The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  E

  Between

  November had always been a hard month for Michael. Midmonth saw the anniversary of the day when, at the age of nine, he had come home from school to find his mother refusing to let him into the living room where his father had collapsed of a heart attack. Michael could remember, still, the sight of the boots, the table turned over, that he’d glimpsed through the doorway and then immediately wished he hadn’t. Patricia had screamed at him—up until then, she’d been the woman he’d never known to raise her voice—screamed at him to wait outside for the ambulance so that it would know where to go.

  In the first few years after his father’s death, Remembrance Day came to mark the beginning of his mother being withdrawn and silent, which was horrible, except when she was weeping, which was worse. They always put the Christmas tree up on the weekend before Christmas, the two of them dragging it valiantly home on a tarpaulin because they didn’t have a car and Patricia refused to pay to have it delivered, and that was the beginning of the return to normality. Michael would put the star on top; Patricia would switch on the lights and step back and say, “Your father loved Christmas. He used to say that if you couldn’t enjoy Christmas then there must be something wrong with you,” and that was their permission to smile again.

  Even more than a quarter of a century later, Michael still felt the anniversary squatting like a hungry demon in the middle of the month. Although his mother claimed to be pragmatic, she always became gaunt and quiet and looked at her son with tears in her eyes.

  Elizabeth, who had made a point of refusing to mark the anniversary of her mother’s death—“It was spring,” was all she would ever say; “there were lambs when we moved to the farm”—had never understood quite how important, how pervasive, this time was for Mike and Patricia. She was preoccupied anyway with remembering what the damp and dark of an English winter was like: remembering, it seemed to her husband, as thoroughly and willfully as she had forgotten it through summer and early autumn.

  Without having noticed that he was doing it, Michael had brought his lackluster November mood to his time with Kate. Meeting her, during faked overtime, at the waterside, kissing her and listening to her, appearing by her side as she walked home from a shift at the restaurant, spending, if anything, more time than he had yet with her, he was nevertheless vague, unavailable.

  Kate had had a lot of theories about this; she had kept Bella posted ever since her time in Paris with her friend. They spent late nights and long afternoons messaging each other about it. The only thing Kate wouldn’t say was who it was. “No one you know,” she would type. “Older, involved, that’s all you need to know. And that it’s love.” On good days, she was sure that he was brooding over how much he loved her and how he wanted to be with her. “Has he said he loves you?” Bella, with all of her newfound Parisian wisdom, had asked, and Kate had replied, “No, but he sees me twice a week, sometimes. If people found out he’d never hear the end of it.” “Maybe that’s what he’s thinking about,” Bella had said.

  On the grayer days—the days when he had said almost nothing, held her hips too tightly, kept his eyes closed, nodded a good-bye—Kate had wondered whether this was the beginning of the end. But that was unthinkable. They seemed bound so tightly together. Each body had learned the geography and geometry of the other; the thought that their hearts might not understand so well had made no sense to Kate.

  In the end, she decided that this was just the place in their relationship when they were getting into a routine. She had thought about tiredness, coldness, stress at work: all of the things that were masked in the early days, but showed through sooner or later, like a scuffed heel painted over with nail polish. She had tried to make things more comfortable, bringing blankets, a hot water bottle, whiskey pilfered from her father’s hoard, making a nest with them. Bella had suggested that she try making things “more exciting,” and so, late one afternoon as the gloaming was beginning, she’d asked, snaking a finger down the middle of his chest in a way she considered unmistakable, if there was anything he’d like to do. Mike, lying on his back with his hands behind his head and his eyes closed, had said, “Have a really good night’s sleep.”

  And Kate, her need to keep from showing her disappointment distracting her from watching her tongue, had said, “When you come to stay with me in Oxford we can lie in.” Michael affects not to hear, but there’s a moment when his body tenses, and her body feels it.

  “All I meant,” she says, “is that when I’m at Oxford, if you were to come to stay, we would have a bed to sleep in.”

  In her mind, the room was furnished in much greater detail. Wooden furniture. A desk under a mullioned window. A framed photograph of the two of them on the sill. A drawer where Mike could leave some clothes so he didn’t have to bring a big bag every time. A bottle of wine on the floor, a plan for dinner later, and then maybe a drink with friends who accepted them as a couple and thought nothing of the two of them being together.

  When Michael gets home, Patricia is sitting in the kitchen, granite faced, while Elizabeth looks up from slicing carrots to smile brightly at him.

  “You hadn’t gotten back to your mum about what you wanted to do tonight, so she’s brought a pie around, and we thought we could all eat here.”

  Patricia adds, “I called the station and they said you’d finished work for the day. I went to your father’s grave but you weren’t there.”

  “I went for a run,” Michael had said. “I hadn’t forgotten that the anniversary was today.” It had seemed an easier lie than, I’ve thought of little except my father and what he would think of me over the last couple of weeks, but all of my days and nights seem to be running into one, so I truly don’t know what day it is most of the time. “I thought I’d rung you, Mum.”

  Elizabeth had chipped in, “He’s always like this the week after night shift.”

  He had kissed his mother, who had said, “You smell as though you’ve been dragged through a hedge,” and his wife, who had whispered, “I’m on your side,” and then he’d gone upstairs to have a shower and he had stood under too-hot water, scrubbing himself too hard, until he felt something close to clean.

  That night, curled around Elizabeth, he slept without moving, his arm heavy across her waist. He slept the sleep of a man coming out of the other side of a fever.

  The next day, he had arranged to meet Kate, and he held her hand, and he looked straight at her, and he had said, “I’m sorry, Kate, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t see you. I never should have started this. It has to end.”

  She had been quiet for a long time, watching their hands as though there was something secret, or maybe sacred, in the places where their skin touched.

  And then she had taken a deep breath, and he had braced himself, but all she’d said was, “I promised you I wouldn’t tell anyone about us, and I won’t.”

  Mike had opened his mouth to reply, but she’d pulled her hand from his then, and said, in a voice that belonged to someone younger, more afraid than she had ever shown herself to be, “Please don’t say any more. Please don’t try to make it better.”

  And she’d walked away. And Mike hadn’t known whether she looked back or not, because his head was in his hands as he sat, overwhelmed by relief, sure that in his wife and his work he had everything he needed, after all.

  Mike,

  I have questions for me too. Why couldn’t I tell? Why didn’t I know? What did I miss? What did I forget to do for you, show you, tell you that meant it was OK for you to do this to me? Why can she be pregnant and not me? How can I go on, not knowing the answers?

  I was your wife. Your wife, Mike. We didn’t have any children. We were everything to each other. And yet.

  I’m staying in my room. I hear Mel and Blake and Andy talking. Sometimes I go down and make tea when they’re all there, because it makes them stop talking about me, because if I think I can
show them that I can walk and talk and drink—I can’t eat, everything makes me sick—they might just let me be.

  Andy told me that if I’m not coping we can try “other approaches.” I said, “Andy, right now, I just feel like lying down and dying. Can you blame me?” “No, not really,” he said.

  I still hate you.

  E

  Now

  Patricia has had the briefest of briefings from Blake.

  “Kate has been to see Elizabeth, and it’s all out in the open.” Patricia, mostly relieved, had said that that was good.

  “Yes,” Blake had replied, in a tone in direct odds to the word, “but I’d give her a bit of space for a while if I were you, Patricia. She’s not really coming out of her room.”

  So Patricia has busied herself with other things. Matinee jackets, mostly, although she has bought the ingredients to make a cake for Elizabeth’s birthday too. Nothing too celebratory, just the chocolate cake that she likes. Just so she knows that Patricia won’t forget her.

  After the hairdresser, she goes to see Kate, who answers the door with a smile that makes Patricia overlook, for a minute, that this girl is difficult, this relationship is difficult, that the baby means that she’s going to have a lot of sideways looks and awkward questions for a while. Kate’s wearing a T-shirt, stretched tight: they don’t hide their pregnancies the way they used to.

  “Come in,” she says. “Mum and I have just been finishing Kayla’s room.”

  Rufus rises when Patricia enters, and although he shakes her hand, his eyes are cold.

  “I didn’t know you were coming,” he says, “but I’m very often the last to know anything in this house.” Patricia is still trying to formulate a reply when he excuses himself and goes out.

  “Ignore him,” Richenda says. “He’s not adapting very well.”

  “It’s not easy,” Patricia concedes, remembering the last time she was here, the tears and the panic. Kate looks bigger, more tired, but happier too. “How are you? How is the baby?”

  “I’m fine,” Kate says. “Fat, but fine. And the baby—we’re going to have a checkup and a scan the day after tomorrow. At the hospital.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yes.” Kate stops, rubs her belly, a clockwise motion, looks down as though her body will speak to her. “I just keep thinking, well, the first scan was fine, and everything she’s doing is everything the books say she should be doing, kicking and elbowing and hiccupping. So. I think it will be all right.” She looks to her mother, to Patricia, for confirmation.

  It’s on the tip of Patricia’s tongue to say, that’s because you want it to be all right. She remembers her own days of carrying Michael, when there was nothing to go on but the look on the midwife’s face as she wielded her tape measure and used an ear trumpet to listen for a heartbeat. “Things have come a long way in nearly forty years,” she says instead.

  Kate looks a little shy as she asks, “Would you like me to ring you and let you know what they say?”

  “Yes.” Patricia nods. “Yes, please.” And then she passes a bag that she’s brought to Kate.

  Kate takes out jackets, hats, bonnets, bootees, in pinks, peaches, purples, white. She holds each garment up to the light.

  “Did you make these?” she asks.

  “Yes,” Patricia says.

  “We’ve only got onesies,” Kate says, “but these are so pretty. Vintage.”

  Patricia and Richenda look at each other, smile.

  “I’m glad you like them,” Patricia says. She looks away so that she can hide her face, her feelings, for a moment. She remembers talking to Elizabeth, cautiously, about babies, and Elizabeth saying, tightly, “I’m not sure babies are going to be our thing, Patricia. I wouldn’t get your knitting needles out just yet.”

  “But they’re so tiny,” Kate says.

  “Some of them will probably be too big,” Richenda says.

  Kate looks at her stomach and says, “Whatever’s in here is huge, Mum.”

  And then this disparate almost-family makes its way upstairs to take a look at the nursery. On the door, wooden letters spell out KAYLA, and Patricia looks at the word and thinks, Well, I think perhaps I can learn to live with that, after all. Kate sees her looking and says, “I haven’t decided on a middle name yet.”

  The room is peach, with cream curtains. It’s pale, plain, beautiful. There’s a rocking chair in the corner, a chest of drawers, a crib. It’s all ready, except that there’s a framed Beatles poster propped against the wall, unhung. It seems an odd choice to Patricia. who is planning a trip to Marsham to buy a sampler kit this weekend. Richenda catches her look.

  “This was in here when it was the spare room,” she says. “Kate thinks she might keep it in here.”

  Patricia says, “When I was born, my parents put me in a drawer filled with blankets to sleep. That’s what it was like for them. You might not feel it, but you’re very lucky.”

  Kate says, “Mum’s been brilliant. I’m going to stay here for the first year, and we’re going to see how it goes. And so long as Kayla is all right, I’ll think I’m the luckiest person there’s ever been.” Then, made bold by Patricia’s first unguarded smile, asks, “Where did Mike sleep? When he was a baby?”

  “Oh, his dad made him a cradle,” Patricia says, thinking how only this girl and Elizabeth have ever been allowed to shorten his name to Mike. “His dad was good with his hands. I kept it next to my side of the bed. You can have it, if you want it. If you’re not putting her straight into the crib.”

  “Really?” Kate says, as though Patricia has just offered her the very earth and skies.

  “That’s very kind,” Richenda adds.

  “Of course,” Patricia says. “No one else is going to use it.” And then she remembers that Michael was the one who always went up into the attic when she needed anything. She doesn’t know how she’ll get it down. She’ll have to ask Blake, or Andy, or the neighbor’s son she doesn’t much like, for help. And her loss crushes her, quietly, again, the way it finds a thousand tiny quiet ways to crush her every day.

  “Do you want to go and make some tea, Kate?” says Richenda, who has been watching everything with a cat’s attention. And Kate does, and brings it to Patricia, who’s grateful for it, even though it’s in a mug. But, she thinks, that’s the young for you.

  Mike,

  I’ve worked out that I need to have twenty minutes of sensible conversation with Mel and ten with either Blake or Andy every day to keep them from doing anything more than look worried.

  But I can’t sleep and I can’t eat and I feel weirder and weirder with every day. The days are merging because I’m not opening the curtains and I’m not getting dressed. My mind is working overtime. I keep thinking about things. Stupid things. Like, you can’t call a baby Michaela Micklethwaite but if you were wanting to get a Michael in there you could call it Kayla. (Mel told me about the name. She thinks it’s stupid. So do I. More importantly, I think you would have thought it was stupid, you with your endless suggestions of Camellia, Daisy, Poppy.)

  And then, there’s Beatle. I asked Blake how it’s spelled, and he said, like the band. So now I’m thinking, Pepper. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But she’s too young to know about the Beatles and you didn’t like them, so I suppose that, at least, is a coincidence. A paranoid coincidence. That’s what happens when you think too much, when your brain churns and churns around the same horrible, muddy, stony, uphill loop. When you can’t talk to the person you need to talk to, even though you can’t bear the thought of seeing their face. Even though, at the same time, you want nothing more in the world than to see their face again.

  Tomorrow is my birthday. I used to love how much we made of birthdays. On the first of my birthdays when we were together, I was in Australia still, and you sent flowers in the morning, which I thought was sweet, and then you t
urned up in the afternoon, which I thought was a kind of madness, especially when most of my birthdays growing up had been a new bell for my bike and a joint party with Mel, and so I’d never bothered much. I remember saying to you, “You’ve set the bar high now,” and you said, “There’s no day more important than the day you arrived in the world.” And so one of our traditions was made. I suppose it would have changed, if we’d had a baby’s birthday to celebrate.

  Last year, when you took me to Venice, I thought it was because you adored me, but it turns out you were just making it up to me for something I hadn’t found out about yet. Love in the bank. Well, it doesn’t work like that.

  This year my birthday is all down to me and I can do what I like so what I am going to do is this. I am going to bed in a minute, and I’m going to take a couple of sleeping pills and wash them down with a whiskey. Every time I wake up, I’ll do the same thing again. Just until my birthday’s over.

  E

  Andy arrives at eleven on Elizabeth’s birthday with flowers. Friendly flowers, muted flowers. Mel takes one look at them and asks, “Have you been talking to Rufus Micklethwaite?”

  “Lucy chose them.” Andy is looking for Elizabeth, with the expression of hope and trepidation that Mel feels is a reflection of the way her own face looks most of the time.

  “Nothing. She hasn’t woken up yet. I took some tea up at ten, but she was dead to the world.”

  “Probably best,” Andy says. “I’ll come back this afternoon on my way home. I’m concerned by how much she’s sleeping, though.”

  Mel shrugs. “She’s been like this since Kate came around with her I’m-coming-to-fuck-you-tonight text messages from beyond the grave.”

  “Tough times,” Andy says. “I’ll see you at about three.”

  Mel nods.

  • • •

  Three is when Elizabeth surfaces again. There’s a mug of tea, cold, by her bed, but she thinks it’s different from the one that was there earlier, when she took her last lot of pills. She wonders whether she can face at least a bit of the day.