Seven For a Secret (12 page)

‘Even blind drunk?' Tom said, helping himself to spare ribs, chicken, salad and garlic bread.

Heather watched Lisa shimmy past, with her arms precariously full of empty bottles, on her way in to the kitchen. Her older brother Darren was trailing sullenly behind her, unhelpfully burdened by just one bottle, as if afraid to compromise his cool-rating. The girl smiled at Tom, a smile full of habitual promise, even if it was only that he would be next when she brought another supply of full bottles out. He backed away, nervous of her décolletage and rounded hips. Heather's were slim and bony, and contrarily she'd always wished for a pert, rounded bottom. She watched men watching Lisa wiggle her way through the throng and up the steps towards the house, and thought how sad it was that Lisa had probably already been conditioned into watching her weight and honing away her captivating curves.

She could see Delia sitting up on the higher part of the terrace, under a hanging basket planted in shades of cream and yellow, surveying the scene like the queen on a state visit to somewhere interestingly primitive. She looked as if she was relishing a display of tribal dancing. Next to her was sitting a woman who could easily have passed for well over a hundred – Heather wondered if it was a trick of the fading light, or if her deeply tanned skin really was practically reptilian. She wore a magnificent lime green cartwheel straw hat tied under her chin with a scarlet chiffon scarf. Delia had on a soft crocheted beret in apologetic beige and was probably, Heather guessed, deeply suspicious of the other woman's panache.

‘That's my ancient mother,' Nigel declared, arriving next to her with a newly opened bottle of champagne, which Heather assumed he had easily charmed away from Lisa. ‘Yours doesn't seem to be listening,' he observed, taking note of Delia's bird-like darting eyes as he refilled Heather's glass.

‘No, well she's watching, that's why. In the morning she'll be able to re-run this party like a video, telling me who said what to whom, and knowing exactly who disappeared into Margot's orchard with someone they hadn't arrived with.'

Nigel laughed. ‘Yours might be the more eagle-eyed,' he conceded, ‘but mine has got by far the best hat.'

‘I can't argue with that,' Heather agreed. ‘It's a colonial masterpiece. She looks as if she's just come back from ruling Burma.'

‘That's the single advantage of having skin like a tortoise – it gives an impression of imperialism. That's from a lifetime of hunting seasons and pruning roses in the midday sun, much as she'd love it to have been from running a tea-plantation.'

Just then Kate emerged from the kitchen and stopped to talk to the pair of old ladies. She was lit from behind and her golden hair shone, Heather thought suddenly, like the aura on the picture of Archangel Michael that she remembered pasting into her Sunday School attendance book when she was about six. Immediately she could smell the dusty room above the vicarage and the stale mustiness of the piled-up, spidery jumble ready for the next bout of fund-raising. She wondered if Delia would want to go to the local church while she stayed with them, and if she would complain about the vicar's wife accompanying the hymns with her jolly banjo.

Kate was no longer talking to her grandmother, Heather then realized, but was standing, staring at one of the guests who had walked past her down the steps towards the pool. Heather watched him, too, curious to see what interested Kate about him. Behind him, the two old ladies had their heads bent together for intense conspiratorial whispering. Like Kate, they were looking at the man who by now was being accosted by Lisa with her drink supply. Heather's insides took a very uncomfortable lurch as he moved out into the light of one of Russell's row of garden flares. She recognized him. His hair was still intact, as she should have guessed it would be, and he walked with the same confident lope she had found hard to keep pace with all those years ago. She moved gently backwards to the far side of Nigel, relieved that Iain was striding along the far side of the pool towards the pavilion. It was quite dark now and she felt sudden enormous gratitude that her mother preferred early nights and would provide an excuse to leave soon.

Kate also recognized the man, Iain she remembered his name was, the one with Margot, who had said he hoped she would be at the party. He must have seen her, but had walked straight past, which irked her. She decided that she'd wander down the garden and lure him into conversation about the film – surely he would be able to secure a part in it for her. It was tempting to stop on the way and think of something sensational to say to Darren. He'd finished helping Lisa on bottle-duty and was now leaning on the low wall by the barbecue, looking bored and scruffily out of place, and pulling tiny plants out of the cracks. He looked as if he needed cheering up. Kate had drunk several glasses of champagne and was feeling whirly in the head. She also felt brave and adventurous, and in need of being thoroughly noticed. Lisa, now off-duty, was strutting her high-heeled stuff by the pool and also heading for the man, probably with the same career prospects in mind that Kate had. She was walking, Kate thought, like one of the girls she'd seen during the time-outs on American boxing matches on TV. She should have been carrying a placard, ‘Round 3.' One stone, two birds, Kate decided, casually missing her footing and tumbling into the softly floodlit water.

‘Oh God, it's Kate,' Tom said to Heather. ‘Do you think she's pissed?'

Kate was swimming elegantly to the pool's edge, close to where Darren was opening a bottle of beer with a piece of the wall he sat on. Just too late, but mindful of priorities, he carefully balanced his beer between an anthemis and an aster, and got up to offer a rescuing hand to Kate. He was too slow. Instead she was hauled out of the water with gallant strength by her alternative quarry. Iain, still protectively holding on to her hand, even though she was now out of the pool, was among many who admired the way her dress had collapsed off one tanned shoulder and clung over the contours of her body. She looked, Heather thought, like one of those dreadful wet T-shirt competitors, and she pushed her way through the throng to cover her with Suzy's damp towel.

‘What on earth are you playing at? Can't you even walk straight?' she hissed crossly to her daughter who stood casually wringing out her long hair and smiling triumphantly at Lisa.

“S'OK Mum,' Kate said with her best smile and her eyes shining. ‘Just slipped.'

‘This lady is your mother?' Iain said, looking at Heather for the first time. It was too late for Heather to get away. Iain was now gazing intently at her face and she cursed herself for hoping that he had become short-sighted enough not to be counting her wrinkles. ‘Hello Feather,' he said very quietly. ‘Such a very long time.'

A quick getaway from Iain and the party was easy; Tom was flying the next afternoon and getting tetchy for the want of a forbidden drink, and of course there was the need to take Kate home and get her warmed up. Margot quite understood that there would be nothing she could offer from her own extensive wardrobe that would come close to what Kate would deign to be seen alive in. Walking along the road to home, Heather decided it was time to tell all to Tom. It was just a matter of choosing the right words, perhaps jokey ones as they climbed into bed. She thought about her underwear – beneath the big shirt she wore an uninspiring plain white body, chosen with the intention of minimalising Visible Panty Line rather than for the purpose of fun and games. She linked her arm comfortably through Tom's and mentally rifled through her knickers drawer, choosing something more sensuous to put on for bed. Tom had an erotic fondness for silky textures, which he attributed to the comforting nightly stroking of the pink satin eiderdown which had covered his childhood bed. Heather, when she first discovered this, had realized she was very fortunate Tom's mother hadn't been a devotee of candlewick, and that she hadn't had to mail-order a collection of tufted knickers in carbuncle-pink. The two of them were trailing the dripping but delighted Kate, followed by a complaining Suzy (‘Why can't I stay the night?
Why?
') and tired-out, slightly muzzy-headed Delia.

‘I'll go straight up to bed dear,' Delia said as soon as Heather unlocked the front door, allowing Jasper to rush out and do some urgent leg-lifting against the terracotta pots. ‘All that excitement, and tomorrow I must go and see Edward again.' Delia hovered in the hallway. ‘Come on Jasper,' she called to the scuffling dog, ‘that's surely enough for now.' She wouldn't look at Kate, whom she strongly suspected of showing off.

Heather recognized the pointed Ignoring of Drawing Attention Ploy, and wished her mother was the type of woman who would have conveniently forgotten everything by the morning.

Miraculously on the walk home, neither Tom nor Kate had mentioned Iain the gallant rescuer. Leaving the party, neither of them had piped up with ‘Who was that man? How does he know you?' Being as totally self-absorbed as only a teenager could be, Kate had probably not even been listening. Heather had dreaded either of them talking about him in front of Delia. If his name had just chanced to slip out, Delia might possibly have gone into a faint, or even, it occurred to Heather, dropped dead. Now that
would
have been the ultimate in Drawing Attention, she thought. As she got undressed it also occurred to her that her mother's instant (painless of course) death would make her own life a whole lot simpler. She touched wood, crossed herself and blushed with sickening guilt at the sinful thought.

Tom was saving his opinions for the privacy of their bedroom. ‘So who was that oily creep? The one who pulled Kate out of the pool and then stood there oozing lechery at her?' Tom's reference to ‘oily' reminded Heather of Uncle Edward; that poor man seemed to have had all his own oil sapped from every pore to the point of crispness. The TV adverts for the reputedly healthier sorts of cooking fat sprang to mind as she cleaned off her make-up: great colanders full of French fries having their grease shaken off. Perhaps we are all simply chips sizzling in the great deep fat fryer of life, just waiting our turn to be scooped out and drained . . . I must be drunk, she decided, her train of thought making her feel queasy, but she carefully dolloped a double measure of lubricating moisturiser on to her face to stave off the awful fate.

‘Old enough to know better, gruesome old goat.' Tom was rattling on half to himself as he padded around the room. ‘Dribbling at a young girl like Kate.' Heather regarded him calmly. Somehow his attitude didn't make her feel he would be terrifically interested in her scarlet frilled underwear – clearly it was hardly worth opening the drawer. ‘And he seemed to know you. Where would you have met a jerk like that?'

The sweetest and most tempting answer would be ‘Darling I married him'. Heather considered, wondering if she could raise the energy for devilment. Tom was being hostile and challenging. She certainly didn't feel awake enough to enter into an explanation that would, given his mood, become inevitably defensive. It would simply be easier to keep the information to herself. It would only lead to derision, to disbelief and to an exhausting late-night bout of self-justification. What's another twenty-five years, she thought, if I can possibly get away with it? ‘He's just someone I met years and years ago,' she told Tom, then added, ‘long before you.' It wasn't quite ‘Mind your own business', but close enough.

‘Knew him well, did you?' Tom wasn't looking at her, feigning only half-interest as he nonchalantly tapped at the keys of his Psion organizer, already half-absent, checking out the next day's flight times.

Heather smiled at him as she brushed her hair in the mirror. It was a trick question and they both knew it. He was asking if she'd slept with Iain, but she mulishly refused to identify the code he was using. ‘I didn't know him terribly well actually, and not for very long,' she told him instead. Well at least that much was true, she thought, switching off the light.

Simon decided it would be safer to go by river. Even if no-one saw him climb over the wall, and he managed not to spear himself on the dense invader-deterring barrier of holly and hawthorn, there was still the danger that their security lights would go on, revealing him creeping round the edge of the herb-lawn like a stealthy burglar. The rowing boat made no noise as he gently dipped the oars into the flat black water, but moorhens flapped like abandoned bin-liners as he passed them, and the rats and voles scuttled and rustled into holes in the bank. Night-time noises were so exaggerated, he thought, as an owl took off from the oak tree with a tremendous commotion. He was hardly daring to breathe in case lights went on and shotguns came out all over the village.

Simon rowed round the back of the little island to lessen the chances of the bankside residents wondering what a lone, unlit rower was up to so late at night, and he approached the almost derelict dock from downstream. As he looked at the house, crouched silently in the boat while he shipped the oars and tied a rope to a rusty iron ring, a woman appeared at an upstairs window and briskly closed the curtains. His heart boomed under his leather jacket and he needed quite suddenly to pee. It felt all wrong, having a pee behind the willow overhanging the dock in Kate's garden, somehow sacrilegious, as if he was in a graveyard, defiling the dead. He hadn't dared direct the flow into the river in case the noise in the silent night cascaded like Niagara. He tried to think of it as marking territory like a lion, pissing a pattern of his initials up the tree bark to avoid the thunderous sound of splashing on the grass.

Afterwards, he edged past the paddock, terrified that Suzy's podgy pony would canter across to him, whickering for a midnight feast. Next he crept along the wall of espaliered fruit trees, alarmed at how, in the gloom, their skinny crucified limbs made him think of a row of torture victims. Simon's breathing was juddery and shallow as he finally reached the house and stood quaking under the window that he'd identified as Kate's. Ideally, he knew, she would have a balcony like Juliet's, twined with night-pungent jasmine and easy to climb up to. (A set of steps would be helpful, he thought, feeling he had exhausted his adventurousness for one night.) Unlike Romeo, though, Simon had no illusions that Kate would welcome his nocturnal visit. For one thing, she was not posed above him in a see-through nightie gazing languidly at the stars and wishing he, and only he, would appear. Her light was out. She was probably fast asleep, he realized dejectedly, dreaming of that gross nerd Darren, or the smarmy git who'd pulled her out of the pool. Simon lurked under Kate's window and wondered rather drunkenly what he had hoped to achieve. He'd been imagining she would be wandering about in the garden, having realized Darren was a complete crud and that older men drooling over teenage girls were nothing short of sad vampires looking to leech off young blood.