The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  “Thanks,” Kate replies, but her eyes don’t move from the ceiling. The curtains are drawn. Richenda’s eyes strain to adjust to the half dark.

  “I thought we could watch a film this afternoon,” she offers.

  “No thanks, Mum. I think I’m going to take a nap.”

  “All right.” Richenda bites back the question of whether Kate will sleep tonight. They had that conversation yesterday, and anyway, Kate seems to be able to sleep for eighteen hours a day at the moment. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”

  • • •

  Richenda is half asleep herself when Rufus comes back. He is wearing what she recognizes as his guilty look, but she knows who his summerhouse client is—Bubbles McVitie, mad as a box of frogs and well over seventy if she’s a day, so not really Rufus’s type. And he’s only been gone a couple of hours, which is not his style either: he likes to think of himself as a romantic, misunderstood and tortured, so his infidelities invariably involve lunch, or dinner. Also:

  “Is that a new shirt?”

  “This? No.” He turns to face her and she recognizes the paisley and blue stripes. It’s one of what Kate calls his “wallpaper shirts” although Richenda likes it. Even at this distance from the time when they loved each other, she can admit that her husband knows how to dress.

  So, less than two hours and not a new shirt; it’s definitely not a woman. But it’s definitely a guilty face.

  “What have you done, Rufus?”

  “Why should I have done anything? I’ve been to a meeting. I’ve agreed to the next stage of the work. I’ve earned money so that you can sit here thinking the worst of me.”

  “All right,” Richenda says mildly.

  She’s less mild when she discovers what he has done.

  Rufus began by calling Kate downstairs with the promise of a present, trying to make her close her eyes. “I’m not a child, Dad,” she said, “and I’m not really in the mood. Sorry.” Then he disappeared out of the front door with the promise of being back in a minute.

  “It’s going to be balloons, isn’t it,” Kate says to Richenda resignedly, and her mother sincerely hopes so.

  But it’s not balloons. It’s a puppy.

  And for all that he’s small, he knows what it is that he’s here to do and goes immediately to Kate, snuffling at her bare feet, the wet nose making her toes curl, the big puppy eyes drawing her hand down to touch, to scratch, to marvel at the softness of his ears. Richenda’s mouth opens but nothing comes out. No one notices, because Kate is stroking the puppy, and Rufus is watching the two of them, proudly, as though he’s just discovered how to turn base metal into gold.

  “He’s a beagle,” Rufus says. “Bubbles breeds them. He has a pedigree going back five generations and he’s been wormed and had all of his vaccinations.”

  “Our house,” Richenda says, her voice high and hot in her ears, “is carpeted in cream and most of the walls and furniture are shades of pale because you, in your architectural wisdom, want nothing but clean space and clean lines. We have never had a pet. We have never wanted a pet. Not so much as a goldfish.”

  “I thought he’d be company for Kate,” Rufus says, still pleased with himself, but not enough to meet Richenda’s gaze.

  “And will Kate take it to university with her?” They both look at their daughter, who is laughing for the first time since the accident, as the puppy licks at her scrunched-up nose and eyes, and in this moment at least it seems that the answer is a resonating yes, barked from the rooftops. Rufus risks tilting an eyebrow at his livid wife, seeing how her face is softening. It’s too soon. When she sees him looking at her, her features set back into fury.

  “And will you take it with you when you go to work, or will I be looking after it?”

  “He’s housebroken,” Rufus offers. “Almost, anyway. He knows about newspaper.”

  “Oh, good. Can he operate a door handle to put himself in the garden?” Richenda curses herself for being bamboozled into moving from it to he. “Does he vacuum furniture and shampoo carpets? I’m sorry, Rufus, it’s too much. He’s just going to have to go back.”

  Kate, who hasn’t been listening, looks up. “He can sleep in my room,” she announces, “and we’ll call him Beatle.”

  • • •

  Later that evening, Kate coaxes Beatle up the stairs and takes him into her room. She lifts him onto the bed, in direct contravention of one of the many doggy directives that her mother has spent the evening laying down, and strokes his silken ears. Crying feels easier in his company and more complete, validated by a witness but not complicated by comfort, questions, cajoling.

  When she is calm again, she strokes the dozing puppy. Every now and then Beatle angles his ears to the sound of arguing from downstairs. Most of it is just rumble and squawk, but the odd word makes it up to them, unilateral and thoughtless and uptight. Kate tells him the story of the gold bracelet her father bought for her mother once, after what it pleased him to call one of his indiscretions had been discovered. “Indiscretion,” Richenda had said very quietly, imagining Kate in the next room couldn’t hear or wasn’t listening, “is an understatement as far as you’re concerned, Rufus. The new shirts. The whistling. The coming home at two a.m. and having a shower. I think I’d be slightly less furious if you made at least some attempt to pretend that you weren’t screwing your way around your client list again.” Beatle’s eyes seem bright with understanding as Kate tells him the next bit: how she had leaned back in her chair and been able to see, unseen, through the doorway. Rufus’s offered gift, Richenda’s opening of the box, the way she had held up the bracelet, twisting it through the light, then gone to her bedside table and offered Rufus an identical box, containing an identical bracelet, with the words, “This is the one you bought me last time. Your taste, if nothing else, is fairly constant.”

  “He looked sorry,” Kate tells Beatle. “Properly sorry.” She hasn’t told anyone about this before, afraid that in the retelling it would become comical, or trite, when it had twisted her up and made her feel so sure that, when she fell in love, she’d never fall out of it again. And before she knows it, she’s crying, and she’s telling Beatle other things that no one else knows.

  Mike,

  I’m wired all night, my mind won’t stop, my heart just breaks over and over again and the noise and the pain of it are unbearable. I can no more sleep through this than I could sleep through being kicked in the ribs every two minutes. But every night I try. Stupid.

  So this morning I was standing at the back door while Pepper had his morning scuttle—Blake takes him out when he walks his dog, which is just as well, because I don’t think I’ll step out of this house voluntarily ever again, despite your mother’s incessant attempts to get me to go to one of her clubs or the library, and Mel’s pleas for a change of scenery before she goes mad.

  So, the back door is as far as I go. But this morning there was a patch of sunlight at the end of the patio. It was so pathetic and feeble that I sort of recognized it, and I went and stood in it, and then I saw the snowdrops.

  My feet got wet as I walked through the last of the frost to pick them up: just half a dozen nodding white heads, tied with a piece of silver ribbon.

  They were just in the corner of the garden, by the gate, the place that got the last of the sun in summer and where we’d sit with a glass of wine on warm evenings. I stood there with them in my hand and I remembered you, just back from work, just half an hour after I was back from work, walking toward me as I sat there. You smiled and said, “I see you’re already in our happy place.” I thought of how, one winter, when I was so low, you bundled me up and walked me around to Butler’s Pond because you said you had something to show me, and there was a tiny crop of snowdrops, huddling under a tree. “You see,” you said, “there’s always hope.”

  So I knew that these were my sign. I knew, straight away, that
these snowdrops are from you. They are what you’d leave. That’s the place you’d leave them.

  If you could. If I believed in that sort of thing.

  I’ve put them on the windowsill in the kitchen, and I’m going to sit at the table all day and look at them.

  Thank you.

  E xxx

  Then

  “Is this your first time in Sydney?” Elizabeth had asked the next guy in line. Brit, she said to herself. Something about the pallor, and the haircut. Michael smiled.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he’d said, looking around the lobby full of people who seemed to know how to do this traveling business a lot better than he did, “but I’ve never been out of the UK before.” He’d handed over his passport, which was fresh and inflexible in her hand. Valid from the month before. He wasn’t kidding.

  “Your secret’s safe with me.” She’d smiled, quietly upgrading him to a room with a sea view. “And welcome to Australia. You picked a great place for your first trip overseas.”

  “Well, it was my New Year’s resolution to travel more, and if you’re going to do a thing, I think you should do it right,” he’d said, and he’d smiled a tired smile as he headed for the elevators.

  Over the next few days she’d kept a lookout for him. She saw him standing in the door way, studying a map. Buying postcards and water from the hotel kiosk. He always seemed to be on his own. On his fourth day, he approached her at the desk with a leaflet about the city, and a question about public transport. The skin on the bridge of his nose was peeling but his shoulders, broad and thick, were turning a pleasing gold. She noticed that his eyes were as brown as his hair, and that one of his front teeth was ever-so-slightly crooked.

  “How are you finding Sydney?” she’d asked as he’d picked up the map and made ready to turn away.

  “Honestly?” he’d replied. “Big and hot.”

  Elizabeth had nodded. “Fair comment.”

  Michael had rested an elbow on the desk and leaned in, a man with a terrible secret. “The place I come from has two bus routes through it and no more than six burglaries a year, unless someone comes in from another village for the hanging baskets and window boxes. I’m a little bit lost, if I’m honest.” Seeing her eyes offering something like pity, he adds, “It’s not as though I’ve never been anywhere, or anything. I’ve done London, and Edinburgh, and I’ve been on training courses all over the place. But everything here is just different. More different than I thought it would be.”

  “I grew up somewhere like that,” she’d said, “but without the buses. It was cycle or die of boredom, where I come from.”

  Then Elizabeth did something that she hadn’t done in four years of working in hotels, four years of at least once a day talking to a guest who was fit, flirtatious, and obviously ready for a fling with a pretty Australian girl. She offered to show Michael the city. He accepted.

  At the end of the day, he kissed her on the cheek and thanked her. She was charmed. The next night, she showed him the nightlife, and they walked on the beach in the darkness and he took her hand. “Are you being a gentleman?” she’d asked him as he walked her to her door, and he’d said, “No, I’m being a man who really doesn’t want to blow it.”

  • • •

  Michael left after a week and a half for a two-week escorted tour of “Australia’s Highlights,” although he told Elizabeth that he’d already found his highlight. He’d be back in Sydney for two nights before his flight home. By the time he got on the coach, Elizabeth had shown him the city, the beaches, the harbor, and a few of the restaurants that the tourists didn’t know about. She’d walked over the harbor bridge with him even though she didn’t much like heights. She’d taken him to Luna Park where he’d laughed like a child on the rides, and she’d cooked for him and introduced him, casually, to her sister. She’d looked at photos of where he lived and tried to imitate his accent. She’d been charmed when he’d offered to come running with her—she was training for a marathon at the time—and liked how, although he was a head taller than her, they’d found a matching stride. She’d had sex with him, noisily all over his hotel room and quietly, gigglingly, in her little shared house. She was having, she told herself, a short-term romance.

  Michael wasn’t. He was smitten and he didn’t care that she knew it. He felt ambushed by love and told her so. She laughed at him, telling him that he had sunstroke, infatuation, a bug. He curled her hair around his finger and shook his head. She told him she’d be forgotten as soon as he was back in the England he kept telling her about, rain clouds and gravy and all.

  “No,” he said. “No, Elizabeth, you’ve got me all wrong. You’ll see.”

  She asked him how, if he’d never been out of his country before, he knew it was her and not Australia he was loving. He explained how he’d felt, this last year, that there was something missing from his life, but that at the same time he loved his job, and his home, and when he saw the TV ad for Australia he’d felt something speak to him, something telling him to come here.

  “There you are then,” Elizabeth had said, rolling herself closer to him. “The universe wants you to get a tan. That’s all it is.”

  “No,” he’d said. “It was you.” But she’d refused to accept it. Refused the idea that she could tie her existence, her happy, easy days, to someone who would, by dint of his birthplace, make her life awkward, complicated, in need of compromise and planning and all of the things she had deliberately removed from it when she came to the city and started anew.

  While he was away he texted her every day: good nights, good mornings. He called and left cheerful, thinking of you messages on her answering machine.

  “He’s behaving like my boyfriend,” Elizabeth had said to Mel.

  “He’s behaving like your soul mate, Sis,” Mel had said, scrolling through the messages, “and you need to decide whether you want that or not. He’s not the casual sort.”

  “No,” Elizabeth had said. “I suppose he’s not.”

  “And neither are you,” Mel had added.

  “No. I know.” She had been mostly happily mostly single since she came to Sydney, and could hardly believe that five years had gone by since her school sweetheart gave her an ultimatum about settling down and getting married, and she gave him the answer he didn’t want. She’d known then that he wasn’t really the man for her, although it had felt as though everyone except Mel had known better and had been lining up to tell her she had made a mistake. She had been sure that she hadn’t. But now she came to think about it, she wasn’t sure that the life she had made since was really the life for her either. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Sydney, and her friends, and running and swimming and working too many hours and saving for a deposit on her own place. She did. But perhaps it wasn’t really right; perhaps that was why she was thinking about Michael the way she was.

  But it was best to be sure. Elizabeth had spent the next week making a list to herself of all the reasons it wouldn’t work. Not really knowing each other. Distance. Culture. Expense. Time apart. Away-from-home self, different from at-home self. The countless times she’d mopped the tears of brokenhearted colleagues when their One True Love had gotten on a plane home and never been heard from again.

  Compared to the reasons for the relationship—getting on well, great sex, both like running, the feeling that, as she struggled to put it to Mel, she “just couldn’t not”—the “against” list seemed overwhelming. So Elizabeth had ignored Michael’s texts—or, at least, she’d not responded to them, which didn’t stop her from reading and rereading them. She’d filled up her diary, booked some more shifts, started planning a trip of her own, and made a future with no Michael, and no space for Michael in it. She’d agreed to go on a blind date with a friend of a friend. She’d persuaded herself that the last ten days—only ten days, barely enough time to decide whether you like someone, let alone anything else—had been a ma
dness that was over.

  By the time Michael returned, Elizabeth had been so sure of her infallible heart that she had stood in the shadows by the hotel doorway and watched him get off the coach: a game of emotional dare. He had been more than she remembered him. More tanned, of course, but more imposing. More upright. More confident. Happier. She’d realized that he had no doubts about her, about them. She saw that he knew, and that was what made him aglow with something special. And in that moment she had recognized that she knew too. Unmoving, unspeaking, she had let herself love.

  He had seemed to sense her change of heart. Just as she had thought about stepping toward him, about his mouth and his hair, he had looked straight at the place she was going to step into.

  • • •

  He’d insisted on a plan. “Can’t we see how it goes?” she’d asked.

  Michael had said, “No. You can see how it goes on a picnic, you can see how it goes with a test drive, but this deserves a plan.”

  So they had made the rules. Some sort of contact—a text, an email—every day. A phone call at least once a week. No going to bed on an argument. No more than three months without seeing each other. An understanding that long-distance relationships were hard and they wouldn’t lose heart too easily or too soon. Elizabeth was to come and take a look at Throckton before the year was out. And, if they were still together in eighteen months, a serious conversation about The Future.

  “This feels like quite a serious conversation about the future to me,” Elizabeth had said, and Michael had turned a solemn face to her and replied, “Elizabeth, there’s nothing wrong with serious.”

  And for a moment, falling for some guy from the other side of the planet had felt not only good, but perfectly reasonable. She had groped for that feeling as she’d watched his flight leave, but there was no finding it again until the three months were up and she was stepping onto a plane herself.

  Now