Seven For a Secret

by Judy Astley

  Heather would yawn and stretch and languidly answer, ‘Oh we all just slept together, some on the floor, some on the beds. Just like an orgy, you know?’

  ‘Now don’t be silly,’ Delia would say, tutting. ‘Wendy’s not the type to allow that sort of thing.’ Wendy was the type, though. It was just that Delia wasn’t the type to believe it.

  And now here was Margot, sitting under Heather’s willow, admiring the feathery-fronded astilbes and niggling for a more credible answer. ‘No, really. How do you know him?’

  Heather frowned. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Margot was supposed to laugh and then politely give up. She got up and threw chunks of bread to a pair of cruising mallards trailing three half-grown ducklings, the remains of their fox-ravaged family. ‘Actually it’s true. I told you about it on the way to speech day. It was Iain that I married and I haven’t seen him since the day he put me on the train in Edinburgh and sent me back to my mother. Must have been, ooh, all of three months later. And before you ask, I haven’t wanted to see him, either.’

  Margot became unusually pensive. ‘What does Tom think of him suddenly turning up here?’ she asked.

  Heather fidgeted with her glass and picked out a piece of ice to melt over her hot fingers. ‘Tom doesn’t actually know,’ she confessed. ‘I sort of didn’t quite manage to tell him last night, and today was a bit of a rush and now he’s gone off to work.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him? Your mother must have seen him at the party, what did she think?’

  Heather felt very shifty confessing to Margot, ‘Well she doesn’t actually know either. I’d rather she didn’t. All that stuff was over years ago. Years and years ago. It was just a few months out of a lifetime, that’s all.’

  It didn’t feel like ‘that’s all’ the next morning, when Heather was getting ready for the lunch with Iain. It annoyed her enormously that she seemed to be caring quite a lot about what she wore. Neither dowdy nor dressy, but something effortlessly stylish in between was the impression she was aiming for, as she stared blankly into her wardrobe and pulled out a few possibles. He’s already taking up too much of my thoughts, she complained to herself as she tried on a sandy linen shirt over a cream body and a long, side-buttoned toffee-coloured skirt. After putting on make-up and then crossly scrubbing most of it off again to ensure that she looked a lot less than eager, she escaped quickly into her car. On the way out she promised Delia, who had a left-out face on, that she wasn’t missing a treat, just a boring business lunch at which the relative properties of cow manure versus horse were likely to be the most fascinating topics of conversation. It’s not far from the truth, she thought, as she drove through the village, Iain will probably talk a lot of crap.

  Kate, on her reluctant way to the kennels, had to wait on the pavement while the scarlet Mercedes glided out through Margot and Russell’s massive iron gates. Iain’s hand came up and waved a regal greeting to her, but Kate couldn’t fool herself that his eyes were on anything but the road. His absence was a disappointment – it left nothing to lighten the tedium of walking two moody basset hounds and a Pekingese with a bladder problem. ‘With all that fur, it’s hard to tell when he’s actually lifting his leg, so be patient with him,’ Margot warned her as she searched through the shaggy pelt to find somewhere to fix the lead. Kate hung around on the edge of the orchard long enough for the three dogs to become thoroughly tangled while she watched some of the film crew attaching cables as fat as fire hoses to something in a lorry. Brian, his jeans drooping to expose road-digger’s bum-cleavage, was shouting something about a ‘jenny’.

  ‘A generator, to you and me,’ Margot explained, proud to show off the new knowledge she was acquiring. ‘Nothing’s happening yet, nothing worth watching. No actors or anything,’ she told her as she patiently helped Kate to sort out the leads.

  Kate wandered across the recreation ground towards the woods, hoping she wouldn’t come across Simon. She hadn’t seen him since the party. Hadn’t seen him, she reminded herself, since he’d sneaked into the garden and wandered around in the dark like a lovesick swain. Gutless idiot, she said to herself, tugging at the lumbering basset hounds, didn’t even have the nerve to throw stones at her window. The worst he could have got was a sleepy ‘Fuck off’ from her; surely he should have had the nerve to risk that. Darren wouldn’t have been so pathetic. If he’d gone into the garden in the middle of the night, she was sure he wouldn’t have expected to go home without what he and his mates called ‘a result’.

  The car park at the restaurant by the river was almost full, for which Heather was thoroughly grateful. She would have hated to find that she and Iain were a lone couple, with too many waiters being over-solicitous, and stilted efforts at conversation echoing coldly in an empty room. The Mercedes was already there, having travelled the same route as her own Renault, probably only minutes before. The fact that they had travelled separately from the same place gave the meeting an unwelcome atmosphere of the clandestine.

  Heather parked nervously between a Volvo and a Mini, too close to the next car to open her door properly, so she had to struggle out from between the two cars feeling hot and crumpled and undignified. Linen was a bad choice unless you were prepared to stay immobile and upright, she thought, as she so frequently did. The fabric always reminded her of lamb’s tongue lettuce – neither could be bettered for their capacity to become unappetisingly limp, almost as you watched, as if the effort of staying uncrumpled was frankly too demanding, and they gave up the ghost quite gratefully after just a few triumphantly crisp moments. As she locked her car door and slid herself sideways between the front wings of the Renault and the Mini, she realized that her hands and legs were trembling and that a few minutes in the Ladies would be useful for deep-breathing her way back into some sort of reasonable composure before facing Iain.

  But inside the restaurant, just as her eyes were adjusting from sunlight to gloom so that she could see which was the right door, both her hands were grabbed and Iain kissed her on each cheek with a loud ‘Heather, darling you look marvellous!’ I don’t, she thought glumly, tension and her inept parking making her feel clammy all over, so that’s lie number one. She resolved to count them during lunch.

  ‘What would you like to drink?’ he went on, leading her by the hand through to the bar, as if he was still taking charge of a teenager.

  ‘Just mineral water please,’ she told him primly, fighting a childlike urge to wriggle her hand out of his, as if he were an embarrassing aunt leading her across a road. ‘And I’ll be back in a minute.’ At least now he had to let go.

  In the cool sanctuary of the Ladies, Heather seethed with a small bout of anger. She wrestled with the poppers of her body inside the cubicle and wondered why such a trivial thing as a pair of social kisses should make her so cross. It was his air of assuming, she decided, as if the fact that she’d agreed to meet him for lunch meant that she was pleased to meet him for lunch, completely thrilled, and delighted, as if she’d been waiting twenty-five years for nothing else. As the noise from the flushing loo died down, Heather could hear a pair of women outside the cubicle discussing their respective lunch dates.

  ‘Well, if I have the lobster he’ll think that’s a come-on, and it’ll be an afternoon of the hot stuff. Too hot in this weather,’ one of the two was saying with a giggle. There was a small silence, for the application of lipstick, Heather saw, as she emerged from the cubicle and took her place alongside them to wash her hands. They reminded her of Margot, blowsy and round-bodied, luxuriating in the large amount of space occupied by their presence, with even their hair teased out and up into extra fullness. One of them, a blonde with long shiny pink talons for nails, was wearing a dress printed with brazen scarlet roses, as if to draw attention to her own plump, seasonal ripeness.

  ‘What about steak then, Maureen?’ the other woman said.

  ‘It’s not really a steak sort of day is it? And anyway I like it rare and you know what they’re like when they see blood,’ was M
aureen’s considered reply. The two women gazed at their reflections thoughtfully, Maureen pursing up her lips into kiss-shape and rubbing delicately at a plummy smudge of colour.

  Heather checked in the mirror that her nervous ham-fistedness hadn’t resulted in her skirt being tucked into her knickers and opened the door, looking back at the two women.

  ‘Why don’t you have Dover sole?’ she suggested with a grin as she left them to return reluctantly to Iain. ‘No-one could possibly get excited about that.’ She would much rather stay in the loo with these two, discussing the sexually arousing, or otherwise, characteristics of food.

  ‘I’ve organized a table for us by the window overlooking the river,’ he told her as he handed her a glass misty with ice-chill.

  He looked terrifically pleased with himself, Heather thought, as if he’d just fixed an upgrade from tripper-class to Concorde. She wished she hadn’t been so cautious, that her glass contained something less feeble than fizzy water – it looked as if it promised so much, all those excited bubbles, the hunks of ice, bright as diamonds, and the pretty lemon, as if the drink positively deserved decoration. She took a sip as she followed Iain to their table and felt the cool, relieving trickle making its way to her stomach. She sat down and looked out over the towpath at the squawking ducks, wishing she could think of something to say, something pithy, witty, something that would sum up once and for all why she felt twenty-five years worth of anger bubbling gently inside her alongside the fizzy water. True, the anger had simmered till the taste was so very nearly gone, but Iain’s return seemed to have respiced it.

  ‘Sorry,’ Iain said suddenly, watching her staring blankly at the view, ‘I should have realized that overlooking the Thames is hardly a novelty to you. We should have run off to London, parking at separate stations of course, and had a secret rendezvous at the Caprice or the Ritz.’ He was grinning at her like a thrilled child.

  ‘It’s all just a bit of fun to you isn’t it?’ Heather said, accusingly, her glass slamming down on the table harder than she expected and splashing beaded water all over her hand. The women who had been in the Ladies were at the next table with their respective partners, looking across at her with frank and friendly curiosity.

  lain raised his hands defensively. ‘Hey, well it is fun, isn’t it? You must admit it’s one hell of a coincidence, me turning up here and finding you.’ His expression changed to puppy-like pleading. ‘I mean, it was such a long time ago, we’re all grown-up now, aren’t we?’

  ‘One of us was grown up then,’ she retorted. ‘Or was supposed to be.’

  ‘Yes, well, mea culpa,’ he conceded. ‘I was a disgraceful cad and I apologize,’ he said with mock humility.

  How can a man the far side of middle age manage to look so boyishly contrite? Heather wondered. For the first time she looked at him properly, and studied his face. It was deeply lined and harshly textured from wind and weather, but the fine bone structure hadn’t been quilted by ageing fat. His eyes were still richly blue and unclouded. Well, mid-fifties isn’t so old, she thought, not these days. There were men of lain’s age collecting their children at the village infants’ school gate. It used to be the age of your grandparents, of people with sticks and briar pipes and strange-shaped brushes for cleaning false teeth with powder. She smelled, suddenly, the gritty, Germolene-pink paste that Uncle Harold had mixed in the bathroom when she was a child.

  lain was smiling at her, watching her watching him, his own teeth as even and clean as a crocodile’s. The sort of man who carries Clorets in his pocket, next to the condoms, just in case it turns out to be a lucky day, she thought suddenly. He picked up the menu. ‘What shall we eat? Tell me what is the most delicious here.’

  ‘Everything here is delicious.’ She smiled across at Maureen and her friend who were still eavesdropping from the next table, and winked at them. ‘I think I’ll have Dover sole,’ she said, raising her voice slightly.

  The two women, to the confusion of their portly companions, giggled. ‘Wicked waste,’ the thinner one hissed from behind her hand across to Heather, glancing with wanton appreciation at Iain. While Iain concentrated on the menu, Heather took another look at him. He was still attractive, she conceded reluctantly, and then hastily amended her thoughts – attractive if you were looking for a rakish old bastard who wouldn’t have been out of place as an eighteenth century no-good bounder. Ruthless seducer of young virgins and housemaids, that would have been Iain’s forte. She could just see him in velvet and brocade making free with the kind of girl who blushed and shrieked ‘Oh la Sir!’ as he rummaged under her petticoats and changed her protests to squeals of delight. As she mused quietly to herself, the waiter suddenly appeared, bearing an extra-large ice bucket, carrying it flamboyantly over the heads of other diners like a joyous footballer with the FA cup. And no wonder, Heather thought, as he settled it into a stand next to their table and she watched him cheerfully struggling with the cork on a bottle of vintage Bollinger.

  ‘I know you only wanted water, but I thought, as this feels so much of a special occasion, I could perhaps tempt you with this,’ Iain said to her. ‘You haven’t actually gone teetotal, have you?’ he then asked anxiously, as the waiter eased the cork out with a delicate and expensive pop.

  ‘No I haven’t,’ she said, ‘and actually I’d love some. But not too much of it.’ He’d been good at champagne, she recalled, as she savoured the dangerously seductive bubbles. He’d had a knack of producing a bottle just at the right moment. The first time she’d gone to bed with him, there’d been a bottle first to quench her final doubts and hesitations as he gently freed her from her school uniform.

  Here in the restaurant, while she dreamily sipped at her drink, she could quite clearly hear her friend Barbara’s voice in the dank school changing room after games. ‘Why are you having a shower? We never have showers, Leach the Les might come and get you!’ It was true, nobody liked using the showers, with their inadequate curtains, lingering smell of hockey-sweat and the ever-lurking danger of the roving-eyed games mistress. The water had run rusty brown at first, she could remember vividly, the pipes flaking away inside from lack of use. ‘You’re going somewhere after school,’ Barbara had accused, her loud voice attracting a curious group of onlookers as Heather, with guilty embarrassment, dried herself and put on a pair of brand new non-regulation shiny nylon frilled knickers specially for Iain to discover later beneath her uniform pleated skirt. ‘Tomorrow you’ve got to tell. Don’t forget,’ Barbara had ordered as she’d rushed off to catch the train to Fulham. Telling was compulsory. As they’d lost their virginity, each girl had reported the deed to the others, fulfilling a solemn playground promise made back in the second year, when such an event had still been something to dread in the far-away future, something that each of them had assumed would probably take place on a terrifying marriage bed with a man who had just promised them all his worldly goods. How different reality had been: Barbara, on her sixteenth birthday, had eagerly donated her virginity to a spotty bass guitarist who could hardly believe his luck in the back of a Ford Transit van parked by the Thames near Eel Pie Island.

  ‘One Dover sole.’ Heather was jolted back to the present by the waiter.

  Iain was watching her with amusement from across his salmon. ‘You were miles away,’ he commented. ‘I hardly dared interrupt your thoughts.’

  Heather smiled, ‘I was years away, actually,’ she admitted.

  ‘Was I there?’ he asked putting on an expression of mock trepidation.

  She laughed. ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Iain leaned closer, half whispering, and brushed his hand against hers as she picked up her glass again. ‘Do you remember that first time, with the champagne . . .’

  Heather blushed and put the glass down quickly as if she’d just recalled an old and lingering allergy. She looked down at her food, quickly assembling vegetables on to her plate to avoid Iain watching her remember how he’d trickled the bubbles down between her breasts as she’d
trembled with delicious anticipation on his bed. He’d licked slowly at the wine, down across her tight flat stomach, further on down to places she’d wondered if people maybe weren’t legally even allowed to lick. Barbara hadn’t reported anything like this, she’d thought at the time, none of the others had. She hadn’t been able to use any of the words they’d included: ‘Hurt quite a lot’ ‘All over a bit quickly’ ‘Probably better with more practice’. The six friends who’d so far admitted going all the way had left her with a blurred impression of a fast, fumbled, uncomfortable near-rape with an embarrassing midway interlude for the difficult (possibly even abandoned) application of a condom. She’d been very lucky, she realized. Perhaps she’d thought she’d never be that lucky again.

  ‘So what have you been doing since – well since?’ Iain asked.

  ‘Marrying, gardening and children,’ Heather told him. ‘What about you?’

  He looked slightly surprised, as if she should know, as if he thought she’d have followed his illustrious career with interest and maybe an occasional tweak of wistful regret. ‘Writing, still, obviously,’ he replied. ‘This and that. Film scripts and so on.’ Heather was enjoying the sole and didn’t comment. ‘Seen any of them?’ he prompted.

  ‘Any what? Films of yours? No, well I wouldn’t know, I might have. Name some.’

  ‘Beyond Treason, Dead Lucky, that kind of thing?’

  Heather smiled at him vaguely. She’d seen the books, of course, his kind of sales figures merited prominent shop displays on every release. ‘No, sorry Iain, not my kind of movie. I like mine more subtle. I’m more a Merchant Ivory type.’

  ‘Obviously we’re not compatible then.’

  ‘Were we ever? The whole thing was always ridiculous, doomed to failure,’ she told him, helping herself to more champagne.

  The waiter was clearing plates. Maureen on the next table was ordering a crème brûlée and Heather wondered on her behalf what sweet and sticky intimacies that would or would not lead to later in the afternoon.