Seven For a Secret (7 page)

Heather, twenty-two and still childishly baitable, had risen angrily like a hooked trout. ‘If I ever
do
marry again, I don't intend to have any secrets,' she'd replied loftily. Her mother's raised eyebrows and pursed mouth had signalled her favourite ‘Well we'll see about that, won't we' expression. Of course Tom had known she'd been married before, Heather had told him quite early on. It wasn't a problem, just something to report to the registrar's clerk when arranging the wedding. It was true there hadn't been any secrets, just maybe a slight omission of the complete facts, which, according to her mother, wasn't the same thing at all.

‘Some things they'd rather not know,' Delia had insisted, so Heather had decided she was being kind, not dwelling on what was past. If she tried, she could make it entirely his fault that she'd been hazy on the details – he should have shown more curiosity. Her marriage to Iain had been brushed aside as ‘just an early mistake, all over long ago' and neither she nor Tom had ever mentioned it again. There had been no need. Heather turned over and swam lazily on her back, watching flakes of cloud trail across the blue above her. But
why
hadn't he wanted to know more? Why had they never had one of those cosily drunken late-night, true-confessions conversations in which Tom admitted something shocking like catching clap on a school trip to Hamburg and she countered amusingly with a briefly-told little story about being a runaway teenage bride with her school photo in all the papers? Why had she never pointed to the best-seller racks at the airport bookstall and said, ‘Good grief can you imagine, I was actually married to the man who wrote that stuff'? Perhaps Tom had also had a mother who'd given him firm instructions Never To Tell All; there could be so much she didn't know (perhaps wouldn't want to know) about him, too.

While Heather floated, the village seemed to be waking up more busily than usual. From the main road, though still some distance away, she became aware of a rumbling, rolling sound which turned into the steady, slow thrum of an approaching convoy. Probably, nothing more thrilling than an early bulk delivery to the local Waitrose, she thought. She climbed out of the pool and was on her way back into the house, warming herself in her bathrobe, when Kate, who probably hadn't seen this time of the day since she'd been wakingfor four-hourly feeds, suddenly rushed out of the back door, brushing her hair.

‘Kate? Where on earth are you going?' Heather asked, amazed at the sight of the girl, in full going-out make-up and a wispy metre or so of a silky floral dress. She must have been up at least an hour, Heather estimated – no hint of the puffy-eyed, baby-bird-look that Kate usually presented to the breakfast table. It suddenly occurred to Heather that she couldn't be a hundred per cent sure that Kate had even been in that night and been to bed. Perhaps teenage girls really did need an armed guard in the corridor outside their rooms.

‘It's today! They're all arriving today! All the people for the film. I've got to get there. They might want extras, Simon said.'

Heather could hear, no further away than the recreation ground, truck-brakes squealing and huffing, a settling and parking batch of sounds. ‘But they won't want them yet, will they? These will be just catering and props and things like that, I expect,' Heather said, not really having a clue whether she was right or not, but with a motherly instinct that Kate should at least have some breakfast before she went to find out.

‘Yes but at least if I'm
there
 . . .' Kate reasoned, backing towards the side of the house and the gate to freedom.

‘Go on then, but don't come back all deflated because there's no-one there but the equivalent of road crew, will you?' Heather warned her.

But Kate was gone, running down the road, chasing an exciting life.

‘Ooh you don't want her getting involved in films, anything could happen.' Delia, asking about Kate's absence at breakfast, had expected to be told that she was still lazing in bed, at which she could have tutted contentedly and told Heather the girl was overindulged. This, though, was probably better. ‘Artistic people,' Delia sniffed, ‘nothing regular in their lives.'

‘Surely that's the whole point,' Heather told her as she crammed thick wholemeal into the toaster. ‘What teenage girl with any spirit wants “regularity” in her life?' Except with their periods, she added silently to herself. ‘I expect she's looking for something more thrilling than walking a kennel-full of pampered dogs for Margot.'

Delia scowled, expressing deep distrust of anything that might be judged to be ‘thrilling'. ‘Doesn't she have any school work? Or what about a nice little holiday job in a shop?'

Heather gave a spluttered laugh. ‘Oh Mother, really! Can you imagine Kate interested in a “nice little” anything? If she was, she'd have stayed at her “nice little” school, with all those “nice little” girls! Some grow up faster than others, some want nothing but a typing diploma and an engagement ring at her age, but most, those with imagination, hope there's some magical, fantasy life-drama in which they can be the star. In Kate's case, literally – you don't think she just wants a spear-carrying part or whatever, do you?' Delia looked mystified and Heather banged around the kitchen, crashing cups on to the table. ‘She's probably imagining that the director will be helplessly overcome by her looks and her legs and all that golden fairy-princess hair, and offer her an immediate starring role. In her head she's not even
here
any more, she's probably in Hollywood at the Oscars, wearing a Vivienne Westwood and sitting next to Keanu Reeves.' She paused for breath and caught sight of her shining eyes in the little star-mirror on the dresser. She'd been shouting, she realized; the kitchen seemed to be full of diminishing echoes. Coffee gurgled in the percolator, an apologetic, rather comic sort of noise, like a nun with indigestion.

Delia was watching her, bird-like eyes bright and darting, her whole face keyed up to choose the right words. Here they come, thought Heather, reaching thankfully into the cool fridge for milk. ‘I never realized how much she took after you,' Delia said quietly.

Heather took a deep and calming breath and forced herself to smile, ‘Well we all take after someone don't we?' she said. ‘I wonder who my role model was?'

She'd gone through a phase in her early teens when she'd wanted, needed, to know about her father. It was a mystery, and she'd hoped there was some glamour attached to this, anything to make her a source of envy to her friends.

‘He died. Complications,' was all she'd been told. ‘Complications' had sounded enough like a terrible disease in itself to be quite adequate an explanation for a very young child of limited vocabulary. Heather at eight had been awed by the number of syllables – obviously that made it
much
worse than mumps or measles. It was as big as the mysterious scarlatina, which sounded as if it should be the name of a dazzling gypsy dancer in a frilled skirt. But by the time Heather had got to the second form at the grammar school, it was nowhere near enough for her to know.

‘Complications of
what
?' she'd asked her mother over one of their comfortable winter-night casseroles.

‘Something he got during the war. He was never the same.' Delia had looked lonely, suddenly, which alarmed Heather at the time – mothers were supposed to be strong and powerful. Hers was an admired survivor, battling alone with bureaucracy that still, in the 1960s, demanded a father's, not just either parent's, signature on a child's passport application, and a detailed written explanation if that signature was unavailable. At the end of each summer term, when copying her own address on to the large brown envelope that would contain her end-of-year report, Heather had been the only one in her form who couldn't address it to Mr and Mrs. She sat, now, in her maple and mint-green kitchen, listening to watery sounds overhead as Suzy splashed about in the bath. She'd never found out about those ‘complications'. She'd given up trying after several secret sessions, under the far table in the school library, with her highly inquisitive friend Barbara and a selection of unhelpful history books.

‘Trench foot? Mustard gas?' Barbara had suggested eagerly, flicking through tatty pages illustrated with ancient Punch cartoons.

‘Wrong war, I think,' Heather had told her dispiritedly.

‘A lot of them caught diseases of the . . . of Down There.' Barbara had slithered up close to her and whispered with a sly, giggly grin. ‘Off the French girls. All that can-can.'

‘I expect it was shrapnel,' Heather had replied curtly, reluctant to speculate on her father's sex life, as well as being pretty sure that if he had been diseased Down There, she herself, who was made several years after the war ended, wouldn't have been born at all.

‘Could be shrapnel,' Barbara had conceded reluctantly. ‘Perhaps it got lodged Down—'

‘In his head somewhere. Then it moved and he got ill and died. Probably,' Heather had decided, and slammed shut the fattest history book, gathered the little heap together and filed them quickly away on the bottom shelf in the wrong place. How ridiculous it must seem to every generation that their parents
do it
, she thought. And in turn, she thought, all these years later, looking at her mother who was neatly folding the last crust of toast into her mouth, how outrageous it must seem to every generation of parents that
their children
should get round to a sex life, too. I've got it all to come, quite soon, with Kate, she thought, feeling a sneaking sympathy for her mother as she was twenty-five years ago, coping with the chaotic hormones of a teenage daughter, with no man around to deal with her own.

Outside, a magpie started its aggressive, football-rattle sound. She looked out and saw the pushy, spiteful bird, bullying robins away from the bird table on the terrace. It was past the season when magpies were in pairs, and superstitiously she muttered, ‘Good morning Mrs Magpie, I hope your family are well,' to stave off the bad luck.

‘Is it one for sorrow?' Delia asked from the table.

‘Yes, frightening the robins away,' Heather told her. ‘Magpies are such pretty birds, I always think,' she went on, carrying cups to the sink. ‘You wouldn't think something so lovely could do such damage, stealing baby birds and eggs from nests. I've seen them out there taking on a whole treeful of sparrows and trampling quite ruthlessly through all the nests after the babies. The poor parents were frantic.'

Delia started rinsing plates at the sink, somehow sure that dishwashers didn't really get things properly clean. ‘They remind me of mackerel, just the colours of them, all that gleaming bluey-black and the pale underneath. Smoothly turned out, good-looking and dangerous.' She paused for a moment, the water running unnoticed over her wrists, then added with an expression of miles-away thought, ‘Like men in evening dress.'

Kate had to admit to disappointment. She'd got there well ahead of Lisa Gibson, who probably wasn't even awake yet. Lisa, when she wanted to be noticed, would be loud and unmissable, wagging her double-D tits at whoever glanced her way. Kate looked forward to pointing out that being on film was well known to add at least 10 lb to one's appearance. Out by the cricket pavilion, the early signs had been good, all those trucks arranged in a circle like a traveller's illicit convoy, at the edge of the recreation ground, on the rough area where the mothers always parked to collect their children from the pavilion playgroup. The lorries and buses reminded her of a circus. They weren't like ordinary goods trucks, there was that slight otherness about them, just like romantic fairground wagons, that made you wonder where they spent their off-road time. No-one saw vehicles like these actually travelling around, using motorways like any old Pickfords furniture truck or an ordinary Habitat van, they just appeared where they weren't before, like fairy rings on the grass in the early morning. There were converted buses with shabby curtains, luxurious magenta coaches with racks and racks of clothes, a catering wagon with the kind of fold-out flaps and cleverly built-in equipment that would, if it was in miniature, make a small child satisfied that they'd been given the perfect good-value toy.

A semi-circle of six or so men sat around on upturned boxes with mugs of tea, eyeing a cavernous bus-load of lighting as if putting off the moment when it must be unloaded and dealt with. Kate hovered shyly outside the ring, her eagerness wavering now that she didn't quite know what to do, who to approach, how to ask if she qualified as star material. Couldn't the right person simply take one look at her and
realize
?

‘Cup of tea love?' one of the men called to her. He looked like one of Margot's builders, with baggy jeans slung under a beer-belly and a grey T-shirt that looked as if it had been used to clean a fly-smeared windscreen. Kate hesitated, wondering if this was a gathering she should, as she normally would, avoid – they reminded her of the workmen who'd taken three whistling, leering weeks to mend a small hole in the school fence. Yet one of these smirking, slurping men could be just the one to help her towards fame and fortune. Perhaps film directors were like rock stars: impossible, till you got a full dose of their ego, to tell them apart from their entourage.

‘Two sugars please,' she then said suddenly, catching sight of Simon emerging from his gateway. When he found her, she would already be an old hand, sitting among these early-morning men as if she'd travelled with them, she thought with happy satisfaction.

Simon was dithering on the pavement, looking up and down the road as if searching for something. Kate, perched on an upturned plastic crate inside the men's magic circle, watched him covertly. She felt very much as she had as a small child playing at camping in the pony paddock. Once inside her tent, or in winter under the shelter of the huge old viburnum that sprawled against the stable wall, it had been as if she was keeping watch on the rest of the world, from a hidden one which was entirely her own. Beyond the cricket pavilion she could also see Julia Merriman walking her labradors and staring with frank curiosity at the collection of strange vehicles.