Seven For a Secret

by Judy Astley

  ‘Funny?’ He looked at her with a mock-hurt expression. ‘Funny? That was my very soul speaking, child. Hey look, here’s the waitress with your nursery tea.’

  Kate watched as the waitress, a plump and pink young girl who was, she guessed, helping out her mother in the holidays, stepped carefully across the grass towards them, carrying a huge and obviously heavy tray. Kate, shocking herself, cast a quick spell of pure nastiness, willing her to trip on a grassy hummock and drop the lot, just to see how far tea for two plus scones, jam and cream could spread. She imagined it like an infant’s painting, great sickly splodges of strawberry, streaks of thick gooey cream, sharp-edged chunks of floral crockery, like a nursery-school collage. She said nothing to Iain about this secret vision as the girl laboriously shifted the contents of the tray on to their table.

  ‘Lucky she didn’t drop these,’ Kate murmured through a blissful mouthful of scone, thickly heaped with clotted cream and jam.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it,’ Iain agreed, in a tone of sly irony that told her he’d clearly read her wicked thoughts.

  Later, in the car, as they sped back to Friarsford, Kate wondered if she had been missed at home. She imagined her mother was probably doing something mysterious in the greenhouse, or sitting in her little shed-office working out how much she could charge someone for telling them where their lupins would look best. (Or more likely, she thought, advising them if it was currently OK to have lupins.) As they cruised along the village High Street, she could see Darren Gibson leaning against the window of the hi-fi shop, trying to look cool. But does he? she wondered suddenly. She had never questioned it before. The fact that he was the coolest boy in the village had automatically meant that he was something special – now it occurred to her that perhaps it meant he was merely the sub-standard best of a thoroughly sad bunch. She certainly couldn’t imagine having tea in an orchard and giggling about sex with him.

  The last time Delia had bought a swimsuit, Lycra hadn’t yet been invented. The blue-and-white striped fabric seemed extraordinarily lightweight, too insubstantial to be holding in her baggy stomach as pleasingly as it did. Her last swimsuit (‘costume’ they called them then) had held her in place by some kind of boned rubbery scaffolding, which smelled of old mushrooms if allowed to stay wet for too long. She stood uncertainly by the edge of the pool, wishing Heather would go and play with plants in her greenhouse, and clutched her pink cotton dressing-gown round her body. ‘Haven’t you got to do something with the basil?’ she asked her, as Heather settled herself comfortably into a padded chair with a mug of tea.

  ‘Did it before we went shopping, don’t you remember? And besides, I ought to be here while you swim, just in case.’

  ‘I don’t see why, I’m not a child.’ Delia pouted at her. She dipped a tentative toe in the water from the top step, very carefully, so as not to overbalance.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with being a child. I don’t really like anyone to swim alone. Even Olympic breast-stroke champions can bang their head on the diving board and knock themselves out,’ Heather pointed out reasonably.

  ‘I don’t think the diving board is likely to be involved,’ Delia muttered. The water really was warm. She’d been worried that, in her new enthusiasm, she had overlooked the possibility that when Suzy and Tamsin dived in and came up grinning, using words like ‘bliss’ and ‘boiling’, they might simply be grateful that there was no ice on the surface to plunge through. They had young, warm bones. She slipped the dressing-gown off her shoulders and walked slowly but determinedly down the steps.

  Heather couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen so much of her mother’s body. She knew Delia would prefer her not to be seeing it at all. Even as a small child, she could remember her mother always locking the bathroom door, and ordering her firmly to ‘wait there’ on the far side of shop changing room curtains, which were never quite wide enough. Heather vividly remembered the fussy twitching of the curtains to exclude gaps, and the exasperated tutting as a tug one way left a spying eye-width of a chink on the other. In the chic little High Street boutique where they’d bought the swimsuit that afternoon, Delia had declined to try it on, saying firmly that it looked all right, if it was a size 14 it would be sure to fit, with a small warning glare implying that if it didn’t, it was through no fault of her own body.

  Delia was making progress down the steps, splashing water over her arms to get herself used to the temperature. ‘You could boil an egg in here,’ she commented to Heather. ‘It must cost a fortune to heat this.’

  ‘The solar’s been working overtime. I think the thermostat’s a bit wonky,’ Heather said. ‘Usually it’s about 78 degrees, and actually I don’t think it’s much more than 82 or so.’ She watched as Delia’s age-crinkled legs disappeared into the pool. She was touched to see that the front of her calves had a faded honey-combed pattern, mottled from sitting too near the gas fire in her flat during winter. She remembered how her legs had been almost burned scarlet each winter, when money had been too much in short supply to heat more than one room, in their boxy thin-walled house. Small deprivations at the time had been scoffed at, as if a preference for comfort was a sign of moral deficiency. Heather’s friend Barbara had possessed an electric blanket on her bed, which Heather had greatly envied. ‘They’re dangerous things. And they’re not at all good for you,’ Delia had sniffed, showing she had more in common with Iain and his family than she would ever have guessed.

  Delia was now cautiously making her stately way across the pool, a gentle breast-stroke with her head held carefully clear of the water, well within her depth.

  ‘Goodness, Grandma’s swimming!’ Kate flopped down in the chair next to Heather.

  ‘We are allowed to, you know!’ Delia called out to her from the water. ‘Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever learned.’

  ‘Sorry! Didn’t mean to be rude, just that I’ve never seen you do it before. You’re pretty good at it!’ Kate called back, grinning at her. She looked at Heather and smiled. ‘Second time today I’ve been told off for being ageist,’ she confessed, biting her lip and feigning humility.

  ‘Oh?’ Heather said with interest, ‘And who was the other one?’

  Kate was gazing into the far distance by now, looking as if she was being easily distracted by the ducks. ‘What? Oh, no-one particular, just this bloke I got talking to.’

  ‘When you were out with the dogs?’

  Kate got up and wandered along the side of the pool, filleting a geranium leaf as she walked. ‘Yeah, sort of. Don’t worry, I don’t talk to the dangerous sorts of strange men, Mum.’

  With parental hyper-instinct, Heather felt she was not getting the whole truth, but put it down to Iain-induced paranoia. Why on earth should Kate report every conversation she ever had? And, contrary to sound mother-advice, if you never talked to strangers, you never met anyone interesting.

  ‘Your car’s back, by the way,’ Kate called from her perch on the end of the diving board.

  Delia, who was now bravely tackling a full length of the pool, grabbed the end of the board. ‘Who brought it?’ she asked Kate, as if she knew (also instinctively) that there was some mystery here that was not going to be satisfactorily unravelled by her daughter.

  Kate spoke loudly enough to include Heather. ‘Brian, the one from Margot’s who does electrical stuff. Don’t ask me how he got here in it though, I couldn’t tell you,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders in a don’t-care, not-interested teenage sort of way.

  Heather was not deceived. OK I won’t ask you, she thought, not this time.

  Hughie’s approach to flying was like that of an overgrown plane-spotter, Tom thought. He found every aspect of the plane fascinating. While passengers dozed or doodled, or stared unseeingly at the film, he hung around in the cockpit asking about this dial and that lever till Tom’s co-pilot started making despairing faces at him. ‘I’ll bring some tea,’ Hughie offered. Tom was happy with that. If Hughie was doing the
serving, he knew he wouldn’t be on the wrong end of the First Class purser’s grudges. He knew what happened to passengers and crew who crossed her, and others. He’d heard them all giggling over drinks in the Singapore hotel about passengers who had dared to click their fingers demanding service. ‘Only wiped the tea bags round the toilet bowl first, didn’t I?’ one of them had been saying. They’d all shrieked with vengeful laughter, like a coven of witches disguised behind the make-up, sunbed tan and nail polish. Faced with a collection of the women in a hotel bar, assembling ready for a nightclub sortie, he’d find himself sidling nervously past, as if terrified of being grabbed and debagged. No wonder he preferred the company of the boys, he reasoned to himself.

  ‘One sugar?’ Hughie asked softly.

  ‘Please,’ Tom replied. Hughie busied himself with the tray and the tea, looking cosily and contentedly domestic. Tom sighed. He had never expected that he would be in this awkward position. He’d always assumed it was only men who had affairs with their secretaries who had to do the dreadful scene where they gently explained that it was only a bit of mutual fun, surely they couldn’t really have been expected to leave their wives. There was something far too adolescent and girly about all this painful drama – only one step away from eyeing up diamond-and-sapphire clusters in Singapore’s duty-free. However could he have foreseen that Hughie was going to be the type who read the Habitat catalogue in bed, biro in hand, drawing circles round the code numbers of his favourite sofas?

  Chapter Eleven

  The weather changed over the next few days, for which Suzy sent grateful thanks to God. It was colder, cloudy and with rain skittering down in ten-minute bursts. Tamsin’s plans for camping on the island had become very complicated, and Suzy was beginning to panic at the scale of the adventure. All she had wanted was to play Swallows and Amazons but without the sails – rowing about in her little boat between the island and the railway bridge, having picnics and laughing at the boozy holiday-makers trying to deal with their hire-cruisers. Then the real fun would be putting up Tam’s tent, cooking supper over a fire (sausages, it had to be sausages) and sleeping out beside the duck nests and the roosting swans. There didn’t seem to be anything in the plans that would worry even the most protective parent, and she didn’t expect any opposition from her own mother.

  Tamsin, however, was using the escapade for a chance to practise a major piece of deception. ‘I’m going to tell Shane that we’re going,’ she told Suzy excitedly up in the tree house, ‘and then he’ll come. I’ll get him to bring a friend for you,’ she added with terrifying kindness.

  ‘What will we do with them, though? Will they stay all night? Where will they sleep?’

  ‘We can take a tent each,’ Tamsin said, as if it was quite obvious as a solution.

  ‘Oh I see, we’ll sleep in one and they can have the others,’ Suzy said and then immediately wished she hadn’t, for, judging by the look of complete scorn on Tamsin’s face, she had admitted a shameful amount of naïveté. Surely they weren’t going to sleep with boys? Not at their age? Her class weren’t even scheduled for the lesson in putting the condom on the plastic willy till after next Christmas.

  ‘Tamsin, you’re only just thirteen!’ Suzy protested, horrified. ‘We can’t!’

  ‘Oh we won’t do anything, it’ll just be a giggle, and for practice for when we’re older. You could call it a dry run.’ She giggled into her hand as if she’d made a dirty joke.

  Suzy wasn’t sure if she had or not and so resorted to trying to look superior. ‘Suppose the parents find out?’

  ‘Oh we’ll tell them the boys just turned up, nothing to do with us.’ Tamsin put on a big-eyed innocent look, as if she was practising that in advance as well.

  ‘And how would you explain us taking a tent each?’ Get out of that, Suzy thought, as Tamsin frowned and pondered carefully, inspecting her hair for split ends to help her concentration. A few slow moments passed and Suzy began to hope Tamsin would abandon the whole crazy plan. If she didn’t, she’d just have to tell her she wasn’t coming and that was the end of it, she didn’t care how shaming it would be. No way did she want to spend a spooky night on the island with Shane and his terrifying huge mates. They’d drink lager and fling themselves about and make belchy noises to impress each other, like they did to annoy the mothers by the swings on the rec. She wished quite suddenly she’d joined the Sea Scouts instead, then she could do all this fun stuff on the river without having to try to get Tamsin to remember she was still a child. She could have been doing proper sailing, or gig-racing, or going to a proper camp with songs and games. One day, not too far ahead, Suzy predicted, Tamsin would be the star of the village bus shelter, her reputation scrawled up in letters even bigger than the ones about Lisa Gibson.

  ‘I know!’ Tamsin dropped the hank of hair and scattered picked-off ends down on to the orchard grass. ‘I’ve got it, we’ll get Simon to come too. Then Mum will think the tent is his. You wouldn’t mind about sharing with him, would you?’ Tamsin asked with a knowing grin, adding with insulting truth, ‘And you’d be quite safe, after all it’s your sister he fancies, isn’t it? Everyone knows that.’

  Suzy peered down from the treehouse and out across the orchard to the back of the house. The film crew had organized the whole façade to be covered in scaffolding, from which was being draped huge black cloths. Kate was there, talking to Brian but looking around her all the time as if Brian was really the last person she wanted to be with, but couldn’t find anyone else who was better. At least Simon wasn’t with her, not just at that moment. Probably, she thought, he was lurking behind a tree gazing at her from a safe distance. Somehow it didn’t even cross Suzy’s mind that Kate’s darting eyes were searching for him.

  Uncle Edward was clearly deteriorating. Heather drove her mother to the clinic and sat with her in his room, listening to the old man’s uneven breathing as he dozed. Sometimes it seemed to stop, and Heather would hold her breath too, and wait. Then he would sigh suddenly through the silence and his shallow breath would resume. She was unbearably moved by, of all things, his hair, which a diligent nurse had carefully combed flat across his beige head. The hair, what there was of it, went the wrong way – Edward’s parting was on the left, not the right – and Heather thought he looked as if he had been arranged for his coffin by an unobservant but well-meaning undertaker.

  Delia seemed to take comfortable satisfaction from his steady downhill progress. ‘I thought he was looking quite a lot worse today,’ she told Heather as they sat at the bar overlooking the river in the Black Swan in Friarsford, ordering a ploughman’s lunch along with ham and chips for Suzy and Kate who were joining them.

  ‘Did you?’ Heather commented. ‘I honestly couldn’t see any difference. He just looks as if he’s already dead to me.’

  Delia sipped her lager, made a face about the bubbles and stared around the bar. Like most old English pubs, it had decor more suited to winter, with its low beams, smoky yellow walls, treacly paintwork and cosy, scarlet-patterned carpet. Its brass knick-knacks, baskets of pine cones and vast log fire really only came into their own in the ever-lengthening Christmas season. In August the fireplace was neglected and dusty, as if no-one quite knew how to fill the space suitably, and the only real concession to summer was a vase of spiky and rigid gladioli perched awkwardly on the bar. In good weather, customers were expected to be outside, admiring the scenery. Today the lighting was gloomy to match the weather outside, and a few aged locals sulked in corners because the saloon bar was full of burly film crew bitching about the professional shortcomings of absent colleagues. Heather listened in and felt glad, as she so often did, that she was self-employed, with no office in-fighting or petty corporate jealousies to join in with.

  ‘Of course he could go on like that for weeks,’ Delia was saying about Edward.

  Heather almost choked on her white wine at the thought that her mother might still be a house guest well into the autumn. Weeks more of tiptoeing round, pretend
ing she wasn’t conscious of being observed. Weeks more of Iain, sod him, living just yards away, ever likely to run into Delia at a village cricket match, the church fête or at a drinks party. The pub door opened and Kate and Suzy dashed in, accompanied by a cold damp blast of air and . . . Iain. Heather looked across at him in sudden panic, and he smiled at her over the top of Kate’s wind-blown hair before heading tactfully for the other bar. He had a smile like a pirate, she thought, all badness behind the glamour. Suzy was pushing her way towards them, her freckled nose wrinkling from being on a level with too many armpits. Kate, Heather noticed, had disappeared, then she caught a quick glimpse of her, the mirror over the fireplace picking up her and Iain, heads close together in the other bar. Iain was still doing his pirate-smile, and Kate was talking fast at him. Then she saw him laugh, put his finger to his lips in a ‘ssh’ gesture, and gently push the girl back towards the saloon. He’s been telling her, Heather assumed angrily. He’s told her what our stupid secret is, and he’s told her to keep it secret too.

  ‘Here she is,’ Delia announced as Kate slid on to the bench next to her grandmother. ‘You nearly missed your lunch,’ she admonished as the barman arrived with his overloaded tray.

  ‘No I didn’t. I never miss food,’ Kate replied with a broad smile.

  She looked suspiciously flushed and excited, Heather noticed. ‘You look happy. What have you been doing this morning?’ she asked in an innocently conversational way. Through the mirror she could see Iain sitting alone at the other bar, reading a newspaper and sipping Scotch and soda.

  ‘Trying to break into films. That man staying at Margot’s says he thinks he can get me into a crowd scene really soon. Isn’t that brilliant?’

  She was bursting with it, Heather could see. There was clearly nothing else at all in her head but the possibility of fame. She felt faint with relief, and relaxed enough to start eating her lunch.