The Dangers of Family Secrets: From the bestselling author of The Ex-Wife’s Survival Guide

by Debby Holt

  When she finished, Miss Diamond proceeded, in her quiet, gentle voice, to demolish entirely the medical technique that Anna had set out. ‘I wonder, Dr Cameron,’ she concluded, ‘if you are sure this is where you want to be.’

  If this was a film, possibly one starring Kristen Wiig – Anna would love to be played by Kristen Wiig – Anna would respond with a scathing, ‘What do you think, Miss Diamond?’ She would turn on her heel and stride out of the hospital, backed by the awestruck, if silent, respect of her peers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a film, Anna wanted to keep her job, and Miss Diamond held all the aces.

  It was possible that Miss Diamond genuinely thought Anna was a hopeless, ignorant, misguided and potentially dangerous doctor. It was also possible that within Miss Diamond’s sylph-like body, there existed the corrosive soul of a bully who sought out potential victims and tried to reduce them to gibbering wrecks. On balance, Anna was inclined to believe the second hypothesis was the correct one.

  Fortunately, her timetable left little time for self-pity, however justified it might be. As she hurried along the corridor, she caught sight of William Niarchos, her good friend and true confidant.

  ‘I’m off at five,’ he called out. ‘Do you fancy seeing the new X-Men film?’

  She had only time to nod before speeding on to her destination. Just the thought of recounting Miss Diamond’s latest put-down helped to lessen its poison.

  At the gynaecology outpatient clinic, she attended to patients with menstrual disorders, utero-vaginal prolapses and stress incontinence, all of which helped to put her problems with her consultant into some sort of perspective. In the afternoon, stopping only to have a leathery sandwich, she made her way to the maternity ward.

  The visitors’ hour was coming to a close when she arrived. She exchanged notes at the desk with Andrea Arnold, the specialist nurse, and watched the usual procession of shell-shocked young fathers and overexcited new grandparents file out through the doors. Then her eyes focused on a man in denim jeans and a red and green checked shirt.

  She hadn’t seen Patrick for fourteen years but she recognised him at once. There were some people whose good looks made them permanently memorable. In Patrick’s case, ash-blond hair, dark eyebrows and eyelashes, along with perfect bone structure, ensured his inclusion in this tiny elite.

  ‘Patrick?’ she said.

  ‘That’s me.’ He stared back at her, his demeanour expressing surprise at being accosted by a strange doctor. His eyes hovered over her hospital ID badge and then widened with disbelief. ‘Anna? Anna Cameron! Is it really you? I don’t believe it!’ He reached for her hand and shook it vigorously with both of his. ‘After all this time! You look so different. You’ve got short hair and you’re…’

  ‘Slimmer? I hope I’m slimmer. You look exactly

  the same.’

  ‘How long is it since…? It must be at least fifteen years.’

  ‘It’s fourteen. Not that I’ve been counting.’ She laughed and he grinned back at her with no hint of awkwardness or embarrassment. He was genuinely delighted to see her. She wondered if he’d forgotten the circumstances of their last meeting. It was fourteen years ago. She said briskly, ‘I must get on. Do give my regards to your parents.’ She put a hand to her forehead and nodded towards the new mothers in the ward. ‘Oh Lord, I’m sorry, I didn’t think. Presumably, I should be congratulating you…’

  ‘What? Oh I see… No, I’ve been visiting a friend. Look, this is ridiculous. You can’t just walk away.’ He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a card. ‘We have so much to talk about. Are you working next weekend? Can you come over to lunch? Where do you live?’

  ‘I have a flat in Deptford. But I’m afraid I will be working.’

  ‘This is so weird! We’re virtually neighbours. You have to come round. What about the weekend after? Come to lunch. I’ll introduce you to Fizz and Lola.’ He scribbled a few words on the back of his card and kissed her cheek before handing it to her. His skin smelt of wood-shavings. ‘It is so amazing to see you! And you look… you look fantastic!’ He gave her a final smile. She restrained herself – with difficulty – from staring at him as he left.

  A rather less attractive smell of well-worn scrubs heralded the close proximity of Andrea Arnold.

  ‘Well,’ Andrea said, ‘he’s very easy on the eye.’

  ‘He’s quite beautiful, isn’t he? We were at school together. I haven’t seen him in years.’

  The last time she’d seen him she was thirteen. Thirteen! It seemed like a lifetime ago. She couldn’t resist looking at his card. The words Furniture Repairs and Fine Upholstery were emblazoned in red. There was a phone number and a business address in Blackheath. His parents had had an upholstery business in Wimbledon. Perhaps they’d moved it to Blackheath or perhaps Patrick had set up on his own. At school, everyone, including Patrick, had assumed he’d become an actor.

  Anna turned the card over and noted a Lewisham address he’d written for her. He was almost a neighbour. He certainly only lived a short bus ride away. She wondered who Fizz and Lola might be. They could be flatmates or a wife and daughter. They could be cats or dogs. Patrick had always liked dogs. She hoped they were dogs.

  She finished at five and breathed a sigh of relief. It had been a long, long day and if she was sensible she would probably go home and have an early night. But the X-Men film would help to exorcise the most recent memory of Miss Diamond and, if that didn’t work, William was the perfect friend for the situation. He rarely allowed himself to be upset by scathing superiors. When a senior doctor once threw his stethoscope at him, William simply assumed he was having problems at home. (In fact he’d been right on that occasion. The doctor had apologised to him the following morning and confessed that his daughter had recently announced her engagement to a very unpleasant boyfriend.)

  They both enjoyed the film. Afterwards, she and William sat in a pizza place, united by a mutual adoration of Jennifer Lawrence, while disagreeing about the charms of James McAvoy. They had an interesting conversation about the strange alchemy of charisma which reminded her of Patrick. She told William about their meeting.

  ‘I was in the maternity ward and I bumped into him. He was my first boyfriend. I haven’t seen him since I was thirteen. He hasn’t changed at all.’

  ‘He looks like he’s thirteen still?’

  ‘No, stupid, I mean he’s as beautiful as he always was. He’s asked me to lunch. He wants to introduce me to Fizz and Lola. Do you think they’re his wife and daughter?’

  ‘They could be dogs.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. They sound like dogs.’

  ‘They sound like lapdogs. If they are, he’s probably gay.’

  ‘Trust me, William, Patrick isn’t gay.’

  ‘My first girlfriend found me through Facebook last year,’ William said. ‘We went for a drink. It didn’t end well.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She wanted to tell me why she broke up with me. We were both thirteen too. She said she watched me dancing with a girl and saw me stroke the girl’s bottom.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I have no idea. Who can remember what happened fourteen years ago?’

  Anna could. Anna remembered everything: the excitement and passion of first love; the fury she’d felt towards her mother; the despair when they moved to Darrowbridge; and, with a sudden ray of clarity, the fact that at thirteen she had stopped liking herself.

  William had been finishing the remains of her pizza. He hated waste. ‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘I’m on at seven tomorrow.’

  Anna could picture him as a thirteen-year-old, with the same untidy dark curls and wicked grin. She bet he had stroked that girl’s bottom. ‘William,’ she said, ‘do you think it’s unhealthy to dwell on the past?’

  William wiped his hands with his paper napkin and downed the last of his wine. He gave the question some thought before pushing back his chair and putting on his jacket. ‘Only,’ he said
, ‘if it makes you fall in love with a man who has lapdogs.’

  Freya did wonder, at first, if Felix had succumbed to one of his depressions. The first of them occurred fourteen years ago, a month after they moved to Darrowbridge. Felix described it as a mental migraine and, when Freya said she didn’t understand, he said he didn’t either. It had lasted three days. He continued to go to work but each evening he came home late and then took off on his bike for a couple of hours. At night he retired to the spare room because he claimed he slept fitfully and didn’t want to keep Freya awake. That first time, Freya had been bewildered and alarmed by the change in Felix. After it was over, he apologised, blamed stresses at work and assured her it would never happen again.

  Freya had her own theory. She suspected he missed his London colleagues and felt guilty about dragging his reluctant family down to Somerset. In the circumstances, he would find it difficult to confess he’d made a mistake.

  In fact, Cameron &West Financial Services soon began to flourish as Felix collected a loyal team around him. Yet the ‘sessions’, as he came to call them, continued to recur once or twice a year. Felix didn’t like talking about them and neither did Freya. The fact that her devoted husband could, if only sporadically, metamorphose into an aloof individual who barely noticed her was a frightening reminder that one could never take security for granted. As a child, Freya had grown up with this knowledge but ever since she’d met Felix she’d done her best to forget it.

  This time, she wasn’t even sure he was depressed. He didn’t go for long bike rides or retreat into silence. He came home from the office and chatted to Freya while she cooked their supper. He expressed interest in her caseloads and… That was it, she thought, he expressed interest. He was polite in the same way that Anna was polite on her fortnightly calls. Surely, it wasn’t right for a man to be polite to his wife? She had had to accept the formality of her relationship with Anna, but Felix was a different matter.

  Possibly, she was imagining all this. She was fifty-three, an age that was invariably tricky for women. She wasn’t sure it was particularly healthy to hope she was physiologically unstable or at least unstable enough to conjure up problems where none existed. But it was far easier to have concerns about herself than to have concerns about Felix.

  In the meantime, she had work to do. On Monday, she drove down to Dorset in her canary-coloured Beetle – a best-ever present from Felix on her fiftieth birthday. A client – Henry Riley – had commissioned her to explore his family’s history as a surprise for his father’s seventy-fifth birthday in the autumn. It was the sort of assignment Freya loved: a generous amount of time in which to collect and collate information, and a specific geographic location that wasn’t too far away. None of the Rileys had ventured far beyond the south-west of the country.

  At midday she stood in an overgrown churchyard in a tiny Dorset village, looking down at the gravestone of Henry Riley’s three times great-grandmother. Freya knelt down to brush aside the cow parsley before taking a photograph. On the gravestone was written Mary Riley, aged 32, wife of Samuel Riley. So far, so expected. Underneath these words there were more: Also Martin Riley, aged 8 and Edward Riley aged 8.

  This was strange. Freya knew that Mary had a son called James. He was a direct ancestor of her client. Until now she’d known nothing of any other children. The fact that Mary and her twins died in the same year seemed to indicate that they’d fallen victim to one of the many infectious diseases that plagued society before the advent of penicillin and a national health service. But why was there no mention of twins on any of the documents she had read? It was a mystery and Freya loved mysteries.

  On Tuesday, she cancelled her hair appointment and drove to Taunton to examine the Register of Burials. It was here that she unearthed one of those rare discoveries that made her job so enthralling. She found the names of Mary and her twin sons. Next to the name Mary Jane Riley the vicar had inserted in brackets ‘suicide after murder’. And then, underneath, next to the names of Edward and Martin, he had added ‘murdered by the above’.

  Freya felt a little giddy. In her imagination she had visualised Mary and her small sons gently fading away together. Now, Mary was a child killer. Why? She had brought up her older son, James, who was eighteen when she died. There was no documentary evidence of maternal mistreatment.

  It seemed to Freya that Henry Riley might soon come to regret his choice of birthday gift for his father. Freya had already discovered that the grandson of Mary’s oldest son had gone to prison for a year after killing someone in a fight. But then, no one was exempt from bad impulses or errors of judgement. As Freya often said, every family had its secrets.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On Tess’s last full day in Scotland, she treated herself to a trip to Abbotsford. The walled garden was as beautiful as ever, its wide herbaceous borders a profusion of pastel colours. She walked down to the river and felt the peace steal over her. Sunlight scudded across the water, illuminating trailing ribbons of greenery and shiny black pebbles below the surface. She turned and let her eyes travel across the lawn, up the steep bank and along the formal terrace, before settling on the vast, sprawling house that, with its towers and turrets and gables, was the ultimate embodiment of Sir Walter Scott’s romantic vision.

  Grandma had brought her here six years ago. It was while gazing at a marble bust of the great writer that Tess had been smitten. He looked so approachable: a sense of warmth and kindness and humour seemed to emanate from his eyes. A sketch of him in the house endorsed her first impression. He held a walking stick at a jaunty angle and had a scarf tied a little untidily round his neck. Were he to come to life, Tess could imagine him saying to her: How very nice to meet you! Do tell me what you are thinking.

  Tess could not remember her state of mind on that afternoon. She suspected she’d been preoccupied with her personal failings. She’d spent far too much time at university dwelling on this topic. How she managed to make any friends was a mystery.

  She still didn’t quite understand what had happened to her on that first visit. She and Grandma had returned to the Commune and, over supper, Tess had talked hesitantly at first and then with gathering enthusiasm about Sir Walter. Doctor Knox, still mourning the loss of his wife, had risen abruptly from his chair and left the room, causing the other residents to cast worried glances at the open door. A few minutes later, he’d returned with a well-thumbed copy of Waverley.

  ‘Start with this,’ he’d said. ‘Let me know what you think.’

  Everything had followed on from that. Tess had arrived at the Commune as a dejected, self-absorbed streak of misery and left it as an eager student who knew exactly what she wanted to do. And now, six years later, here she was, a fully fledged academic armed with a first-class degree, a teaching post at a good university in London and well on her way to finishing a PhD on the lasting legacy of Sir Walter Scott. These days, she felt quite at home when she walked through the entrance hall with its suits of armour and relics from Waterloo, its armoury stuffed with swords and guns, including Rob Roy’s very own pistol. Sir Walter had been an avid collector of historical paraphernalia and he also loved spending money, a weakness that would cost him dearly in the last years of his life.

  Each time she entered the rose-coloured dining room she remembered it was here that he died while listening to the sound of the River Tweed outside. In the drawing room, there was a painting of Sir Walter with his dogs. One of them stared longingly up at him and Tess knew just how he felt.

  She checked her watch and hastily pulled her car keys from her pocket. It was time to return to the Commune and get ready for the party. Three of the inmates were going and all of them were sticklers for punctuality. Tess drove back along the narrow roads as fast as she dared. Arriving at the house, she raced up the wide staircase, clutching her anorak in her arms.

  Twenty minutes later, she walked down the stairs in her black dress. She could hear laughter coming from the kitchen and went through to find Shei
la and Linda chopping vegetables at the table while Derek stood, rolling pastry.

  ‘Hi, Tess.’ Sheila smiled up at her. ‘We’re making a mushroom quiche for the three of us. Derek, show Tess your pastry!’

  ‘I don’t know why they find it so funny,’ Derek said. He held up a vast thin circle of pastry for Tess’s inspection. ‘I think it looks rather good.’

  ‘Derek,’ Sheila said, ‘it’s just for the three of us!’

  As she and Linda started laughing again, Tess kissed Derek’s cheek and said, ‘It looks very professional. If there’s any left over, I’ll eat it later!’ She hastened through to the hall and found Grandma, Doctor Knox and her great-aunt waiting for her.

  Doctor Knox wore a tartan tie with his tweed suit. Grandma’s short figure was well served by the brown velvet dress she always wore to parties. Great-aunt Katherine, her short grey hair newly permed for the occasion, wore a long black skirt and a silk shirt, its material festooned with purple flowers. She cast a meaningful glance at the grandfather clock. ‘We should go right away. It’s a long way to Kelso.’

  ‘It’s half an hour,’ Grandma protested. ‘And we don’t want to be the first to arrive.’ She smiled at Tess. ‘You look lovely, darling. I’m so glad you’re coming with us. Robert has something exciting to tell you.’

  ‘I do,’ Doctor Knox said, ‘but let’s get going first.’

  In fact, most of the journey was taken up by Grandma’s discovery that they had left their hostess’s birthday present behind. Doctor Knox was happy to turn round but Great-aunt Katherine wouldn’t hear of it, arguing that it was better to be punctual and present-less than to be late with a gift, particularly as the gift was a nondescript scarf. Since Grandma had chosen it, a heated altercation between the sisters-in-law ensued and was only terminated by Doctor Knox’s timely reminder that he had news for Tess.