Want to Know a Secret? (7 page)

Sometimes she came across Harold and his veined face would brighten. ‘I’ll duck in and see Gareth after Valerie, my dear!’ There was no sign of the pinched pallor of the night of the accident; he was hearty and energetic.

Occasionally she’d catch sight of James’s dark figure striding in to see his wife and he’d grin at her as if enjoying a private joke, but he visited mainly in the evenings. No doubt he had a job to do on weekdays. Once she saw Tamzin with two young women so like her – except rounded and robust – she knew even before Tamzin introduced them that they must be James’s other daughters, Alice and Natalia.

‘Poor Uncle Gareth!’ they chorused, corn-coloured hair swept up with bright ornaments behind their heads. ‘Bless him! His poor face!’

‘Yes,
bless
him,’ agreed Diane, wondering if she’d look as insouciant if she wore her hair so carelessly whisked.

Her visits became more interesting as Gareth improved. His facial swelling began to deflate, sinking his eyes into violet rings. Teeth began to twinkle through his gums and he began to form recognisable words. He was just like a giant baby.

Diane measured his progress as carefully as any nurse.

On the day when she judged him to be adequately responsive, able to carry on a conversation and suck up liquidised food, she sat back in the visitor’s chair, cupped her knee in her linked hands and stared straight into his blackened eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you’d found your father?’

Gareth stilled.

She allowed the silence to stretch.

His head sank back onto the pillow. ‘Can we leave this for a bit, Diane?’ Suddenly his voice was weak and fatigued and the clarity of his diction took a giant stride backwards: ‘Han ee eave iss ver a bi, Dia?’ And a peevish note, as if Diane should have been more considerate than to bother him with trivialities.

She rocked a little in her chair. ‘It’s been left long enough, Gareth.’

He closed his thick eyelids, slowly, as if in pain.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that you’d found your father?’

The eyes remained closed. But it seemed as if he’d accepted that the inevitable moment of confession had come when he asked, ‘Do you know how Valerie is?’ his diction clear again.

‘I don’t even know
who
Valerie is.’ Diane paused at the quiet knock that heralded the appearance of refreshments. She supposed such service was one of the things that Harold was paying for. Or it might be Gareth footing the bill, of course, with his newfound wealth. She hadn’t bothered to enquire.

Her coffee was fragrant and freshly poured into a white china cup from a filter jug. Gareth’s was provided in a blue plastic cup with a ‘chimney’, reminiscent of Bryony’s toddler days. Diane stirred in sugar with a clinking spoon. The door hushed shut behind the auxiliary.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she repeated, lodging the spoon in the saucer.

Gareth sipped in silence.

She fixed her gaze on his eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ The same quiet, reasonable tone.

His eyes closed, firmly, blocking her out.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

The eyelids flipped open to display blazing eyes. ‘Because he’s
my
father. OK?’ His voice dripped sarcasm.

Diane felt the blood boil into her cheeks at the echo of her own words.
They were
my
parents!
Remembering herself shaking with determination as she confronted Gareth about the will.

She moistened her lips. ‘It’s because of the money.’

Irritably, he closed his eyes again. ‘What?’

‘The reason you didn’t tell me. It’s not because Harold’s your father, it’s because he gave you money and you didn’t want me to share it. You didn’t want my life made easier, for me to have a car, or a new TV, or clothes that I hadn’t made myself. Not even a new pair of winter boots! You gave yourself an extra two days off a week to enjoy with Valerie and Harold and told them I was mentally ill.’

She waited. Then began again. ‘The reason you didn’t –’

‘Yes!’ Gareth turned his head sharply, making himself wince. ‘The money. Obviously the money. Because we don’t share decisions about money that comes to us from our parents –
do we
?’

The palms of her hands prickled with fury.

His eyes burned balefully as he massaged his fattened jaw with his fingertips. Probably it was aching now with this unaccustomed talking. Or through gritting his loosened teeth in his swollen gums.

‘Gareth, I had my pride.’ The familiar cry that epitomised all her confused and hurt feelings towards the parents who’d tried so hard to control her, even from the grave.

He rolled his head on the pillow. ‘We couldn’t afford pride.’ Again, the hand, to soothe the jaw he was meant to be using only gently.

‘And before Bryony went to Brasilia, when I wanted to see if we were eligible for various low-income benefits and you went ballistic, it was nothing to do with
not taking handouts
or
not being a charity case
or
not wanting anyone to think you couldn’t look after your family
. It was because you knew your horde, your stash, the treasure that your long-lost father had given you, would come to light?’

Silence.

Outside the window the blue sky was ragged with piebald clouds racing before a stiff breeze. The double-glazing hushed the thunder of traffic to a whisper. Amongst the trees, birds could be seen but not heard. Diane leaned her elbows on the bed. Her heart was beating not fast, but hard, as though running in seven-league boots. ‘We could’ve afforded another car.’

‘We could have had another car ages ago – if you’d challenged Freddy.’

And Diane looked at him and saw that he was ugly. Not because of the swelling or the bruises, but because of what he’d let his grudge make him do – hide his wealth and his family away like kinky perversions. ‘Do you remember when we were happy?’ she murmured. ‘When it didn’t matter that we had no money, it was us against the rest. My parents tried everything they could to come between us when they were alive and you let them achieve their aim once they were dead.’

He shook his head. ‘You let them achieve it.’

‘It was only money.’

He grimaced. ‘And we only didn’t have any.’

Diane left the room, shaking. The traffic would be gathering impetus as the dreaded rush hour approached but she couldn’t command her disobedient legs to carry her to the car. She felt as if she were made of drumsticks, stiff and clunky, held together with brittle old thread.

In an embrasure beside a tall window facing the hospital gardens she discovered a water dispenser that turned the sunrays into a rainbow, and a comfy little chair in plum leather with a cushion in the same fabric as the curtains. She sank down, weedy in the wake of battle. She so rarely confronted Gareth; long experience had taught her it wasn’t the best way to manage him. And the scene had been ugly with old sores and unsettled scores.

No, she wasn’t really surprised that he hadn’t told her about Harold because of the money. It had always been about money, about the days when she had money and he didn’t.

Not much more than twenty-five years ago, when they began to get serious, Gareth had been prepared for resistance from her parents. He wasn’t stupid. He knew how the world worked and that
fitter from a council estate
wouldn’t be on Peter and Karen Wibberley’s list of prospective sons-in-law. He’d expected a chilly reception when Diane took him to meet her parents.

But they had both been shaken by the depths of Peter and Karen Wibberley’s repugnance.

Sitting back in his imposing house with a fragile teacup in his hand Peter Wibberley hadn’t pulled any punches. ‘And what do you do?’

‘I’m a fitter at Greatorex Packaging.’

‘And where do you live?’

‘The Brightside Estate.’

Peter Wibberley’s silver hair was combed straight back, his moustache darker grey. He nodded sadly, as if his worst suspicions had been confirmed. ‘I am not the sort of father,’ he pronounced, ‘to expect to vet my daughter’s friends. Normally, I trust her judgement.’ He sipped his tea.

Diane felt her palm sweating, where it lay in Gareth’s hand as they sat side-by-side on the sofa.

‘However,’ Peter continued, ‘I think we might as well be straight from the outset. We had envisaged something – someone – very different for our daughter. I can’t imagine your relationship with Diane lasting and my wife and myself will not be acknowledging it.’

Karen Wibberley turned to stare at Gareth, her hair permed into a fuzz of mousy curls. ‘She’s only eighteen. Eighteen! We have to protect her from … people like you. From herself,’ she added, as if Diane wasn’t even there.

A crackling silence. Then Gareth rattled his cup and saucer onto the coffee table and strode from the room.

Diane flew after him in tears of fury, hair sticking to her cheeks. ‘Gareth, I didn’t know –’

‘Well, now you do,’ he said, without breaking stride. ‘Now you fucking-well know.’

Gareth had sulked for a fortnight, a fortnight during which Diane’s parents had been kind but unyielding. Gareth Jenner was out of her life. Good. If she accepted that then they would forget the whole unfortunate episode and things would go on just as before, with Diane bathed by her parents’ approval.

But then Gareth rang Diane at work, from a callbox. ‘Let’s talk,’ he suggested. That night she lied to her parents about her movements and met him at a restaurant. ‘It was a bit of a sodding shock,’ he said, grimly, ‘that shit your parents handed out. I thought that if I kept my nose clean and worked hard it would be enough in this so-called classless society. I didn’t think it mattered where me mum brought me up. I thought what mattered was what I made of myself.’

Diane was forlorn. ‘I thought they’d be OK when they met you.’

Gareth sliced through his steak with suppressed violence. ‘Some bloody hope! I suppose that there’s no point in asking you to marry me, now.’

Her mouth dropped open.

‘No, I shouldn’t have asked.’ He took a slug of his beer. Diane drank wine in restaurants but Gareth hadn’t taken to it. ‘Blood’s thicker than water. You have to please your parents.’

Anger set her face on fire. ‘I’m not twelve, you know.’

He went back to his steak, shrugging her off, dismissing her point of view, just like her parents had. ‘But you’re a bit of a hothouse flower. Not exactly hardy. No, you’d do better to wait for the right bank manager to come along. Or doctor, or accountant. Do right by your mum and dad.’

And, somehow, she’d found herself flinging his bitter resignation back in his face. ‘Rubbish! And don’t tell me I’m a hothouse flower; I’m perfectly resilient. I’m not like my parents, valuing people for superficial reasons.’

He let his eyes lock with hers, took her hand and raised it to his lips. ‘So you’ll marry me, then?’

‘Yes!’ The word had spurted from her in triumph. How victorious she’d been as she stalked in to demonstrate to her parents and, perhaps, to Gareth, that she wasn’t to be dictated to. ‘We’ve something to tell you. Gareth proposed tonight and I accepted.’

She’d felt the first stirrings of uncertainty as her father’s face went puce and the newspaper slipped from his lap.

Gareth even went forward to offer his hand. ‘I know I’m not what you want for your daughter, you’ve made it quite clear. But we’ll stick together and have a bunch of kids and give them a grand life. Not like me, who never knew his father.’

‘Oh, my God,’ breathed Karen, through fingers spread across a horrified mouth.

And there were no congratulations or sherry or questions about the future. There was just that horrified, disappointed hush. And a squirming in Diane’s belly that wasn’t completely joy at her betrothal.

That very night, they planned a wedding for six months ahead, at the register office, of course, because Gareth had never been christened and never went to church. It all felt quite unreal but, fuelled by her parents’ anger – ‘We’re waiting for you to come to your senses!’ – Diane took to the marriage a determination to make it work, a savings account just big enough for the deposit on an ex-council house in Purtenon St. Paul, and a green Mini.

From time to time she’d actually been impressed at the unremitting, freezing bitterness with which her parents treated her husband and, to a large extent, herself.

‘I’ve been brought up to take a few knocks. I can cope,’ Gareth said, often. ‘Don’t fall out with your parents over me.’ He’d been good about years of stilted Christmases with his parents-in-law, the only time they ever shared with Diane and Gareth, and later Bryony, their cushioned existence in their big house with cleaners and gardeners, new cars and all the status symbols. He’d been there for Diane when her mother had died, the rift between them unhealed.

When the time came, at her father’s graveside Gareth had stood beside her, although he’d later told her that it was just to be certain that he saw the mardy bugger safe underground.

Anticipation had been shining from his eyes when she arrived home a few days later after talking to Freddy about the estate. ‘Straightforward, is it, the will?’