Want to Know a Secret? (24 page)

… Just as Bryony bounced through the door in pink shortie pyjamas. ‘George
,
I heard you – Oh. Who are you?’

Diane’s heart sank as, looking about ten, curls on end and a thunderous scowl on her sleepy face, Bryony glared at Tamzin.

The warming tone of the blouse couldn’t disguise Tamzin’s sudden pallor.

George looked at Bryony as if trying to remember who she was. ‘Wow,’ he said, at last. ‘Hey, Bryony. Great to see you.’ He let go of Tamzin long enough to stoop to kiss his cousin’s cheek. ‘Wow, can’t believe you’re home. Diane said, like, you’d be asleep until this afternoon.’

‘I heard your voice.’ Bryony’s dark gaze flipped from George to Tamzin.

‘Oh, right, sorry. Diane kept telling us to be quiet but I forgot.’ George laughed. ‘This is Tamzin, by the way. She’s your half-cousin, same as I’m your half-cousin.’

With a frozen smile, Bryony said, ‘Hello, Tamzin.’

With an uncertain pucker between her eyes, Tamzin returned, ‘Hello, Bryony.’

They stared at each other until Bryony said, abruptly, ‘I met Granddad, yesterday.’

Tamzin nodded, slowly. ‘The rest of us call him Pops.’

‘Shall we get on?’ Diane pulled her tape measure from around her neck. ‘George has to get off to uni after Tamzin’s fitting. There’s plenty in the fridge if you’re hungry, Bryony.’

Bryony shrugged. ‘I think I’ll go back to bed now I’ve said hi to George. You’re all obviously … busy.’ She turned on her heel and stalked from the room.

‘Right, Tamzin,’ said Diane, ignoring both Tamzin’s uneasy expression and Bryony’s less-than-perfect manners. ‘I’ve decorated the first two pairs of jeans. Hop into a pair and we’ll see how you look.’

Diane waited until she’d seen Tamzin and George off and then made two cups of tea and a couple of slices of toast to carry upstairs to the room at the front of the house where her daughter had slept since she was a few weeks old. Knocking, she walked in. The curtains were closed and the room thick with the mustiness of sleep. Bryony was a shape beneath the quilt. ‘I’ve brought your breakfast.’ She didn’t insult Bryony’s intelligence by pretending she thought Bryony might be asleep.

Slowly Bryony stirred. ‘You shouldn’t have.’ Her voice was dull.

‘It’s been ages since you ate.’ She waited while Bryony hauled herself up, propping her pillows between herself and the pink-buttoned headboard, then deposited a mug on the bedside and passed over the plate of buttery toast before opening the curtains and a small window.

Bryony regarded her toast with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. A blue inhaler lay on the bedside table and she took two puffs from that instead. Bryony would always have an inhaler and use it several times a day.

Diane was just grateful that modern drugs let her lead a normal life with so little intervention and pushed away the memory of the years of Bryony’s childhood, when that certainly hadn’t been the case.

She parked herself on the foot of the bed and blew across the surface of her tea to cool it. ‘Is it very odd?’

‘What?’

‘Coming home after a year. Is it like Narnia? You feel as if you’ve been away for ages but now you’re home nothing’s changed?’

Bryony nibbled one corner of the toast. ‘The opposite. It’s as if I’ve been away no time but everyone else thinks I’ve been away forever.’

‘Dad’s narrow squeak must have rocked you.’

Bryony nodded and swallowed with an obvious effort. Before bursting out, ‘And then there’s the secret family thing – Mum, what’s been going on?’ Her eyes were as dark and shiny as Galaxy Minstrels. ‘When Dad phoned me to tell me I was, like, so pleased that there was some kind of explanation that meant he wasn’t having a scuzzy affair. And he’d had this mega accident in a helicopter and I got all emotional because he could’ve been killed. But in the next few days I couldn’t stop thinking, and it seemed really strange. It is strange, isn’t it? He’s got this family and he kept us secret from them. I mean, you call them his secret family but I think we were the secret. Is he ashamed of us?’ She discarded the plate on the bedside and it wobbled around in a noisy circle before settling.

Moving up the bed, Diane reached out to stroke Bryony’s pillow-matted curls. ‘I don’t think you need draw that conclusion, darling.’ She searched for a way to soothe her. ‘You have to remember what an underprivileged upbringing Dad had. In those days being poor meant more hardship than it does now. Benefits weren’t plentiful, especially not for single mothers. Granny and Dad did everything humanly possible to keep the family all under one roof. Wendy worked hard but women earned less than men.’ She knew the story by heart; Gareth had chewed over and over his childhood until his words ceased to have an impact.

But, for the first time for years, she felt touched by those old troubles. She remembered the worn but clean home, furnished with second-hand bargains. And that was the Jenner world well after Wendy and Gareth between them had hauled the family away from the breadline.

‘But we’ve always been poor, Mum, we know about it.’

‘Sweetie, we’ve never been poor! We’ve had to be careful; we’ve not been well off. But we’ve never gone hungry, never been without shelter. How can you say we’re poor when you’ve spent all that time working in Brasilia and seen what real poverty is?

‘I think that when Dad eventually met his father and sister, he didn’t know how to react. When Harold wanted to make things up to Dad financially … well, it was such a huge amount of money to Dad that he literally didn’t know what to do with it. For a while he just kept the knowledge to himself. And,’ she hesitated, ‘he has always thought that I betrayed him by not challenging my father’s will. That I’d cheated him – and you – out of a more comfortable life. He feels that what he did was no worse than what I did.’

Bryony snuggled her head into the crook of Diane’s neck like a child, arm around her waist. ‘That’s a crock of shit. You refused money your parents didn’t want you, or him, or me, to have. I don’t think I would’ve wanted it, either. But he’s lived a double life and kept us hidden so that he could keep all his money to himself
.
’

Diane couldn’t think of a reply.

‘So that girl is Dad’s half-sister’s daughter?’

‘That’s right. Tamzin. I’m making her a load of clothes.’

‘And her folk are rich, I suppose.’ She wriggled herself into a more comfortable possession of Diane’s shoulder.

‘By our standards.’

‘What’s her problem? Is she anorexic, or something?’

‘Something. Unhealthily thin. She’s suffered from depression for the past couple of years. She’s going through a good patch, at the moment.’

‘Is she … is she George’s girlfriend?’

Diane’s arms tightened around Bryony’s body. Not a frail, bony body, like Tamzin’s, but a warm, fleshy, curvy young woman’s shape, on the verge of plumpness. Diane had always been too busy and too short of money to gain weight but Gareth’s mother had been a size in the last couple of decades of her life. She hoped Bryony wouldn’t go the same way. It would be so bad for her asthma.

‘It looks like it. Although they’ve only just started seeing each other.’ She hesitated. ‘I expect it took you by surprise, her being here.’

‘I felt so stupid. I crashed in expecting a big hug but George had his arms full of her,’ Bryony complained.

Diane continued absently to stroke her daughter’s warm back as she had done a thousand times when shocks, fears and spills had brought Bryony into the sanctuary of her mother’s arms. A lost toy. A scraped knee. Not getting the part of Angel Gabriel. A fickle friend. A fickle boyfriend.

And soon she felt the telltale hot wetness against her neck and the tiny shudders of the body pressed against hers. ‘Darling,’ she murmured. ‘Everything will be fine when you’ve settled back at home and decided what you want to do next. If you don’t want to go back to Brazil, you could probably go to university now.’ Some good might as well come out of Gareth’s money.

Bryony’s sobs only increased.

‘Or travel somewhere else? Or get a job here?’

The rounded shoulders heaved. ‘No I can’t. Oh, Mum – I’m
pregnant
! The father’s name is Inacio, he doesn’t know about the baby and I don’t know where he is. And one of the other girls says he’s
married
!’

Chapter Twenty

‘I have to tell you something.’ Diane sank into the visitor’s chair. She had rung Ivan and Melvyn and told them she wanted the evening visitor’s slot, and sorry if it cut across their plans. They hadn’t minded. There was an athletics meeting on Sky Sports.

Gareth’s still-bloated head turned her way, brown and purple in the pouches and furrows as if he’d been washed carelessly. The bladder infection had disappeared almost as suddenly as it had come and the electric fan was gone. ‘I think I’d better go first. It’s quite important.’

What Diane had to say was pretty important, too. But then she remembered Gareth’s text. No doubt he assumed that she’d travelled in specifically to discover what he had on his mind. Not long ago she might have done that very thing.

But now she was different. Deceived, betrayed, hidden; she was the kind of person who made choices unhampered by unearned loyalty. She’d made James her lover and, today, under the guise of taking a walk in the sunshine, she’d called him for the comfort of hearing his voice as she tramped the matted verges, whilst Bryony recovered from her storm of weeping in a hot bath.

James’s voice had been deep and warm and full of pleasure. ‘When can we be together?’

‘Bryony’s home.’ But she couldn’t resist adding, ‘Though I’m planning to go to Cambridge on Wednesday.’

‘I’ll clear my diary. I’ll drive you. I want you.’ His voice was dark and rough, making the hair on the nape of her neck stand up.

I want you
sent her giddy; images of them in the back of his car flashing across her mind. The heat, the laughter, the stroking of his hands. ‘I’ll meet you there because I’ll have my car packed with sample garments. I’m seeing a woman who owns a boutique.’

‘Pity. I love having you in my car,’ he said, deadpan.

Her laughter rose up into the sunshine, above the country lane. It was almost an hour before she’d ended the call, hot with joy at the prospect of a few hours with him. She’d hugged the thought to her ever since, dreaming off into space whenever she had five minutes.

‘The most important thing,’ Gareth was saying, reclaiming Diane’s attention, ‘is that I’ve ended things with Stella.’ His pause was heavy with significance.

Diane raised her eyebrows. ‘It’s wonderful how many people do end their affair the instant it becomes untenable to continue.’

He managed to look injured. ‘You don’t think I’m ending it just because I’ve been found out?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not like that. You’re not looking at it from the right angle. I never realised how much I might hurt you until I saw how it made you feel to discover –’

‘It made me bloody angry,’ Diane interrupted, dispassionately, deciding that now would not be a good time to leap onto her high horse about fidelity. ‘What
hurt
was that you hid me from your new, wealthy, desirable family and luxuriated alone in your lovely cottage.’ She jumped up and prowled to the window to gaze out of the window at the lawns, conscious of having to inhale the sweetish disinfectant smell of hospitals instead of fresh cut grass. ‘But none of it’s particularly important at the moment.’

‘Of course it’s important.’ Gareth sounded peevish. He shifted on the bed, pinned by the paraphernalia of his injuries. ‘I realise that I acted badly. Like a child that’s had too many presents on Christmas Day and doesn’t want to share. I realise, I
realise
.

‘But now it’s all out in the open I feel relieved. You were right – I was paying you back for what happened over your dad’s will.’ His voice dropped. ‘We can start again, move to a nicer place. You can give up your dressmaking.’

Slowly, Diane returned to her seat. Gareth held out his good hand to her but she pretended not to notice. ‘Gareth, you’re insulting my intelligence with this sudden munificence. All that’s important about the money is what it’s made you become. You’re only beating your chest in case I make you share your horrible filthy bank balance.

‘But I can’t worry about what’s left of our marriage right now. I came here to tell you what Bryony told me this morning – because, believe it or not there are things more important than money. Even your money.’

She paused to give him a moment to refocus, to switch his mind to his daughter. ‘Gareth, Bryony’s pregnant. She doesn’t think she’ll be seeing the father again, and she needs both of us on her side for a while. So let’s worry about that, rather than balancing the scales of retribution.

‘That’s what I came to tell you,’ she continued unemotionally, though she saw the colour had drained from his face. ‘The father’s name is Inacio, he’s a Brazilian that Bryony saw for a few weeks. He’s about 27 and, apparently, is “well fit, with black eyes that send you funny”. She fell hard for him. She thought it was the start of something. But he stopped phoning and when she called his mobile he was offhand.

‘It took her a few weeks to realise that she was pregnant. Then somebody told her that Inacio’s married.’