The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  “Could you?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says, “I could. I’ve thought about it. I could.” She doesn’t say, This place is everything I don’t quite remember, growing up, before my mother died, before we had to go and live on a farm, before I decided on the other extreme and headed for the big city that was just as lonely. She didn’t say, There’s something here, apart from you, that feels comfortable, for all of the oddness, for all the Wedgwood blue up above where the azure should be. She knows how hard it will be to be parted from Mel, hopes, trusts that the agreement they made years ago, that they would always be there for each other but would never hold each other back, will be strong enough.

  “Before you make up your mind,” he says, and suddenly it’s all gotten very, very serious again. “If you come here, there are some things you should know.”

  “OK,” she says, and her voice is slow but her mind is fast, fast, flicking through everything they’ve said and emailed and talked about and not talked about, trying to find the shoe drop that she’s missed before the second one falls.

  “I don’t want you to come here to live with me. I want you to come here and marry me and I want us to have hundreds of babies.”

  She laughs. “Hundreds?” Remembers their “Hopes and Dreams” emails, a mixture of the silly and sublime, marriage, children, happy old age mentioned by both, sandwiched between jokes about space travel and keeping pigs just in case they’d misjudged each other.

  “Hundreds,” he says, “and all of them with your eyes, please.”

  She says, “I could do that. But let’s aim for three, first, and see how it goes.” And he looks at her, as closely as he can look, to make sure that she is sure.

  And she is.

  She goes home, their parting a sort of triumph because it’s the first step in their avowed life together. On the flight she stretches between sleep and not sleep, twisting the pretty silver ring that they bought on the way to the airport around and around on her ring finger. (Michael had taken a note of the size so that he could, he said, “organize the real thing” for when they were next together. The woman in the shop had as good as melted on the spot.)

  They start the paperwork, Michael impatient and methodical, Elizabeth by turns calm and frustrated, and after four months that felt like a long time apart but are forgotten as soon as the plane lands, they are reunited. Elizabeth has a fiancée’s visa; the wedding is just less than a year away.

  “You’re here for good this time,” Michael says.

  “For good,” Elizabeth agrees. She doesn’t tell him that, for the sake of her sister’s peace of mind, she’s opened a joint credit card account with Mel. It’s for emergencies only, the emergency being that if she’s not happy, if she doesn’t settle, if anything goes wrong, she’ll get straight on a plane and come home. (“I’m only agreeing if it works both ways, and you’ll use this to come to me if you need to,” Elizabeth had said. “It’s been you and me for a long time, and I don’t want you to think for a moment that I don’t know that this is a big deal for you too.”) She does tell him that the sisters have agreed to spend a month together every year, here or there or in between, fortnights in European hotels or months as one another’s houseguests.

  Patricia manages to hide her horror at the idea of a beach wedding in Australia fairly well, comforting herself with the idea of Throckton grandchildren and the little bit of exoticism that Elizabeth is bringing to her family, remembering that conversation in the kitchen, sure as she can be that her new daughter-in-law-to-be is every bit as serious, as loving, as her son is. And Michael is nearly thirty, Elizabeth two years younger, so even if the wedding will be only eighteen months after they first met, they are old enough to know what they are doing.

  Within a week of Elizabeth returning to Throckton they get a puppy, soon named Salty due to his habit of licking their legs when they come back from a run. Elizabeth has finished the first part of her unpacking, and they’ve found, or made, homes for everything in Michael’s previously too-big house.

  “So we’re all set,” Michael says.

  “Happy ever after, here we come,” Elizabeth replies.

  Mike,

  I’ve—we’ve—walked around Butler’s Pond hundreds of times, so it wasn’t as though there were going to be any surprises. The water was still, and Pepper frightened some ducks, but the noise they made frightened him right back. It’s the sort of thing that used to make us laugh. This time I just felt jealous of Pepper, of his ability to be crushed, for a moment, and then bounce up again as though nothing bad had happened.

  The ground was wet underfoot. I remembered those conversations we used to have, about little wellies. Still.

  When I got to the place where you drowned I was all ready to cry, but I didn’t. The swan’s nest that we kept an eye on all last summer is abandoned now, and I sat down next to it. Pepper puttered about for a bit, and then he came and sat down next to me, and the two of us looked at the water. I thought about how cold it must have been, in the water and out, that night.

  And then I sat and wondered at how I came to end up here, thousands of miles from the place where I grew up, with no husband, no child, no future to speak of. I kept waiting to feel something: some sense of you, some revelation. The full force of grief. I think I hoped that there was something I’d missed so far, that I would understand. Some secret of mortality, some understanding of what happened to you that night.

  I waited, but nothing happened. Except maybe the knowledge that there’s nothing worse to come. I am plumbing my own depths of grief. There’s a strange sort of comfort in that.

  Then Pepper ran off and I found him curled into the roots of a tree, looking very sorry for himself. I thought I could smell your aftershave.

  On the walk home, I decided it’s time to start making some little steps out of this awful place. I don’t know how, or how well, I’ll do it. I do know that I will never stop missing you, or loving you, even though you did the thing you promised that you never would, and left me.

  E xxx

  Now

  Mel is surprised by how little resistance her haircut and new clothes suggestion meets. She’d agreed with Andy that if she kept it light, made it not too much of a big deal, Elizabeth was more likely to agree, and so she waited until she and her sister stood side by side making sandwiches in the kitchen.

  “You know, Sis, if I’m ever going to find myself a decent English bloke you need to stop this trip down the crone road. I’ve made us hair appointments in Marsham, and then we’ll get you a manicure, and then we’ll buy some clothes that fit you and aren’t jogging pants.”

  She’d stopped, watching Elizabeth carefully, kicking herself for making it sound like too much of a postmourning makeover, but her sister had just said that that was fine, so long as they came straight home if she said so.

  “Do I look like a monster?” Mel had asked.

  “No, you don’t, but I probably do,” Elizabeth said, then added, “I know I have to start somewhere, Mel,” with such a wobble in her voice that Mel had been the one in tears, for a change.

  When they’d pulled into the parking lot in Marsham, Mel had said, “You know, you’re allowed to do these things. Shaving your legs is not a betrayal of Mike. Having your nails done doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten him.”

  “I know,” Elizabeth had said, but Mel hadn’t believed her.

  • • •

  Elizabeth flips through the hair magazines while she half listens to Mel putting the fear of God into the hairdresser about what she wants and what she doesn’t. She’s heard it all before—how many times she had to go back until they got the color exactly right, how in the end the managing director of the whole chain got in his helicopter and came to meet Mel to apologize in person—and while it used to make her laugh, now it’s irritating, because a haircut feels so trivial. But then, suddenly, she’s looking at a pictur
e of exactly the haircut she would want, if she cared about how she looked.

  Elizabeth shows the picture to Mel, who says, “It’s very short,” and passes it on to Chloé, the hairdresser, who has somehow come out of the other side of the hair expectations lecture as a trusted friend. Chloé looks at the picture, scrunches her nose, looks at Elizabeth, head on one side, and says, “It is quite drastic.”

  Elizabeth says, “In India, widows shave their heads. In comparison, this is nothing.” Mel and Chloé look at each other. Mel nods, and before Elizabeth can get exasperated about not being allowed to decide on her own hairstyle, she is having her hair shampooed and her scalp massaged. She takes deep breaths and endures. She thinks she might have liked this sort of thing once, but now she’s grown unused to such deliberate touching. This casual intimacy from a stranger feels wrong, when intimacy has become so absent from her days and nights.

  As Chloé cuts and great swathes of dark brown hair fall, heavy, to the floor, Elizabeth watches her reflection and feels as though she is coming back from a long way away. Her eyes look bigger and her cheekbones are emerging from the shadows of her hair, casting shadows of their own. She has to admit that this suits her. And she thinks about how Mike wouldn’t have liked it: how he used to hold her hair in his hands, how she used to joke about having it cut off so he could carry it around with him, how even joking about it made him uncomfortable.

  She thinks about days at the beach in Australia, lying on her stomach reading while Mike stroked her hair, over and over, from the top of her head to the middle of her back, while he watched people go by. Every now and again she’d turn over and remind him that he was off duty, and he’d say, “Never.” Which, as it turned out… Elizabeth watches her reflection and thinks about spilled milk, but it’s not enough to stop the tears from coming.

  Mel, trapped under a dryer at the other side of the salon, makes concerned faces and “honestly, it really suits you” eyes. Chloé says, “It’ll grow back.”

  And Elizabeth, who is sick of crying, nods and dries her tears and doesn’t bother to explain how everything she’s done these last four months has been something Mike would have wanted, or would have approved of, or would have liked. This haircut, something he would have hated, is all for her. She can’t tell whether she is proud of herself, or ashamed. She’s definitely angry, but unsure of whether it’s herself or her husband that she’s angry with. But she feels strong. She is strong. She looks Chloé in the eye.

  “Now dye it blond,” she says. “Really, really blond. Icy.”

  • • •

  Mel is sitting in the garden in the late afternoon sun, feeling mildly optimistic about her sister, who not only had a haircut—a real, proper, wow haircut, not the swift removal of split ends that had been the most Mel had hoped for—but also bought jeans, and tops that suit her, and a new pair of shoes. They’re not what Mel considers shoes—she admires her own new, red, patent leather boots, gleaming in the dull greens of the garden—but they are a start. And, as her experience of this funny little country is largely cobbles and mud, she can see why Elizabeth went the Mary Jane route. The important thing, she texts gleefully to Andy and Blake, is that she has done some things that are looking after her, and that she has done them willingly and without repercussions, apart from the tears in the hairdresser’s, which, Mel thinks, any long-haired woman might shed when she made such a big change. Although Elizabeth had gone upstairs as soon as they got back, Mel isn’t worried. This feels like a good road.

  Mel hears footsteps stop outside the gate and braces herself for another chat with Patricia. The two of them tend to plow the same furrows, conversationwise: the wonderfulness of Michael, the delights of Throckton, how Elizabeth is doing. Patricia has gamely attempted to understand Mel’s work as a translator, but none of those conversations has gone well. Mel understands that there’s no malice in Patricia when she asks whether her job will be done by a computer one day (“There’s no such thing as a literal translation,” Mel had said, and Patricia had said, “Not yet”), but she tries to keep away from the subject. In what she thought was a moment of inspiration, she’d asked for book recommendations, thinking that this would mean that there was always something to talk about. Unfortunately for Mel, whose tastes are a little more varied, Patricia likes family sagas, and having supplied a dozen, interrogates her about them every time she sees her.

  But it’s not Patricia. It’s Rufus Micklethwaite, carrying a bouquet. Mel recognizes him from an article in the Throckton Warbler, when he’d been pictured at the opening of a school extension he’d designed. Patricia had pointed him out, wondering that he looked so pleased with himself after what his daughter was putting everyone through.

  “Hello,” he says. “I believe you’re Elizabeth’s sister.” He holds out a hand, which Melissa shakes, although just hearing this man speak her sister’s name has made her suddenly furious, her soul the color of her boots.

  “That’s right,” she says. “I’m the sister in charge of picking up the pieces.” She sits down again, without gesturing for him to do the same.

  So he stands awkwardly and says, “I brought these for Elizabeth.”

  “You can’t see her,” Mel says. “She’s sleeping.” She lights a cigarette, blows smoke high, and ignores him to see what he’ll do. He stands his ground.

  “Well, I brought her these flowers—”

  “I’d assumed they weren’t for me.” She nods, grudgingly, to a chair, and has a look at him.

  She has to admit that he’s handsome—at least, if you don’t know what an idiot his daughter is. He has good skin, and he knows how to dress, with decent cuff links and trousers the right length so that when he sits down she doesn’t get any leg.

  The flowers too are well chosen. The bouquet has no ribbons or flounces, stating clearly that they are not for a celebration, and no lilies either, so nothing to make anyone think of a funeral. There’s no fluff of fern or gypsophila, but there are sculpted leaves, framing roses, tulips, freesias, tiny orchids, all in shades of purple.

  “They’re nice,” Mel says, but then, seeing Rufus plump himself up at the praise, thinking of her sister crying, sleeping, crying, pacing, crying months of her life away, adds, “The perfect way to say, ‘I’m really sorry my daughter fucked up and your husband died and then, when it was all starting to get a bit better, my daughter fucked it up all over again.’”

  “I just wanted,” Rufus says, “to let your sister know that we haven’t stopped thinking of her. That we won’t stop being grateful to her husband. I’m sorry if you think that’s inappropriate.”

  “What’s inappropriate,” Mel says quietly, so he has to lean a little toward her, “is a woman in her thirties being a widow. What’s inappropriate is her knowing that her husband died in such a terrible way. What’s inappropriate is you not knowing where your daughter is—which, frankly, points to how we are all in this mess in the first place—and so allowing her to upset my sister again. If Elizabeth was here she’d thank you for the flowers and say she was glad that Kate was alive, but she’s much nicer than I am.”

  “I’m sure she is,” Rufus says and gets up. “But I won’t trouble her or you again. I was trying to do the right thing.”

  “I think that’s best,” Mel says, then adds, although she knows she shouldn’t, “Would you like to take a photo of my boots before you go? You seem to really like them. You’ve hardly taken your eyes off them.” And she stretches out her leg so the leather gleams. As she tells a horrified Elizabeth and horribly amused Andy and Blake later, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Mike,

  Today I had a visit from Ian, who manages the hotel now. I think he was probably at your funeral though I don’t remember. Mel let him in.

  “Things are looking up, Sister,” she said as she brought him through. He wants to know if I want to work the season again. He was ve
ry kind. He said he didn’t know whether it would be inappropriate to ask, or inappropriate to assume that I wouldn’t want to come back, so he was here to see what I wanted to do, and to give me the option of saying no.

  I asked what he’d want and he said, “The same as usual, really. Three to five days a week, a bit of flexibility, from the end of May to the start of September.” I said, “Well, I suppose so, I have to start somewhere.”

  Ian said, “Good.”

  Mel said, “I bet you’ve had more enthusiastic responses to a job offer than that one.”

  Ian didn’t know what to say, but I told him to ignore her, and we arranged for me to go in and take a look at the updates to the computer system, and that was that.

  So, in two weeks I’ll be working, just like I was at the same time last year, and nothing like I was at the same time last year. I have no idea whether I’ll be able to do it. We’ll see.

  When Ian had gone, Mel said, “I really didn’t know what you were going to say.”

  I said, “Me neither, until I opened my mouth. But it’s time, isn’t it?”

  She said, “Yes, it’s time.”

  I think maybe it’s time for her to go home too, but when I mentioned it, she said her career’s been going brilliantly since she’s been here because there isn’t a decent daiquiri to be had within thirty miles so she’s in no hurry to leave. I think that’s Mel-speak for “I’m not quite sure that you’re ready to do without me just yet,” which is probably fair enough. For all that I probably look a bit more together on the outside, I think it’s more of a scab that I’ve formed than anything else.

  I mean, look at me. Look inside. Underneath.

  I’m still writing to you, for a start.

  I loved you. I love you. I will love you.

  E xxx

  Then

  Elizabeth had gotten through her first British winter with relative ease. The fact that she was newly, glowingly, excitedly married had helped. So had the winter itself, a snowy, bright one rather than the dull, wet months she’d been warned about. The days matched her mood. She watched in wonder at the snow coming down, laughed as it made a clean squeak in her hands.