Secrets (36 page)

He'd planned to do it. The thought had made him chuckle – imagining himself flinging open the front door and making like Jimmy Stewart or someone. Joe couldn't remember the last time he'd actively daydreamed but he'd enjoyed that one. He had envisaged Tess, perhaps barefoot, dancing down the stairs laughing at his announcement and floating into his arms. He'd spun her round in his mind's eye, twirled her two, three times while she buried her face in his neck and then kissed him and kissed him and kissed him. And Wolf had been there too, lolloping around. As had Emmeline; squawking in delight whilst grabbing fistfuls of his trousers.

Not to be. Not at this time of night. Not this trip.

He saw to his joy that Wolf no longer required his convalescence quarters in the hallway and the dog gave him a rapturous welcome in the kitchen. Then Joe went upstairs, straight into his en-suite to strip off and give his face and hands a good wash. He suddenly hadn't the energy to go downstairs and fetch his bag to retrieve his toothbrush. There was toothpaste by the basin and he squeezed a little onto his finger just to refresh his mouth. He took a good rinse of water and then, with his lips to the tap, a long drink. How he loved the water here. He switched off the light and stood still in the darkness. Should he tiptoe in to Tess? It was so ridiculously late. Could he minimize the creak to her door just so he could see her? It was so bloody late.

He crossed into the bedroom; sat on the edge of his bed thinking, Jesus Christ, I'm seriously tired. And then he realized that Tess was there. Asleep and still and silent and soft. Slowly, carefully, he settled himself under the covers. He didn't turn to her and reach for her; he simply lay there sensing her. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he rolled onto his side and peeled back the sheet. She was facing away from him and in the little light there was she looked carved from alabaster; the sinuous line of her back, her hair pulled away from her neck. He watched the rise and fall of her breathing. Carefully, he pulled the sheet up over her again and moved himself against her so that she was enfolded within him, his arm over hers, his hand holding her wrist, her feet tucked on top of his. He hoped not to wake her, but his need to soothe himself after the rigours of his journey, to feel himself back into his home life, was stronger. After a nightmare of a day, he was back in the place he wanted to be and the night was now magical.

She stirred. ‘Joe?’

‘I'm home, Tess. Shh. Go back to sleep.’

Chapter Thirty-three

There was a fair amount of cash, in mostly low and obviously used notes. It wasn't a fortune but the amount was certainly surprising, not least considering where it was hidden.

You don't
keep
money under a mattress, Joe thought as he regarded the notes under Tess's. You
hide
it there.

It was perplexing. It wasn't like coming across someone's diary – one would sense that it was private and above board. But cash? And talking of boards, what was he to do with the large piece of plywood he'd brought into her room? It was propped against the door, next to the mattress he'd upended against the wall. He went to the window bay and sat in the Loom chair.

Very nice to find you here, he'd said to her when they woke in his bed earlier that morning.

Don't flatter yourself, boyo, she'd replied. It's only because my back's been a little sore – that bed in my room is a bit slack.

He knew what she meant – the morning he'd crept in alongside her, they'd been rolled into a squash in the centre of the bed, much like an overloaded hammock. This morning, while Tess was showering, he thought to himself, I know, I'll surprise her; I'll do a little estate-maintenance of my own. There are a couple of sheets of ply up in the attic – I'll strengthen the bed base for her.

And now she was downstairs preparing lunch and he was upstairs trying to do a good turn but he'd found a problem bigger than the knackered bedsprings.

Why would she hide her money? he wondered. What's wrong with the local bank? It was then that memories of details – insignificant at the time – drifted into his mind where they became evidence of something amiss. He remembered how Tess had not wanted her wages by standing order. In fact, she'd requested cash from the start. He looked again at the money. It was around two months’ worth of the wages he paid her, plus a hundred pounds or so more. But hadn't he written a cheque last time – because now he remembered putting only Miss Tess on the payee line.

Why didn't he know her surname?

What had she been crying about, in secret, that time on the landing?

Who doesn't have a mobile phone, these days?

          And what was that stuff with the sister?

Standing there, looking at her money, Joe realized with some concern that there was obviously quite a lot he didn't know about the girl he thought he knew off by heart. And yet – he loved her.

But, if he didn't have the full picture, what was it that he loved? Carefully selected highlights she'd chosen? A medley of her best bits? And if he found out more, what then – would he still love her? And if further information could alter how he felt about her then wouldn't he rather just not know? Because the love feeling was good, it was really good. So why have anything jeopardize it? They could just play house each time he came home. Intense, hermetic periods of time where they could live the rosiest life complete with child and dog and the seaside.

Is it better to have secrets than the truth?

Isn't Nathalie a case in point?

He'd hardly been true to Tess – but a secret that tormented him was better than the suffering the truth might cause her.

The sound of Tess coming upstairs jolted him from contemplating his morality, but it did not give him enough time to right the mattress and move the sheet of ply.

‘Joe?’

Conflicting feelings of guilt and of being aggrieved kept him pinned to the chair.

‘Joe?’

You're going to have to answer her.

‘In here.’

He said it the moment she opened her bedroom door – and the moment she opened her bedroom door the sheet of ply fell away from it and fell to the floorboards in such a slap and clatter she never heard him answer her. However, the whack of ply against oak boards was nothing compared to the far sharper slap Tess felt she'd just been given around her face on seeing the mattress off, her money there and Joe sitting staring right at her.

It was horror and embarrassment and outrage, shame and fury simultaneously. Her face crumbled at the weight of so many emotions and immediately, Joe felt wretched. He hadn't suffered emotions anywhere near as intense when he'd come across her money. He'd felt slightly indignant, a little peeved – but mainly he'd been just curious.

‘What the –’

But Joe didn't want to hear her swear. ‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ he interjected.

She was speechless, glancing at the money as if it had betrayed her, as if it had called to Joe, under here! under here!

‘It might look like I was barricading myself in your room,’ Joe said. ‘Actually, I only came in to strengthen your bed.’

He watched her stare at the plywood and saw her figure out that he was telling the truth.

She slumped down to the floor, rested her arms on her knees and sunk her head against them, her mind a racket of hurried sentence-starters. She concentrated on the weave of her jeans, because that's what filled her field of vision. A tiny voice, the sensible one she didn't hear too often, was telling her that this was her opportunity, this was a timely chance to try a little honesty, to reveal not conceal, whatever Mrs O'Sullivan made of that. Because who was Mrs O'Sullivan anyway – didn't Tess's grandmother always subscribe to a problem shared being a problem halved and hadn't Tess trusted her grandmother more than she'd trusted anyone else in her life?

She stared at the denim. Around the knee it was paler, a slight fur to the stressed surface. It would no doubt split before too long; after all she did spend an inordinate amount of time on hands and knees being a horsey to Em or scrubbing Joe's floors. Hopefully, torn jeans would come back into fashion. Or had they never really gone out? She wasn't that concerned with sartorial trends any more; in London in the salon, she had the chance to peruse
Grazia
on a weekly basis. It hadn't crossed her mind to buy a copy since she left and came here.

‘Tess?’

Joe's voice. Joe in a chair just over there. All the money behind her. Perhaps an opportunity lying ahead, if she chose to take it. But Tess no longer liked risk. She could instead just blank out everything and simply focus on the weave of her jeans.

‘Tess?’

She looked up and he looked across at her and she gave a shrug and said, Christ, Joe – you have no idea.

And just as she wished, he comes over and sits next to her on the floor, their backs supported by the side of the bed.

‘No idea,’ Joe says. ‘You're right. I thought the only people who kept their money under their mattress were daft old chaps in Ealing comedies.’

‘I have to keep mine there,’ Tess tells him and she's really pleased when he gently stills her hands from worrying the denim around her knees. ‘I have to keep my money with me – now that I have some. I can't take it to the bank. I'm in a bit of trouble.’

But just as Joe's about to say, tell me, a clatter and howl point to trouble of a more pressing kind elsewhere in the house. They belt out of the room and charge downstairs with urgent cries of Em? Emmeline? Not in the sitting room, nor the drawing room, front door shut – thank God – but all is eerily quiet. And when they enter the kitchen, they see why. Seemingly nonplussed and apparently uninjured, Em is sitting on the floor. Wolf is sitting gingerly some way off, looking at her reproachfully. They are surrounded by everything in the kitchen that was previously within reach of a toddler.

‘She probably clonked him with one of the containers,’ Joe says. ‘That's why he howled.’

Tess doesn't comment. He glances at her and sees that she is desperate to bite back laughter.

‘You're wanting to come across all stern and cross, aren't you?’ He nudges her. ‘It's our fault really – trying to have a deep and meaningful, relationship-defining heart-to-heart upstairs whilst leaving a toddler and an old dog to their own devices downstairs.’

‘Look at the mess!’ Tess says.

‘It's only cornflakes.’

‘And rice.’

‘And clothes pegs.’

‘And every pot and pan you own.’

‘And all the tea towels you like to iron.’

‘And soap pads I bought specifically because they colour coordinate with Wolf's coat. I'm joking, Joe.’

‘No, Emmeline, yukky. You don't have to suck a dishcloth – let's go and get an ice cream instead.’

The money remains upstairs, uncovered. The mess is left in the kitchen to be dealt with later. They all need fresh air and a change of scene and they've all lived here long enough to know that there's little an ice cream beside the sea can't fix.

Joe treats them. Emmeline and he both have strawberry but Tess has a milkshake of inventive flavour combining – chocolate, ginger and malt. They stroll along the pier; the tide is well out beyond it and families have appropriated slithers of the vast beach as their own behind colourful wind-breaks. From the pier, those further away look like a spatter of paint against a beige sand canvas. There are jet skis in the water, canoes too and the ubiquitous surfers. Tess casts a quick thought to Seb but then she thinks, well, if he's here then he's here – it's his town too. But the surfers are too engrossed to do any people-spotting on the pier.

They stroll to the end of the pier and back again and when they reach the amusement centre they turn and simply walk back along the pier more slowly this time. Tess has finished her milkshake. Joe is trying to enjoy his ice cream without Wolf's doleful glances distracting him. Em's in her own little world.

‘The thing is, Joe,’ Tess suddenly starts, ‘it wasn't that it happened quickly, it didn't take me by surprise, I didn't wake up one day and think, shit, I'm stuffed – it was the
severity
by which it snowballed. It was the horrible power of the momentum – it just grew worse and worse and worse.’

After a day of airports and stress, Joe had been enjoying the fresh air and mellow pace of his town, the humbling scale of the sea, the magnificence of Huntcliff Nab glazed by sunshine, dominating the section of sea from which it rises so staunchly. The scars and striations of coastal erosion, the rutways carved into the bedrock from the old alum and iron-stone industries, combined to resemble hieroglyphs carved into the cliffs. He had assumed they'd leave Tess's issues on the base of the bed with her cash, to return to them later. He turns to her. She looks a little lost.

‘Sorry?’

She sighs. ‘Oh well,’ she says, ‘what the hell.’ Then she stops the ice-cream cone reaching his mouth. ‘I love you.’

It's momentous. She could now say nothing and just rest her head against his chest and wait for his response. But she doesn't – because she didn't say it for him to say back to her. It's her prologue. So she doesn't notice that the ice cream still hasn't reached his mouth because he's stunned and still. And she doesn't see the sparkle in his eyes as he looks at her intently. She's looking out to sea. She's taking a deep breath – not of sea air but of courage because she's decided to talk her heart and she has a lot to say.

‘I'm broke, Joe. I'm so broke. I don't honestly know what I'm going to do. I owe thousands of pounds. My bank account is frozen. Everyone is chasing me – three companies in particular. In addition, I owe money to my sister, my friend Tamsin – and my old landlord. I have four credit cards maxed out. I can't afford to fill my car let alone tax it next month. I have nothing to my name apart from what I brought with me to Saltburn. And I'm thirty and it's humiliating and pathetic and what kind of a mother does it make me?

‘And yes, I ran away. I ran away because it was so bloody grim in London. I ran away, really, to hide from them all. Not from my sister or Tamsin – but from the demands and the aggression: the letters and phone calls and the bailiffs who kept coming to the front door. I ran away and hid here.