The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets

I
T WAS THE SIGHT I HAD HOPED NEVER TO SEE: THE FRONT DOOR
wide open, Becky, our sitter, leaning out into the darkness as if straining to break free of the doorway's bright rectangle, her eyes wide with urgency. When she saw our car, she ran out into the drive, then stopped suddenly, arms at her sides, looking at the pavement. Wondering what she would say to us, how she would say it.

I assured myself that it couldn't be a real emergency; she'd have rung me on my mobile phone if it were. Then I realised I'd forgotten to switch it on as we left the cinema. Timothy and I had been too busy having a silly argument about the movie. He had claimed that the FBI must have known about the people in the woods, that it must have been a government relocation programme for victims of crime. I'd said there was nothing in the film to suggest that, that he'd plucked the hypothesis out of nowhere. He insisted he was right. Sometimes Timothy latches on to an idea and won't let go.

‘Oh, no,' he said now. I tasted a dry sourness in my mouth. Becky shivered beside the garage, her arms folded, her face so twisted with concern that I couldn't look at her. Instead, as we slowed to a halt, I focused on the huddle of bins on
the corner of the pavement. They looked like a gang of squat conspirators.

Before Timothy had pulled up the handbrake, I was out of the car. ‘What is it?' I demanded. ‘Is it Alex?'

‘No, he's asleep. He's absolutely fine.' Becky put her hands on my arms, steadying me.

I slumped. ‘Thank God. Then… has something else happened?'

‘I don't know. I think so. There's something you need to have a look at.' I was thinking, as Timothy and I followed her into the house, that nothing else mattered if Alex was safe. I wanted to run upstairs and kiss his sleeping face, watch the rhythmic rise and fall of his Thomas the Tank Engine duvet, but I sensed that whatever Becky wanted us to see couldn't wait. She had not said, ‘Don't worry, it's nothing serious.' She did not think it was nothing.

All our photograph albums were on the floor in the lounge, some open, most closed. I frowned, puzzled. Becky was tidier than we were. In all the years she had babysat for us, we had not once returned to find anything out of place. Tonight, we had left one photo album, the current one, on the coffee table so that she could look at our holiday pictures. Why had she thrown it and all the others on the carpet?

She sank to the floor, crossing her legs. ‘Look at this.' Timothy and I crouched down beside her. She pointed to a picture of Alex and me, having breakfast on our hotel terrace in Cyprus. Crumbs from our bread rolls speckled the blue tablecloth. We were both smiling, on the verge of laughing, as Timothy took the photograph.

‘What about it?' I said.

‘Look at the table behind you. Where the blonde woman's sitting.'

I looked. She was in profile, her hair up in a pony-tail. She wore a sea-green shirt with the collar turned up. Her forehead was pink, as if she'd caught the sun the day before. Her hand,
holding a small, white cup, was raised, halfway between the table and her mouth. ‘Do you know her?' asked Becky, looking at Timothy, then at me.

‘No.'

‘No.'

She turned a page in the album and pointed to another
photograph
, of Timothy reading
Ulysses
on a sun-lounger beside the pool. ‘Can't you read John Grisham like everybody else?' I'd said to him. ‘We're supposed to be on holiday.' In the pool, the same blonde woman from the previous photograph stood in the shallow end, her hands behind her head. I guessed that she was adjusting her pony-tail before beginning her swim. She wore a one-piece swimsuit the colour of cantaloupe melon.

‘There she is again,' said Becky. ‘You didn't talk to her at all, in the hotel?'

‘No.'

‘Didn't even notice her,' said Timothy. ‘What's this about, Becky? She's just another guest. What's the big deal?'

Becky sighed heavily, as if, by answering as we had, we'd confirmed her worst fears. I began to feel frightened, as if something unimaginably dreadful was on its way. ‘She doesn't look familiar?'

‘No,' said Timothy impatiently. ‘Should she?'

Becky closed the album, reached for another one. This was one of our earliest, from before Alex was born. She flipped a few pages. Cambridge. Me, Timothy and my brother Richard outside King's College, sitting on a wall. I was eating an ice-cream. The day had been oven-hot. ‘Sitting next to you, Claire,' said Becky. ‘It's the same person.'

I looked at the blonde head. This woman – I was sure Becky was wrong, she couldn't be the same one – was turned away from the camera towards her bespectacled friend, whose face was animated. They looked as if they were having a lively conversation, utterly unaware of our presence. ‘You don't know that,' I said. ‘All you can see is her hair.'

‘Look at the freckles on her shoulder and arm. And her earring. She's wearing the same ones in Cyprus – gold rings that are sort of square. Not very common.'

I was beginning to feel a creeping unease; otherwise I might have pointed out that rings could not be square. ‘It's a
coincidence
,' I said. ‘There must be more than one blonde woman with freckly arms who has earrings like that.'

‘Or it's the same woman, and she happened to be in Cambridge and then Cyprus at the same time as us,' said Timothy. ‘Though I'm inclined to agree with Claire. It must be a different woman.'

Becky was shaking her head as he spoke. ‘It isn't,' she said. ‘When I looked at the Cyprus photos, I noticed her. I thought I'd seen her somewhere before, but I couldn't place her. I puzzled over it for ages. Then later, when I was standing by the shelves choosing a DVD, I noticed the picture in the frame.'

All our eyes slid towards it. It had been taken by a stranger, so that all three of us could be in it: Timothy, Alex and me. We were in the grounds of a country house hotel just outside Edinburgh. It was the week of the book festival. Many of our trips, over the years, had revolved around Timothy buying books. Behind us were two large sash windows that belonged to the hotel's dining room. Clearly visible at one of them was the blonde woman from the Cyprus photographs. She was wearing a blue shirt this time, again with the collar turned up. Her face was small, but it was unmistakably her. And the earrings were the same – the square hoops. I felt dizzy. This had to mean something. My brain wouldn't work quickly enough.

‘That's why she looked familiar,' said Becky. ‘I've seen that photo millions of times. I see it every time I come here. Alex is just a baby in it and…I thought it was an amazing
coincidence
, that the same woman was wherever you were in this picture four years ago and also in Cyprus this summer. It seemed too strange. So I got the other albums out and had a
look. I couldn't believe it. In each one, she's in at least nine or ten of the photos. See for yourselves.'

‘Jesus.' Timothy rubbed the sides of his face. When he removed his hands there were white spots on his skin. I began to turn the pages of another album. I saw the woman, once, twice. In Siena, at a taverna. Walking behind me in a street market in Morocco. Three times. She stood beside Timothy outside the Tate Modern, again with her short-sighted,
frizzy-haired
friend.

‘But…this
can't
be a coincidence!' I said, expecting to have to convince Becky, or Timothy. Nobody disagreed with me. I felt sharp, piercing fear.

‘What does it mean?' Timothy asked Becky. He rarely asked anybody for advice or an opinion, let alone a
nineteen-year
-old babysitter. His lips were thin and pale. ‘She must be following us. She's some sort of stalker. But…for nearly ten years! I don't like this at all. I'm ringing the police.'

‘They'll think you're crazy,' I said, desperate to behave as if there was no need to take the matter seriously. ‘She's never done us any harm, never even drawn herself to our attention. She's not looking at us in any of the photos. She doesn't seem aware of our presence at all.'

‘Of course not!' Timothy snorted dismissively. ‘She'd try to look as innocent as possible as soon as she saw a camera coming out, wouldn't she? That's why we've not spotted her until now.'

I turned to Becky. ‘Is every album the same?' I didn't have the courage to look.

She nodded. ‘Some, she's on nearly every page.'

‘Oh, God! What should we do? Why would someone we don't know want to follow us?'

‘Timothy's right, you've got to tell the police,' said Becky. ‘If something happens…'

‘Christ!' Timothy marched up and down the lounge, shaking his head. ‘I don't need this,' he said. ‘I really don't.'

‘Tim, are you
sure
you don't know her?' An affair, I was thinking. A jealous ex-girlfriend. I would almost have preferred that; at least there would have been a rational explanation, a clarifying link.

‘Of course I'm sure!'

‘Do you want me to stay?' asked Becky. What she meant was that she was keen to leave.

‘She's not some woman I've slept with and discarded, if that's what you're thinking,' Timothy snapped.

‘You have to tell me if she is,' I said. Neither of us cared that Becky was listening.

‘Have I ever done anything like that?'

‘Not that I know of.'

‘Claire, I swear on Alex's life: not only have I never slept with this woman, I've never even
spoken
to her.' I believed him. Alex was sacred.

‘I should go,' said Becky. Our eyes begged her not to. She was a symbol of safety, the only one of the three of us who was not dogged by a stalker. We needed her normality to sustain us. I had never been so frightened in my life.

‘I'll drive you,' said Timothy.

‘No!' I didn't want to be left alone with the photo albums. ‘Would you mind if we phoned you a cab?'

‘Of course not.'

‘I said I'll drive her!'

‘But I don't want you to go out!'

‘Well, I want to get out. I need some air.'

‘What about me?'

‘I'll be back in half an hour, Claire. Why don't you ring the police while I'm gone? Then we can talk to them when I get back.'

‘I can't.' I began to cry. ‘You'll have to do it. I'm in no fit state.'

He frowned. ‘All right. Look, don't worry. I won't be long.'

Once he and Becky had left, I went upstairs and looked in on Alex. He was sleeping soundly, his hair covering his face. Despite my pleas, I found that I felt less afraid once Timothy had gone. I thought of one of our honeymoon photographs, one that could not possibly contain the blonde woman: Timothy in our en-suite bathroom at the Grand Hotel Tremezzo. He insisted on lavish holidays. Perhaps that was why we were always short of money. That and his book-collecting. In the picture, there is a mirror in front of him and one behind, reflecting an endless row of Timothies, each smaller than the last, each holding the camera to his eye, pressing the button. They dotted an invisible line that led from the foreground to the background. I knew why the picture had sprung to mind. It was the principle of
magnification
: seeing my own panic reflected in Timothy's eyes had added to my paranoia.

I went downstairs and began to look through all our
photographs
. This time I was methodical, unsuperstitious. I found the blonde woman with the upturned collars and the square hoop earrings again and again: on a boat, in a park, walking along a canal tow-path. Sometimes she was right behind us, sometimes nearby. Who was she? Why was she following us? I had no way of knowing. Neither would the police, not with only our photo albums to work from. Of course, they could track her down if they wanted to – they could appeal on television and somebody who knew her would be bound to come forward – but the idea of them doing such a thing was laughable. She had committed no crime. Stalking was against the law, I was fairly certain of that, but the direct accosting of one's prey was surely a pre-requisite. What, I wondered, would the police have to say about a stalker so
unobtrusive
that, were it not for Becky's meticulous eye, we might never have become aware of her? Her presence in our lives, unnoticed for all these years, felt more ghostly than criminal. I was suddenly very aware of myself, my thoughts and my
actions, and looked around the room, up at the ceiling, half expecting to find someone watching me.

I concentrated on the woman's face, trying to see a character or a motive behind it. She was either beautiful in a classical, well-proportioned way, or very bland-looking – I couldn't decide. I found it unsettling that, however hard I stared, I couldn't commit her face to memory; it was almost impossible to take in as a coherent whole. I looked at her features one by one and judged each of them regular, flawless, but together they made no lasting impression. I'd had this feeling before, usually about famous people. Sharon Stone, the late Jill Dando. They too had faces one could study in detail and still not know what they looked like.

In one photograph our blonde ghost was touching me. Her shoulder was pressed against mine in a crowded wine bar. Hay-on-Wye? No, Cheltenham. Another of Timothy's literary holidays. I was holding a tall cocktail, dark red and fizzy, like carbonated blood. I pointed to it, an apprehensive
expression
on my face. Timothy had labelled the photo ‘Am I really expected to drink this?' He assigned titles to all our pictures; his parents did it too. It was a Treharne family tradition.

The blonde woman had a book in her hand. It was on the edge of the picture, some of it missing. I screwed up my eyes to read the title.
The Octopus
– that was all that was visible. My heart jolted.
The Octopus Nest
, I whispered. It was a novel I hadn't thought about for years. Timothy used to own it, probably still did. He'd tried to persuade me to read it, but I gave up. Sometimes it is apparent from the first page of a book that nothing is going to happen. A Timothy book.