The Darkest Secret (10 page)

The lintel is weathered and the light inside is dim. Despite the greyness of the day, Claire walks past the light switch as though it doesn't exist, and winds her way up the passageway. She has to wind her way, because the hall is full of boxes. But not like Tom's cardboard box collection; not Xbox packaging she's forgotten to throw away: boxes that are neatly stacked and sealed with parcel tape. The hallway is quite wide, I see, but the route along the length of its flagstone floor is no more than a couple of feet wide, and it bends in the middle. Boxes are piled up on either side. Boxes and those plastic crates you buy in pound shops, and somewhere beneath them some tables and a couple of chairs, a couple of rugs rolled up and stacked against the wall, dog bowls, a collection of wellington boots so large it's as though they're breeding down there, and, thrown down seemingly at random on top of the boxes, piles of coats and scarves. Enough to clothe the population of a homeless shelter, and none of them suitable to be worn even in a public space like the village.

‘Excuse the clutter,' says Claire, casually as though she's referring to a few coffee cups and a pair of shoes. ‘We're having a bit of a sort-out.'

No, you're not, I think. That's what I say every time I can't avoid having a visitor round at mine.
I'm in the middle of a clearout
.
It's at the worse-before-it-gets-better stage. I'm going to take these books, boots, belts, bags, to the charity shop
. And everyone knows it isn't true; everyone plays along with it because they know I will never change.

I play along too. ‘Don't worry about it,' I say. ‘You should see my flat.' Because that's what everyone says to me as they skirt around the empty wine bottle collection and gather up my bath towels to make a space on the sofa.

I glimpse a sitting room and a dining room as we pass, spaces left between the boxes to allow access to the doorways. The dining-room walls are lined with shelves and the shelves are filled with jars. Great big Kilner jars all the way down to little tiny ones that must have once held fish eggs, each jar neatly labelled and each label written on with black Sharpie. Ranks and ranks of them: ‘tomatoes' ‘peppers' ‘green beans' ‘cannellini' ‘butter beans' ‘sauerkraut' ‘chutney' ‘rhubarb' ‘gooseberry' ‘redcurrant jelly' – there must be at least twenty of these – ‘stewed apple' ‘mushrooms' corner to corner, floor to ceiling. I catch a glimpse of the interior of one of the cardboard boxes where the lid has been left open and see that it, too, is replete with jar lids. Claire, it seems, is preparing for the zombie apocalypse. But in an organised way, at least.

‘Sorry,' she says. ‘I can't bear to waste all that spare produce. We thought we'd sell them at a farmers' market or something, but… well. I thought maybe I'd give the land a rest this year. You know, Jethro Tull style. I try not to use too many chemical fertilisers, so it could probably do with a rest. I collect the donkeys' droppings and the sweepings from the chicken coop, and compost everything, but… you know… it's probably not enough, in the end.'

‘How about the pigs?'

‘Oh, no, not for vegetables. Parasites.'

‘Looks like you've easily got enough to last you out a year,' I say, generously.

Claire turns round and looks at her hallway as though with newly opened eyes. ‘I guess so. Oh, dear. Come and have a cup of tea. Or a drink. Would you prefer a drink? After your drive?'

I would love a drink. Love one. But I think I'd better pace myself. It's going to be a long few days. ‘Tea will be fine,' I say.

‘I've got a lot of gooseberry wine to use up,' she says. ‘And rhubarb and blackberry and elderflower.'

A proper little liver-off-the-land. I can't believe that this is the same woman. The one I knew got in a state if she broke a fingernail. Now her hands are rough and red and the nails are clipped to the quick.

‘Do you buy anything at all?' I ask.

‘Not if I can help it,' she says. ‘There are so many chemicals, you know. And additives. Colours. Even the stuff you think is really simple. Shop bread's full of other stuff, did you know? I'd grow my own wheat, really, but it's just not practicable. I get organic flour delivered and we make our own. I won't have Ruby exposed to that stuff.'

She stops at the bottom of the stairs, calls up. ‘Ruby! Milly's here!'

‘Mila,' I say. ‘I go by Mila these days.'

‘Oh!' she says. ‘When did that happen?'

‘University,' I say. Not the entire truth. I changed it just before I went up, but never got round to the going-up part. Too many mentions of ‘Coco's sister Milly' in the press over the years for my liking. And besides: Millys are chirpy. They have things like jewellery rolls and they colour-code their underwear. They work in Human Resources and aspire to living in Tunbridge Wells. With a name like Milly you either change it or you abandon all hope.

A sound of movement far away in the house. A faint ‘Coming!' drifting along the landing. ‘I'll make the tea,' says Claire. ‘Why don't you go and sit in the living room and I'll bring it through?'

‘Sure,' I say.

‘It's mint,' she says. ‘Is that okay? I've got ginger in the freezer if you'd rather.'

I wonder if it's too late to change my request to coffee. Think about the additives and decide that there's no hope she'll have it. ‘Mint's great,' I say, and start wondering how quickly I can claim to need to top up my petrol and stop at a garage in the morning.

I go into the living room. Low ceilings, a faded carpet that was once patterned with flowers, two low chintz sofas and an armchair. Roughage leaps on to the nicer-looking sofa, the one near the fire, which is lit and provides the only heat I can feel in the house. Flops down among the cushions and sighs.

No food stores in here, but the room, away from the seating area, is full to the brim. More shelves, this time stuffed with knick-knacks and souvenirs. A shell, a feather, a piece of salt-bleached wood. A teddy bear, a pair of tiny pink shoes, a christening cup, a My Little Pony. And more, odder things. A sippy cup. A spoon and pusher, made for tiny hands, with red plastic handles. A hair bobble with small plastic pandas. Some alphabet building blocks. Some Lego. Baby sunglasses. A tiny floppy hat. I know what it is. On a table in front of the shelves, a church candle, one of those six-inch-thick ones that lasts for weeks, burns in a saucer, surrounded by framed photos. Of Coco.

The walls are covered in them, too. Coco smiling, Coco on a white rug on a cold stone floor surrounded by Christmas wrapping paper, Coco on a beach, Coco and Ruby, identical in the sorts of gauzy dresses she would take any opportunity to dress them in back then, Coco in an inflatable rubber ring by a paddling pool, Coco at the top of a slide in a pom-pom hat, Coco and Ruby as tiny babies, wrapped around each other in a cot, an echo of how they were in the womb. Scrawled childish drawings – a wobbly flower, a scribble, a stick person – framed up in gold and glass as though they were precious art.

The room is a shrine.

I hear someone walk along the landing above my head and thunder down the stairs. I feel strangely guilty, staring at this evidence of Claire's loss, the plastic tat that should long ago have been thrown away. I move over to the fireplace and squat down to talk to the dog while I wait for my sister to appear.

She had her first dream of Sean when she was seven, and the memory still makes her shiver. It wasn't much of a dream by the standards of what has followed, as hormones and knowledge have shaped her brain. But the first time – that shiver of surrender and the feel of his imaginary arms encircling her – will always stay there at the back of her mind.

And he doesn't even know I'm alive, she thinks. I got all dressed up and he barely even glanced at me. I hate my age. He can't see me because of it. Can't see that I would do anything for him. Anything. And the Anything I've been given is taking the children to the beach so his spoiled sour wife can take time off.

She glances up the sand. Milly and India have the twins and Joaquin, and they've gathered around something that lies in the sand. Tiggy and Inigo Orizio wobble hand in hand at the water's edge, jumping back in shock each time a tiny wave – more wake from passing boats than actual waves; Poole Harbour in high summer is more like lake than sea – breaks over their plastic-sandalled toes. Tiggy sports an inflatable doughnut around her waist and Inigo wears a pair of waterwings. They're fine. It would take them so long to get out of their depth that there would be time to launch the coastguard long before they did. Fred sits nearby, studiously burying his legs in sand with a tin shovel.

Simone settles down on her back with
Harry Potter.
She's not reading. She rarely reads, but looking as though she is doing so makes her look less lonely. She longs to take a swim, but she's too conscientious about her job and doesn't want to leave the three kids she's somehow ended up watching while the other two just stick to their own siblings. This bikini, pink gingham with a pair of shiny buttons between her breasts, picked with such scrupulous care when she had found out she was coming down here, has never got wet. I'm such a fool, she thinks. All those daydreams, and he just thinks that I'm a kid. I need to stop. He's got a new wife now. A man like that was never going to wait.

But oh, if I had his children… I would never be casting around for people to take them off my hands. They would be the most precious things in my world, not an inconvenience to be dealt with by employing staff. Not every woman is made for a career, like Maria. I don't want suits and BlackBerries and expense accounts. I want a home. A home I can call mine for my love to grow in.

She thinks about Claire. The streaked highlights and the perfect manicures and the suspiciously still forehead though she's only thirty-three years old. I hate her, she thinks. Not only because she has what should be mine, but because I just hate her. She has my life. She has the life I should have grown up to have, and she doesn't even appreciate it.

 

‘Have you seen what she's wearing?' asks India. Joaquin has run off to the sand dunes in one of those explosions of boy energy that come in very useful when you want to do a bit of bitching.

‘Can't exactly miss it,' says Milly.

‘She's not gone off Dad, then.'

Milly laughs, nastily. ‘God almighty. It's like – how sad can you be?'

‘It's disgusting. It's like she doesn't realise how old he is.' Fifty, to both of them, seems as far away as the moon. The twins seem to them unnatural phenomena enough, evidence as they are that he and Claire have been having creaky old-man sex. The thought that anyone of their own spectacular generation could see him as anything other than an object of pity makes them shudder.

‘She's weird, though,' says Milly. ‘She always has been. Daddy's little duckling. You don't think she really… you know… do you?'

‘Soppy Simone? Oh, please. I know she's creepy, but she's not
that
creepy.'

‘No. You're right. Besides. She's not exactly, you know, sexy, is she?'

‘String bean.'

‘And all that stringy hair all down her back like seaweed.'

‘Do you think she's even
snogged
anyone?'

‘She's saving herself for Daddy,' says Milly, and they both roll over in the sand and make gagging gestures.

Coco pokes at the jellyfish with a stick. Ruby, always the follower, sits and watches. Claire has dressed them all matchy-matchy again, like dollies, in little elasticated skirts over their ruched swimsuits and pink cotton sun-bonnets, their soft baby skin white with factor 50. They're nice little things, thinks Milly. It's not their fault who their mother is.

Coco looks up at her enquiringly. ‘What that?' she asks.

They're a bit thick, though, she adds to herself. I'm sure they should be reading or something by now. ‘Jellyfish,' she says. ‘It's called a jellyfish. Cause it's like jelly, look.'

She pokes the dead animal with a toe and thinks actually, it's not like jelly at all. There's no wobble to it; it's more like rubber.

‘Fish!' cries Ruby, and splays her hands in the air.

‘Fish!' says India.

‘What time are we meant to go back?' asks Milly.

‘Oh, who cares? If they want free babysitters they get free service.'

‘Pay peanuts, get monkeys?'

‘Yeah, as if anyone's going to pay us. I'm so pissed off. It's quite obvious he wasn't expecting us, the gnarly old sod. So now he's just going to use us as staff so he and Claire can get pissed. He can bugger off, quite frankly.'

Milly grunts in response.

‘I've a good mind to go back to London,' says India.

‘Oh, come on, it's not that bad.'

‘Whatever. It's not exactly going to be a barrel of laughs, is it? All those blustering old blokes drinking brandy. If Charlie Clutterbuck tries flirting with me again I think I'm going to throw up.'

‘Oh, he's harmless,' says Milly. ‘It's that new guy, Jimmy. Not sure about him
at all
.'

‘Junkie,' says India, authoritatively. ‘Pupils like pinpricks.'

‘No!'

‘And as for his missus, I mean. What's all that about?'

‘She's quite pretty,' says Milly.

‘Well, if you like that sort of thing,' says India. ‘She's all a bit too Daddy's Little Girl for my liking. I bet she does baby-talk in the sack.'

‘You're obsessed with sex,' says Milly.

‘Said the kettle. Not that I'm going to get any of
that
this weekend,' says India glumly. Then she spots three lanky figures moseying up the beach and brightens up. ‘Ay-ay! Maybe I spoke too soon!'

 

Simone hears laughter and looks up from her book. The Jacksons have attracted a small knot of boys. Three of them, sun-browned skin and salt-bleached curls falling into their eyes as they look at whatever it is they've got over there on the sand. One, the tallest one, digs in the pocket of his long-line surf shorts – as much use on this piece of sea-line as a shark net – and hands over an object that proves, when Milly flips out a blade, to be a Swiss army knife. The twins sit complacently side by side, straight legs in Vs and toes pointed at the sky. Her half-brother dances on the balls of his feet, doing jazz hands with excitement in that stupid way he does.

Curious, she leaves Fred and saunters over. Milly sees her coming and pulls a face, then pretends that she's unaware of her presence. They don't like me, thinks Simone for the millionth time. They never have. It's as though they're suspicious of me. It doesn't matter what I do, they just turn their backs when they see me coming. Even when we were kids, the same. I wonder if they know that I know the names they call me. Soppy Simone. The Limpet. The Little Mermaid. And, this year, Slimeoan. They probably don't. It probably never occurs to them that just because they can't see someone, it doesn't mean they're not there.

She reaches the group and sees the focus of their attention. It's a jellyfish the size of a dinner plate, a deep-water animal washed up from God knows where. Beautiful, in its way: translucent white with an inner circle of palest pink. And India has sliced it open with the knife. As though it were a cake. ‘Look,' she's saying. ‘It has air bubbles. I guess that's how it floats. How on earth do they get air in there?'

‘I guess they're born like that,' says one of the boys.

‘Yes, but they must get more as they get bigger. Don't you see? Where do they get it from?'

‘Are you sure it's dead?' she asks.

One of the boys looks up, looks her over and finds her unfascinating. ‘It is now,' he says, and looks at Milly with a yearning sort of greed. ‘Besides, it can't feel anything. Jellyfish don't have brains. They are the only animals that don't.'

‘Well, not the
only
ones,' says Milly, pointedly looking at Simone, and the whole group bursts out laughing. Simone feels her cheeks burning.

‘This is Simone,' says India, and again she hears the sound of a joke in the tone: a joke that, as ever, she's not allowed in on.

‘Hi, Simone,' says the youngest of the boys, and once again she feels a ripple of mirth run between them all.

She sends her charges to join the others, and takes her swim. Pounds along against the current twenty yards out and repeats and repeats her daily mantras. It's not for long. Not for long. I don't need friends. I don't need their approval. I don't need friends. All I need is Sean. Time, time, time. All I need is for time to pass. One day, all this will be behind me.

No one believes in love the way I do. If I told them, they would laugh. They think that at fifteen you don't know your own mind, let alone seven, but I always have. I just knew. In the way I knew how to eat, or knew how to breathe. I knew it again and I know it now. And if I wait, wait, wait, one day he will know it too.

 

When she gets out, panting from the exertion, she takes her time about dressing, gives attention to every detail, because soon it'll be time to get back to the house. She has brought a big beach bag with everything she needs. She hops and jumps, skin sticky with damp and salt, back into her white shorts and ties her top back up above her midriff. Smooths lavender – she heard him exclaim how he loved the smell in the South of France when she was ten – body lotion on every limb, checks that her toenail varnish remains unmarked by the eroding sand. Lets down her hair from its swimmer's topknot and combs it out slowly, slowly, with a little serum so that it ripples, sleek and fluid, over her shoulders and down her back. She pulls out her mirror and checks the waterproofness of her mascara. Slicks a touch of pale tan colour on to her lips. It's only when she's finished and is packing her stuff away that she registers that the laughter she hears from up the beach is aimed at her.

 

‘Gawd, look at her. She'll be dabbing perfume on her fanny in a minute.'

The boys laugh awkwardly. They're quite unsophisticated compared with the lads Milly and India meet around Camden Town: the difference, she supposes, between London and Salisbury, where they're from. But they're boys, and Josh, the eldest of them at nineteen, is quite lush in a gangly sort of way.

India stretches in her bikini, shows off her breasts with a look of knowing insouciance. Beside her, Milly feels quite young and gauche. India's moved to Camden for the sixth form, and she's soared ahead in the year she's been there. I'm not sure I'm ready for grown-up yet, she thinks. All those new people, and they've probably been going to nightclubs and that for years. I suppose I should get some practice in, but – boys. I don't really know what to do with them. They don't seem to be interesting the way girls are. It's all football and showing off, with them. She's had a few encounters at parties, because it's pretty much a hiding to Coventry not to be seen to have a snog and a feel, but she's found them clumsy and unsexy, their skin rough and their fingers poky. It'll be okay, she thinks, when I meet someone I fancy. I'm just choosier than India. She really doesn't seem to be fussy about anything much. So funny. It's usually me who wants to push things, kick over the traces and see where an adventure will lead me, but when it comes to boys it's like there's ten years between us.

‘So what is there to do around here at night?' she asks, and gazes at Josh over the top of her sunglasses.