The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  She’s had the briefest of conversations with everyone she needs to in the wider family, who have sympathized and said things like “Well, I suppose you’ll make the best of it,” with an undertone of “My child would never/has never done such a thing.” Richenda hadn’t noticed how much she is holding on to, how many words, how many worries and doubts. But now here is Blake.

  And Blake is telling her things that resonate with her own, unexpressed thoughts. That an unplanned child is not the same as an unwanted child. That these things can be the making of a family. That babies are born into circumstances thousands of times worse than this one will be, and that there’s no reason why Kate shouldn’t be OK, with the right support.

  Richenda’s face makes a shrug, because her hands are holding mugs. “She’s not getting a lot of support from her father. Or from the baby’s father, come to that.”

  “Do you know who he is?” Blake’s voice, well trained, is behaving exactly as it does when asking any other question.

  “No. She won’t say. I’m not going to try to make her. She’s as stubborn as me and her father are over that wretched gate—she gets it from both sides—so it wouldn’t do any good, anyway. Not that Rufus isn’t trying. But, well…” Richenda pauses, hands coffee to Blake, takes a sip of her own as Blake waits. “All that she’ll say is that he’s not around, and that could mean anything. It must have been after Christmastime when she got pregnant, because it was too early for the pregnancy to show in the hospital tests, and she didn’t leave the house for three weeks afterward. So he could have been someone here, visiting, over Christmas. He could be away on a trip, or already at college. She might not even know who he is.”

  She looks to Blake, who, understanding what’s required, nods a nod that says sad but true. He’s turning over “he’s not around,” examining it. Looking for clues, not wanting to find them.

  “I’ve got a shortlist of her friends who came back from their gap-year things for Christmas, but, well, I just don’t know.” She pauses, going through the lineup in her mind. She remembers them, part of the group of almost-adults sprawled over her sofas, waiting for Kate before going out on New Year’s Eve. While the girls downstairs had been flirty, giggly, already a little drunk, upstairs Kate had been sullen, dragging her heels. Maybe—

  “There’s no point in speculating,” Blake says gently.

  “No,” she agrees. She remembers that Rufus had a junior working with him, from September to January; he’d come to the house a few times, seemed to get on well enough with Kate, although she’d rather assumed he was gay. Still, there’s no telling. She wonders how she can ask Rufus about him without appearing to ask; she’d gotten furious with him last night for doing exactly what she is doing now.

  “And how are you, Richenda?” Blake asks.

  “I have absolutely no idea,” she says.

  • • •

  Upstairs, Kate teases Beatle with a ball, waiting for the grumble and throb of the voices downstairs to fade, so that she can take a walk. She knows she will soon be tired again, her body too heavy to be easy with, but for now she feels strong and her breath moves happily in and out of her. She doesn’t have to hide her baby anymore, and she knows how to hide her eyes, looking constantly away from people, above or below or toward the ever-helpful Beatle, so that she can’t be stopped, chatted to, engaged in conversation.

  Her favorite walk is to Butler’s Pond, the place where the mix of emotions is so sharp and strong that she doesn’t know whether she’ll be elated or distraught. But both feel true, and in most of Kate’s world at the moment truth is not an easy thing, but rather, something to be protected, hidden, cosseted away, as her pregnancy has been.

  She won’t tell her mother where she’s going. She’s been letting her assume she’s going to the graveyard with her posies, sure that no one will find the flowers where she really lays them, between the roots of an ancient tree, hidden from the water’s edge and the people passing by with dogs and children on bikes, trikes, and scooters. She wished she’d put them here all along, but she’d been so afraid of coming back to this place, for all the power and the pull it might have.

  As she waits, she thinks through her list of names. And suddenly, she has it, and she doesn’t care who’s downstairs or what they’re talking about.

  She heads down to the living room, and sees her mother and Blake look up at her, startled, caught out. Yes, definitely talking about her. Well, let them. Blake takes his hand from her mother’s arm. Kate almost changes her mind about what she’s going to say. She hesitates, and in that moment Blake gets up, faces her, and says, “Congratulations, Kate. You must be very excited about the baby.” He looks straight at her as he says it. And he smiles.

  Kate is thrown, completely thrown, because it’s the first time someone has congratulated her about her little girl. She stands very still, absorbing the feeling of it, thinking of all the other people who have babies, who are washed in congratulations for months, who would think nothing of this heartfelt reaching out, these simple words. She looks at Blake again, just to make sure there’s no ill will, and he’s still looking at her, still smiling. She remembers that Mike had said he was a good man, but then, Mike had only good things to say about everyone. And she smiles back.

  “Kayla,” she says. “I’ve decided to call her Kayla.”

  Mike,

  Everything is dull. People say I’m doing well, and I suppose I am. They say it as though I’ve been crippled and am learning to walk again, which I suppose is also true. I’m doing well in the sense that I don’t spend every minute of every day beating my breast and wailing. But everything is dull. Flat.

  You know that argument we used to have, when you used to say I didn’t like the weather in England, and I used to say that it wasn’t that I didn’t like the weather, it was those days when there was no weather I couldn’t bear. When the air is still and the sky is gray and it’s not sunny and it’s not raining and there’s no wind and it’s certainly not warm but it’s not exactly cold either. Those days. My life is one of those days. The sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow and everything is just going along. And it’s fine, bearable anyway. So long as I don’t look up from this dull, gray path and see my dull, gray life stretching on and on and on.

  You were a third of my life, which feels like so little. One day you’ll be a quarter of it, then a fifth, maybe only a sixth if I live to be 72. Awful thoughts, when I look up from this gray path on this gray day.

  We had made a little nest of our life, you and me. Our favorite places, our long weekends away, our barbecues and our crosswords and our walks and our wine.

  You, saying, “We’re just like an old married couple.”

  Together, it was lovely. On my own, it’s too sad. But I’m just getting on with it.

  I’ve told Mel she should go home. She still says no. I think I’m glad.

  I miss you, so much.

  E xxx

  Mel’s only real source of Throckton gossip—if she cared, which she doesn’t—is Patricia, with her blending-into-one-after-a-while tales of babies born and conservatories built and cruises embarked upon.

  Elizabeth had done a good job of stopping her mother-in-law from talking about Kate Micklethwaite and her baby, and so Mel hears very little about her. Until the day when a flurry of texts between her, Andy, and Blake means that she is sitting at the kitchen table while Elizabeth is at work, having a conversation that she really doesn’t want to be having.

  “I know I complain about Throckton being boring, but I take it all back. I didn’t know how much I liked boring, until now,” she says as they settle with coffee that she has insisted on making, although none of them wants it.

  “It’s never boring,” Blake says.

  “Too damn right,” Andy adds.

  Mel remembers that the brother-in-law she was very fond of had been a decades-long fixture
in the lives of these two. So she takes charge.

  “Come on then,” she says, “from the top.”

  Andy nods. “When I got to the office this morning, Peggy, who’s our receptionist, brought me a coffee along to my office. She doesn’t usually. She shut the door behind her. I assumed that she wanted to talk about something medical—you know, the staff are supposed to make proper appointments like everyone else but they never do—but she said she knew that I was good friends with Michael Gray, so she thought I ought to know there was a rumor going around that he was the father of Kate Micklethwaite’s baby.”

  “Which we don’t think he would be,” Mel clarifies, “although we can see how people might put two and two together, after the accident.”

  “Which we don’t think he would be,” Andy says.

  Blake says, “Richenda says she won’t say anything about the father, except that he’s not around. Rufus Micklethwaite is playing holy hell with her every chance he gets, but she won’t say a word.”

  “Just like she won’t say anything about when Michael died,” Mel adds, “and she’s lying about that as well.”

  They all look at one another.

  Mel says carefully, “We’re assuming this is no more than a rumor, right? Blake, I know what I said to you, about what we’d think if we didn’t know Mike, but we did know him. I can’t imagine…” Her words falter, fail.

  Blake says, just as carefully, “Elizabeth and I were talking, at the Christmas party, and she was saying that between work and his marathon training and Pepper having taken to running off on walks, she’d hardly seen him.”

  Andy adds, “She went into the water. He was there. He was near enough to get her out. It was cold. She wouldn’t have had long.”

  “What are the chances of that?” Mel asks.

  “Not high,” Blake offers.

  They look at each other, seeing in each other’s faces the chasm that they’ve opened. Andy shakes his head, a furious clearing motion. “No. No. He wouldn’t. He adored Elizabeth.”

  Mel says, “Unless he’d met her nearby, and she was upset. He’d have walked her home, wouldn’t he? He’d have been near enough then.”

  “Yes,” Blake says, “but—”

  “Oh God.” Mel puts her head in her hands. “I’m always telling Patricia that there’s no bloody point in speculating, and here I am, chairing a speculation meeting.”

  “We might never know,” Andy says, and the chasm closes again, thanks to all of their good efforts. Mel reaches for her cigarettes and is about to head for the door, when Blake speaks, and brings her back to her chair with a bump and a groan.

  “Surely the point is not whether or not Michael fathered that baby,” he says. “Surely the point is that people are speculating about it, and sooner or later someone is going to say something to Patricia, and then Patricia will say something to Elizabeth, if someone from the hotel doesn’t first.”

  “You’re right,” Andy says. “We need to do something.”

  Between

  Kate had argued, passionately, against helping her mother with the tombola at the Throckton Fair.

  “I know, Kate,” Richenda had said. “I don’t especially want to do it either.”

  “So why are we doing it?”

  “Because we do almost nothing in the community, and so when one of your father’s clients, who is one of the organizers, asked if I would help, I said that I would because it seemed like the least I could do.”

  “But that’s your decision. I didn’t agree to it.”

  “No, I know you didn’t.” Richenda has had a sleepless night and a long day of snippy exchanges with Rufus and she is too tired not to let it show. “But, Kate, your exams are finished, you have nothing else to do, and I presume you’ll be expecting me to drive you around while we—or rather I—buy the rest of what you need for your trip. So I was hoping you could see your way to giving up an afternoon. I think, quite frankly, that you owe it to me to help.”

  So Kate, knowing that “quite frankly” was a phrase her mother used only when she was very near the end of her tether, had agreed with as little grace as she could get away with. She had been roped in for this kind of thing before, and she never knew how to talk to people, or liked the way older people treated her as though she was a child still.

  It had started every bit as unpromisingly as she feared. The early June sky glowered but didn’t rain, so every other conversation that she had was about the weather. The wind whipped raffle tickets out of the basket if she didn’t watch them. Her father had slept in the spare room the night before, which meant that her mother was taciturn and complaining by turns, wondering out loud what on earth she would do when Kate went. “Why don’t you just leave him, Mum,” Kate had eventually said in exasperation, and Richenda had looked at her daughter and laughed and said, “Well, you know what, I just might, one of these days,” and she’d disappeared and come back with a bag of hot doughnuts, which they’d eaten while taking the mickey out of Rufus.

  Kate had enjoyed that part, because she was almost never allowed to be rude about her father, his separate trimmers for nose hair and ear hair, the way he claimed to be able to tell fresh pasta from dried after it was cooked, his near-obsessive polishing of his car.

  Then, just as Kate was about to suggest that she might go and her mother could probably cope now, Richenda had gotten up. “I’d better do the rounds,” she’d said glumly. “Stock up on tea towels with cats on and lemon drizzle cake.”

  Kate had told her off for being a snob and resigned herself to the loss of the whole day, envying the friends who had come to say hello earlier before heading off to Marsham in a cloud of good feeling that only the end of exams could bring. She’d texted them to say she wouldn’t be able to join them. And then she’d been left alone with the last few tickets, a bottle of port, a jar of pumpkin jam, a ginger cake, and the Throckton Warbler for company.

  And then it happened. The oddest thing. On the front page of the newspaper was the story of a policeman who had saved a mother and child from a house fire. The rescued mother was a friend of the chef at the restaurant where Kate did the occasional weekend shift, so she had already heard all the details: the iron left on when the baby started to cry; the assumption that it had fallen into the basket of clothes waiting to be ironed or maybe the cat had caught the cord; the mother settling down on the sofa to feed the baby, the broken nights before; the next thing she knew, the smoke, the panic, and then the man appearing in front of them, like a dirty, coughing angel, holding out a hand. Kate looked at the photograph, the grateful mother, the police officer holding the child, looking handsome and ever so slightly embarrassed.

  And then she had looked up when she heard a cough, and there he was, in front of her, the man from the photograph, looking handsome and ever so slightly embarrassed.

  “I can’t wait for next week’s newspaper to come out,” he had said to Kate, then, leaning forward conspiratorially, added, “I am in so much trouble.”

  “Why?” she had asked.

  “I wasn’t really supposed to go in. It wasn’t safe. There are rules. You have to wait for the fire department. And my mother and my wife are giving me a lot of grief about it.”

  He had glanced over his shoulder to a couple of women standing a little distance away. It was obvious which was his mother; the other woman was in jeans and a navy jacket, thick brown hair being whisked around her face, pushed back, whisked around her face, pushed back. She was holding a dog under her arm; it looked as bored as Kate had felt until this lifesaver had showed up.

  “Well,” Kate had said, made bold by his bright eyes, the scent of limes that splashed toward her every time he moved. “I think you were very brave.”

  “Thank you,” he had said, and he’d grinned, and inside her head Kate had said, I wouldn’t give you a hard time if you were mine.

  Michael pick
ed up the ginger cake. “We brought them,” Kate explained. “We bring them back from France because they taste wonderful there, and we always forget that they’re not as good here. Somehow they don’t have the same flavor back in England.”

  “Don’t let my mother hear you say that,” Mike had said. “She thinks Throckton is the best place in the world.”

  “I’m going to Thailand, in September, to work on a turtle conservation program,” Kate blurted, then wished she hadn’t. Her attempt to sound interesting had come out like a schoolgirl showing off.

  But Michael had only looked at her, grinned again, and said, “Turtles, eh?” in a way that made them both laugh, and then he had given her a five-pound note and said, “Well, we don’t have any pumpkin jam at home, so here’s hoping.”

  And he had won the pumpkin jam, and the ginger cake, and she’d said, “Congratulations,” and he’d said, “Thank you. There’ll be a feast in our house tonight,” and she had watched him walk back to his family, touch the dog on its head and his wife in the small of her back, give the ginger cake to his mother and the jam to his wife, who pulled a face and said something that made them all laugh.

  And Kate had felt different. Queasy. As though the world was a different color now.

  Now

  “Am I in trouble?” Elizabeth asks when she comes in from her shift to find three solemn faces awaiting her. One day, she thinks, she will take a photograph of the three of them when they are like this, and show them exactly how obvious it is when they’re thinking that poor Elizabeth thinks she’s coping, but she’d barely be alive if it wasn’t for us. She pauses, takes a breath. No, she tells herself, no. Grief can make me sad and lonely. It does make me sad and lonely. That’s OK. But it will not make me bitter, or ugly, or unkind.