The Darkest Secret (8 page)

And then I'm crying. I'm not sure what for. The fact that he's gone, or the fact that he went? I don't even know who I'm crying for. Nine-year-old me, or the mess I am at twenty-seven? But the sadness tears at my chest like a trapped animal trying to get out, and my face seems to have taken on a life of its own. I grit my teeth and feel my lips pull back to expose them, feel the wet flood over the side of my nose and soak the pillow.

‘Oh,' I say, out loud. Then, ‘Oh, oh, oh,
oh
.'

I'm alone. I have no one to comfort me. Everyone I know is elsewhere, going on with their lives, and I've ensured over the years that there is no one I can call on. I grab a pillow and wrap it in my arms, and somehow find it comforting. Oh, Dad. What a sod you were, and yet here I am mourning you anyway.

The phone begins to vibrate on the bedside cabinet. I swipe my sleeve over my eyes and sit up. A withheld number. Someone calling from an office, presumably. I consider for a moment not answering. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that someone from the press has got hold of my number. But then I think: it could be anyone. It could be India, or Maria, or Robert, looking to give me information, someone from the morgue or the police or something. I hit Answer and put it to my ear.

‘Hello?'

Silence. For one second, two. I'm beginning to think that it's a wrong number, or an Indian call centre taking its time to connect me to the salesman waiting to ask if I've ever had PPI, when a voice I've not heard in years speaks and the back of my neck prickles.

‘Milly? It's Claire.'

‘Claire who?'

‘Claire Jackson,' she says.

Maria Gavila feels a bit weary as they sail past the chain ferry. Time on the
Gin O'Clock
is precious, because it's the only time when they don't have to be on parade. And even though Harbour View has fences and, according to Robert, gates like prison bars, they'll be back on show again once they get there and she'll be back to giving people what they need, or at least what they think they need. Robert is at the helm in his comical captain's hat and he's as happy as a pig in shit. This weekend will be exhausting. Sean and Charlie's appetite for partying is almost inexhaustible, and of course they'll be leaving it up to the women to work through the hangovers and keep the kids out of their hair in the daytime.

Her vodka, lime and soda is almost finished, and there's not enough time before they put in at the marina berth they've booked to make it worthwhile getting another. Simone is in a swing chair reading
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
. Whether she's reading or rereading is anybody's guess. It's such a long book, and Simone is such an idle reader, that it could well have taken her a year to get halfway through. Linda and Jimmy are nursing bottled beers at the aft table, still playing Beggar-my-Neighbour with the kids, though the fun must have worn thin by Southampton. It's partly to avoid talking to each other, she thinks. I'd have got fed up with Jimmy's ‘rock'n'roll medic' act years ago, too. The only thing that keeps them together is the fact that he's off on tour prescribing pharmaceuticals to overpaid musicians half the time. I would probably have backed off from being friends with them years ago myself, if it weren't for the stream of gossip that pours out of him after every tour, and God bless the Hippocratic oath.

She uncurls herself from her chair and makes her way forward to find her husband. The
Gin O'Clock
is their largest boat yet – four compact berths below deck, white leather upholstery and drop-down walls that turn the canopy into a makeshift saloon in inclement weather – but it still takes her less than thirty seconds to reach him, hanging on to the guard rail as she walks. She comes up behind him and encircles him with her arms, leans her chin on his shoulder. There's more of him than there was when they met; he's filled out, become more substantial as his status has grown. She doesn't mind. Maria has kept her figure despite the almost nightly stream of events she attends, sticking to a single glass of champagne and waving away the canapés in order to compete with her actress-model-singer clients, all twenty years younger than her and thin as whippets and all wanting shots with their Alpha Rep in front of the sponsor boards; but weight feels better on a middle-aged man, as long as it doesn't wobble. He's her power husband, the other half of her power couple, and she likes him as he is.

‘It's not too late to say we've sprung a leak at the Isle of Wight,' she says.

Robert shakes his head. ‘You know we can't, Maria. They'll just tell us to come over on the ferry.'

‘It's all right for you,' she says. ‘No one's going to be expecting you to spend the weekend playing house with the laydeez.'

Robert sighs. ‘It's just a weekend. And I'll make it up to you, I promise.'

The boat reaches the pontoon and Robert starts to manoeuvre. Maria lets him go and goes to lean on the railing to look at sunny Poole. It's hardly a Visit England brochure. But then, old people need a lot of ramps and guard rails in their retirement communities.

‘Simone!' shouts Robert. ‘Stand by to tie up, will you?'

Simone drops her book on to the deck and uncurls herself slowly from her chair. Like a cat, thinks Maria, or a marmoset. My goodness, where did those legs come from? And the bosom? I could swear she was a child when we set out on this trip, but now look at her.

Simone is wearing white hotpants and a gingham shirt that she's knotted beneath her breasts to show a little brown midriff and emphasise her neat little cleavage. Her poker-straight – no need for these ceramic straighteners they're all carrying in their make-up bags these days – waist-length hair shines chestnut with glints of gold, as though someone's come in and dipped it in glitter varnish. Maria stares, mesmerised, at her stepdaughter. My God, she's a woman, she thinks. Then an awful thought rushes through her head –
I must watch her around Charlie Clutterbuck
–
and she squashes it down before it can take root. Charlie has known Simone since she was a toddler. He would no more… he's no Woody Allen even if he
does
like to play the lusty
monseigneur
. Good God, he's spent enough of his career watching his parliamentary colleagues fall one by one to the
News of the World
to never want to go anywhere near a teenager as long as he lives.

Simone sashays along the deck in her pink flowered mules towards the little gate in the guard rail. She's wearing make-up. All the way around the coast, marina-to-marina from St Katharine Docks, she's been as bare of face as a ten-year-old, and has stuck to a uniform of smocks and leggings when she's not been spreadeagled on the prow soaking up the sun in her bikini. Now she's as brown as nutmeg and her skin, usually freckled and scattered with evidence of her hormonal age, is smooth as marble, her eyes lined black like a cat's and – good God! Are those false eyelashes? What's going on? Is there some boy I didn't know was coming?

A thunder of footsteps and the smaller kids barrel up behind her in their flotation vests, push her out of the way before she reaches the gate. ‘Me!' shouts Joaquin, her son with Robert, seven years old and loud as a foghorn. Simone presses herself back against the cabin wall and treats them to a look of teenage contempt. She studies her nails, and Maria sees that they're painted. A subtle shade of pink, thank God, but painted. ‘Me! Me!' shout the Orizio kids at Joaquin's heels, three and four and six and caught up in the web of hero worship. It's all monkey see, monkey do at that age.

‘You look nice,' she says, experimentally, and Simone silently tells her to back off through her curtain of shiny hair.

 

‘Look,' says Robert as they walk up the road through Poole, their dependants trailing along behind, the young ones poking things with sticks and the two of them savouring their last few moments before the world kicks in again. ‘I'll tell you what. You just get through this weekend and I promise we won't have to do it again. He's only fifty once, and I can guarantee you that she won't be around by the time he's sixty.'

‘Really?' she asks, brightening.

‘I doubt she'll be around by the time he's fifty-one, actually,' he says. ‘The bloom is most definitely off the rose.'

‘Thank God for that,' she says.

‘She'll be toast come Christmas. It'd have happened years ago if it weren't for the twins. As it goes, I think there's someone else on the horizon.'

‘Oh, really? Who?' She glances around and notices that Simone is walking a few feet behind them, fiddling with her phone. ‘
Attends!
Pas devant les enfants,
' she says.

Simone looks up and says the first words she's shared all day. ‘I do speak French, you know,' she says. ‘Actually, I probably speak more than you do. That's what you get for sending me to private school.'

 

The queue for the chain ferry seems to run all the way back off the Sandbanks peninsula and into the suburbs behind. They walk past car after car full of red-faced children staring hopelessly out in search of the sea. Adults stand on the tarmac, lean on roofs, smoking, and she's painfully aware of how many eyes follow her stepdaughter's barely covered buttocks as she sways along the road. It's an endless worry, parenthood, she thinks. No sooner do you stop worrying about them eating bleach than you're yelling at them to LOOK before they cross the road, and now it's oh, darling, you don't know about the nasty men in the world, please take care. I was no better. I used to walk around in a rugby shirt and fishnet stockings and it never occurred to me that I was doing anything other than dress-up.

Jimmy jogs up beside them. ‘So tell me about this Charlie Clutterbuck?'

‘What do you want to know?'

‘He's a bit of an arch Toryboy, isn't he?'

‘A slavish free-marketeer,' says Robert. ‘I can tell you that. Always was, even at university when the rest of us were huffing and puffing and supporting the miners. He's tipped for Cabinet if they ever get back in again, especially now he's got such a safe seat. He'd have gone straight into politics with the Thatcherites if he'd had a private income. Had to go into the City for fifteen years first, to save up.'

‘Yeah, what I'm wondering,' says Jimmy, ‘is how much we're going to have to mind our Ps and Qs. Am I going to get MI5 banging on my door?'

‘Oh, I wouldn't worry about that,' says Robert. ‘Dobbing people into MI5 is far more of a New Labour thing. Besides, our Charlie had the busiest of noses the moment he had the income to support it. He's never done things by halves, be it entertainment or fascism. I should think he's gone underground a bit, but you know Tories. I don't suppose he'll manage to keep it under wraps for long. As it were. If anything he'll be beating you to it.'

‘Okay,' says Jimmy. ‘Well, I'll play it by ear.'

‘There'll be lots of drink,' says Maria, reassuringly. ‘Gallons and gallons of excellent wines.'

‘Yeah,' says Jimmy, ‘good old drink. How old-school.'

 

She's just starting to wonder if they might have missed the house when she sees Sean, standing on the pavement with his hand on his hips, talking to a man in a hard hat. Beside him, on the ground, is a slate nameboard with the legend ‘Seawings' painted on it in gold cursive lettering, obviously awaiting reattachment to one of the ugly red-brick pillars that have been recently built to take heavy gates.

‘Christ,' she says, and peers at the building site behind the pair of them. A man with four-day stubble sits high up on the seat of a JCB, looking down. Suddenly conscious of how her neat little sundress must look from above, she pulls her cardi tight over her bosom and glares back. ‘This isn't it, is it? I thought he said it was finished.'

The driveway beyond the digger is a chaos of mud and scaffolding. Up a bank, she can see half a dozen men heaving paving slabs into place. A patio? Swimming-pool surround? Either way, it's clearly not done. It looks like it might be for the pool. A pre-cast resin shell, twenty feet by ten, sky-blue and still cloaked in protective tape, leans against the devastated turf. She guesses that the crane that looms over the wall is there to lower it into place once the hole's been dug. Everything's smoke and mirrors, even the most expensive houses. Pull the wattle-and-daub off a palace wall and you'll find that it's all made of rubble. Behind the swarming workers, a man leans from a window and paints its metal frame in a garish tone of seaside blue. Seriously? Men with muddy boots still in the bedrooms? You've brought us to stay here? ‘What is he thinking?' she asks.

‘Maybe the contractors have been fibbing,' says Robert. ‘It wouldn't be the first time.'

They approach the two men. The builder glances over Sean's shoulder and gives them an ‘I'll be with you in a minute' nod. Turns back to Sean.

‘I am sorry,' he says, in perfect English whose lack of elisions betrays it as his second language. ‘We are only doing our work. Your own house was full of builders itself until yesterday, you must remember. We have taken longer than we thought, because your own builders were here until yesterday, I am sure you know that. And they were not – there was no co-operation. Until today they were blocking the drive and we could not get the digger in. So now we have to make up the time.'

He heaves a shrug that takes both arms in their entirety to complete. All this, it says, we could have shared. The famous Polish influx, she thinks. Bane of the British builder. Amazing how they've all forgotten the dosh they made on the Costas last decade. Europe should only work one way, the way most of our people see it.

‘So… how long?' asks Sean. ‘I've got little kids, and guests coming any minute.'

Another expansive shrug. ‘Our contract says end of Saturday. But, you know… the sooner we carry on, the sooner we are done, hey?'

He nods over Sean's shoulder at her little party. Jimmy and Linda have caught up now, the kids gathered around their knees and Joaquin inspecting the digger's caterpillar tracks as though they're made of real caterpillars. ‘I think maybe these people want to talk to you?'

Sean turns. He's pink-faced and sweaty, the heat and the unaccustomed failure to get his point across raising his body temperature. ‘Oh,' he says. Comes over and kisses the women, leaving damp patches on their cheeks, shakes the hands of the men. ‘Sorry about this. Good to see you.'

‘Builders behind?' asks Robert. They've known each other for thirty years, shared a flat in Sheffield, barely bother with verbs and pronouns when communicating with each other.

‘Not mine, fortunately,' says Sean. He turns back to the Polish builder, who has taken his hard hat off and is polishing the perspiration off its interior with a grubby handkerchief. He's tall and wiry. They all are, as far as she can see. A far cry from the lardy backsides she's got used to seeing over the years around British work sites. ‘So can you try to keep it down a bit?'

The shrug, again. ‘You are a builder yourself, I think? It is not much longer. I promise. These guys are all… gagging to get back to Krakow.'

‘There's a guy turning up,' says Sean. ‘Big car. Probably a Mercedes, I should think. Can you move the guys out of the way to let him in so he can park on our drive? And not damage it?'