This Secret We're Keeping

by Rebecca Done

  Anna gave a short sigh. ‘Well, let’s just say if one more person advises me to “let fate take its course”, I shall be striking them over the head very forcefully with this bottle.’

  Jess smiled. ‘You, let fate take its course? Who are these people?’ Telling Anna to stop worrying was like telling a camel to stop stockpiling fluid. Some things were just down to DNA.

  ‘Do you remember Claire Bartlett, from school?’ Anna asked Jess, absent-mindedly constructing a mini-Jenga tower on her knee with the tangerine peel. ‘I bumped into her by the pool yesterday.’

  Jess attempted to recall. ‘I think so. Was she a goth?’

  ‘Ha! Not any more. She was doing Aqua Zumba in full make-up and a Boden tankini. Anyway, she couldn’t wait to tell me she’s had triplets.’

  ‘What’s a Boden tankini?’ Jess wondered, bemused.

  ‘Never mind. The point is, Claire said having the triplets was all down to yoga. She’d been trying to get pregnant for two years, then she started the yoga, and –’

  ‘Three came along at once?’

  ‘Yes! Apparently it’s all about opening and toning the pelvis, reducing stress and providing inner balance for a calm and detached mind. And cleansing the system, obviously. Hence the fruit and …’ She cast a slightly resentful glance the grape juice bottle. ‘Anyway, Claire put us in touch with her yoga teacher. She’s a fertility guru, and she’s only in Thornham, so we popped round last night for a chat.’

  ‘What’s she like?’ Jess asked, trying to pretend that she didn’t feel a niggle of suspicion towards anyone without a medical qualification declaring themselves to be a world authority on the inner mechanics of somebody else’s reproductive system.

  Anna made a little grimace that fell somewhere between excitement and trepidation. ‘Quite strict, actually. She gave us a list of rules.’

  ‘Rules?’

  Anna nodded. ‘Yep. Like – we can’t drink any alcohol at all, and we have to eat properly and take the yoga really seriously. And Simon’s got to do it all with me. She even made us sign a disclaimer.’

  ‘What’s she disclaiming?’ Jess asked, suddenly envisaging an ill-tempered female Buddha being fanned by servants with palm leaves as she beckoned desperate couples over one at a time to be assessed then slapped round the jowls with a yogic rule book.

  ‘Liability for us failing to get pregnant if we don’t follow the regime?’ Anna suggested with a shrug, like such a thing would be perfectly reasonable. ‘She is amazing, Jess. Even if she wasn’t already a fertility goddess, she has a body to die for.’

  ‘So have you,’ Jess pointed out. Anna was long-limbed and elegant, like a ballerina.

  ‘You should see Rasleen,’ Anna said meaningfully.

  Jess shaved a few stone off her imaginary Buddha. ‘Is she Indian?’

  Anna shook her head and frowned. ‘No, she’s from Clacton. Her real name’s Linda.’

  Jess suppressed a smile. ‘Oh.’

  ‘I don’t know, Jess. I’ve got to do something,’ Anna said desperately. ‘I can’t wait another eight months before they add us to the list for IVF. And Simon’s already drawn the line at going private.’

  Jess was personally of the opinion that Anna was already doing all she could. As she saw it, the monthly stress and expectation of trying for a baby was enough to drive anyone to stick their head in a vat of cut-price Merlot and stay there – yet Anna refused to allow herself any slack, punishing herself by agonizing over whether she’d ruined everything with that takeaway last Tuesday or the lager she’d indulged in two Saturdays ago.

  ‘You spend your whole life assuming that having babies is as simple as just having sex,’ Anna said wistfully, finally demolishing her little peel high-rise with a thumb. ‘God – just imagine if I’d got pregnant when we first started trying, like most people do. We’d have an actual baby by now. A son or a daughter. Or twins.’

  Jess caught her eye and they regarded one another for a few seconds. ‘Yeah,’ Jess whispered. ‘Imagine that.’

  Anna looked away, and a silence fell between them as they allowed themselves to be briefly submerged in the howls and clicks of North Pacific whale song.

  ‘Simon thinks Rasleen’s too expensive,’ Anna said eventually. ‘He keeps telling me I’m “bound” to fall pregnant, just because my stupid sisters are all super-fertile. He says I’m being too control-freakish about everything.’

  Though Anna’s two youngest sisters (she had three) were definitely not stupid, no one could deny that they were super-fertile – and to make matters worse, they’d both ended up having twins. Anna loved her nieces and nephews, but the sudden proliferation of young babies in the Baxter family meant that get-togethers and celebratory occasions were slowly turning into breeding grounds for unspoken resentments and frustration.

  ‘Do you think I’m a control freak?’ Anna asked Jess. Surrounded by the empty champagne flutes, an abundance of tangerine peel and a glow from the fish tank that could easily have passed as festive, Anna suddenly had an air of the Boxing Day blues about her.

  ‘Yes,’ Jess said firmly, ‘but that’s because you’re a Baxter female. Control-freakery runs in your blood.’ This was true, and (she’d recently discovered) the sole reason behind Anna’s father’s new shed, which he cryptically referred to as a ‘garden room’ and made routinely available for use by any male as an emergency bolthole during Baxter family gatherings.

  ‘Sorry I made you drink grape juice,’ Anna said eventually with a rueful smile.

  ‘No problem. Sorry I made you drink all that wine and champagne on Saturday. Don’t tell Linda.’

  Anna lifted an eyebrow. ‘Oh, I think we can lay the blame for that one firmly at Matthew Landley’s door.’

  There followed a pause that seemed oddly heavy.

  ‘Jess?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘About Matthew. I know you’ll end up going to his stupid party. Be careful, won’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Several seconds passed before Anna said quietly, ‘You know what I mean.’

  7

  Matthew

  Saturday, 27 November 1993

  It was high tide.

  I was renting a cottage just outside Holt at the time, a brick-and-flint end terrace which had come furnished, with space for the car. It wasn’t exactly cool – unless you were a particular fan of condemned 1970s gas fires and textured ceilings – but the landlord hadn’t yet cottoned on to the principle of economic inflation and he didn’t seem to care if his tenants stained the carpets either, both of which were plus points.

  Sometimes, I hung out with the other teachers at the weekends. They weren’t a bad crowd. We’d divide our hours of freedom fairly evenly between Josh’s Super Nintendo, drinking at Salthouse and games of five-aside in Fakenham.

  Hadley Hall’s home economics teacher, Sonia Laird, often came along to watch our football games, or to share a drink in the pub. I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, but Sonia had a boyfriend she’d been seeing on-and-off for five years.

  For someone who had a boyfriend, Sonia was incredibly flirtatious when she got pissed. She would sling one of her legs across my thigh, all eyelashes and lipstick, and purr, ‘So come on. How come a gorgeous guy like you doesn’t have a girlfriend?’

  I could never really think up a good answer to that.

  Sonia was big into fifties style – halterneck dresses that skimmed her knees, hair with bouncing curls she’d fashioned with enormous rollers and stunned into place with hairspray, lipstick so red it made her teeth look yellow – and when she was really pissed, she’d lean over and slur what I could only assume to be further seductions into my ear.

  I didn’t mind too much: listening to Sonia when she got like this rarely required me to do anything but nod and occasionally shift out from beneath her wandering hand, but I felt a bit sorry for her boyfriend.

  Looking back, she seemed so intent on me fancying her that it was almost inevitable we would
soon find ourselves alone together. If there was something she wanted, Sonia was as determined as bindweed.

  It had started out innocently enough on a Saturday night in Salthouse, where I’d arranged to meet Josh and Steve for a drink. But I was surprised to see on arriving at the pub that the only person at our usual table was a wide-eyed Sonia in a low-cut top, who straight away began fluttering and making out like bumping into me was the most outrageous coincidence.

  It soon became obvious that the others weren’t going to show, but Sonia – probably sensing my strong desire to flee – worked hard to convince me they were just running late. (They weren’t: Steve’s defence the following morning was that he’d been struck down by chronic food poisoning, with Josh claiming he’d been prevented from going anywhere by a sugar-beet lorry that had jackknifed at the end of his road. At first I thought the whole thing might have been a set-up, but Steve had lost almost a stone by the next time I saw him, and over a similar timescale Josh had become embroiled in a sort of bitter turf war with the sugar-beet farmer. Plus, I had never shown the slightest bit of interest in Sonia Laird, even when she was flinging her legs around, so what pleasure Steve and Josh might have hoped to derive from me continuing to show no interest, I couldn’t really imagine.)

  As soon as enough time had passed for my friends’ poor time-keeping to become implausible, Sonia changed tack by insisting that her boyfriend would be joining us shortly, and would I mind waiting until he got there? I was reluctant to just get up and walk out, leaving her on her own, but whenever I asked her what time he was likely to turn up, her response was to raise a finger to her lips and wink. Three rounds of that unnerved me enough to shut up about him, so for another hour or so I indulged her with some company and stilted conversation, which mostly consisted of Sonia laughing uproariously at everything I said.

  By nine o’clock, I decided to call time on our little tête-à-tête. This was partly because Sonia had started slurring her words and I could no longer be bothered to try and decipher what she was saying, and partly because I judged there still to be a small risk of her boyfriend showing up, and I didn’t really fancy the idea of him taking issue with all his girlfriend’s empty wine glasses and using them as weaponry.

  Sonia lived in a village halfway between Holt and Sheringham, so it made sense for us to share a taxi. So far, I hadn’t been paying too much attention to her repeated complaints that she was hungry, but I did as soon as our taxi driver pulled up outside the address she’d given me – which turned out to be a terraced house masquerading as a Lebanese restaurant – and attempted to charge me a tenner for the pleasure.

  At first I tried to stand my ground, but taxi drivers in the rural counties aren’t known for their equanimity, a reputation he was more than happy to uphold by immediately switching the meter back on. With Sonia still flirtatiously refusing to tell me her real address and the fare racking up, I had no choice but to take her inside for a quick salad, whereupon I hoped I could sober her up and possibly ask the owners if I could borrow their BT book so I could track down this nomadic boyfriend of hers and bribe him into taking her back.

  The restaurant was essentially a converted living room, and we were the only customers. An elderly woman gave us a bowl of withered olives to share that I hoped were complimentary, along with a side plate for spitting stones on to. I ended up ordering a lamb kebab on Sonia’s behalf and nothing for myself in the hope of hurrying things along, which turned out to be ironic because the food took so long to arrive that I was tempted to politely enquire if they were shipping it in across the Med. The wait had given Sonia more time too to get off her face on house wine and become staunchly resident in my personal space – but fortunately she’d also let slip that she lived opposite the church, so I asked for the bill before she’d even started eating and didn’t argue when she suggested we got out of there about ten minutes later.

  The whole disastrous evening culminated in Sonia threatening to be sick on the walk home before almost passing out in her own front garden. As tempting as it was to leave her there, I managed to haul her up and fit the door key into the lock for her, upon which she took advantage of the one-and-a-half seconds I was standing still to try and stick her tongue down my throat.

  When I finally made it back to the safety of my own cottage, I was greeted by a series of six fairly abusive answerphone messages, each one demanding with escalating outrage to know why I had resisted.

  After that, Sonia seemed determined to make me feel like I’d done something heinous by refusing to manhandle her on demand, so I resolved to try and avoid her as far as possible. I was wary of unwittingly giving her the wrong impression – as she’d informed me via my answerphone that I had done already – and of somehow finding myself held hostage in a restaurant again while she masticated olive stones. So if I got the heads-up that she was coming to the pub, or to watch us play football, I’d cancel at short notice. It was simply less complicated to spend an evening at home by myself with a Pot Noodle than be made to feel like failing to kiss her had been a crime akin to punching her in the face.

  That Saturday evening in November was one such occasion. Five of us had arranged to see a film in Norwich – sci-fi action starring Sly Stallone – but then Craig informed me that Sonia was coming, so I cancelled. I was pretty pissed off about that. It wasn’t as if I was a die-hard Sly fan or anything – unlike my slightly weird brother, Richard, who secretly believed he was Rocky in disguise and had spent much of our childhood petulantly begging our dad for boxing lessons – but still, I wanted to see the film. Even more irritating, I’d overheard Sonia earlier in the day saying she thought Hollywood action films were sexist claptrap appealing only to nerds who would never have the balls to throw a punch in real life. I was now regretting the missed opportunity to tell her there’d been a last-minute change of plans and we were meeting at the cinema in Lowestoft instead – or even better, Hull.

  The upshot of all this was that I would either have to go and see the film alone (loser) or take Richard along (ditto). I was fairly sure too that a viewing with Richard would come complete with some sort of skills-of-Sly running commentary, which wasn’t exactly the cinematic experience I had been hoping for. Sod it: I would just have to write tonight off and borrow the video from Richard in a few months’ time.

  I stretched out on my sofa (black leather and wipe-clean, it neatly fulfilled my landlord’s bad-taste criteria of being both ugly and practical), sank a beer and came up with a brief but satisfying revenge fantasy in which Sonia was caught in the back row of the cinema giving head to someone who wasn’t her boyfriend.

  The doorbell went at about eight. Over the past two hours I hadn’t really moved from my position on the sofa except to put on a Smiths tape and crack open some more beer – an unbeatable combination.

  I thought perhaps my elderly neighbour, Mrs Parker, was going to be on the other side of the door with an objection to music and an order for me to get out more (both conversations we’d had previously in some depth), but when I opened it I was surprised to see Jessica Hart, the girl from my maths club, standing in front of me.

  ‘Can I help?’ I said politely, which was pretty stupid. I knew who she was. Obviously the way to approach this wasn’t to pretend I thought she was a Girl Guide trying to recycle my tinfoil or sell me strange flavours of home-made jam, or whatever it was they did.

  ‘Mr Landley, it’s me – Jess.’ She laughed slightly nervously and pushed a glossy sheath of straight blonde hair back over her shoulder. ‘Don’t you recognize me out of school uniform?’

  I slapped a hand to my forehead. ‘Oh, Jess. Sorry.’ I realized then that I had a beer in my other hand. Inappropriate. ‘You caught me …’ I floundered for a cool activity I could be in the middle of. No teacher wants to be unmasked as a loner or a nerd, however close to the bone that might be. I wished then that I’d spied something interesting to pick up en route to answering the door, but the only prop I had was the beer can, so I raised it lame
ly. ‘I’m a bit busy.’

  She peered past me then, presumably to try and spot all the trendy people I was doing my drinking with. I shifted sideways to block her view, then cleared my throat. ‘So, er, Jess – what can I do for you?’ Had I not been a beer-and-a-half down, I might have told her straight away she could catch me on Monday if she needed to ask me anything, and shut the door firmly in her face. But instead I just stood there, the beer can dangling at my side, waiting for her answer.

  To my surprise, she fished around in her bag and produced her battered old maths textbook, flicked to a page marked with a piece of folded notepaper and pointed to it. ‘I know I’m probably being really stupid, but I just don’t get why x equals …’

  At that moment I was distracted by a passing car and a young female face staring out of the passenger window. It looked a bit like my star pupil, Laura Marks, watching me with my beer and the girl from my maths class.

  I took a sideways glance at the street. There were probably people peering at us from behind their living-room curtains at this very moment. I needed to take this inside, not conduct it out on my doorstep for everyone to gawp at.

  ‘Come in,’ I said gruffly, promising myself I would quickly tell her what x equalled and then show her out – possibly through the back garden, just to be on the safe side.

  She followed me into the living room, where I gestured for her to sit down on the sofa. It occurred to me that her weekend clothes – jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt – made her appear older than she did at school.

  Her eyes met mine then, which was the part where one of us was supposed to establish exactly what she was doing in my living room on a Saturday night. I had been expecting her to be completely self-assured, entirely unfazed by the fact that she was here – but now that we were looking at one another, she actually appeared slightly hesitant, as if someone had just dropped her off and she’d never met me before in her life.