The Darkest Secret (20 page)

I smile at them all and turn to Simone. Soppy Simone, Moaner, the Constant Nymph, her straight hair drooping like the
Mona
bloody
Lisa
's into a watermelon cleavage. I almost reel back, the surprise is so huge. When I last saw her – what, five years or so ago? – she was one of those creepily thin girls, always pulling down the cuffs of their tops to hide the fact that their skin is blue. She looks like she's doubled her body-weight. She's bursting out of her dark blue dress, all breasts and tummy and a bum that pushes her whole body away from the chair-back. The only thing that's left that's thin is the hair. Linda piled the pounds on, as well – there were all sorts of mean-spirited gibes about how she'd compromised her balance with her
embonpoint
and that was why she'd fallen down those stairs – and Claire, and my mum is three dress sizes smaller now than she was when we were young. I used to think it was something to do with relationships, but she's not put it back on since she got with Barney.

Simone looks up as I come in and treats me to one of her watery smiles. ‘Sprouts,' she says, and points her little knife at a sack of the things. ‘For dinner. I thought I'd get ahead. They always take so much longer than you think they will.'

‘It's cutting the little crosses in the bottoms,' I say. ‘That always seems to double up the time.'

She simpers. ‘You father loves the little crosses in the bottoms,' she says. I suppress a shudder, at the evidence of the intimacy between them. I can't help it. India and I remember her when she was seven, following Dad around like a spaniel puppy. I still can't believe that they ever had an adult relationship.

Her face falls and she corrects herself. ‘Loved,' she says, and freezes for a moment. ‘He loved them.'

I sit down. Reach out a hand to touch her arm but she jerks it away as though the thinks I'm going to grab it. ‘Must get on,' she says, and the robot smile comes back. ‘We've nine to dinner.'

‘Can I do anything?' I ask.

‘No,' she says, firmly. ‘It's all under control, if people would just stop fussing. Do you remember my brother Joaquin?'

‘Joe,' corrects the young man. Steps forward and offers me a hand to shake. He must be nineteen by now. No more slugs and collecting spit in a bottle for him. Ruby stares at him, transfixed. No, no, I think. No, you can't get a crush on him. It would be… incest? Horrible, anyway. Our families are dreadfully intertwined as it is, the generations overlapping, the godparents and the best friends and the half-siblings and the horrible history. My mum is Simone's godmother. How creepy is that?

‘I remember you,' says Ruby to Joe. ‘You're the boy with the stick, aren't you?'

Joe blinks. ‘Possibly,' he says. ‘I don't know.'

‘You were always hitting things with sticks,' she says.

‘Oh. Yes.' He laughs, then looks guilty and glances at his sister. ‘I think I did go through a phase of hitting things.'

‘You sure did,' I say. ‘You got the backs of my legs several times.'

He grins. ‘I remember you, though. Your every third word was “bugger” and Mum started saying, “Who do you think you are – Milly Jackson?” every time I swore.'

‘Which was a lot, I should think.'

‘Yes. Your name's engraved on my brain.'

‘I remember,' says Ruby. ‘Your mum took us down to the café on the beach and you taught me about dunking fries in ice cream. You were nice, even with the sticks. I still do that, you know. Chocolate milkshake from McDonald's.'

‘Oh,' I say. ‘You prefer chocolate? Sorry.'

‘That's okay. How were you to know?'

‘I thought everybody preferred vanilla.'

‘Your father didn't,' jokes Maria, then her shoulders go up to her ears as she sees the look on everybody's faces. I've never seen her slip up, ever. Maria has an ear for atmosphere that's second to none. She, must be terribly out of kilter. God, she's known Dad twenty years or something. It's all of us, in our ways. We're all bereaved.

‘Did I?' asks Joe. ‘Oh, yes! I remember! How funny. All these years I've thought that was Coco.'

People say Coco's name without that little hesitation that used to accompany it, these days, even to her closest family, I've noticed. So much time has passed that in most people's minds she's no longer a tragedy, just a memory. A bad memory, a sad memory, but not one they expect to set other people off.

‘No, it was me.'

‘Really? Everyone was calling you Coco.'

Ruby rolls her eyes. ‘Yeah. No one could tell us apart. They were always muddling us up.'

‘Hunh,' says Joe. ‘Well, I never.'

‘How was your trip?' interrupts Simone, socially, as though we've just come for the weekend. ‘It's a lovely drive, isn't it?'

The sprouts are halfway up the walls of the cauldron that sits by her left breast, a pile of stalks and outer leaves spilling over the edge of the newspaper she's laid out to take them. There must be enough there to feed us all twice over, but she rips open another string bag of the things with her knife. Ruby comes and attempts to kiss her cheek. Again with the ducking, the jerking away.

‘Let me do some of those,' says Ruby.

Simone freezes, like a robot whose processor has hung. She's always done things like this, too. You would come round corners and she'd be standing there stock-still, her face frozen and her eyes empty, and you'd have an eerie feeling that if no one had come along she'd just have carried on standing there, like Hayley Joel Osment, until the Ice Age. And then she would reboot as you passed across her field of vision and the listless smile would reappear, the drippy hair would drop down over her eyes and she'd say hello. I remember getting a weird feeling, when I was about ten, on the last family holiday with the Gavilas before my godfather forgot I existed, that Soppy Simone was just a shell. That if you cracked her open there would be nothing at all inside: or some primeval worm —

‘I wouldn't dream of it,' she says again, jerking suddenly into life. ‘I want you to relax while you're here. I'm sure you're exhausted after your trip.'

I look at her. She's repeating lines, I think. It's the sort of thing she's heard someone's granny say, and she's stored it up for when she has a house of her own.

I have a horrible flash image of her and my father having sex in the big old four-poster bed his great-grandparents had sex in, the one he's carted from house to house like a trophy. The old man and his little doll, mechanically bending herself about to please him, doing whatever he commanded with the same emotionless humility with which she brought him his tea.
Old fisshe and yong flesshe wolde I have fein
. Planting his seed in her because it's what you do with wives.

I suddenly want out. Not just out of this kitchen but out of the house, out of Devon – out of Europe if I can manage it. Out of my family, away from all this history, away from funerals and loss and having to find the right words when I don't even know what the right
feelings
are. I want to be curled up in bed in the dark. I want to be at a club in Camden Town with a brain full of pills. I want to be on a mountaintop in Wales. I wish I were in Bali, on some black sand beach pretending that none of us exists. Poor Child Bride. From Echo to
The Merchant's Tale
to Andromache in a few short years.

The door opens with a bang and Imogen appears, a silver ice bucket dangling from her elbow by its handle. She's picked the lilies up from the trash-pile in the hall and cradles them as though they are a precious child. Cocks her head to one side like a chicken and fixes Simone with a smile of ghastly sympathy.

‘Simone,' she says. ‘My dear.'

Simone glances up, then returns to her sprouts as though the greeting had never happened. Imogen looks wrong-footed for a second, then clicks her way across the quarry tiles, lays the lilies down on the kitchen table. ‘We didn't know what to bring,' she says, ‘but we couldn't come empty-handed.'

‘How lovely,' says Maria, though she's seen them already. ‘Lilies. Look, Simone!' she continues, in a tone better suited to talking to Emma. ‘Imogen's brought you some lovely lilies!'

‘How very kind,' says Simone, automatically, and barely affords them a glance.

‘I'll put them in a vase,' says Imogen, and starts opening cupboards, one by one. Joe pushes himself off his perch and goes into the scullery. Returns with a giant Kilner jar that must once have held a whole goose confit.

‘Will this do?'

‘No vases?'

‘The vases are all full,' says Simone.

‘Never mind,' says Imogen. She fills the jar with water and cuts off the cellophane. A few dabs of yellow pollen drop on to the table. Simone pushes her chair back, goes to the sink and wets a sponge. Wipes it up, returns to her seat.

‘There,' says Imogen brightly, and slides the jar into the middle of the table. ‘That looks better, doesn't it?'

Ruby makes a polite murmuring noise, but nobody else responds.

‘Thank you so much for having us to dinner,' says Imogen. ‘It's terribly kind.'

‘Yes, well,' says Simone. ‘Sean would hate it if I let you go hungry. Or thirsty.'

Imogen looks a little uncomfortable. ‘Talking of which,' she says, ‘the ice bucket seems to have run out. Would you mind if I filled it?'

Simone gets to her feet again. Opens the freezer and pulls out a rubber ice tray. Starts to pop the cubes out, one by one, into the bucket.

‘No, no, let me do that,' says Imogen, suddenly embarrassed. She's trying, I suppose. Very trying. She reaches out to take the tray from my stepmother's hands. ‘You've got quite enough to do as it is.'

Simone rounds on her suddenly, her teeth bared. ‘Leave it!' she snaps.

Imogen takes a step back. ‘I was just —'

‘Well, don't!' says Simone. ‘It's my house and you're my guests.'

‘But I…'

Simone purses her lips and Imogen falls silent. Waits as enough ice to sink a ship pops piece by piece into the bucket and the lid is slammed firmly on. ‘Thank you,' she says, humbly.

‘Dinner's at eight,' says Simone.

Imogen totters from the room, puts a hand on the door-frame as she goes, as if to steady herself.

‘Simone…' says Maria, then subsides as her stepdaughter's eyes flash in her direction. We all stand for a few seconds as Imogen's footsteps recede. Then Simone lifts the lilies from the jar, carries them, dripping, over to the giant chrome bin tucked by the back door, shoves them in and puts the lid on with a clang. Stalks back to her seat at the table and picks up her knife once more.

A smile affixes itself to her pale face. ‘I hope you like lamb!' she says to Ruby. ‘I've got a leg of lamb for you all!'

‘Are you really wearing that?'

He stands in the doorway and his eyes flick up and down her body, come to rest on her stomach.

‘What's wrong with it?'

Sean sighs and looks away. ‘Never mind. I guess silver's just very… unforgiving, that's all. If that's what you want to wear, wear it.'

And never mind my feelings in the matter,
says the unspoken addendum. She looks at herself in the dressing-table mirror. She had thought that it looked great in the shop, when she was standing up, but now, sitting down, she sees that even with the Magic Pants there's a little bulge between her navel and her crotch. He wanted her to get a caesarituck when the twins were born, the way they do in Hollywood, and he's never forgiven her refusal. Maybe I should have, she thinks. Even after three years and frenzied Pilates my stomach still looks… deflated. And I knew going into it that I was marrying a man who had issues about women's bodies and any faults they might have. All those sneering jokes about Heather and her saddlebags and the way her tits had sagged; I should have realised that all that stuff doesn't just vanish because it's you. God, the way women are trained to compete with each other! When will we learn that all it leads to is the destruction of all of us? He's exploiting it in Linda now, and I've only myself to blame.

She gets up and pulls from the wardrobe the long black Grecian-style dress she brings everywhere, as back-up for these increasingly frequent moments. She's worn it several times before, which in his eyes will be a fault in itself, but it will have to do; the thing about being hypercritical, she thinks, is that you always end up disappointed no matter what anybody does. The dress has floaty panels of gauze that cover every sin. There's more and more black in what she wears each year. When she met him, she delighted in colour, enjoyed throwing together the contrasts and even the clashing, enjoyed standing out, got secret pleasure from the thought of Heather's wardrobe of taupe and beige and grey. And now the same colours dominate her own. It's a way to disappear, she thinks. Right now, Linda is Oz and I'm Kansas.

She drags the silver dress off over her head and hurls it into a corner. No point taking care of it now; she will never wear it. His eyes do the flick, flick, flick again as he sneers at the controlwear beneath. She hates wearing it. Hates the heat, the constriction, the way it digs into tender flesh, the struggles to get it back on again in tiny toilet cubicles. I should have just had the op, she thinks. I didn't want to because I thought it would be bad for the babies, being born early just to assuage my husband's vanity, but it was totally not worth it, for the grief I've lived with ever since. She pulls on the black dress, turns to confront him.

‘Better?'

He purses his lips and says nothing. Clever, she thinks, glaring at his back as he leaves the room. You're so clever. You always know when to stop talking, so I'm still angry when I go out in public but you can pull the whole what-did-I-do? injured-innocent act for everyone else's benefit.

She picks up her bag and her shoes and follows him downstairs, fixing on her platinum bangle as she goes. The diamonds she brought for the occasion are inappropriate now that so much of her décolletage is covered, but she has nothing else to wear. The stairs are a death trap in shoes. Even in bare feet, her soles giving her some traction, she hangs on to the banister as though it were an amulet. It's no time at all until someone dies coming off these, she thinks. And only Sean would put a hard stone floor at the bottom of them.

Linda is wearing sky-blue. Blue lace, just enough scraps of it to bypass obscenity laws, held together by pale blue net that tightly wraps the rest of her body. The dress stops at the top of her thighs. Charlie Clutterbuck's eyes are bulging out on stalks. She's rifling in the cutlery drawer while the children eat strawberries and ice cream. Well, almost all the kids. Ruby is missing, and so is Maria. Claire goes over to her elder daughter, strokes her hair back from her forehead and plants a kiss on her crown. I must remind myself of this, she thinks. At least that's one good thing that's come out of this disastrous union with Sean. We made good babies.

‘Where's Ruby?'

‘Oh, that's Coco, is it?' asks Linda. ‘I still don't know how you tell them apart.'

You could try looking, thinks Claire. But then you'd have to tear your eyes off my husband, I guess.

‘Coco's hair parts on the left,' says Simone, ‘and Ruby's parts on the right. That's right, isn't it? R for Ruby? And the bracelets. Same thing. That's why Dad and Maria gave them to them, wasn't it?'

‘It wasn't the intention, but yes.' Simone is a smart cookie. Observant. Claire doubts that her own stepdaughters have worked that out yet. She's dressed for the evening in a gold tapestry shift dress that's far too old for her and slightly too large, and Claire realises that she's borrowed one of her stepmother's dresses to come to the restaurant too.

‘She threw up, I'm afraid,' says Imogen. ‘Maria's taken her to the loo.'

‘Oh, dear,' says Claire. ‘I hope she's not going down with something. She's been pretty quiet today. I thought it was just… you know… last night.'

‘Oh, we had a lovely time in the jacuzzi while you were out,' says Simone, brightly, ‘and she seemed to enjoy herself down on the beach.'

‘Probably just overexcitement and too much ice cream,' says Imogen. ‘She gave them
more
ice cream at the beach, you know. You'll need to put them all on diets when they get home.'

Claire laughs, then stops. ‘Oh. You're serious. Really?'

‘Obesity is going to be one of the big political hot potatoes soon,' says Imogen, looking down her nose. ‘We can hardly lecture the great unwashed about their dreadful diets and be carting a bunch of porkers around ourselves, can we?'

How does that work with the War on Drugs, then? wonders Claire. The last time Imogen's husband was on
Question Time
he was advocating life sentences for dealers, and you could practically see the powder marks beneath his nose. She keeps the thought to herself. ‘I hadn't been planning on lecturing anyone,' she says.

‘Still,' says Imogen. ‘You'll be wanting to keep an eye on their weight, all the same.'

‘They're three years old.'

‘Well, you know what they say about obesity starting young.'

‘Do they look obese?'

‘Goodness,' says Imogen, ‘I wasn't
criticising
. I was just
saying
.'

‘Well, don't,' says Claire. ‘Just don't.'

 

‘Nope,' says Linda. ‘Can't find them. He must have taken them back, the stupid sod.'

She stalks over to the door in her four-inch heels and bellows out into the garden. ‘Jimmy! Where's your bag of tricks?'

Silence. ‘
Jimmy!
'

‘Crikey,' says Sean. ‘If the lighthouse ever breaks down, the coastguard could use you to warn shipping.'

Jimmy slopes up the garden, shirt flapping over teak-brown skin. He's been topping up his already dramatic tan all day. Started drinking at eleven, too, with a quick vodka ‘to straighten him out', and his gait is far from direct. His poodle curls are wet and cling to his head. He's clearly been in the pool again while the women fed his children. There's not a man in this house who's prepared to put in his time, thinks Claire. It's like the 1970s.

‘What?'

‘Where's your bag of tricks?'

‘Over by the fireplace.'

Claire feels a prickle at the back of her neck. ‘Really? Six children in the house and you just left it lying around?'

‘Chill, sistah,' says Jimmy in his nauseating Mockney. ‘It's got a lock on it.'

He wobbles across the room and fetches his briefcase from down behind the sofa. Opens it on the island counter like M showing Bond his latest gadgets. ‘There you go,
madame
. One strip of zopiclone, at your command.'

Linda snatches them from him and starts popping the pills from their foil.

‘And may I say' – he plants a groping hand on her lace-clad buttock – ‘that you're looking especially tasty this evening?'

Linda swats him away, doesn't even look at him. He shrugs, as though this is the normal course of his day. ‘Anybody want anything else, while I've got it open? Any aches and pains? Low mood? Little blue pill for the birthday boy?'

Everyone ignores him. No doubt they'll be changing their minds once they get back from the restaurant, but there's something about formal dress that seems to steer people towards alcohol. ‘No?' He looks around with swimmy blue eyes. ‘Okay, well, just a little Oxy for your poor old doctor's aching back and away we go.'

He taps a capsule out from a brown bottle, swallows it and washes it down with vodka. Smiles around the room triumphantly.

Maria comes back from the loo, leading Ruby by the hand. She's stripped her down to her bathing suit, and throws her little pink dress into the washing machine. Ruby is pale, with a greenish tinge.

‘Oh, lord.' Claire goes down on her knees in front of her daughter, feels her forehead. It's hot. Not burning hot, but certainly warmer than it should be. ‘Are you feeling sick, darling?'

‘My tummy hurts,' says Ruby.

‘I hope you're not going down with something.'

The corners of Ruby's mouth curl down and her eyes fill with tears. ‘I threw up,' she announces.

‘Oh, I know,' says Claire, and wraps her in her arms. Ruby is unresponsive. Just stands in the hug and tolerates it.

‘Nothing a good night's sleep won't sort out,' says Linda, wielding the pill-cutter.

Claire sits back. Holds her daughter's shoulders between her hands as she stares at Linda in astonishment. ‘No! No way! I'm not giving her that stuff if she's ill. I'm sorry, but I'm just not.'

Sean erupts. ‘Oh, great! Here we bloody go again!'

She looks around, and all the others are giving her The Look. There we go, Claire Jackson, pouring cold water on the fun as usual. There's not one person who looks as though they might support her. They're all
his
friends. Even the ones like Maria who pretend to be Claire's as well. In the end they all follow the money. And their own pleasures. Even Imogen doesn't seem to have an opinion to offer on her lousy mothering skills, in this instance.

‘Oh, look, I'll stay home,' she offers.

‘No!' Sean is so close to shouting that she glances at the door. She suddenly has a horrible feeling that the entire neighbourhood is listening as they argue about whether or not to drug their children. ‘Oh, you'd bloody
love
that, wouldn't you? Princess Claire the martyr, spoiling the evening by making all the rest of us look bad. You're so… ugh!'

‘Sean! Come on! Ruby's under the weather. I can't just go off and leave her!'

‘Oh, yes,' he snarls bitterly. ‘
Your
child. For God's sake, she's just got a twenty-four-hour bug. She gets them all the time. I don't know why you're suddenly coming over all Mum of the Year tonight.'

Because I'm not usually feeding her narcotics
.

She gulps. I knew it. I
knew
it. He's jealous of them. He can act the loving daddy when it makes a point, but he's been in a sulk since they were born because he's no longer my only priority.

‘You just —' he cries, ‘— you're just always spoiling
everything
! It's my birthday! My birthday! My fiftieth birthday! I'll never have another! I've gone to God knows how much trouble, let alone how much expense, to organise this dinner and you can bet your arse I won't get out of paying your share at this sort of notice. It's so typical of you. Throwing spanners in the works when
anything
is about
me
having a good time. Well, you can fuck off, Claire. I'm sick of it.'

‘Sean, I just… I'm not trying to… I just… I don't…'

Seven pairs of eyes boring into her, six enjoying the marital drama. Absolute silence as they face each other. ‘It was fine,' says Sean. ‘You know how you went on about it last night and it was just bloody
fine
, despite all your best efforts. Jimmy's a doctor, for God's sake. He knows what he's doing. What, you've got a medical degree, all of a sudden?'

‘But we won't be
here
!' she wails.

Linda has finished the cutting. She goes round the kitchen table as Sean rants, giving the littlies their ‘special vitamins', one by one by one. Coco opens her mouth, lets her pop hers on to her tongue, swallows it down with a swig of orange juice. So wonderfully co-operative, my little girls, Claire thinks. They'll do anything if you're nice to them. He should want them there, on his big day.

‘You just… you spoil everything,' he finishes. ‘Whatever. Don't come. I don't care. Seriously, Claire, I'm done with caring.'

He turns away from her in disgust and storms out to the gazebo.

 

Charlie and Robert follow him, and, after helping himself to another vodka, Jimmy follows. Claire kneels on the floor by her daughter and strokes her hair with a thumb as she stares after her husband. It's over, she thinks. I think that was me getting my marching orders.

Maria is the first to speak. ‘I really think you're worrying too much,' she says. ‘Nothing happened last night, did it? It'll be just the same. They won't be able to get out of the annexe, even if they do wake up.'

‘But Simone was there last night,' says Claire. ‘Don't you see? They weren't alone.'

‘I'll tell you what,' suggests Imogen, ‘why don't we take it in turns? Someone can go back every half-hour and check on them. How about that? It's only a five-minute walk. We can just pop up and check on them between courses. It'll be fine.'