Seven For a Secret (11 page)

Women, luckily, had so much more scope for changing appearance than men did. Last time he'd seen her, she was pretty sure she was still at the stage of painting on thick, black fishtail eye-liner and cute dolly-freckles across her nose. Delia was the big problem, she decided, as she scrubbed earth and compost out from under her nails. Delia had never actually met Iain, but she had his name, so she had once theatrically claimed, burned into her brain, like a red-hot stake carving into brimstone. Someone might mention his name within the boundless range of her hearing – a sense that seemed to have developed a highly tuned acuteness in old age, as if it was God's apologetic compensation for fading eyesight and uncertain balance. But even then there was a chance of getting away with it. Iain, Heather knew, wrote as Iain Ross, not using the family name of MacRae. Delia knew nothing about the lurid books he wrote, but would have been satisfied, if she did, to find that totally in keeping with her so long-held opinion of him.

‘That Terrible Man, that Deceiver!' she had ranted, years ago, at Heather after her inglorious return home.

‘But I wanted to go. He didn't kidnap me, I could've said no,' Heather had protested, insulted that her mother thought her quite incapable of having chosen the elopement option all by herself.

‘You were led,' Delia had insisted. ‘You always were easily led,' she'd continued damningly. Heather hadn't bothered to argue – to argue properly, you needed a worthy opponent, one whose mind was capable of change, otherwise it was completely exhausting, like trying to fend off a raving Rottweiler with a sock full of cotton wool, a waste of effort. You might as well lie still and play dead till the savaging finished.

‘You can invite a friend or two if you like, we don't mind, you know.' Margot, her face gleaming with rejuvenating cream, hovered in the doorway to Simon's room and tried to cheer him up. Through his bedroom window, she caught the highly satisfying view of caterers arriving to do expensive organizing out on the pool terrace. Simon had thought of asking Nick or Alex from school, but wanted neither competition nor a sniggering audience in his pursuit of Kate.

‘S'all right,' Simon replied, ‘everyone's too far away to organize this late. It'll be so much better when we can all drive.' He looked up from playing computer snooker and grinned at her.

‘Oh will it?' Margot replied. Of course Simon would get a car – Russell would make sure his showroom at Upwardly Mobile had in stock just the right racy little girl-pulling GTi job round about the time of Simon's seventeenth birthday.

‘You spoil that boy,' he kept telling her whenever Margot bought him something new. The last thing had been the leather jacket, a lovely scuffed-up soft one from the Harley Davidson shop in Chelsea. ‘You could have got one like that on the market,' he'd moaned, when he caught sight of the receipt stuffed not quite far enough into the kitchen bin, forgetting that the day Margot married him he'd bragged that she need never worry about bargain-hunting again. Giving Simon a car would be justified as ‘a sound marketing decision'. ‘Spend a bit, make a
lot
,' he would say, the idea being that all Simon's friends, turning seventeen, would be able to tell their parents what a terrific deal they could get, investing in a trouble-free little motor from Russell's high-status dealership.

‘What shall I wear?' Heather murmured as she gazed into her wardrobe.

‘Do you really want an opinion, or is it just rhetorical as usual?' Tom said, grinning at her from the bathroom doorway. ‘Whenever you've asked me that before, you've always completely ignored what I've suggested. Women do, and I know I'm not supposed to say that.'

Heather laughed at him. ‘I just mean, do you think it's going to get really cold later, which means layers, or is it worth risking it and wearing something strappy in which I might freeze?' She didn't mean that at all. Her fingers were trembling slightly as she examined possible outfits. She wanted to look good, but not overdone – it was a casual sort of party. But if she
was
recognized by Iain, she felt a healthily vengeful urge to stun him, to make him think he'd really missed out on something all these years, wasted something special. In the end, while Tom was climbing into linen shorts and a wash-faded T-shirt, she chose a short black skirt and a long white collarless shirt. She tied her hair back with one of Kate's big velvet scrunchies and added a pair of silver hoop earrings. Shoes had to be the flattest she could find, so she could be as short and unnoticeable as possible. She considered wearing her reading glasses too, but thought that might result in her tumbling theatrically down Margot's terrace steps and rather defeat the object of passing unnoticed.

‘You'll get barbecue sauce all down that shirt,' Tom warned her as they went downstairs.

‘You sound like my bloody mother!' she warned him back.

Delia liked going to mixed-age parties. The great consolation for her age and frailty was that she felt like the queen arriving. Often she was the oldest guest, which gave her a satisfying
gravitas
, but if there turned out to be a glut of pensioners present she felt a mean little stab of pique. People tended to be kind, take an elbow to lever her over small doorsteps, make sure she had somewhere comfortable to sit, knew where the loo was and had a constantly topped-up drink. They felt this was the best they could do, and she accepted that and was content with it. No-one knew how to speak to old people; she was accustomed to being treated as if her mental faculties had died off ahead of the rest of her and as if English was only her second language – second, presumably, to fluent geriatric ga-ga. There was plenty of solicitous courtesy and a regard for comfort, but little chance to exercise her powers of conversation, as if by living a long time she was likely to have exhausted both vocabulary and opinions. She didn't mind this at all, having long ago decided that age conferred a restful right to be entertained by others rather than being burdened with doing it herself. Party small-talk was a waste of time, and watching people, especially if they showed signs of potential misbehaviour, was far more rewarding. Often, at neighbourly gatherings in Putney, she and her friend Peggy clucked like ancient gossiping extras from a BBC costume drama, lined up against a wall with an extra-large Amontillado each, allowed to witness preadulterous goings-on, on the grounds that surely they were too old to have all their wits, add two and two and make it a judgmental four. If there had been a guillotine, they would have happily knitted beside it.

Delia sat on a thickly padded chair at the highest vantage point on Margot's terrace and watched groups of people arrive, collect drinks and identify acquaintances to chat to. Kate, she could see, was perched on a low wall by the changing pavilion, drinking a tumbler of something fizzy that could have been Aqua Libra (she'd seen bottles of it on the way through Margot's kitchen) or could have been the champagne that she herself was enjoying, once the bubbles had settled. She also noticed that Kate was giggly, talking to Margot's handsome son, but always with her eyes darting just past him as if waiting for someone else.

‘Get on very well don't they?' Tamsin murmured to Suzy, looking across the pool to Kate and Simon. Suzy felt tortured – why wouldn't Simon come and gossip about the guests with
her
? She just knew Kate was simply being talked
at
, was having to make no effort at all herself simply because, in her tiny little baby dress, she looked too good to have to entertain. She herself, well she could tell Simon all sorts of deliciously malicious things about the village residents. She'd bet a month's allowance that he hadn't read the comments in the bus shelter about Lisa Gibson. Lisa was being employed to serve drinks, wearing a white, tight, low-cut top and a skirt that was hardly more than a waistband with a couple of layers of added frill. Suzy watched her going up to men with her champagne bottle, looking impudently into their eyes and asking pertly, ‘Fancy some of this?' brandishing it at breast-height so they couldn't miss her best asset. Her heavily lipsticked mouth was pouted into a bored smile and she made sure that when she served the women she poured the drink slightly too fast, sending bubbles splashing carelessly over their hands and wrists. Lisa's brother Shane was round at the frQnt of the house, supervising the parking arrangements.

‘I believe in giving people a fair chance,' Margot was telling Heather, who had pointed out that with Shane's record, such a responsibility was just a bit of a risk. ‘If he's in charge of the cars, he'll feel too responsible to do any damage, won't he?'

‘Well, it's one theory,' Heather told her with a hesitant smile, wishing she shared Margot's habitual optimism.

Margot watched the aproned caterers expertly wielding giant barbecue tongs over the children's hamburgers. ‘Feels like the last supper,' she confided. ‘From tomorrow, we have to stay out of the way and leave the Great Writer to rattle round this place all by himself now that the actual filming is going to start. I'm beginning to wish I hadn't said yes, but they were so persuasive.'

Heather was quietly wondering about the exact size of the cheque they'd been persuasive with, when Margot broke into her thoughts. ‘Of course you must meet him. Absolutely charming. And did you know he's actually a
Sir
?'

Heather took a too-fast gulp of her drink and spluttered instead of replying. Of course she knew. That was something else she'd done wrong, according to her mother. Having disgraced them both (irrevocably) by running off with Iain, she had then failed yet again by completing her divorce just three months before he inherited his title. ‘Could've been
Lady
MacRae if you'd only stuck it out a bit longer. And you wouldn't have had to drop the title just because the marriage was over, you know,' Delia had grumbled to her as she finished reading out old Sir Cuthbert MacRae's obituary from the
Telegraph.
‘Then you'd have had something to show for all that trouble.'

‘You mean
you
would!' Heather had retorted. ‘I can just see you, showing off to all those witches down at the Townswomen's Guild.'

Heather was glad they hadn't arrived early. Plenty of people mingled noisily in Margot's garden, the film technicians looking completely at home and falling on the food as soon as it was ready. There was no sign yet of Margot's pet guest. With any luck it would be dark before he appeared. Perhaps, though, she suddenly thought, he was there all the time, as unrecognizable after twenty-five years as she herself hoped she was. She inspected all possible men closely. Iain must be in his mid-fifties by now, the romantically luxuriant hair that had reminded her of a portrait of Shelley might long ago have disappeared down shower plugholes, Heather realized, as she caught herself appraising men who were still years short of a mid-life crisis. He could have run to fat, be wearing glasses, or have lost a leg for all she knew. In spite of his fame, she had never seen him on TV; his wasn't the kind of literature that rated a South Bank Special. Melvyn Bragg would not salivate over titles like
Death Rattle
, the cover of which Heather had seen, featuring a half-clothed woman doing something bizarre with a snake.

Most of the men in Margot's garden she recognized from around the village: the young harassed husbands who lived behind the High Street, the improbably red-haired short one who ran ‘Inside Story', the cricket team, Nigel from the nursery who had brought his beautiful, artfully tousled wife with him. There seemed to be an entire cross-section of the village population, probably because Russell and Margot were somehow unclassable. The impoverished land-owning régime, who enviously trashed them as swanky and vulgar, were not too proud to accept the chance to be so generously catered for, and everyone else was thrilled with the opportunity to drool over their decor. Julia Merriman happily accepted a third glass of champagne from the convivial Russell and then just as happily whispered to her companion that it was rather
de trop
to serve The Real Thing at an informal barbecue. ‘Not sure about you,' she then commented to Heather, ‘but I find barbecued food quite frightfully sticky.'

Heather smiled. ‘But don't you just love licking all the gloopy bits off your fingers without it being considered appalling manners?' she asked. Julia frowned and looked uncertain. Heather grinned to show she was teasing, but Julia was looking at her as if she suspected finger-licking to be highly pornographic.

‘Come and get some food,' Tom said to Heather, appearing suddenly after an agreeable maligning of the England selectors with a computer analyst from the new estate. ‘I thought you might need rescuing from Julia. I could see her revving up to ask you whether she should prune in March or October. It must be like being a doctor where people think it's all right just to ask a quick one about an iffy bladder.' They made their way past the pool's diving board to the pavilion, where the buffet and barbecue were spread under a yellow-and-white striped awning. Small children were leaping in and out of the water, shrieking at top volume to each other.

‘They'll get cramp, swimming so soon after eating,' Tom remarked. He could see a gasping six-year-old with deflating arm bands struggling to the steps at the shallow end, swimming along with his mouth open in the way Tom imagined whales ingest plankton. ‘Is no-one watching them? Where are their parents?' he wondered aloud, feeling that he'd done his stint as a diligent lifeguard when Suzy and Kate were little, and that he should be let off responsibility duties now.

‘Oh around. And I don't expect they've eaten much anyway. They were probably all thoroughly fed before they came out. You know what people are like, a whole evening can be blighted if they get to a party and the only thing picky little Tarquin is tempted by is the dreaded forbidden Mad Cowburger,' Heather replied, relieved that someone at last was hauling the child from the water and wrapping his shivery tiny body in a huge Snoopy towel. ‘Don't forget how it was when ours were little: somehow you're keeping an eye on them, even when no-one thinks you are.'