The Secrets Between Us

by Louise Douglas

  In the bedroom at Avalon I pushed the drawers shut; they were stiff and creaky. I stood up and wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand.

  I supposed this part of the house hadn’t been used for ages. The radiator was icy cold. The room needed airing; that was all. It needed somebody to live in it and open the windows and bring it back to life.

  I washed my hands and face in the bathroom further up the landing, put on some fresh mascara, brushed my hair and went back downstairs.

  Jamie was lying on the sofa in the living room, with his head hanging over the side, watching TV and eating cubes of cheese and crisps from a bowl on the carpet. The kitchen door was closed but I could hear Alexander’s voice beyond.

  ‘Is your dad on the phone?’ I asked Jamie.

  He nodded, without taking his eyes from the television.

  I sat down beside him, picked up his feet and put them on my lap. His socks were sticky and smelled of trainers and sweat.

  ‘He’s talking to Grandma,’ he said.

  Genevieve’s mother, I presumed.

  ‘She didn’t want you to come,’ Jamie said. ‘She thinks it’s a scene.’

  ‘A scene?’

  ‘A bus scene.’

  ‘Oh. Obscene.’

  ‘She says you’re a hole-digger.’

  ‘I think she meant gold-digger.’

  Jamie looked up at me, caught my eye and looked away again.

  ‘What’s a gold-digger?’

  ‘It’s a person who pretends to be somebody’s friend because they want the other person’s money.’

  Jamie stared at me while he thought about this information.

  ‘No, I think Grandma did mean hole-digger,’ he said.

  I tried to hide my smile but I wasn’t quick enough.

  ‘Grandma doesn’t think it’s funny,’ said Jamie.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  Jamie fished the remote control from the carpet and turned up the volume on the television. He pulled his feet away from me.

  I stood, stretched, switched on the light and drew the curtains. I wandered to the far end of the room and studied the spines of the books in the case. Amongst a plethora of Jilly Cooper novels, books on horse management and eventer biographies were a couple of Italian language dictionaries and guidebooks and a number of books on law. Framed photographs stood on top of the case. Most were of Jamie at various stages of development but in amongst them was a portrait of a woman. It had to be Genevieve. I picked it up and held it to the light.

  She didn’t look as I had imagined her. She was smiling in that bashful way that the most attractive people do – as if they know how beautiful they are and are faintly apologetic about it. She was standing beside a railing in some foreign country; beyond, a range of slate-grey cliffs towered over a perfectly green sea. One slender hand rested on the railing and her face was turned towards the camera. Her hair, the silver-gold-buff colour of ripe wheat, was shoulder length, well cut. She wore a yellow vest-shirt, shorts, a wedding ring. Her shoulders were smooth and tanned. Her composure and grace reminded me of an old-fashioned celebrity but her look was contemporary. She had a heart-shaped, symmetrical face and dark eyes beneath long, dark lashes. She was beautiful; there was no denying it. Genevieve was lovely.

  ‘That’s Mummy,’ said Jamie.

  ‘She’s very pretty,’ I said, and I heard the note of jealousy in my voice.

  ‘Mmm.’

  I smiled at the child and was struck by how very small he was; too small to be motherless. I had no right to attempt to fracture his already bruised loyalties. I put the photograph back in its place.

  ‘Do you miss her a lot?’ I asked.

  Jamie nodded. He sat up and wriggled deep into the side of the settee. He put his thumb in his mouth. The blue teddy was tucked into the crook of his elbow.

  ‘I wish she would come back,’ he said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DESPITE EVERYTHING, I settled down to sleep that first night feeling a little more normal. Nothing had been quite as I’d hoped. I’d been naïve in underestimating how difficult things had been, and still were, for Jamie and Alexander. Still, I was relieved to be away from Manchester. For the first night in ages I didn’t hold my breath waiting to hear May’s footsteps as she ritually crept to my bedroom door and listened to make sure I wasn’t crying. I no longer had to keep a perma-smile glued to my face to prove to the people who loved me that I was all right, and I didn’t have to worry about what I said. I could just be, and it was soothing. I hoped I’d be trusted to look after the house and the child without too much supervision. While Jamie was at school, I’d be on my own, and I was certain I’d be able to pull myself together if I had the time and space and didn’t have to deal with people looking at me and talking about me when they thought I wasn’t listening.

  That weekend, Alexander showed me around the village. The late-summer light made everything appear strangely artificial, like a film set. The country air was soft on my face, it tasted different from city air, and I soon became accustomed to the agricultural tang of cut hay, mud and manure that suffused the whole area.

  We walked down Avalon’s drive and turned left, going perhaps half a mile before we reached the new quarry junction. It seemed out of place, set, as it was, beside this quiet country road. There were traffic lights at the entrance and large double white gates protected by cameras pointing in and outwards. The whole area was surrounded by a high, spiked metal fence. The road was wide enough for load-bearing lorries to turn and exit with their heavy cargo. The entrance was guarded by a lodge and I could see the uniformed guard inside. He had his feet on the counter and was staring at a television mounted on the wall. I could not tell if he was watching a programme or monitoring security cameras.

  ‘This is Jamie’s inheritance,’ Alexander said. ‘Genevieve’s family owns all this, the quarry and the land behind it.’

  ‘Do you work for them?’

  He shook his head. ‘I work for myself. Sometimes I come here to look at a piece of stone, see if it’s suitable for a particular commission. Mostly I work at the yard in Castle Cary. That’s where I’ve got my gear and where people come to see me.’

  We watched as the gates swung open and a truck pulled out on to the road, its engine grinding under the weight of the stone it carried. It shed a fine white dust as it rumbled and groaned on towards the village.

  ‘Don’t the people who live here get fed up with the noise?’ I asked.

  Alexander shrugged. ‘They’re used to it.’

  We walked on into Burrington Stoke. It was not much of a place, just a few shops on either side of the road, a pub that was still hung with baskets of colourful trailing flowers and which advertised Sunday lunches and Butcombe beer, and a run-down hotel. A number of unassuming former local authority houses lined the far end of the road and some lovely old cottages and country houses were set further back. At the far end of the village, close to the memorial cross, was the entrance to a farm. Small, shaggy cows stood by the gate feeding from a bale of hay, bothered by black, buzzing flies. A lane at the side of the farm led up to the village primary school. Alexander nodded to a couple of young women coming down the lane on horseback. I backed into the hedge to make way as they passed. The animals were huge. Their big feet clopped and they swung their heads as they went by, eyeing me suspiciously. The young women with their big shoulders and bare arms made no attempt to hide their curiosity. As soon as they had passed, one said to the other, loudly enough for me to hear: ‘Who’s she then?’ And the other said: ‘No idea,’ and then added more quietly, ‘But did you see her shoes?’

  I looked down at my feet. I was wearing purple ballet pumps made grey by the quarry dust.

  ‘You’ll need proper boots,’ Alexander said. ‘It gets muddy here when it rains. I’ll sort some out for you.’

  He showed me where the entrance to the school was, a little way up the lane.

  ‘I’ll drop Jamie off on
his first day back on Tuesday morning, and Claudia will pick him up when she fetches her girls,’ Alexander explained. ‘She’ll show you the ropes. After that I need you to be there to meet him every day. He mustn’t come home with anyone else. It’s important.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And, Sarah, you can’t be late. You have to be at the school gate before three thirty.’

  ‘I won’t let you down. Who’s Claudia?’

  ‘Genevieve’s half-sister.’

  ‘Won’t she mind me being here?’

  Alexander shook his head. ‘She knows I need help. She’s been a rock these last few weeks. In fact, she was the one who suggested I get a nanny.’

  ‘Are her children at this school too?’

  He shook his head. ‘They go to St Margaret’s in Montacute.’

  ‘They have to go to school on Saturday morning,’ said Jamie.

  I pulled a face. ‘How awful.’

  ‘But they have riding lessons and longer holidays.’

  ‘That’s not so bad then.’

  ‘Uncle Bill says he has to pay an arm and a leg for them to have longer holidays.’

  ‘That’s the beauty of independent education,’ said Alexander.

  We walked a little further, past the run-down hotel and what was probably once an old ducking-pond, and soon were at the far end of the village.

  ‘Isn’t there a church?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s up on top of the hill. Close to where Genevieve’s parents live.’

  I smiled at Jamie. ‘Do they have a nice house?’

  ‘It’s big!’ he said, widening his eyes and holding out his arms in an exaggerated fashion.

  Over his head, Alexander nodded. ‘I’ll drive you up,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’ After lunch we got back into the Land Rover. Once again, we turned left at the bottom of the drive, drove along the main road for a while and turned right into a narrow lane about a hundred metres before the entrance to the new quarry. In places the lane was little more than a single track, winding upwards between high hedges. We drove through a narrow tunnel formed by the branches of overhanging trees, climbing steeply through twists and turns until we came to a fork.

  ‘That’s the entrance to the old quarry,’ said Alexander. He slowed the Land Rover. ‘They shut it down thirty years ago.’

  The quarry’s gates towered above the lane. They were locked together by a thick chain secured by a padlock. Barbed wire was threaded between the metal bars of the gates. A gurning skull and crossbones gleamed from the blood-coloured background of a weathered DANGER, KEEP OUT sign that hung at an angle from the gates. Another sign said: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

  I shivered.

  ‘Why did they close the quarry?’ I asked.

  ‘It was inaccessible for big wagons. It was more commercially viable for the Churchills to open the new one at the bottom of the hill where the trucks can get out on to the main road without any problems than it was to build a new road up here.’

  ‘Why is it all fenced off like that?’

  ‘Kids kept coming up here in the hot weather to swim in the pit. Teenagers. They ignored the signs and jumped off the cliff. One lad drowned.’

  ‘That’s awful!’

  ‘It was years ago,’ said Alexander. ‘Before I met Genevieve, but she remembered him.’

  ‘He shouldn’t of been in there,’ said Jamie solemnly.

  ‘No, he shouldn’t,’ said Alexander. He was silent for a moment. Then he said very quietly: ‘Nobody goes there any more. People have forgotten it exists.’

  We drove on.

  At the top of the hill, the lane opened out. On either side were fields bordered by hedges and fences. I noticed a pair of handsome liver-chestnut horses standing beneath a small clump of trees at the centre of a gently rolling meadow to our left. Alexander nodded his head without taking his eyes from the road.

  ‘Genevieve’s,’ he confirmed.

  The first building we reached was set back from the lane and surrounded by a high fence and electric gates, so all I could see was the roof and a huge, arch-shaped window. It was clearly a large barn that had been beautifully and extensively converted. Laurie and I used to be addicted to home-buying and restoration television programmes and I could tell that no expense had been spared. Everything was perfect.

  ‘That’s where my cousins live,’ said Jamie, leaning over me to point.

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘Classy, eh? Mixture of Claudia’s old money and Bill’s new,’ Alexander said. I looked at him. Was he being sarcastic? Was that jealousy I’d heard, or resentment perhaps?

  ‘And here’s the church,’ he said in an ordinary voice. ‘If you’re interested, there’s loads of Churchill family history inside and in the graveyard.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’

  ‘And just over there,’ Alexander continued, nodding his head to the other side of the lane, ‘you’ll see the roof-tops of Eleonora House.’

  ‘They live here? Almost on top of the old quarry?’

  ‘The original Mr Churchill wanted to build his house as close as he could to the source of his wealth,’ Alexander said. ‘I suppose it made him feel proud; connected. Plus, he could keep a close eye on things.’

  ‘It must’ve been tough on the workers,’ I said quietly. ‘They wouldn’t have been able to get away with anything.’

  Alexander smiled.

  He pulled the Land Rover up at the entrance to the drive to Eleonora House, and left its engine running.

  The house was bigger and grander than anything I could have imagined. It was a real old-fashioned country pile, with wisteria curling up a façade that was set a good way back from the lane at the end of a straight drive lined with topiary bushes shaped abstractly like clouds and waves. A life-size statue stood on an ornate pedestal just outside the gates at the entrance to the drive. It was a Victorian-style child-angel, with a lovely face and downcast eyes. One hand held a rose to her breast, the other was extended, as if to draw visitors into the drive.

  ‘That’s Eleonora,’ Alexander said. ‘She was the original Mr Churchill’s youngest daughter and the one he loved best.’

  ‘She died young?’ I asked quietly.

  Alexander nodded. ‘Some kind of masonry accident while they were building the house. The sculptor used her death mask as a model for the statue.’

  ‘How morbid!’

  ‘Gen thought it was romantic. She was the image of the statue when she was a child.’

  I would have liked to know more, but at that moment Jamie, who was sitting behind me, shouted: ‘There’s Grandpa!’ and I was distracted.

  The Land Rover’s window was open. I could see, quite clearly, the figure of a tall, aged man in a hat just outside the house. He was stooped over a cane and was examining something, a rose bush perhaps.

  ‘Can we go and see him? Can we go and say hello?’ Jamie asked.

  Alexander glanced at me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it would be better if we waited.’

  ‘Too late,’ Alexander said. A thin woman had come to stand beside the man. She was shading her eyes with one hand and, with the other, she beckoned us down the drive.

  ‘Virginia,’ Alexander said, almost under his breath.

  ‘Couldn’t you pretend you didn’t see her?’ I asked.

  ‘That would be lying,’ said Jamie.

  ‘Come on,’ said Alexander. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WE SAT ON comfortable, solid garden furniture on a circular terrace beside a perfectly manicured lawn in what Virginia Churchill called the ‘family’ garden. The lawn was square, surrounded by flower beds, and each bed contained a profusion of different plants. I was no gardener, but I recognized the skill that had gone into the planting; the tumble of contrasting colours was not accidental but designed so that each patch of flowers complemented the next, and behind the flowers were hedges that acted as a perfect backdrop. The centrepiece was a huge old pond, it
s stoneware overgrown with trailing plants and the dark green water heavy with pale, waxy lilies. Dragonflies black as jet buzzed amongst the water plants. The overall effect reminded me of a romantic painting and, if I had not been so nervous, I would have enjoyed simply sitting and looking.

  As it was, Alexander and I were carefully avoiding one another’s eyes while we were served tea by a middle-aged woman called Mrs Lipton. Mr Churchill – I could never imagine calling him Philip – sat awkwardly on his chair, with one leg stretched out in front of him. He wore worn brown corduroys and a cotton shirt with a cravat. The rim of his hat covered his eyes, but I could see a wide jaw and a chin that was faintly stubbled. His skin was weather-beaten. Veins bulged on the back of huge, bony hands that were spotted with age.

  When the tea was poured, Mrs Churchill asked Mrs Lipton to fetch some toys for Jamie, and she returned with a child’s archery set. She set the target up at the far end of the garden and, after making sure we had everything we needed, joined the boy to help him put the arrows in his bow, and to retrieve them when they fell short. Within a few moments of Jamie leaving the group, Mr Churchill’s jaw relaxed and his mouth fell open. He began to snore rhythmically.

  The whole situation made me feel awkward and tongue-tied. I could think of nothing to say, so was quiet apart from thanking Mrs Lipton for the refreshments and complimenting the Churchills on their beautiful home and garden.

  ‘It’s very good of you to come and introduce yourself,’ Mrs Churchill said to me. Her voice was clipped and there was more than a hint of sarcasm or perhaps irritation. She passed me a cup of tea. The china was pretty if a little fussy.

  ‘Virginia, I’m sorry, we didn’t mean to turn up unannounced like this,’ Alexander said.

  She made a swatting motion with her hand.

  ‘No, I’m glad you came. You know how anxious I was to find out who this person was you’d engaged to look after our grandson.’