Can you keep a secret, p.4
Can You Keep A Secret?, page 4
‘It’s a taxidermist’s dream,’ I say in wonder at the foxes and otters, badgers and stoats, all trapped in varying poses in their glass cages below.
‘It’s revolting,’ Hilary remarks. ‘Using dead animals for ornamentation.’ As a vegetarian, she is particularly offended.
There are so many doors up here – I try to calculate the number of rooms but lose track.
‘This is us,’ Rachel tells me, opening a door into a bright space with ochre walls and a black slate fireplace. A large window with a cushioned seat gives on to trees and sky.
I cannot imagine growing up here. The fireplace in this bedroom is bigger and far more impressive than the stone-clad offering in our sitting room at home. I stand there, taking it all in: the dark wood floors, the heavy-looking furniture, the giant raft of a bed adrift in the middle of it all.
‘You’re in the spare room, Hils. Just by the bathroom. You don’t mind, do you?’
Hilary glances at me, and I can see a brief calculation going on behind her eyes.
‘No. Not at all.’
But she makes no move to go and find her room, simply stands there with her bag slung from one hand and watches as Rachel throws herself on to her bed, letting out a long, slow breath.
‘Thank God,’ she says, looking up at the distant ceiling. ‘A moment’s peace from those boys.’
She loosens her collar and kicks off her shoes, then hooks one toe under the rim of the sock on the opposite foot, pushing it down until it falls on to the floor. She does the same with its twin, her bare feet stretching. ‘We’ll have to share the bed, Lins. But I promise I don’t snore.’
She reaches across to her bedside locker, fumbling inside the top drawer until she finds what she is looking for: cigarettes and a lighter.
‘You’re sure you don’t mind sharing? Because now’s the time to say it if you do. I can always kick up a fuss about you needing your own room. Get Niall or Marcus to bunk in with Patrick.’
‘I’m sure Niall would rather bunk in with you,’ Hilary says quietly. The image of Niall’s hand on Rachel’s leg comes into my head again. Hilary must have seen it, too. Rachel leans into the flame of her lighter and, above her cupped hands, her eyes wrinkle with humour.
‘Yes, I’m sure he would.’ She leans back on the pillows, one arm behind her head.
‘Do you like him?’ I ask.
She shrugs. ‘He’s all right. A child, of course, but then, they’re all children,’ she says, tapping ash into a scallop shell.
‘She’s kissed him, you know,’ Hilary announces, her eyes flaring with amusement.
A shadow passes over Rachel’s face, but then she brightens and gives Hilary her sweetest smile.
‘Do you want to go have the first shower, Hils?’
‘I wasn’t going to …’
‘That train was so hot, and in the car … Well, I didn’t like to say anything to you in front of the boys.’
She picks a fleck of tobacco from her lip, then pauses to examine it.
Hilary drills her with a hot stare, before turning and slamming the door behind her. The noise reverberates through the room and, as her footsteps charge away from us down the hall, the corners of Rachel’s mouth twitch into a grin.
‘You’re wicked,’ I tell her and we both laugh, and I fall on to the bed next to her and reach for the cigarette in her hand. Taking a drag, I say: ‘When?’
‘When what?’
‘You and Niall. When did you kiss him?’
‘Over mid-term. Before you came to St Alban’s.’
‘What was it like?’
‘Like someone shoved a stick in my mouth and had a good poke around.’
I make a face and she grimaces.
‘Does Patrick know?’
‘I expect so. I expect everyone knows.’
I pass back the cigarette and sit up again. It is not the first time I have felt on the edge of things at St Alban’s. There is so much I have missed. For all Rachel’s kind attention to me since I started a few weeks ago, I remain the new girl, unsure of myself and those around me.
‘Hey,’ she says. I know that she has sensed my prickling feeling of exclusion. She rewards me with a smile, that familiar flash of mischief in her eyes. ‘Can you keep a secret?’
Warm feelings flood through me. I nod my answer.
‘He did more than just kiss me.’ Her voice drops a notch, and I wait for it. ‘I let him dry-hump me.’ Her eyes flare again and shock makes my mouth fall open, but there is no chance to react as the door opens and Heather Bagenal walks in.
‘Hello, girls,’ she says breezily, casting her gaze over us and around the room, her eyes resting briefly on the cigarette in Rachel’s hand. I feel the breath catch in my throat, but she says nothing. The only sign of her disapproval is when she goes to the window and pulls it open a fraction. From outside in the garden, I can hear the boys – their voices raised in laughter. Heather looks down on them briefly.
In a way, she is very much what I had expected – tall and slender, blonde, rather beautiful, with the same grace and ease as her daughter. Yet there is something vague about her, too – a dreaminess that surprises me. She smiles when she speaks, but every so often the smile slips and then her face looks blank and a little plain.
‘How do you like St Alban’s, Lindsey?’
‘Good, thank you.’
‘It must be tricky joining halfway through the school year. How are you managing to settle in?’
I mumble something about everyone being very kind, and again I feel the slipperiness of her gaze.
‘I’m not sure I’d take my child out of school in the middle of term and pop them into another school. Still, I’m sure your parents had their reasons.’
Her tone is perfectly polite, but I feel confused by her remarks. There is a reprimand in there somewhere.
Rachel laughs. ‘Don’t mind her, Lins. She’s just prodding to see if you were expelled from your old school, aren’t you, Heather?’
‘I am not.’
I watch Rachel carefully. Smoking openly in front of her mother, addressing her by her first name. I let him dry-hump me. I am way out of my depth.
‘Although it’s a reasonable assumption,’ Heather asserts. ‘If a girl or boy arrives during the year, it’s normally because they’ve done something terrible at their old school. Either that, or their parents are getting divorced.’ She stops and gives me a misty look. ‘Your parents aren’t getting divorced, are they, dear?’
‘No.’
‘Well, thank heavens for that.’
‘Heather thinks divorce is vulgar,’ Rachel explains, and her mother admits to it without fear or hesitation. She doesn’t seem to notice the mocking tone in Rachel’s voice.
‘Dinner at eight, girls, all right?’ She glides towards the door and I notice the length of silk scarf running down her back beneath her neatly cut hair. ‘And change out of those dreary uniforms.’
The door closes behind her and the air settles. Rachel swings her legs down and goes to her dressing table. It is littered with cosmetics, hairbands and trinkets; another ashtray contains a few crushed stubs.
‘Sorry about that. She’s a nosey old stick.’ She stabs out her cigarette butt, then picks up a hairbrush.
‘Come over here,’ she says, and I do as she instructs.
Submissively, I sit, facing the mirror.
‘Hold still,’ she says, gathering up my hair in one hand and drawing the brush across my scalp. I feel it crackling with electricity.
‘You could tell her if you wanted, you know. She’s very understanding.’
‘That’s okay,’ I say. I don’t want it to be a big thing. It’s enough for me to have shared it with Rachel.
I had told her almost as soon as I arrived at St Alban’s – an intimacy she had forced with her direct and persistent manner, but I was glad of it afterwards. I explained in a sheepish way about a problem I had been having with another girl in my old school, a persistent bully whom I hadn’t the courage to stand up to. For months, I had struggled in silence with my tormentor, and the ones I had reached out to for aid – my parents and teachers – had been reluctant, hand-tied. It got to the point where I felt like a nuisance. Every time I brought home a new bleeding scrape on my leg or a ring of bruises around my upper arm, it seemed to exacerbate the problem. The bully’s father is considered a ‘big man’ in our town. To alienate him is to alienate the whole clan, and a family like that have ways of making their grievances felt. Ours is not the only pub in town. My father said I could either stay where I was and put up with the bullying, or I could move schools. As there is only one secondary school in our parish, that meant moving away.
Rachel has worked the brush over my whole head, and now her hand slows, then stops. Tentatively, she hooks a finger under the back of my collar and lifts it free of my skin so that the back of my neck is exposed. She says nothing at first, but I can feel her finger touching the ridged surface of the burn. I have told her about it but never shown her. I feel the tenderness of her touch. I can hear her breathing gently. I want desperately for her not to ask me about it. About the way they held me down. About how something so small can hurt so much.
‘Well, I’m sure your parents know best,’ she says quietly, yet still in that grown-up voice of hers, ‘but were it my father, he’d have taken out his shotgun.’
She presses the collar back against my neck, and resumes brushing.
‘You’ve got gorgeous hair,’ she tells me. ‘So sleek and shiny. I wish my hair were like yours. Tell me, what was she called, the bitch that did that to you?’
‘Antoinette,’ I tell her, and she snorts with derision.
‘Fucking Antoinette,’ she says primly. ‘Off with her head, say I.’
Her voice – the certainty and humour within it – makes it fade away. The burn, the cuts, the humiliations, all of it pushed aside by these waves of relief and gratitude.
Down the hall, we hear the door to the bathroom open and close. Rachel moves to the window, and I watch her open it wider until she can lean out and observe the boys taking turns to drive the car across the sweep of gravel in front of the house. Her amusement is palpable.
‘What idiots,’ she says warmly, sitting to watch them, taking the brush to her own hair.
My heart flies open.
5
2017
Marcus drove with the same casual yet sharp-eyed concentration that I remembered of him when we were in school. Pale, bespectacled, his hair neatly combed, wearing a light blue sweater and jeans, the gaucheness of his teenage self had disappeared, and he seemed both relaxed and urbane.
It was Patrick who had arranged the lift for me. I had protested that I could easily catch the train, but he was adamant.
‘It will be fun,’ he insisted, ‘you and Marcus catching up on the journey down.’
Privately, I baulked at the idea of two hours alone in a car with Marcus, envisaging conversation that could only be stiff and contrived. The years that had passed made strangers of us; old connections, if not already broken, would certainly have thinned. Even back when we were teenagers, there was always something slightly stand-offish about him. Not that he was aloof or snooty – far from it. But his bookishness had been offputting – that sense that he was steeped in knowledge that none of the rest of us possessed. I always had the fear whenever I opened my mouth of saying something to him that would sound stupid or naïve, unworldly.
Much of my reluctance proved unfounded. When he pulled the car up outside Garda HQ, where I waited with my weekend bag on the steps next to me, I watched him hop out, a grin on his face as he approached.
‘Hello, stranger,’ he said, and there was a moment of physical awkwardness, neither of us sure of how best to greet each other after the long years apart. Catching ourselves out at our foolishness, we both laughed and Marcus leaned in to kiss me on the cheek and the awkwardness dispersed.
‘It’s been so long!’ he exclaimed. ‘I often wondered what had happened to you. Why you had slipped off the radar like that.’
‘Well,’ I said brightly, not wanting to get into the real reasons. ‘Here I am again.’
The journey down proved more relaxed than I had foreseen. We chatted about our lives while Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ played on the in-car stereo. Glenn Gould had replaced Robert Smith in the intervening years and while Marcus was still clever, the coldness had disappeared. A lot of what he told me about himself I knew already from Patrick – that he was a partner in a successful architectural firm; that after years of fiercely guarding his privacy, he had come out some time ago and had had a few boyfriends since, none serious. He had started seeing someone recently, a TV executive he’d met through a mutual friend.
‘I hear you’ve been keeping Patrick busy,’ he remarked. ‘I’ve hardly seen or heard from him these past few months – not since you reappeared on the scene.’
I wasn’t sure how much Patrick had explained to the others about me and him, our nascent romance, and reading my hesitation, Marcus reached across and gave my thigh a quick pinch.
‘What a dark horse you are! Stealing our Patrick’s heart.’
The forwardness of the gesture surprised me as much as what was uttered. Marcus had always seemed so reserved, eschewing tactile communication. But the words he used, the warmth and humour with which he said them, made my own heart soar, and I couldn’t suppress the grin that came to my face.
‘It’s as much a surprise to me as to anyone else,’ I told him.
‘A whirlwind romance.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Although he always did like you.’
‘Did he?’
‘Oh yes, of course. Had circumstances been different, I’m sure you two might have got together years ago. But then, who’s to say, if you had, whether it would have lasted. It’s all about timing, don’t you think?’
I agreed.
Traffic was building on the M50: we weren’t the only ones looking to get a head-start on the weekend. Not that I minded. My feelings of trepidation about this weekend began to fade. I had doubted the wisdom of attending this reunion. Fear announced itself in my dreams, which had grown troubled the closer the weekend drew. I was never prone to nightmares. The violence I spent my professional life analysing and recording never made its way home with me. But in the nights that led up to my return to Thornbury, some of those crime scenes paid visits, bodies submerged in my subconscious began to find the surface and float: one victim after another. But the more Marcus talked, the more convinced I became that everything was going to be all right, that the past could remain the past and this weekend would seal the end to all those dark memories, and Patrick and I could face into a bright future together.
‘I’m glad for you both,’ Marcus said. ‘He needs something hopeful in his life.’
It was a curious statement to make, one that hinted at something deeper. I knew that, of all his friends, Patrick had always been closest to Marcus, and I wondered what private thoughts or fears he might have shared with him.
‘Why do you say that?’ I asked, and he made a sort of pouting expression as he concentrated on the road, as if trying to summon from memory exactly what had prompted the statement.
‘I always thought it was hardest for him, Peter dying like that. It wasn’t just the shock of it, but the sudden transfer of responsibility to Patrick of that whole estate. He was so young – barely eighteen. It was unfair, in a way. All the plans he had – university, travel, just the freedom to be young – all of that was swept away in an instant. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard for the rest of the family. But Rachel got to escape – she hightailed it to London at the first possible opportunity. And as for Heather … You’ll have heard the rumours that circulated about her?’
‘Yes,’ I said calmly.
‘Not that I ever believed them. She loved Peter, despite their differences. And violence just wasn’t in her nature. Rachel believed it, though.’
I felt the push of some dark emotion threatening to surface. ‘Did she?’
‘She never returned to Thornbury – not until after Heather died. Never spoke to her mother again – so Patrick says.’ He shakes his head in sad reproach. ‘Poor Heather. You couldn’t really blame her for taking refuge inside a bottle, not with all that to contend with.’
He said this gloomily, and I thought of Heather, how the sparkling hostess could wilt once the party was over and all the guests had left. I remembered those large, watery eyes, her late-night rasp.
‘To tell you the truth, I’m glad he’s selling the place. Cutting himself free. He’s been shut away there for too long. It’s not healthy.’
‘When’s the last time you were down there?’ I asked.
‘At Thornbury? Two years ago was the last time. I was there for Heather’s funeral. Awful occasion.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘In some ways, it was worse than Peter’s. But of course,’ he went on, stealing a glance at me, ‘you weren’t there for either.’
I kept my eyes on the road. ‘How was it worse?’
‘Heather’s funeral? I don’t know, really. I mean, his death was obviously far more shocking. But she had survived so much. The scandal of Peter’s death, the dip in that family’s fortunes. Not to mention the whispered rumours that circulated about her involvement in his passing. Most people there could still remember what she had been like before Peter died – in her heyday. By the time she died, she was virtually a recluse. This aging alcoholic living alone with her bachelor son in a crumbling old pile falling down about their ears.’
‘Was Thornbury in a bad state then?’ I asked, thinking again of the windows with their plywood covers, the overgrown avenue, the gloomy, shut-up rooms of the house. I didn’t like to admit to Marcus that I hadn’t been there myself in all the time Patrick and I had been seeing each other.
