This Secret We're Keeping

by Rebecca Done

  ‘So?’ she prompted, sensing Will’s train of thought had drifted. He was walking a few paces behind her. She turned and waited, to let him catch up. ‘What’s your secret?’

  ‘Natalie wants to start trying again.’ Pause. ‘For a baby,’ he clarified as he arrived at her shoulder, in case Jess wasn’t familiar with the universal code for fucking-to-order.

  She stared across at him, feeling her stomach shrivel in the manner of a slug being doused liberally with rock salt. ‘Oh,’ she managed eventually. ‘Well, congratulations.’

  ‘No, Jess – don’t … don’t congratulate me. That’s not what I meant.’

  She turned away, unable to bear the image of Will and Natalie in Chiswick cradling a pink-faced little newborn, surrounded by flowers and gift-shop balloons and stupid oversized cards. The tide swelled dangerously against her calves once again and she started to wade off.

  He began to shout after her then. ‘It should have been us, Jess!’ His voice was tight, catching against the cold. ‘It should have been us, with the marriage and the baby and the perfect fucking life!’

  She felt her grief rise forcefully in her throat like vomit – a regret so intense it made her feel dizzy – and it took all her effort to contain it, to prevent it erupting messily from her mouth.

  ‘Is that what you and Natalie have?’ She turned round and began to shout back at him, her voice a fierce gust to join the storm of coastal wind. ‘The perfect life?’

  ‘Of course not! Why the fuck do you think I’m out here off my face in the middle of the night? I’m not drunk on domestic bliss, Jess!’ He sounded almost angry. ‘I miss you every single day for the sake of a few fucking months back then!’

  She felt the tears come instantly, devastated afresh by the idea that just another birthday might have made all the difference. She forced herself to turn away from him and start walking again, or at least attempting to. It was only down to chance that they hadn’t both snapped an ankle by now on the uneven underwater terrain.

  ‘Jess!’ Within seconds she felt him catch her up, his arm finding her waist as he spun her gently back round to face him. He dipped his head to hers, his voice becoming an apology. ‘I’m sorry. I’m saying all the wrong things, I know that. The last thing I want to do is chase you away.’ His gaze fell momentarily to the hip flask in his hand, and he stared at it with exasperation, like he’d somehow been expecting the rum to make everything better, not worse.

  ‘I feel the same as you do,’ she confessed, her voice thick with tears as her flash of frustration began to subside. ‘It’s how I’ve felt for the last seventeen years.’ She swallowed, struggling for a second to speak. ‘I wish you hadn’t told me about the baby.’

  His mouth flipped open slightly, like he was lost for a way to explain it. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just … Natalie’s not very discreet, you know? She talks to people, all the time – in the deli, the post office … Our builder’s only just had his third, and she’s been grilling the poor guy all week on age-gap siblings.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve just been feeling paranoid, Jess, that you might bump into her or overhear something, and get completely the wrong impression. But look – don’t say “the baby”, like it’s already in existence. It’s not like that. It’s not going to happen like that.’

  She met his eye, attempting to swallow away the lump in her throat as she did so, but said nothing more.

  They waded a few steps further until, finally, their feet found the edge of the sand dunes. Jess was surprised to notice as they emerged from the water that Will was wearing his cowboy boots. ‘You’ve trashed them,’ she observed sadly, looking down at his feet.

  ‘Nah,’ he said, though as he followed her gaze, he looked equally sad. ‘They’ll buff up.’

  ‘So, what do you want?’ she asked him, shivering as they ascended the bank that marked the edge of the salt marsh. Damp marram grass brushed their calves. ‘Do you want another baby?’

  ‘Not since I ran you over,’ he said softly, and then paused. ‘Is possibly the weirdest sentence ever spoken in history.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, the weirdest sentence ever spoken in history is, I can’t remember the difference between R.E.M and UB40.’

  He laughed. ‘I think you could be right.’

  They were silent for a few moments, though Jess’s teeth kept threatening to break into a metronomic chatter.

  She sensed the need for a change of subject. ‘Have you made any plans for your birthday?’ It was just over a week away, the ninth of June.

  ‘Personally? No plans. Hate birthdays. But Natalie …’ He glanced at her and hesitated.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said gently. ‘You can say it.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said resignedly. ‘I was only going to say … birthdays tend to be more about Charlotte now. I let her get excited on my behalf.’

  Jess smiled faintly, remembering what he’d told her about villages in Burkina Faso. ‘Well, maybe you’ll get a nice goat.’

  He took her hand again then before pulling her gently to a halt so they were facing one another. ‘That reminds me, Jess.’

  ‘Of what?’

  He looked hesitant. ‘At the risk of making an ever bigger twat of myself … I got you something.’

  A goat?

  ‘I figure the risk’s quite small,’ he qualified. ‘I’ve already gone quite far.’

  She nodded. ‘Yep, tonight you’ve really excelled yourself.’

  He ventured a smile. ‘Well … this might help. Are you ready?’

  Despite herself, she smiled back faintly and shrugged. Her teeth had started to chatter again. ‘As I’ll ever be.’

  Suddenly brighter, he stuck his hand into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘Close your eyes,’ he whispered. ‘Open your hand. All that jazz.’

  ‘What?’ she laughed, but she did it anyway. She felt him plant something light in the centre of her palm, and when she opened her eyes, she saw it was a small grey jewellery box. It looked a little battered, and was soaked through. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘You’ll find out if you open it.’

  So she did. Resting on the gathered silk inside was a silver necklace with a single tiny pearl at its centre. Slightly tarnished, it looked old, like it belonged to somebody else.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she whispered, and then looked up at him, waiting for an explanation. ‘I mean, is there some sort of back story, or …?’

  He exhaled stiffly, like he was building up to make a revelation, taking a few squelching paces in the opposite direction before turning back round to face her. ‘Okay, I’ll say it quickly. I bought you that necklace for Christmas, Jess, 1993. I was going to give it to you that night in the bird hide, but I bottled it. Thought you might think I was being a cheesy twat.’

  She stared at him. Her teeth had stopped chattering now.

  ‘So I kept it. I kept it all this time because I had this stupid idea that one day … I might have the chance to give it to you properly.’ Shaking slightly as he spoke, he reached out and removed the necklace clumsily from its little box before leaning across to fasten it at the nape of her neck. She lifted her fingers to where she felt it against her breastbone, and he moved his hands to her shoulders.

  ‘How does it look?’ she whispered.

  He smiled and shrugged happily. ‘Exactly as I thought it would.’ Then he pulled her into a hug, and mumbled into her hair, ‘Incidentally, I’m really sorry the quality’s not up to much. That was my first stab at buying jewellery. You deserve classier than that after a seventeen-year wait, Jess.’

  She admonished him with a squeeze to his ribcage. ‘It’s so worth the wait. Honestly. That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.’

  ‘Jess, be serious,’ he said, pulling back from her and dropping his chin slightly to meet her eye. ‘That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for you? Presented you with a crappy old necklace in the middle of a salt marsh at one in the morning?’

  She knew he was teasin
g her really. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I think it’s probably time to get yourself a new boyfriend,’ was all he said.

  She smiled and thought to herself that, on balance, she would have to agree.

  20

  Matthew

  Wednesday, 16 February 1994

  So my beautiful girlfriend was going to be in Venice with the lower fifth on Valentine’s Day, and I desperately wanted to be there with her. But it had been looking like the only way that was going to happen was if I purchased my own plane ticket and stalked them all by water taxi.

  As it turned out, however, Sexy Santa’s broken ankle could not have been more perfectly timed.

  Sonia was one of the teachers with her name on the list for the trip – but several weeks after I had somehow fractured her fibula by watching her fall off my front step, Mackenzie asked me to go in her place.

  We’d not said a word to one another since New Year’s Eve. Sonia was highly aggrieved and convinced that her ankle injury was a direct result of my failure to fancy her, so she’d spent the last few weeks getting most of the staffroom on side. This meant the vast majority of my (mostly female) colleagues now believed I’d tricked her into stripping off at my house before ejecting her on a whim that was no doubt related to lager, football or something I’d read in Arena. (I’d been naive enough to think we might both want to keep quiet about the whole thing in an effort to preserve her dignity, so to realize she’d been spreading pre-emptive lies about me in the staffroom really pissed me off.)

  Mackenzie’s reasoning for banning Sonia from the Venice trip was three-fold. One, she’d been behaving like she’d lost all four limbs in a motorbike accident and it was becoming increasingly apparent that supervising on a school trip was a risky choice of assignment for someone so feeble. Two, I had rudimentary Italian. Three, I got on well with Brett Michaels, who as head of the language department was running the trip. We had bonded previously over our mutual suspicion of the cheap instant coffee in the staff-room and of Lorraine Wecks (also Venice-bound as Sonia’s partner-in-crime), as well as our shared disdain for Hadley’s most pointless unwritten codes of conduct, like the one to do with keeping facial hair in check. (Brett had once thought it would be funny to ask Lorraine if she needed bringing up to speed on that, to which Lorraine had responded by carefully angling her cup of soup all over Brett’s freshly shorn jawline. He had to stop shaving for a while to let the scorch heal up, which marked the start of a minor competition between us to see who could cultivate the hairiest face before someone lost patience and complained to Mackenzie. Our record so far was two working weeks, and I had won. Brett bought me a four-pack of Red Stripe lager as my prize.)

  So I’d been all set to go, until Sonia turned up at school three days before the trip with a letter from her GP, claiming she was fighting fit. Brett chose to interpret this literally by going spare and nearly head-butting her. It culminated in the three of us battling it out in Mackenzie’s office, with Sonia fake-crying and Brett arguing loudly and angrily over the top of her head.

  The upshot, eventually, was that both Sonia and I would be going to Venice – because we all knew that, in reality, Sonia was an emotional wreck who barely had any place teaching at all, let alone limping along at the back and holding everybody up on an awesome holiday disguised as a field trip.

  Brett and I exchanged a high five as we left Mackenzie’s study. We also failed to hold the door open for Sonia, which wasn’t deliberate but Brett thought in hindsight to be quite a nice touch. The battle lines were drawn. It was Landley–Michaels versus Laird–Wecks.

  Oh, it was most definitely on.

  The illusion of a free holiday faded almost as soon as the plane touched down at Treviso airport, when it dawned on Brett and me at roughly the same time that we were in charge of twenty teenage girls on a week off from private school with well-constructed game plans to fall in love with Italian men. For my part, I was in a state of such nervous distraction for the first twenty-four hours that I barely even noticed Jess, let alone remembered our shaky strategy for getting some alone time on Valentine’s night. (She would wander out of her bedroom at eleven p.m. as if sleepwalking, at which point I would Just So Happen to be coming back from checking bedrooms. We’d then dart off down a corridor for a sneaky kiss. Perfect.)

  Our second full day of sightseeing was St Mark’s Square and a climb up the Campanile. Jess declared that she was scared of heights and wanted to stay down in the square. Like an idiot, I nearly busted us both by turning to her in surprise and saying, ‘Are you? You never said.’

  I tried quickly to cover it up by muttering something to Brett about checking phobias for insurance purposes before we flew out, and just about got away with it. Just.

  Jess was mostly hanging out with her friend Anna Baxter in Venice. The Witches, thankfully, were all at home, no doubt spending their respective half-terms dispersed between shopping centres, bowling alleys and various fast food outlets. I’d recently noticed that Jess had begun to distance herself from them of her own accord anyway; in fact, she really seemed to be thriving at school. The difference was not so much evident in my maths classes – she’d unwittingly signed herself up for compulsory arithmetic progress the minute she became my girlfriend – but in the improvements she appeared to be making all-round. I’d overheard complimentary comments in the staffroom lately from several other subject teachers, and it had actually started to look as if she might be a realistic A-star prospect by the time it came for her to take her GCSEs next year. She was coming across as more studious on this trip somehow too, more engaged – even when Lorraine was monotonously lecturing everybody about Marco Polo with about as much dynamism as a brick at the bottom of the Grand Canal, and it was beginning to seem likely that one of us was going to have to push her in it.

  All of this could not have made me happier. But there was something about Anna Baxter that slightly unnerved me, which was that she always seemed to be watching – Jess, me, gondoliers on the make … she wasn’t so different to Sonia in that way. Wherever I turned, I got the feeling she’d turned there herself thirty seconds earlier and was waiting for me to catch up so she could catch me out.

  Having publicly expressed my ignorance of my secret girlfriend’s secret acrophobia (not vertigo, I informed the assembled group like a typical sodding teacher, it’s not the same thing), I still only cottoned on to what Jess had been trying to do when the time came for everyone to head up the tower and she shot me a look. But, by then, it was too late.

  ‘I’ll stay with you, Jess,’ Sonia said loudly. ‘I can’t get up there with these crutches. You go up, Anna. Jess will be fine down here with me.’ And then she turned and smiled at me – only it wasn’t a real smile, it was a hollow impression of one: the sort of smile a woman might give her husband if she’d invited the neighbours round for dinner, knowing all along that he was fucking one of them stupid every time her back was turned. It was the sort of look that said: I know. I know about you two, and I’m going to get to her first.

  I started to panic, probably visibly. ‘I could stay too,’ I gabbled to Brett. ‘Recce the cafes.’

  ‘Nah,’ Brett said, looking affronted. ‘You’re climbing the tower with me, Landley.’

  As it turned out, there was a lift, meaning there had been no need at all for Sonia to bow out in the first place, which only served to heighten my suspicion and alarm. So the whole time I was at the top of the tower looking out over Venice, when I was supposed to be counting heads and pointing out the island of Giudecca and the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Salute, or whatever the hell it was, all I could think about was what Jess might be saying to Sonia down in the square. It was absolutely bloody freezing up there, but I was sweating like it was the middle of summer. I kept obsessively craning my neck to try and spot them over 300 feet below us on the ground – but, of course, they were nowhere to be seen.

  Brett had one p.m. lunch reservations by the Rialto Bridge at some crappy tourist restaurant he’d
picked out of the guidebook. We were all seated outside on the cobblestones, which thankfully came complete with patio heaters, the girls at three pods of tables closest to the bridge, and me with Sonia, Lorraine and Brett nearer to the restaurant itself.

  Everyone was wearing their coats and trying to appreciate Venice’s beauty on one of the bitterest days of the year. Hunched up in my favourite denim jacket with the sheepskin collar, I personally would have killed for some rum in my cola. I was finding it challenging to be in the same room as Sonia, let alone share breadsticks and soft drinks across the same table, all the while wondering if she was about to bust me wide open for being a grade-A pervert.

  I was desperate to get the chance to talk to Jess so I could find out what Sonia’s little game was, and I didn’t have long to wait. We’d only been seated about five minutes when I caught sight of Jess pushing back her chair across the cobblestones. I’d become somewhat adept in the art of peripheral vision over the past few months, and I managed to watch her glance at me, make her way to the restaurant and vanish inside it all without looking up once from my laminated photographic menu.

  I knew I shouldn’t get up and follow her until at least sixty seconds had elapsed, but my impulse control petered out at thirty. I got to my feet, muttering something about needing the toilet to Brett, who was arguing with Sonia about the correct pronunciation of chiesa (predictably, it was Sonia who was convinced it should be pronounced chee-ay-sa, and with a heavy English accent to boot). I shot a quick glance at Lorraine too, but she had her eyes on the bridge and a breadstick in her mouth. I couldn’t be sure that any of them had even noticed me stand up.

  Heading across the cobblestones with purpose, like a wino spotting an off-licence, I stepped inside the frigid gloom of the restaurant lobby where I saw off an overly eager waiter keen to seat me all over again. Jess was waiting for me at the foot of a spiral staircase that was cordoned off with a sign that threatened Divieto di accesso! along with a yellow hazard warning cartoon of a stick man tripping into an open flame. You had to wonder what the hell was up there.