One Secret Summer (68 page)

She got up from the table and walked over to the sink. Outside, the late summer’s evening was slowly drawing to a close. It
had been an unusually warm September. She looked down into the gardens. A red-breasted robin picked his way delicately across
the lawn, dipping his beak every now and then in a sharp, staccato movement to root out a worm or a grub visible only to him.
She stood there for a few minutes, her concentration utterly absorbed, lost in a world of buried memories, the sound of
her father’s voice coming to her as if he were there, standing next to her, watching for what she might do or say. He’d been
such a stickler for the truth; that, and nothing but. It was from him she’d learned the true meaning of integrity, grit, determination
… the stuff she’d always thought herself made of. Her mother’s lessons had been gentler: compassion, perhaps, and the importance
of feelings. Mike didn’t hold with feelings. Feelings got you into trouble – much better to stick to facts, concrete things,
concrete concepts like justice and truth. She grimaced. How hard she’d tried to live up to that expectation; her whole life
thus far had been to that end – Oxford, law, becoming a barrister … even this last unexpected path that her career had taken
had, at some subliminal level, been addressed to him. For him. The only time she’d deviated from what she thought he’d expect
of her … well, look what had happened. She glanced down at her stomach. It was almost ironic. In the end, her child would
be her greatest achievement, especially if she and Aaron were unable to have another. This child was
it
; the rest would fall away. She only had to look at Diana to understand what she didn’t want to become. Three sons; none of
them properly hers. She’d never fully understood what the source of tension in the family was – clearly, it was something
to do with Josh – but her own intuition prevented her from enquiring any further.
Dig a four-foot hole and you’ll find two bodies; dig a ten-foot hole and you’ll find twenty.
The line from a film or a book she’d read suddenly came back to her, startling her. There was a secret at the heart of the
Keeler family that was struggling to repeat itself now, with her. But she was damned if she would let it. As painful as it
might be to keep the truth to herself, she couldn’t allow the same thing to happen to her child as she suspected had happened
to Josh.
Feelings
. A half-smile lifted the corner of her lips. That was her mother’s voice. She didn’t know; she had no proof – but the
feeling
that somehow, in some buried, deeply hidden way, Josh didn’t belong in the Keeler family the way Aaron and Rafe did was stronger
than any fact she cared to admit. She couldn’t allow that to happen again. She wouldn’t. The moment of truth was
now
; not back
then, not in Mougins, or the café on Gray’s Inn Road or the mornings she spent lying in bed with the memory of what she’d
done swirling endlessly around in her head. Now mattered; not then. Now, and what would happen next. She turned away from
the window feeling strangely lighter than she had done in months. Like Diana, she supposed, her dogged search for the truth
in her everyday life had obscured her to a much deeper truth. What was it Dom had said to her once?
People rarely remember what you do or say, Jules, but they do remember how you make them feel
. If there was ever a moment to trust her own intuition about what to do next, it was now. The child belonged to her and Aaron;
nothing more would ever be said.

DIANA

London, New Year’s Eve, 2000

In the corner of the room, a TV screen was dancing with light and static. A reporter was speaking, saying something meaningful,
no doubt, about the new year that was nearly upon them. Diana lay back against the cardboard-stiff sheets, her left arm upturned
and lying loosely by her side as the nurse skilfully inserted one needle after another in the pale patch of skin of her elbow,
producing only the slightest sting as she drew blood. There was a plastic bubble taped to the soft flesh beneath her shoulder
and several more plastic discs from which tubes sprouted like a potato she’d once found as a child, playing underneath the
kitchen sink. She’d screamed as she touched it and then stood back in horror as it rolled clumsily out of the cupboard and
on to the ground, all gnarled bumps and desiccated, wrinkled-looking skin, much like hers would be … No, stop it. She made
a small sound of impatience within herself.

‘Nearly done,’ the nurse said cheerfully, deftly transferring the syringe full of bright-red blood – her blood – into one
of the purple-tipped vials that stood waiting on the sideboard. ‘One more to go and then you’re done. Lucky you.’

It was on the tip of Diana’s tongue to enquire how this – being prodded and pierced for an hour every other day in preparation
for what looked like six months of absolute hell in front of her – could possibly be described as ‘luck’, but she held herself
in. In half an hour, Geoffrey would come through the door with the results of the tests they’d just run, and together, she
and he would discuss her options. It sounded like some kind of bedtime drink, she thought to herself drowsily. Or a new kind
of perfume. For a whole day the previous week, she’d moved around with a flattish metal canister in a holster that recorded
the weather of her body – every drop and rise in temperature, every fluid ounce of sweat, everything … dreams, thoughts, the
taste of metals in her mouth and all. From those records, and from the results they were drawing from her body today, a plan
would be made. She turned her head warily to one side. It had all happened so fast. Caught in the middle of some ordinary,
mundane act – answering the phone, writing up a brief, perusing her notes, cooking, even – she became aware that her body
had deserted her, gone off on its own, haywire course, in much the same manner as her thoughts. She fancied she could feel
it engaged in its silent, secret war against itself.

‘All done.’ The nurse was relentlessly cheerful. ‘There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?’

Diana shook her head. She lay for a few minutes longer, aware of the blood pumping through her body and the low, steady drumbeat
of her own heart. The sound of it filled her ears. The door opened in the corner of the room and someone came in. There was
another sound; someone was speaking. It took some effort to listen. It was Geoffrey. She nodded where she thought it appropriate,
stretched the muscles of her face in response, although she’d taken in practically nothing.
Treatment … promising … good preparatory results … twice a week
… The words
drifted round and round. ‘Yes,’ she murmured drowsily. ‘Yes, yes.’ Yes to everything they said. Her attention wandered off.
The nurses moved about her purposefully; they all had parties to go to, they told her cheerfully. New Year’s Eve. She would
be able to see the fireworks from her window, they said. She lay back against the pillows, too exhausted to think. She was
waiting for Harvey. He would be here any moment now in his theatre robes, ready to take her home.

She woke suddenly. She didn’t know what time it was. She sat up cautiously in bed, trying to tell from the quality and sound
of the silence outside whether it was day or night. She dimly remembered climbing into bed – Harvey at her side – and then
the sound of his voice as he began telling her something … and then the rest of it was blankness, blackness. She was so tired;
it seemed as if she’d never been more tired. She lay back against the pillows, exhausted. It was night, slipping towards morning.
Outside she could just hear the earliest morning birds in the oak tree at the bottom of the garden beginning to stir, their
voices rising slowly into the sky. The air around her was dark and still, layers of sleep suspended over the bedroom and the
rest of the house. She turned her head – Harvey wasn’t there. He must have got up and moved to the spare room. He’d done that
several times that week. She knew he often found it too painful to sleep next to her. Poor Harvey. He didn’t know the half
of it, and already his world had been turned upside down.

There was no moon – the room wouldn’t have been so dark otherwise. Suddenly, out of her lassitude, something had changed.
She began to think very clearly, as if the emotions of the day had settled in her mind like sediment and all her faculties
were suddenly awake and clear. A sudden slow sweep of headlights came into the room; outside, a car was making the turn around
the street, heading towards the main road. She heard the engine fall away and then she was cocooned in silence again. She
pulled an arm out from beneath the thick, warm duvet and let it fall back on to the cover. She was afraid to look at it, to
look at
herself. Outside of her body, life went on … her family came and went, her sons … one of them, Rafe, his filial concern mingling
with another, professional kind of angst that made conversation between them, for the first time ever, difficult. They came
every day, one or the other. Julia, with her high, swollen belly; Aaron so full of touching, father-to-be pride. Maddy, distracted
and distracting as ever, absorbed with some new part she was playing, settled at last. And Niela, of course. She let her mind
drift for a moment. How unexpected that had turned out to be. Dear, sweet Niela. On those days when she went into hospital
for her twice-weekly dose of chemotherapy, Niela was often waiting for her when she got home. She said very little in those
first few hours afterwards, instinctively reacting to Diana’s inability to do anything other than just be. She would sit beside
the window in the upholstered chair that Harvey had brought in from the study, sometimes reading to Diana in her lightly accented,
careful voice, at others just looking out of the window at the garden below, lost in her own thoughts but always attuned.
Niela. She’d come to depend on her in a way that she’d never thought she would depend on anyone, ever. There were things she
could tell Niela that she dared not utter to anyone, not even Harvey. One morning, a few weeks earlier, she’d come downstairs
after a particularly bad night. She’d walked into the kitchen and caught sight of Harvey sitting at the table facing the French
doors that looked out over the garden. He was eating breakfast alone, his head bent over a bowl of cereal or some such. He
didn’t hear her come in. At the sight of him, the childish dread of abandon flowed over her. Did all those years together
mean nothing? Forty years – a lifetime. If it happened to her as she knew it would, Harvey would be alone. She turned around
and crept back upstairs, unable to bear the thought.

The birds were singing properly now, and in the far corner of the window, the faint light of dawn was beginning to show. She’d
been lying awake a long time. She pushed aside the covers and slowly slid her legs out of bed. She stared at them for a
moment: thin, pale, white … not the legs of a few months previously. Tanned, slim, toned. She’d always been proud of her legs.
She slipped out of bed and walked towards the window. She pushed back the remaining heavy bunch of curtain and looked out
into the slowly lightening sky. The stars were still out, those hard, blossoming points of light with which she’d suddenly
found herself connected. She had the clear-headed sense of being a source of light herself, just like those twinkling above
her. The grainy reality of her own life and the certainty of death grew stronger in her as she stood in her nightgown, watching.
Her eyes travelled the length of the sky, taking in its richness. She was suddenly overwhelmed. Too many things were happening;
too many memories, too much pain and guilt … When the stars began to blur in her eyes, it was the welling of a deeper pain
that was the overflow of the moment. She raised a hand to brush them away. She’d told Josh the truth. And Niela. No one else
needed to know. No one else mattered. Not even Harvey.

She turned from the window and went back to bed. The slow, even beat of her heart played out a steady rhythm … alive/afraid;
alive/afraid … she was tired again. It was time to put down the burden she’d been carrying for so long. She climbed into the
soft mass of feather duvet and pillows. She groaned aloud, since there was no one to hear her. She spread her hands out in
front of her; her wedding ring and the heavy, solitary diamond Harvey had given her, all those years ago, sat awkwardly on
her finger, now that she’d lost weight. The diamond slid to one side, the flesh underneath showing up as a white band against
the slightly darker, tanned skin of her hands. She tugged it off and put it down on the bedside table. It settled with a satisfying
clunk, the last sound before silence.

Djemmorah, Algeria, October 2001

The car crested the last hill, and suddenly the village and the long, thick line of olive trees opened up in front of them,
snaking through the valley, skirting the foothills but hugging the road. The hills around them were dotted with white rocks
and the odd, solitary tree. Josh was silent as he shifted gear and plunged downwards. Niela too was quiet as they began to
leave the barrenness of the desert and descended into green. The buildings were made of the same pinkish, sandy mud as the
hills – square, rugged buildings with the odd curiously elaborate embellishment across the doorway or windows. The air was
dry and cool, slowly warming up as they drove down into the valley. The sky was a piercing blue, dazzling in its intensity,
broken only by the faintest wisps of white leaning in wide, shimmering streaks towards the horizon. On her bare knees in front
of her was the map they’d been consulting ever since leaving Algiers. All they had was the name of the town – to which Josh
had once been, unbelievably, en route to somewhere else – and an ages-old letter addressed to Mohammed Ben Ahmed, rue 13 Fevrier,
Djemmorah. Rufus had given it to Josh just after the funeral.

‘They don’t seem to have street names,’ Niela commented as they drove slowly into what seemed to be the centre of the village.
An open square, surrounded by mud-walled buildings, with a few crooked signs hanging haphazardly above shop awnings and the
beautiful walled maze of streets leading away from the square. It was just after three o’clock in the afternoon and the shadows
were already long on the ground. A few men looked up curiously as Josh parked the car to one side of the road
and opened the door. Niela quickly wound a headscarf around her head and fastened the remaining buttons on her long white
skirt.