Sworn Secret (8 page)

She opened her eyes to see what it was he’d given her. An iPod. She looked at him. The music still played. It had wiped everything else out of her head – there was only him and her, like cardboard cut-outs, cut from the real world and stuck to a sheet of brilliant white paper. Just them and nothing else. Then he stood and smiled at her.

It was a simple, uncomplicated smile that needed no explanation or translation and required no reply. It was the sweetest smile she’d ever seen, and at that very moment something amazing happened. Something she could never have predicted. For as long as she could remember, the him in her head had been a faceless shadow, an indistinct silhouette without a name. She’d danced with and kissed and loved this mysterious stranger a countless number of times, waltzing around those spaces in her mind she’d so carefully furnished with candles and flowers and happiness. Never once in those hundreds of times did she ever imagine that beneath her lover’s featureless mask was Haydn. Yet there he was, the him in her head smiling at her, suddenly, fantastically, with both a name and a face.

A Ghastly Accent

Jon stared out through the windscreen. He gripped the steering wheel, knuckles white as a corpse. Behind him Rachel unclipped her seatbelt. He didn’t turn to face her; he couldn’t stomach the thought of laying eyes on Rebecca, who was sitting beside her on the back seat. All he had were hows and whys. How and why repeated over and over.

It was grief. Grief was how and grief was why. Her grief and his. He’d let his out and it had got in the way, clouded his judgement, loosened his grip on her, allowed her to run after Rebecca. But he still couldn’t work out why he hadn’t followed her. Why it had taken so long for him to check she was OK. Why it was only when they heard that dreadful shrieking from the playground that he’d thought to find her. He’d just stood there, gawping through tear-blinded eyes at that blasted picture of Anna. He couldn’t look anywhere else. From the moment he walked into the hall it was all he could see. Her smiling at him. Maybe if they hadn’t put that picture on the stage he might have stopped Kate following Rebecca. But the picture pushed his grief out like volcanic lava. He’d worked so hard to keep it locked away, ever conscious that Kate and Lizzie didn’t need his misery. They had more than enough of their own, and his was surplus to requirement. The only thing he could do was box and bury it. But that picture, which in an instant tore him open, exhumed that miserable box of sadness and missing, and now his wife was at the police station and the child she’d beaten was sitting dumbstruck in his car.

He cleared his throat, wishing there was something obvious to say. A way to apologize. But words were insubstantial, inappropriate.

Rachel opened the car door and moved to get out, but then she stopped, and sat back in the seat.

‘What on earth possessed her?’ she asked.

Jon turned then. He readied himself for the sight of Rebecca and then made himself look at her, still quivering, white with shock, her lip swollen. She clutched her arms around her middle. She was unable to look at him, avoiding his eyes as if he were the Devil, her eyes fixed, unseeing, on something outside the car window. Their moment of closeness, when she’d clung to him with every ounce of strength she had left, had gone.

He looked back at Rachel and considered her question.

‘The day,’ he said at last.

And yesterday, he thought, and the day before that and the day before that.

He thought of Kate. He saw her standing above Rebecca, her face clouded with alarm, her hand raised to her mouth, tears collected in her eyes. She had fixed her eyes to his, begged him to help her.

I’m sorry
, she’d mouthed,
I’m so sorry
.

Jon’s heart ached for her and he knew that he had let her down. Kate was the last person to hurt a child. She’d never raised a hand to their girls, and both of them, Anna especially, had certainly deserved it on occasion. His mother never understood why they didn’t get a sharp smack every now and then.

‘It never did you or Daniel any harm,’ she’d mutter, disapprovingly, as Kate disappeared to reason with whatever tantrum blazed.

But that wasn’t Kate’s way.

‘Children don’t need to be smacked. They’re like flowers. All they want is some food and water, a bit of sunshine and lots of love, and they’ll grow just right. If you hit them, you’ll break them.’

She was a good mother. Sometimes, way back then, before Anna’s death, he’d find himself watching her with the girls, in utter admiration. She was so young when she’d fallen pregnant with Anna, then Lizzie so quickly after, and then he was away with his job, leaving her for weeks at a time with the two small children. She never once complained. Instead, she made sure they didn’t miss him, painting him love-you-Daddy pictures, making fabulous misshapen biscuits with fluorescent pink icing and too many silver balls, leaving incoherent messages on his mobile that he’d listen to over and over in those sterile hotel rooms in every lonely corner of Europe. Had he ever told her how much he’d appreciated that? He couldn’t remember.

Rachel got out of the car and walked around to Rebecca’s side. She opened the door and held her hand out and waited until her daughter took it. They stood next to Jon’s window. Rachel’s arm lay protectively around her daughter’s shoulders; Rebecca leant against her mother.

‘Will you be all right?’ he said.

Neither replied.

‘I don’t know what else I can say, but if either of you need anything, you must call me, any time, day or night.’

‘You know, it’s her who needs help,’ Rachel said. ‘Not us.’

He dropped his head, but feeling Rachel’s eyes needling into him he glanced up again. Her mouth twitched ever so slightly, then she reached through the window and laid her hand on his.

‘It’s not your fault, Jon.’

He stared at her hand. Her skin was creamy and smooth and peppered with tiny moles like the shell of a speckled egg, so different from Kate’s, whose hands were dry and red in places, with paint ground permanently into them.

‘And, I know this is probably out of turn, but from where I’m standing, it’s not fair on you either,’ she went on. ‘You lost Anna too.’

Jon closed his eyes as she stroked him with her thumb, warm and gentle. He tried to imagine her touch was Kate’s.

‘I should go.’ The words caught in his throat. ‘I need to get back to Lizzie.’

‘Poor thing,’ Rachel whispered. ‘Seeing her mum like that.’

Jon didn’t reply.

He waited until the two of them disappeared inside the house before he started the engine. He drove in a numb daze, unable to distinguish one emotion from the next as they jostled inside him. He felt as if he were wading through glue. The amount of effort required to do simple things – shift gear, check mirrors, park – was exhausting. He sat in the NCP near the police station and tried to steady himself. What was he going to tell people? What would they think of Kate? He winced at the sound of his mother’s voice in his head.
Well, of course
, she said tightly.
I’m not in the least bit surprised.

Jon shook his head. ‘You mustn’t blame her,’ he said aloud. ‘Losing Anna turned her world upside down.’

He saw his mother’s eyebrows arch.
Losing Anna turned all our worlds upside down
, she said.
But all she sees is her own tragedy. What the rest of us feel is of no concern to her. It’s about time Kate realized the whole sorry situation doesn’t simply revolve around her
. He saw his mother cross her arms and lift her chin, the tortoiseshell comb pushed firmly into her snow-white hair. He wouldn’t agree with her. However fond he was of his mother his loyalty was with his wife, as strong now as it had been the first time he brought her home to meet his mother. He remembered how terrified Kate had been, juddering about on the doorstep while they waited for the door to open and, when it did, her hand squeezing his so hard he laughed. He pulled her along the corridor as she ohmygodded her way past framed doctorates, the photo of his father shaking hands with Neil Kinnock, the one of him in a crowd of eminent strangers with the grand red-brick façade of Harvard behind them, then proudly holding his knighthood, his mother beaming out from beneath the rim of her ridiculous pink hat.

‘What am I going to say to them? Oh my God, they’re going to think I’m a moron.’ She paused. ‘And I am a moron, by the way. I failed my maths O-level.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Twice,’ she whispered. ‘I failed Maths O-level twice.’

Jon laughed and kissed her forehead.

‘I’ve never met a Lady before. Shit. What the hell am I doing here?’ She tried to pull back towards the front door. He held firm and pulled her on.

‘He’s knighted for services to economics, so really, she’s only a Lady because he was such a swot at school,’ he whispered with a grin.

She groaned. ‘None of the swots at school could stand me. They thought I was a real pain in the arse.’

‘They’ll adore you, just like I do,’ Jon said.

As they walked into the front room, or lounge as Kate called it, he crossed his fingers behind his back.

He was besotted. She was so different from the ones before, a samey-samey group of respectable girls who were headed for Oxbridge, and who dressed nicely, with parents who were solicitors or doctors or academics, and whom his mother grinned at while sipping sloe gin. But Kate, with her lace-up boots, nose ring and art school flair, was fire and frivolity and full to the brim with lust for life. She injected him with energy. She was his elixir. It was only when he met Kate that Jon saw how dull his life had become, typical eldest child, conservative, responsible, desperate to please. It shackled him. But then he found Kate and she had the key.

‘So?’ he asked, when he returned to the front room having put Kate in a taxi back to east London.

‘Oh, Jonathan, darling, she is so
uncultured
,’ his mother replied. ‘Doesn’t even play the piano. Not a single lesson!’

At that moment Jon decided against telling them about the pregnancy.

‘And how
anybody
can think that the painting of the Sistine Chapel isn’t an important moment in the history of art is beyond me. I mean, that’s verging on the criminal.’

‘She didn’t actually say that,’ said Jon, fighting to keep his voice level. ‘She said she didn’t class it as a catalyst of stylistic change.’

‘She certainly did not use the word
catalyst
, darling. I doubt very much if she could even
spell
catalyst!’

Jon took a deep breath. ‘Was there anything you liked about her?’

‘Well, if you pushed me, I suppose she was occasionally amusing, though brash-amusing, not witty-amusing. But I do think it’s rather tasteless that she used to be with Daniel. I mean, is it Daniel? Or is it you? These modern women have fewer morals than common street girls.’

‘She had a couple of drinks with Daniel,’ Jon said, trying to ignore a surge of jealousy. ‘It was nothing more than that. We’ve been together for nearly three months and,’ he paused, ‘you know, it’s actually pretty serious.’

His mother snorted.

‘I thought she was rather delightful,’ his father said, from behind the
Sunday Times
. ‘And jolly pretty.’

Jon gave his father a grateful smile, but his mother’s second scoff saw it off.

‘Not
jolly
pretty, Peter. Pretty I’ll give her, but she’s too self-consciously avant garde to be
jolly
pretty. And, darling,’ she said, wrinkling her nose against an undetectable smell. ‘Where on earth is that ghastly accent from?’

‘She doesn’t have a ghastly accent.’

Jon’s mother cocked her head like a toy poodle.

‘Fine,’ Jon said. ‘Have it your way. My girlfriend’s accent comes straight from the gutter of Bristol, her father left when she was no more than a baby, she can’t play Für Elise on the piano, she says
ta
instead of
thank you
, and she failed her maths O-level, twice. But how about we pretend, just for one moment, that none of these things matter a jot in the real world, and acknowledge that we’ve all had the privilege of spending time with one of the most fabulous women I’ve ever met. I love her, and God help me if I won’t do everything I can to make sure she marries me before some other lucky bastard nabs her.’

For a moment or two there was a stunned silence, and then his mother calmly laid both hands palm down on her lap and looked straight at him. ‘The girl failed maths O-level
twice
?’

And with that he walked out and hailed a second cab to Dalston.

‘They hated me, didn’t they?’ Kate said, as they lay tangled in the sheets.

‘No. How could they?’

‘I said “ta for dinner”. That’s wrong, isn’t it?’

‘You were being polite. That’s anything but wrong.’

‘But you call it lunch. I remembered that as soon as I said it.’

‘It doesn’t matter what you call it.’ He kissed her perfect nose, small and upturned with freckles and a mole on one side that looked like a full stop. There we go, one beautiful girl with a perfect nose, he imagined whoever-made-us-all saying, as she was finished with that full stop and a flourish.

‘Ta ever so truly very much for my super-duper delumtious luncheon, Mrs Lady Thorne, your ohsoloftyhighness, would’ve been best. You should have warned me.’

He laughed.

‘They won’t be happy about the baby.’ She patted her washboard stomach.

‘They’ll be over the moon.’

‘Liar.’

‘If not, then, well, fuck them.’

‘Jon! You swore!’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them!’

‘No,’ she whispered as she leant in to kiss his neck with soft, lingering lips. ‘I’ll fuck you, ta very much.’

Jon’s mother had eventually come round, and until the day of Anna’s funeral, she and Kate got along fine, because as much as his mother disapproved of her accent and her views on the importance of Michelangelo, or her lack of mathematical prowess, when the baby-out-of-wedlock appeared, the two of them were immediately united. His mother loved Anna, and then Lizzie, nearly as much as Kate did, and that shared love was enough to cement them. It broke Jon’s heart when he thought back to those days, all of them together, maybe watching one of Anna’s countless dance shows in the living room, being presented home-made tickets, Lizzie at the CD player on music duty, his wife and mother both grinning with love and affection as Anna performed and Lizzie followed her with a bike-lamp spotlight. They had barely spoken for nearly a year, their only exchanges brief and perfunctory. Jon was at a loss. His mother’s harsh lack of forgiveness and Kate’s stubborn refusal to offer any apology or regret seemed to make the chasm unbridgeable.