This Secret We're Keeping

by Rebecca Done

  Jess frowned. ‘No, I mean … I’m not with Will, Anna. It was a one-off. I told you that.’

  Still, she had cancelled on Zak yesterday. She’d been supposed to travel down to London in the afternoon, but had called him in the morning to tell him she had the flu.

  ‘In the height of summer?’ Anna ventured, with a level of disbelief that was verging on amusement.

  Fortunately, Zak hadn’t seemed to be suspicious, which in a way had made it all seem worse. ‘I know. I’m not proud of myself. I know I’m no better than bloody Octavia.’

  Anna’s face dropped. ‘Exactly. If he finds out you’re lying, he’ll completely lose his shit.’ She enunciated the last three words very deliberately. ‘You know what he’s like about stuff like that.’

  Jess frowned. ‘I know.’

  ‘Shall I tell you what I thought the other night, when I saw Matthew?’

  Jess shrugged, because she wasn’t anticipating a compliment.

  ‘I thought … he doesn’t suit you.’

  Jess made a face. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jess. He looks … old.’

  He still looks twenty-five to me. ‘Er, Will’s only a year older than Simon,’ Jess pointed out. ‘There’s nine years between you two – or did you forget that?’

  Anna rolled her eyes against the discrepancy. ‘Me and Simon met as adults.’

  ‘The age gap’s still the same.’

  ‘Oh, no moral difference?’

  Jess paused. ‘Well, yes – if you happen to be the CPS.’

  Anna almost spoke over her. ‘Look, the long and short of it is, you need to choose between them, Jess. Will, or Zak.’

  ‘It’s not about choosing, Anna. I’m not with Will. If he left his family for me … there’s a massive risk he’d never see his daughter again. And I don’t want that for him.’

  ‘So, what – you’re just going to see each other on the side?’ Anna let the question hang, but Jess got the feeling she would probably have liked to add, Nice – and who are you turning into, by the way?

  She drew a steadying breath. ‘No, I’m not. I know I need to stop it.’ She’d not felt able to admit it to herself before now.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Anna agreed. ‘And never mind him leaving his family for you – there’s a good chance Natalie could beat you both to it. She’s probably not as stupid as you think, you know.’

  ‘I never said she was stupid.’

  ‘You just need to sort things out with Zak and never see Will again,’ Anna pressed, a quick refresh on society’s moral codes. ‘He ruined your life the first time round, Jess. Please don’t let him do the same thing again.’

  He didn’t ruin my life. Matthew was the best thing that ever happened to me.

  But Anna wasn’t letting up. ‘You need to think about how much you’re prepared to throw away for the sake of Matthew Landley. You do this –’ she paused – ‘all the time.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Every boyfriend you’ve ever had – including Zak – you compare to him.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You always say, Matthew would never have said … Matthew would never have done … Matthew used to say …’ She shook her head. ‘The thing is, you were never really together.’

  ‘Yes, we were,’ Jess said fiercely. ‘You’re a little bit in denial about that, Anna.’

  ‘Jess,’ Anna said then, and suddenly all the features on her face seemed to tighten slightly. ‘Have you told him … ?’

  ‘No,’ Jess said quickly, more sharply than she had intended. ‘No. I haven’t.’

  There was a long, horrible pause.

  ‘So when’s he supposed to be going back to London?’ Anna asked her eventually.

  ‘September. That’s the plan, anyway.’

  On the television above the pool table, Sky Sports was showing Formula 1 from Monaco. A car had come off the track against a run of advertising hoarding and, watching it in slow motion, Jess was suddenly reminded of what Will had told her on Monday night.

  She turned to Anna. ‘Will told me Miss Laird died in a car crash. I mean, she was walking. The car mounted the pavement.’

  Anna swallowed and looked down at her glass of water. ‘That’s awful.’

  There was a strange pause then, as if Jess had said something really tactless.

  ‘I’m not really sure how I feel about it,’ she confessed, thinking perhaps she’d come across as slightly blasé.

  ‘I’m assuming Mr Landley feels abundant glee.’

  ‘No, of course not. Why would you assume that?’

  Anna shot her a look that said, Be serious. ‘What did he say then?’

  ‘Not much, really. What could he say?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Something nice?’

  Jess took another sip of wine, resisting the urge to do a Simon and sling back the whole lot in one. ‘Because she died?’

  Anna fixed her with a patient smile. ‘I think that’s traditional.’

  ‘Yes, maybe if you’re in earshot of her family at the funeral,’ Jess conceded. ‘Otherwise, why should he? She completely screwed him over. She’s responsible for everything. Everything.’

  Anna shut her eyes like she was waiting for Jess’s ill will to leave the room, and when she opened them again, she looked grave. ‘Please come and do some yoga with Rasleen. Come tomorrow. I think your solar plexus may be blocked. Do you feel it here?’ She placed a hand on her upper abdomen.

  ‘Er …’ Jess looked down at her top. ‘Not really.’

  Anna appeared unfazed. ‘So you’ll come? One session. You’ll get to meet Rasleen and, you never know, you might even start to see Matthew Landley in a completely different light.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Jess said, but what she was thinking was that this all sounded more like low-grade hypnotism than it did yoga, so she definitely wasn’t going.

  ‘That means no,’ Anna surmised.

  ‘Probably,’ she admitted after a moment’s pause.

  Anna made a huffing sound and downed the last of her water like she once would have downed a tumbler-full of late-night whisky.

  An hour later, as Jess headed back home, having wished Anna luck with her next fertility window and before she really had time to think about what she was doing, she dialled Will’s number. But it went straight to voicemail.

  It was late when he returned her call.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I keep forgetting that everyone else has normal sleep patterns.’

  Jess smiled. ‘Where are you?’ She was curled up on the sofa, rubbing Smudge’s belly with her foot and cradling a mug of warm beef broth, a rainy-night throwback from early childhood, at a time when her mother still had the capacity to be nurturing. It was one of those comfortable old habits she’d never quite felt the urge to shake off.

  ‘Erm, it’s raining outside and I’m sitting in my garden shed. My arse is wet and I’m also wearing an undersized cagoule and red wellies, in case that picture wasn’t quite attractive enough for you. I look like a sodding garden gnome.’

  She started laughing. ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sitting in the pitch dark with my hood up like a weirdo, and to cap it all off, my dick has gone hard just hearing your voice, which is most un-gnome-like of me.’ He sighed heavily. ‘So what are you doing? Come on, you must be less tragic than me right now. It wouldn’t be difficult.’

  ‘Um – right now?’

  ‘Excellent.’ She could hear his smile. ‘Go on.’

  Jess grinned, hesitating for just a moment. ‘Pyjamas and beef broth.’

  There was a disbelieving pause. ‘You’re not seriously drinking gravy?’

  ‘Broth is not gravy! And it is raining,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not the 1970s. Or January. And I’m assuming you’re not at a football match.’

  She smiled faintly into the phone. ‘Want to come over and try a cup? You never know, you might like it
.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Sorry, Jess. Much as I am a big fan of hot stock …’ He trailed off, and they were quiet for a moment.

  ‘Is Natalie back from Birmingham?’

  ‘Yeah, she is.’

  ‘Was Charlotte okay the other night?’

  ‘Oh, fine. I told Natalie I got stuck in traffic. Apparently Helen did microwave pizza for Charlotte while they were waiting, and that’s literally all I’ve heard about since.’

  Jess swallowed. For some reason, to hear this made her eyes prick with tears. ‘I really … I had a really good time on Friday.’

  ‘Me too, Jess.’

  She swallowed, wanting to ask him what they should do now, but knowing that he wouldn’t have the answer to that. How could she possibly expect him to?

  ‘Look, Jess … I’m not a big fan of under-the-radar.’

  ‘We can hardly be over it,’ she said sadly.

  He sighed heavily. The impossibility of it all felt suddenly overwhelming.

  ‘I’m sorry I called you,’ she concluded eventually. ‘I know I shouldn’t.’

  ‘You don’t ever need to apologize,’ he told her. ‘For anything. You can skip that bit with me, Jess.’

  She fought back a sharp and sudden urge to disagree. Actually, there is something I need to apologize for. Something I never told you. ‘Okay. Well, maybe I can see you soon.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll …’ He trailed off again.

  ‘You’ll what?’

  ‘No, I was going to say “I’ll be in touch” and then I realized that sounded like just about the crappiest thing I’ve said to anyone, ever.’

  She managed a soft smile. ‘Let’s not say anything then.’

  ‘Okay.’ He exhaled with some force. ‘Right. Need to try and get out of this sodding shed now.’

  She hesitated. ‘Are you stuck?’

  ‘Erm, sort of. The door’s jammed shut. I think the wood’s swelled up.’

  Despite herself, she started laughing. ‘Would you like me to call 999?’

  ‘No, you can spare me that indignity, thanks very much. I’d rather succumb to hypothermia.’

  ‘You know, on second thoughts, I think you might actually be more tragic than me tonight.’

  ‘Well, actually, that’s where you’re wrong, because just as soon as I get out of this –’ there followed the sound of thumping against wood – ‘fucking shed …’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said through her laughter. ‘That sounds like it might need both hands.’

  ‘Oh, no need to be so smug,’ he said, and she could tell he was struggling to suppress a smile. ‘Enjoy your beef broth. Never knew that about you.’

  Her laughter took over then, and she couldn’t say anything else.

  17

  Matthew

  Wednesday, 5 January 1994

  I hadn’t slept. Like, at all. So by three a.m. I had given up and started making vats of strong black coffee in the I-heart-maths mug that Steve had bought me for my birthday (he’d assumed this to be a masterstroke in irony, which was ironic in itself given how much I did, in fact, heart maths). The mug was roughly the same size as your average household bleach bucket, and for its part the coffee was so strong, made as it was from pure exhaustion, that by the time I arrived at Hadley Hall I was literally shaking. The overdose of caffeine had worked its way inelegantly to my bowels, and as soon as I reached the school gates I was forced to make a hasty detour to use the toilets in the drama studio.

  Yes, I hadn’t seen Jessica for the sum total of twelve short days, and I was, quite literally, crapping my pants.

  If it had been up to me, I would quite happily have pitched up in Jess’s garden shed the previous night, when she’d finally returned home from her festive family trip to east London; but I had resisted on the basis of the reindeer notecard she had sent me shortly after arriving at her aunt’s flat. It had informed me, in her familiar stop-start handwriting, that they would be getting back really late on the Tuesday night because they were going to see Swan Lake at the … well, it could have been anywhere. It could have been the MGM Grand for all I knew, because I hadn’t read any further. The first four sentences had been enough to send me crashing into the sort of doom spiral that always seems so much worse during the festive season (and would doubtless be exacerbated this year by my over-consumption of sherry and cheese straws, and enthusiastic masturbation several times a day because Jessica was more than a hundred miles away, leaving me alone in my cottage-slash-igloo with very little but the onset of frostbite to occupy my mind). The rest of the note, I learned afterwards, had gone on to explain that she wouldn’t be able to call me either, as her aunt’s phone was in the family kitchen where everybody had to sit all day because her aunt was too much of a tight-wad to heat the rest of the flat. And she definitely wouldn’t be able to leave the flat to find a payphone because apparently her aunt’s estate in Dalston was full of predatory men looking to jump young teenage girls.

  The irony of this was not lost on me. Ha bloody ha.

  So I decided, at the very last minute, to spend Christmas with my own family. Richard had brought his new girlfriend, Katy, home (new being code for first ever), so I wasn’t allowed to make my usual jokes about his hair or expanding waistline, and neither could we sit up together late into the night – as was by now tradition – swigging from our mother’s festive bottle of Baileys while working our way through Richard’s entire library of James Bond videos and talking, mostly theoretically, about girls.

  Over the past couple of months, I had thought a lot about discussing Jess with Richard, but each time I thought I might broach the subject, I bottled out at the last moment. I sensed, somehow, that my brother might disapprove – and this was Richard, who didn’t have much of an opinion about anything, except maybe the declining quality of the Christmas television scheduling, and whether the internet really had any potential as a money-spinner (he thought that, on balance, it probably did).

  So Richard’s disapproval would really have meant something to me. In fact, I knew it had the potential to drive an irreversible wedge between us, so for that reason, I didn’t see the point. I decided to wait, perhaps until Jess turned twenty-one, before breaking the news to all my various friends and relatives.

  I also got the feeling that Katy might not be the sort of woman who’d approve of sexual activity with a minor, and as she appeared to make Richard happy, it hardly seemed the ideal time to regale her with the story either.

  With Katy in tow, Richard had conveniently ditched the James Bond obsession, and was even wearing a shirt with sleeves and a button-down collar, which thrilled our mother virtually beyond speech or movement. Given that the signs were now all pointing to a new unspoken Katy-regulation warning me off any mention of 007, I figured it would have been rude of me to suggest cracking open the video library, so I simply sat silently in the corner throwing nuts down the back of my throat and trying very hard not to fantasize about Jessica’s tits.

  Our mother was irritatingly on-edge for the entire festive period because apparently Katy’s family was something to do with landed gentry and had maids to clean their various houses, which my mother didn’t. So everyone had to keep removing their shoes and doing bizarre stealth runs with the Hoover whenever Katy was in the toilet. On Boxing Day I found a copy of the Yellow Pages with the page turned down on Molly Maid.

  Katy herself spent most of the time perched on the edge of the sofa wearing an expression of faint repulsion as if my father had just exposed himself from behind the piano, while my mother waved bowls of cheese and onion crisps under her nose and waffled on about how pretty her hair looked.

  I got the impression that Katy didn’t exactly take to me, mostly because whenever I tried to talk to her, she’d ignore me, squeeze Richard’s hand and look in the opposite direction. So I’d end up trailing off like an idiot while Richard picked up the baton and started talking about what holidays they had planned for next year or how w
ell Katy’s dad’s sheep were doing on his farm. This annoyed me, because I knew for a fact that Richard didn’t and wouldn’t ever give a shit about anything to do with the countryside, or to be more specific, the importance of his girlfriend’s family flock to the UK wool industry.

  Maybe Katy disapproved of my long-haired look, given that she was dating a man with a buzz cut, and not a very good one at that. I’d realized that some women were inexplicably distrustful of men with hair that had grown anywhere beyond an inch from the scalp. If that was the problem, she would fit in well at Hadley Hall. Interestingly, I could imagine her getting on with Sonia Laird like a house on fire.

  Richard-and-Katy’s (seriously? Joint gifts already?) present to me that year was a box of Cuban cigars, picked up cut-price as part of a bulk purchase made by Katy at José Martí International Airport during a trip to Havana that July, before she’d even started dating Richard. Given that not once in our lives had Richard and I ever shared a cigar, I thought it was a bit of a weird, cop-out present, and hoped this wasn’t the shape of things to come. As I saw it, having a girlfriend was not a good enough excuse for becoming thoughtless, boring or both.

  I’d been hoping too to use my little festive interlude to have a chat with my dad about getting in touch with our Italian relatives, perhaps even mooting the idea of making a trip out to Tuscany in the summer. But with a guest in the house my dad was under strict orders not to deviate from his list of pre-approved conversation topics, for fear of causing the only girlfriend Richard had ever had to scarper in the direction of the ring road without looking back. Whenever an opportunity presented itself for us to chat, my mum, who had an in-built radar for this kind of thing, swatted my dad with her oven glove and ordered him back into the living room with a top-up for Katy’s bitter lemon – so I was forced to compromise by spending my downtime with my head in a travel guide to Italy, which seemed a bit of a waste when you had real-life Italian flesh and blood to talk to.

  I’d planned to stay for New Year’s Eve, having imagined Katy (before I’d had the non-pleasure of meeting her) to be the sort of girl who might want to head to the pub for a few drinks and a drunken attempt at ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on the stroke of midnight. But apparently Katy’s family was in the tradition of making health-related New Year’s resolutions, none of which involved finding yourself awake and pissed at one a.m. on New Year’s Day, since that was likely to interfere with running five miles before breakfast or drinking unpasteurized milk or whatever it was they did to make themselves thinner.