Seven For a Secret

by Judy Astley

  Kate glared furiously at Tamsin and flounced off in the direction of the action and the river. The two younger girls followed at a safe distance and, left alone, Heather shivered and folded her arms across her body, shoving her hands up her sweater sleeves for warmth.

  ‘You need a little drinky to keep you warm.’ Margot appeared at her side, clutching a jug of steaming mulled wine and a couple of mugs. ‘Everyone will think it’s coffee,’ she whispered with a giggle. ‘Only giving it to the chosen few.’

  ‘You’d make a party out of anything, Margot,’ Heather told her admiringly, gratefully accepting the warm, spicy drink. ‘If the Grim Reaper came calling, you’d invite him in and open the Bollinger.’

  ‘Got to have someone to drink with,’ Margot told her. ‘Russell’s not here – again. And anyway, what’s wrong with being nice to Death – there’s always that chance that Death just might be nice to me.’

  ‘Eternal paradise and harps and all that?’ Heather asked.

  Margot snorted. ‘Not bloody likely, just a decent spot not too uncomfortably close to the fires of hell, I should think. Come down to the river and let’s see what they’re all doing.’

  Margot’s river frontage was two hundred feet of stone steps and ornate balustrading, with chained gaps for access to Russell’s Slipper launch and Simon’s dinghy. Now it had been transformed into what looked like a small dock, with a canal barge which an over-eager stylist had decked out with more flowers and decorative enamel knick-knacks than any serious bargee would ever have found room for. Beyond it was moored a small Edwardian pleasure cruiser with a striped canopy, and a tray of drinks set out on a white ironwork table. Fierce spotlights exposed a crazing of dry lines on the decking, just as cruelly as the lines of age showed on women of a certain age in harshly lit rooms. Iain still wasn’t anywhere to be seen and Heather felt uncomfortably conscious that she, Margot and their children were distinctly excess to requirements. She thought that any moment they would be asked to move along, as if they were gawping passers-by, ghoulishly hovering around at the scene of a gory murder.

  ‘Oh look, just like a real movie,’ Margot suddenly said, nudging Heather’s arm and pointing towards the crane. The director, or so she assumed, was climbing onto a small platform and being hoisted up above the crowd. He wore, to Margot’s great delight, a leather jacket, black baseball cap, was smoking a baby cigar and carried a megaphone.

  ‘Did you know they still actually used those?’ she asked Heather. ‘I thought they’d have gone out with Laurel and Hardy.’

  ‘No, I thought something more of a phone type of thing would be what they used, wouldn’t you think? All hi-tech and terrifically cool. Of course they’ve probably got that as well. He probably likes the megaphone thing because it’s big,’ Heather said with a giggle. ‘You know what men are like . . .’

  ‘What are men like?’ Iain suddenly appeared at her side and smiled at the two women.

  ‘Men are always adding length,’ Margot informed him cheekily. ‘One way or another they’re always at it – flashy cars, guns, truncheons, whatever.’

  Iain laughed and put his hands up defensively. ‘Not me, I promise. Never felt the need.’

  Heather feigned intense interest in the flurry of action as a man encased in a diving suit climbed heavily into a dinghy with a couple of technicians. She couldn’t look at Iain, couldn’t risk him giving her a conspiratorial wink that Margot just couldn’t miss.

  Kate crept up and stood next to her, with Simon a few loyal paces away. ‘What are they doing? Is someone going to jump in?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s the plan,’ Iain told her, leaning close to her and pointing towards the boat which was motoring upstream towards the island. ‘It’s supposed to be a chase sequence, which it won’t at all resemble till it’s all edited together. In fact, right now it’ll look pretty slow. I’ll give you a running commentary,’ he promised her.

  ‘Lights! Run sound! Cue smoke!’ the director yelled from his lofty podium.

  ‘Heavens, they really say it!’ Heather whispered to Margot. The small boat chugged slowly back towards them, with Brian sitting up in the bows wafting a smoke machine across the water.

  ‘Supposed to be river mist,’ Heather heard Iain explain in a whisper to Kate. She waited for Kate to make one of her accustomed teenage-rudeness replies along the lines of ‘Well believe it or not I can see that for myself,’ but instead she just nodded and smiled. Good grief, thought Heather, please don’t let her be turning into one of those women who play dumb to let men think everything they say is just so clever. Then she wondered if she was thinking this because it was Iain, or if it would be the same if Kate had been listening as avidly to Simon.

  The man in the wetsuit stood up and prepared to jump into the river, just as a distant roaring sound was heard overhead. Heather smothered a giggle as the director shouted ‘Cut!’

  ‘Is that supposed to be part of the sound effects?’ Kate commented to Iain. ‘If so it’s not very, well, effective.’

  ‘No, it’s Concorde running late out of Heathrow,’ Heather told her, ‘You should know, you’ve been hearing it for years.’

  Kate gave her a sharp look. ‘OK, OK, don’t stress,’ she said.

  ‘Respect for your mother,’ Iain said to Kate with a teasing smile and a wagging finger. Again, Heather waited for the scowl and the suggestion that he at least naff off and mind his own, but instead the girl’s face was lit by a broad and captivating smile.

  ‘Sorry, Mommy dearest,’ she purred, linking her arm through Heather’s as if trying to create a cute on-show tableau of family harmony.

  Simon, at a discreet distance under the trees, was watching Kate and feeling angry and chewed up inside. She was practically bloody kittenish with that leery old man – could hardly stop smiling at the old goat. He’d never seen so much of her orthodontically-perfect teeth. They, and her bright hair, shone so ridiculously in the dark, he was surprised the director of the film hadn’t ordered her off the set for messing up the light-readings. Darren was right, he should either settle for something a lot less challenging in the way of women, or make more of an effort to get her interested in him. He’d secretly read several of Tam’s copies of Just Seventeen, and knew that was what feisty Nick Fisher on the problem page would have advised him to do (if, of course, he was the sort of bloke who wrote in – it amazed him that so many did . . . ). So he’d do the effort bit first; the other was like giving up altogether, and he wasn’t about to do that without a fight. What kind of effort, though? That was the problem, one that even N. Fisher would find hard to solve. Perhaps Darren would have an idea, seeing as he seemed to be pretty clued-up about everything else.

  Heather couldn’t believe the attention to detail that went into the filming. She and Margot sipped their mulled wine and watched the dinghy make five more runs with its smoke machine and the diver jump over the side just twice. He was to swim under the water towards the two moored boats, with just his flippers occasionally visible for the cameras. The first time he swam too deep and arrived at the boats with the director shouting that he might as well have been a bloody trout, could he please manage a soupçon of visibility.

  ‘Is he usually so rude?’ Heather whispered to Iain.

  ‘Yes, absolutely all the time. Especially when something like this takes hours when it could be done in minutes if things went right.’

  The next time the dinghy sputtered down the river with its dripping diver, the engine died out. ‘Cut!’ was yelled furiously from above on the crane.

  ‘I think someone’s been sitting on the fuel line, don’t you?’ Kate commented to Heather, pointing to Brian awkwardly manoeuvring himself around in the boat.

  Heather had stopped concentrating, beginning to think it would be rather nice to go home and get warm. Feeling ridiculously keyed-up about Iain had made her unusually shivery in the clear and dewy night, and the grass beneath her thin canvas shoes was uncomfortably damp. She’d wait for a suitable gap in t
he action and then leave, she decided. This time, as if in celestial compliance with her wishes, the smoke trailed from the dinghy just as it should, the diver swam with his flippers aloft like an exuberant sealion, and just as he reached the Edwardian boat Heather’s mobile phone trilled out bright and loud through the silence.

  ‘Cut! Fucking cut!’ yelled the director, flinging his baseball cap down across the boats and into the river. He and everyone else in the garden turned to look as Heather hastily and with enormous embarrassment fished her phone out of her pocket.

  ‘Better come over here out of the way,’ Iain said, propelling her across the garden towards the deserted terrace while she fumbled with the aerial. All she could think of was that his hand was pressing firmly into her back as she walked, making it hard even to think of what she was supposed to say to greet whoever was calling.

  ‘Heather? Are you there?’ her mother’s anxious voice squawked down the phone. Heather, as if she could be seen, pushed Iain’s hand away and she turned to face the house so she didn’t have to look at him.

  ‘What’s wrong, are you OK?’ she managed to ask.

  ‘No, well yes, I am, but Edward isn’t. The clinic phoned and he’s now got Cheyne-Stokes breathing and isn’t likely to last the night.’

  Chain smokes? Heather, her mind not really on the call, tried to sort out what Delia was talking about. Her mother liked medical terminology – bones were always ‘fractured’ never just broken, people she knew got a ‘carcinoma’ not plain old cancer, although anything remotely gynaecological was referred to as You Know, accompanied by a meaningful downward glance.

  ‘My extremely old Uncle Edward is dying. I’ll have to go. Where are Kate and Suzy?’ Heather, feeling rushed and flustered, said to Iain at last. He made a move towards her, with the excuse of being comforting, but she moved faster and walked past him back towards the crowd.

  ‘Why don’t you go on ahead and take your mother to the hospital, and I’ll find them and explain to them what’s happened,’ Iain suggested. ‘And will they be all right at home on their own, or shall I ask Margot to put them up?’

  She hesitated, thinking how competent he was being, how helpful and decisive, and how very many years too late. ‘They’ll be fine at the house, if you could just tell them. Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘No problem,’ he said softly, leaning across and kissing her gently on the electric area at the edge of her mouth. ‘Take care driving, won’t you?’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Kate knew the phone call had been bad news the moment she saw Iain lean across and kiss her mother. The old uncle must be dead, she assumed and Iain was being the first person to have to express a bit of sympathy. He really was a terrifically kind man, she thought as she watched him coming over alone towards her. She wondered, curiously, if he would kiss her, too, in sympathy, and how it would feel, having an elderly mouth in contact with her face. After all, it wasn’t as if he was family. As Iain approached, he collected Suzy on the way and led her by her reluctant hand to where Kate was waiting to be told what was happening. While she waited in the dark, walking a little way up the lawn and separating herself from the rest of the gathering, she wondered how she should compose her face to react to the death of someone she neither knew nor particularly cared about. She wanted, she realized, to make Iain want to comfort her, put his arms round her and pull her against his large body. She hadn’t even been properly kissed since Annabelle’s birthday party, and she decided that if she was trying to make such a much older man fancy her, she must be getting sexually desperate.

  ‘Sorry about your uncle,’ Iain said in a voice that was cheerfully normal, and he put his arm round Kate’s shoulders, disappointingly as if she was a fellow chap in a rugby team. ‘He seems to be on his way out. Your mother’s had to leave. Now will you two be all right at home on your own?’ he asked, looking intently at Kate. ‘Or would you rather stay with Margot?’

  ‘I am nearly seventeen!’ Kate blurted out with automatic scorn.

  ‘And I’m not a baby,’ Suzy added, smiling, though, to emphasize that she did intend to be passably polite, even if Kate couldn’t manage it.

  ‘Fine, I was just asking,’ Iain said with a grin, moving his arm away from Kate.

  ‘Sorry,’ Kate mumbled, wishing he would put his arm back and that she could snuggle cosily against him. Perhaps it was her dad she was missing, she thought, confused, though he’d never been all that much of a touching sort of father. He was affectionate enough in a distant sort of way, just hallo and goodbye kissing, and she’d always been thankful that their family wasn’t like Annabelle’s. They had frequent awful things called ‘bug-hugs’, where they all gathered in a circle and put their arms round each other, making cooey noises and assuring each other loudly how much they were adored. She knew this because they’d once done it in front of her, when Annabelle’s youngest brother had had a major telephone row with his best friend. She’d felt left out, she remembered, and she’d thought them very impolite to brandish their mutual smug love like that in front of her. It was her first suspicion that the nuclear family might not be altogether a wholly good thing. Too excluding and pleased with itself.

  ‘Could we go home now, do you think?’ Suzy asked Kate. ‘I’m a bit bored really.’

  ‘OK,’ Kate told her, ‘I don’t suppose anything exciting will happen now, anyway.’

  ‘I’ll walk you back, you can at least let me do that,’ Iain insisted.

  ‘Where are you going, aren’t you staying?’ Tamsin, a huge blue mohair sweater now dousing the effect of her short slinky dress, challenged Suzy.

  Suzy looked determinedly solemn. ‘Someone is dying,’ she announced importantly, watching Tamsin carefully, but without much hope for any sign of genuine sympathy.

  ‘What, that old uncle you’ve never even met?’ Tamsin demanded, ‘Why does that mean you’ve got to go home?’

  ‘Actually,’ Suzy stated bravely, ‘I’m going because I’m bored stiff, if you want the truth, though I don’t suppose you do.’

  Tamsin’s mouth fell open in surprise. ‘Oh. Oh well see you sometime. You will come camping with me though, won’t you?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘I might, it depends,’ Suzy told her loftily. ‘I’ll phone you.’

  ‘About time you stood up to her,’ Kate said admiringly as the three of them walked down the drive towards the road. ‘She runs rings round you.’

  ‘Not any more, by the sound of it,’ Iain commented, watching Suzy stride on ahead with a newly confident bounce in her step. Kate turned to smile agreement at him and stumbled over a large stone. ‘Careful,’ he said, grabbing her hand to steady her. All the way along the road back to their own house, Kate waited for him to let go. It was only when they reached her gate and he still hadn’t that she realized she’d wasted all the time she could have enjoyed the feeling of his warm, firm hand, waiting for that feeling to end. What an idiot, she thought to herself. What a complete idiot.

  The nurse assured them that Edward was completely unconscious, though Heather noticed she was still careful not to talk about him in his room as if he wasn’t yet there at all. Outside the room she’d explained to them about his breathing. Of course Cheyne-Stokes had been nothing to do with chain-smoking, it was just an unfortunate near-eponym.

  ‘He takes one long breath, then nothing for a while, so you might think he’s gone, and then there are short shallow breaths and the whole thing starts again,’ the nurse warned them with a big, jovial, inappropriate grin before they went in to start the grim vigil. ‘I just had to mention it, otherwise you’d be forever pressing the buzzer to tell someone he’s passed on.’

  Delia was looking pale and was wearing her pink straw comfort-hat. Heather sat down on the opposite side of the bed and thought about asking her mother why on earth they were actually there, but the question sounded too bizarrely existential when asked across so nearly dead a man. Surely they could have simply been telephoned when he’d actually gone, espe
cially if he had no idea they were in the room with him. And, poor man, if he was aware they were there, he could hardly fail to know he was about to meet his maker – why else would two distant relatives be summoned to his side in the middle of the night, other than to watch for his departure into the everlasting darkness? It was probably all to do with Administration, Heather concluded, as she curled her feet under her in the soft chair and tried to get comfortable. Perhaps if they could get his death over with, certified and tidied away in the night, the clinic could have another profitable patient occupying the room by midday tomorrow. It would disrupt their timetable if they had to leave Edward tidily laid out for a late-morning Family Viewing. What a cynic I’m becoming, she thought, her own long sigh coinciding noisily with one of old Uncle Edward’s.

  As she sat waiting in the half-dark, she thought about Iain. She put her finger to the edge of her mouth where he had so lightly and thoughtlessly kissed her. She stroked the edge of her lip, absent-mindedly trying to revive the sparky feeling. He had, quite literally, touched a nerve.

  ‘Do you think . . .’ Delia cleared her throat and continued in a loud whisper, ‘do you think I should hold his hand?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps if you feel like it,’ Heather whispered back. It occurred to her that not only she, but also her mother, might never have seen anyone dead before, though surely she had seen her own husband, paid those dutiful last respects? Perhaps Delia was frightened, she was certainly looking pale and nervous. They both looked at Edward’s hands, which lay as dry and brittle as winter twigs on the white sheet. Every few moments his crab-claw fingers fluttered slightly, as if the trembling was to remind them there was still a tiny trace of life flickering feebly inside him and that it wasn’t yet time to pull the sheet over his face. Maybe the twittering hands didn’t want to be held, didn’t want to have their last free movements stilled by well-meaning confinement.