, and teased ‘Oh no, you haven’t found out about me and Russell and the trip to Rome have you?’

  ‘What? Oh don’t be silly,’ Margot scolded, not even pausing for a second to allow for doubt. ‘Whoever in their right mind would want to go to Rome with my husband? He’d spend all his time pricing up Ferraris. No, no. What I want to know is what it is you’ve not been telling me and, please, don’t pretend there’s nothing going on,’ she ordered, wagging her gold-painted fingernail at Heather. ‘I know there’s some big mystery, and I can’t wait to hear it.’

  ‘Let’s go down to the river. We’ll feed the ducks,’ Heather murmured as she gained time by rifling through the bread bin.

  The two women strolled down the garden, Margot giving an excited little skip every now and then and grinning in a keyed-up fashion that Heather thought almost charmingly childlike. It gave her a few moments to think about what to tell her, but that, of course, depended on what Margot already knew. She must know something, after all. She was positively keyed up with the burden of guessed-at gossip.

  ‘So what’s got you all inquisitive then? What am I supposed to have done?’ she asked as they settled themselves on the bench looking out over to farmland across the water.

  ‘You’re very naughty, you know that?’ Margot said. ‘You knew him all along, didn’t you, and you let me rattle on about Iain MacRae and him being a Sir and all that, and you knew him all the time.’

  ‘Not all the time. Not for a very long time, actually,’ Heather corrected her, and took a long sip of the cool drink. ‘But why do you think so anyway? Has he said something?’ It occurred to her she should have known better than to trust him.

  ‘I was in his car. I saw you give him quite a nasty deliberate v-sign, pretty spiteful for you, you’re not usually like that. And I know it couldn’t have been meant for me because we haven’t had words. Not yet anyway. We will if you don’t tell me anything,’ she giggled. ‘So I reckoned, and with a sod of a husband like Russell you get to be quite a detective, I reckoned that meant you knew Iain well enough to dislike him. But of course when I asked him, he did that awful thing of just tapping his nose and saying “Aha, wouldn’t you like to know.” I hate it when people do that, don’t
you?’

  ‘Yes I do,’ Heather agreed. ‘They always look so pleased with themselves. I can just imagine Iain.’

  ‘Ah, so I was right, you do know him,’ Margot leapt in quickly. ‘How well and where from?’

  ‘He didn’t tell you then?’

  ‘He said I should ask you. He said it was no secret as far as he was concerned and that it was entirely up to you.’ Margot had calmed down now and was placidly lighting a cigarette, confident that she could settle back and wait for a truthful reply. ‘It was a terrible thing to say, you know, guaranteed to make me far more curious than if he’d told some suitable lie. So you can blame him.’

  ‘Oh I will, I will.’ Heather herself was thinking about a suitable lie. He could hardly be an old childhood friend, Iain was so obviously a perfectly sanded-down, smooth-cornered ex-public school type. If it wasn’t that lust was more or less classless, their paths would hardly have crossed out in suburban Staines. Someone she’d met on a holiday? That wouldn’t merit a lasting up-yours loathing. ‘He’s my ex-husband,’ she said simply, smiling her honesty directly into Margot’s astonished eyes.

  ‘He isn’t!’ Margot exclaimed. ‘I don’t believe you!’

  ‘OK, that’s fine. You asked, I told you.’ Perhaps she should have said that to Tom when he’d asked, and if he’d reacted in the same way then at least he couldn’t complain later that she’d been lying. She’d found it a useful trick, when young and still living at home and trekking daily to the college, simply to tell her mother the dreadful truth about what she was up to. It saved having to remember what lies she’d told to cover her tracks and which might need to be recalled on the inevitable cross-examination. When Heather arrived home sleepily on a Sunday morning from a party the night before, her mother would concentrate her inquisitive gaze on the washing up or something interesting in the fridge and ask things like, ‘And did all the boys stay the night too? I’m sure Wendy’s house only has three bedrooms.’