The Darkest Secret (12 page)

‘She was a particularly nice pig,' says Ruby, ignoring her. ‘She liked apple cores and a good hard scratching behind the ear.'

I cut off a slice of Blossom and put it in my mouth. It's quite dry, grilled without fat, but beautifully tender. ‘She clearly had a happy life,' I say. ‘It shows in the meat.'

Claire goes to the sink to fill the water jug and I surreptitiously scatter salt over my plate. The kale is steamed, naked, and the quinoa is boiled, unbuttered. How has Ruby put on so much weight? I wonder, when they live on a diet that's entirely devoid of pleasure? Ruby puts a finger to her lips and reaches for the salt pot. ‘No, Ruby,' says Claire, her back still turned to us. She must have been watching our reflections in the window. ‘Salt's just for guests, remember?'

Ruby subsides and goes back to poking her kale.

‘There's plenty of salt in veggies as it is,' declares Claire. ‘No need to fur up our arteries.'

I wonder if I should tell her that only ten per cent of the population is actually responsive to salt, but I decide to let it lie. I learned a long time ago that once someone's adopted a belief there's little point in trying to argue them out of it. And besides, I'm trying to train myself not to be a pedant.

She comes back to the table and fills our water glasses. I half expect it to be some exquisite peaty well water, but it's just plain old tap. She sits. Takes a mouthful of quinoa on her fork and chews it for about twenty minutes.

‘Gosh, it's nice to see you,' she says.

‘And you,' I reply politely. I've never unlearned the family training. I lie reflexively when manners are at stake, but I can never keep the lack of enthusiasm out of my voice.

 

We go to bed at ten o'clock and I'm already dropping. The strain of trying to keep up conversation with someone you've hated all your life sucks the strength from you. My bedroom is at the end of the landing, next to a tiny bathroom with fixtures that look as though they were put in in the 1940s. There's a single bed and a tea-chest covered with a piece of batik that clashes with the floral wallpaper, a lamp on top, a stand for a suitcase and a couple score more boxes piled three deep against the walls. I'm tempted to look inside and see what it is she's keeping up here, but they're sealed up with masking tape and I don't trust myself to reseal them well enough that she wouldn't be able to tell I'd been in there. No labels up here. Just blank cardboard and a layer of dust on the windowsill. I content myself with quietly opening the wardrobe door and looking inside. It's ram-full of rolled-up clothes, stuffed like a mattress. They bulge at me, threatening to explode out into the room never to return, and I hastily latch the door shut before they can escape.

I brush my teeth in the bathroom, give myself a speed wash in my nightie, because it's absolutely freezing up here. I can't imagine that anyone ever has a long bath in that tub with the shower hose draped over the back of the taps, at least not in winter.

How has this happened? Dad muttered several times over the years about how she'd taken him to the cleaners, so how come they're living so poor now? Mind you, I remember him saying the same thing about my own mother, when she wanted a share of a fortune that had been seeded with her own inheritance. Sean was always a bit ‘what's mine is mine', I guess. And what's yours really wants to be mine, too. That's how the rich get rich, and why they're so suspicious of benefits claimants.

There are radiators in every room, but each one is turned down to the anti-frost setting, no more. Dominated by an ancient Aga, the kitchen was warm, and the scented heat of the sitting room wood fire at least kept the chill from the downstairs rooms, but up here I can imagine that I'll wake tomorrow to find frost on the insides of my windows. The bed itself feels slightly damp, but that could just be the long-term cold leaching itself from the springs into my body. I put a jumper on over my nightie and retain my socks, and huddle under the duvet, wondering how many other people have slept in this room during Claire's tenancy, if any. I don't even know if she has any family, apart from Ruby. Certainly there was no sign of them during the Coco era. It's a cheerless sort of room, not designed to encourage guests to linger. The lining paper is beginning to peel in a high-up corner and the carpet is threadbare.

I know it's hardly an underfilled space, but what happened to all the
stuff
? I remember her as the Constant Shopper, filling her houses with bits of formless ‘modern art' in chrome and glass and fol-de-rols for tables, lining up pair after pair of unworn stilettos in her walk-in wardrobe as though they were precious evidence of her very success at life. ‘It's for your father,' she would say, fingering a piece of embroidered satin, a swatch of pleated Lycra, a sheath dress with some long-retired Italian's name emblazoned on the neckline. In a way it was a form of hoarding, I suppose. Just… one approved by society, where accruing a collection of rusty car parts or feral cats is not. There was far more in that walk-in than she could ever hope to wear in a year, but she added to it constantly with near-religious zeal and had the staff swap everything in and out of a storage unit in Battersea with each change of season. The hoard here is just as regimented, kept hidden from prying eyes by its obsessive use of containers, but I know from looking in that cupboard that inside those cardboard boxes is a wormhole to a world of chaos.

That was what she was always like, I suppose. Rigid control on the surface and the howling void beneath. That's why so many people cling so fiercely to their semblances of discipline: their habits, schedules, routines, diets, personal trainers, personal grooming, theories of morality. It's all about the fear of the chaos beneath.

It's certainly true of India. Nothing in her life is real unless it's been ticked off on a list. For us, the recognition of the void came so early that we were always going to go one of two ways: spend our lives fighting valiantly to hold back the tide the way she does or, like me, accept the truth and let the chaos reign.

‘Why can't we get the girls to do it?'

Claire Jackson rolls her eyes. ‘Which girls? Because if you mean my husband's, good luck finding them.'

‘Oh,' says Charlie, his heart sinking. ‘Gone off-piste, have they?'

‘You could say that. Linda saw them heading for the chain ferry half an hour ago. In mini-skirts.'

She's cutting up vegetables. Halving cherry tomatoes, julienning carrots and celery and steaming cauliflower. Supermarket packs of anaemic cooked organic chicken, ham the colour of a bridesmaid's dress and wholemeal pitta breads sit on the counter next to the chopping board. Imogen is laying the table with miniature cutlery and plastic plates, filling sippy cups with juice diluted with water and gathering what seems like an endless stream of toddlers to strap into chairs. Do all of these even
belong
to us? he wonders. There seems like such a lot of them. Did Imogen collect a couple on the way down without my noticing, just to keep up with the general fecundity? That Linda woman can't possibly have produced three, can she? Her stomach's as flat as the Norfolk Broads.

‘They can't have got far, surely?' he asks, hopefully.

‘Don't kid yourself,' says Claire. ‘If I know anything about the sort of mini-skirts those two were wearing, they'll have had no trouble thumbing a lift. They could be anywhere on the peninsula by now.'

‘Aren't you worried?' asks Imogen.

Claire shrugs. She's never made any great secret of her distaste for Sean's first family. ‘It's Purbeck, not Peckham. And they're Sean's children, not mine,' she says, simply. ‘Besides, they've got phones.'

Wow, thinks Charlie. You really are a piece of work, aren't you? No wonder he's getting tired of you.

‘Well, what'll we do?'

Claire pulls a face. ‘I daresay
we
won't do anything,' she says. ‘I should think
you
will take your cue from my husband and go and drink champagne in the garden while the women feed the children and put them to bed.'

He draws breath to reply, but catches Imogen's eye before he does so. Don't, says her look. Don't even think about it. Charlie has been with Imogen for enough years, has looked to check her expression at enough parliamentary cocktail parties, to ignore her judgement on all matters social. He looks at the children.
En masse
, with their staring eyes and their open mouths, the snail trails running from nose to upper lip, he finds children quite frightening, like a herd of tiny zombies. He's secretly quite glad they never had any themselves, though Imogen's liking for involving herself with them suggests that she might be more conflicted. He takes the prompt to leave.

 

Beneath the gazebo by the pool, Sean has gathered his party on the Indonesian teak benches. The strange doctor, Jimmy, is already skinning up a joint; Robert and Maria Gavila are holding hands; Linda the interior designer is curled up like a Siamese cat, somehow both decorous and faintly obscene in a tight little dress that shows off every hour she's put in at the gym. Strange little Simone, having changed out of the frankly terrifying hot pants she was wearing when he arrived into a turquoise maxi-dress, gazes at Sean the way a rabbit gazes at a snake. Or is it the way a snake gazes at a rabbit? Either way, Sean at least gives the impression of being unaware. She's been staring at him like that since she was ten, thinks Charlie. That monumental crush she's got would be embarrassing if he gave it even the slightest moment of acknowledgement.

Sean has lit a cigar. He sits back against the cushions like a pasha in a harem. ‘Ah, Clutterbuck!' he cries. ‘About time! Glass of fizz, old boy?'

‘I should coco!' he says, and flings himself into a seat. This weekend has taken far longer to get started than he would have liked. It's the last weekend of the parliamentary recess, and he'll be back at his desk on Wednesday. And with an election next year it'll be all hands to the pumps. He feels a bit end-of-school-holidays-ish and wants to make the most of the time he's got left.

Maria pours him a glass of Veuve and he downs half of it in one, lets out a hearty sigh of contentment. Sean and Robert are his oldest friends. It's rare for him to get the chance to be this much at his ease. ‘Ah, that's more like it,' he says. He really fancies a line of his namesake pick-me-up, but with Simone there he supposes he'll have to wait.

‘All well in the house?' asks Robert.

‘Teatime,' he says, and waggles his head.

‘Ah,' says Maria. ‘Are they okay? Is Joaquin up there?'

‘Yes, he's up there. He's discovered the bongos in the corner of the living room.'

Linda shifts from one elbow to the other. ‘Those are real zebra skin,' she says, proudly. ‘They marry the disconnect between the white floor tiles and the black marble in the fireplace.'

Five pairs of eyes flick over to look at her, then back to Charlie. ‘Maybe I should go and help,' says Maria, reluctantly. She looks happy where she is, lounging against a kilim-covered bolster.

‘I'll go,' offers Simone in her little-girl voice.

‘Ah, there's a good girl,' says Sean. She beams as if someone's turned a super trouper on to her face. God, it's almost pathetic, thinks Charlie. She's like a spaniel puppy, begging for attention.

Simone gets slowly to her feet, pulls her tummy in hard as she stands up. Stretches and sticks out her tiny bosom. The adults all watch her and say nothing as she sashays away across the lawn.

‘She's growing up,' he says, once she's inside the door.

‘Don't,' says Maria. ‘I'm going to have to lock her in a darkened room or something.'

‘Heh,' says Charlie, ‘I wouldn't worry too much. She's only got eyes for one man.'

‘Watch it,' says Sean. ‘She'll grow out of it.'

‘I bloody hope so,' says Robert. ‘If you think I'm going to give her away at your wedding, you can think again, matey.'

Maria shudders melodramatically. Linda shifts again, pulls in her own stomach and pushes her breasts forward. No sign that she intends to join the feeding frenzy; an admirable belief that other people will take over if she just leaves it. The breasts are disproportionately large on her slender frame. Enhanced, thinks Charlie. They're going to have to change standard sizing to deal with it, the way all these ambitious girls are hurling themselves in to get double Ds clamped on to their size eight bodies. He's not much of a one for fake tits himself. He likes his women to fly under the radar. But then, you don't want your wife to look like a hooker if you're aiming for Cabinet.

‘What's all this about the nanny?' he asks.

Sean takes a long suck on his cigar and exhales a long stream of smoke into the evening air. On the other side of the coffee table, Jimmy lights his joint and holds his breath like a deep-sea diver. ‘Yes, sorry,' says Sean. ‘Polly Paranoia got it into her head to sack her, this weekend of all weekends.'

‘Why?'

Sean reaches for the champagne bottle. There are three empties sitting on the side table already. It's quite clear no one's planning to do anything by halves. ‘Frankly, if I were fucking as many women as she thinks I'm fucking I'd have had a coronary by now.'

‘God,' says Charlie, ‘women,' as though every woman's suspicions were naturally the product of mental health issues. Imogen has never once complained about the high turnover of parliamentary researchers that pass through his office.

‘I suppose it's inevitable, to a degree,' says Robert, ‘given the way your own relationship got started.'

Charlie lets out a thunderclap of laughter. ‘On the nail, Robbo! On the nail!'

‘Oh, you bugger,' says Sean, but he doesn't show much sign of being offended. Jimmy holds the joint out to Linda, who takes a short toke and passes it to Sean. Their fingers brush as they pass it, too slowly for it to be an accident. Oy oy, thinks Charlie. Doesn't look like the competition was coming from the nanny.

‘So that's it?' he asks. ‘No childcare all weekend? Couldn't you find a temp or something?'

Sean shakes his head. ‘God,' he says, ‘you can tell
you
never had children.'

‘Thought I'd bequeath my quota to you, old boy,' says Charlie. ‘Looks like you need it.'

Sean sucks down a lungful of smoke and looks, for a moment, as though he's going to cough it straight back up again. It smells vile to Charlie. Not the way dope smelled when they were at university. He remembers it as fragrant, back then, not this acrid, chemical-scented stuff that hangs around London's bus stops like melted tar for millennia after the user has departed.

‘Have you ever tried getting staff at no notice on August bank holiday weekend? No go, my brother. We're on our own.'

‘Well, at least we've got the girls,' says Maria. ‘They can help out.'

‘I wouldn't rely on mine,' says Sean. ‘They're already in a snit because I forgot they were coming. Apparently they've taken off into the fleshpots of Purbeck already.'

‘You forgot they were coming?'

‘Well, or Heather wanted to spoil my birthday. Which I think is probably more likely, don't you?'

‘Nice way to talk about your offspring,' says Robert.

‘Hell hath no fury,' says Jimmy, and Charlie notes that he has one of those cracked drawls, slightly higher than it should be, slightly slurred, slightly Cockneyfied. A junkie voice. I need to make sure we never get photographed together, he thinks. I bet there's going to be a licence-loss scandal attached to
him
before the decade's out. Still. At least he knows now that the strangers in the group won't be rushing off to tell tales to the tabloids.

He feels in the breast pocket of his polo shirt for his wrap. Linda has thoughtfully picked a coffee table topped with glass for the middle of the gazebo.

‘Well,' he says, bending forward, ‘no point in letting it ruin the weekend, is there?' and starts chopping.