Keeping Secrets

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• Sue Gee
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  

Sue Gee is an acclaimed and established novelist.
Reading in Bed
(2007) was a
Daily Mail
Book Club selection;
The Mysteries of Glass
(2005) was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She ran the MBA Creative Writing Programme at Middlesex University from 2000–2008 and currently teaches at the Faber Academy. Sue Gee has also published many short stories, some of which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and her most recent publication is a collection of stories,
Last Fling
(Salt 2011). She lives in London and Herefordshire.

The street where Alice Sinclair lived was quiet, and lined with lime trees: a north London street of Victorian family houses set between the roaring Holloway Road and a pleasing common, with tennis courts, broad paths, a playground and swimming pool. During the day mothers pushed small children down past parked cars to the library and up to the sandpit and the swings; at night, curtains were drawn and cats sat motionless on the low walls at the front or prowled the creeper-covered fences at the back. From time to time the darkness was disturbed by yowling, but rarely by more than this. The street was enclosed, sealed off from all but local traffic; in its safety and solidity it represented to Alice everything she used to associate only with other people: contentment, security, peace.

At half-past ten on a Friday night she was wandering round the bedroom in her long cotton nightdress, putting things away. The room was warm and untidy, newspapers and journals heaped in piles on the floor by the big double bed, a bookcase still overflowing from when they'd first moved in, meaning to sort it out later. Clothes were strewn over the sofa beneath the window, and a little trail of toys and crisps led out on to the landing. The evidence of family life, run by someone who had never expected it, the hour domestic and respectable, a time when home-loving people might switch off the news and go up to run a bath. Half-past ten is not like eleven, which begins to be dangerous.

There had been a time when Alice's weekends had barely begun by eleven, when she was neither at home nor respectable. She was restless, out on the prowl; taking risks at parties given by people she hardly knew; going home with strangers; waking, late, alone. In those days she had lived in rented rooms – for a while in London, where she was at art school; for a long time in Oxford, where the start of a love affair had taken her and where the end of another – no, much more than that – had put her in the bin. She had no family near her, although her elder sister Hilda, living an organised life in London, used occasionally to come and visit her, and she had few friends, although she knew a lot of people. She was a solitary, beautiful drifter, smiling at everyone, wanting to die.

Those days, in which some terrible things had happened, and nearly happened, seemed now as remote as though someone else had lived them. These days, she tried not to think of them.

On a chair by the wardrobe her husband's suitcase lay open, haphazardly packed with two clean shirts, clean underwear and socks, the grey ribbed sweater Alice had given him for Christmas. She found a handkerchief, roughly stitched with a ‘T'by Hettie, and put it on top; she put Lego in a box and picked up Annie's vest and pants, flung down when they raced to the bath, and her own jeans and sweater, stuffing them all in the laundry basket. Outside, along the landing, Tony was still in his cramped study, opening and closing files, looking for something.

‘Okay?' she called. ‘Can I help?'

‘It's all right.' He was sliding open drawers in the filing cabinet, muttering. Tomorrow he was leaving for a conference in Manchester. Most of the journals heaped up in here were his, overspill from the study:
Family Law, New Law Journal, Legal Action.
‘Shan't be long.'

Alice picked up her brush from the chest of drawers and began to run it through her hair – pale, silky, fair, little changed from when she was a child, quite different from her sister's sleek dark bob. Alice was slender, and looked delicate, although she was rarely ill; in her early thirties but looking younger, despite her past. This was partly due to physical qualities – slenderness, fairness, dressing, still, like a student – more to do with the childlike air she had always had, or at least the air of a particular kind of child: frail, self-absorbed, preoccupied. They were the qualities Tony had fallen in love with, looking for what lay beneath that dreamy vulnerability, searching for her secrets. Tenderly and insistently questioning, discovering, as he thought, each one, he had offered her protection, and she had accepted – protection from the world and from herself, sinking gratefully and disbelievingly into a home, a family, a place.

She put down the hairbrush and went to the window, hearing voices. Pulling the curtains a little apart she looked out, seeing in the quiet, tree-lined street, with its window boxes and drawn curtains, a couple walking up from the far end: he, in flapping coat, was wheeling a bike; she, with cropped hair and beret, kept pace beside him. They were talking loudly, deep in discussion: Alice thought they had probably just come out of a meeting, picturing the smoke-filled upper room of a pub. As they drew closer she saw how young they were, and watched them go past, listening to their animated voices and the whirr of the bike, cutting through her side street to the corner, where they could turn down to the main road.

When I was that age I would never have argued like that with a man, she thought. I wouldn't have dared. Slept with, no doubt, but never argued. That was more dangerous than anything. She closed the curtains and went over to the bed, pulling back the duvet, hoping, as every night, that Annie would not wake up.

In the study, Tony slammed shut the filing cabinet. A couple of minutes later he came out, blowing his nose, on the way to the bathroom. Alice lay back on the pillows, half-listening to running water, the murmur of
The World Tonight.
She had her eyes closed when Tony came in, dropping his clothes on the sofa; he came round to her side of the bed and quietly switched off her light, slipping in beside her. He took off his glasses, put them on his bedside table, and gave a long, tired sigh.

‘Found it?' she asked sleepily. ‘Whatever it was.'

‘Press cuttings. Yes. God, it's a mess in there – you don't ever let the girls in, do you?'

‘Never,' said Alice, remembering yesterday morning, when she had found Annie underneath his desk, stirring the wastepaper basket.

‘Liar.' He moved closer, and put his arm round her. ‘God, I'm done for.'

‘What time's your train?'

‘Eight-fifteen. I suppose I'd better leave by half-seven.' He reached for the alarm clock, flicking up the button. ‘You'll be all right, won't you?'

‘Fine.' Alice yawned, and rested her head on his chest. Tony had a long, thin body; he was fit, in the sense that he was perfectly well, and did not smoke, but he walked and ran – occasionally across a squash court, more usually trying to catch a bus, or chasing his daughters in the park – rather awkwardly, as if movement were something of a strange, foreign thing. On first introduction there was always a pause, a moment when you wondered if this was going to be a dull man, seeing his very ordinary glasses, and slightly receding, ordinary-coloured hair. But Tony had rare qualities: a true generosity, a genuine interest in other people. He was reserved but secure, a man whose instincts were protective – hence his work, a criminal lawyer in an inter-city firm where the sign for legal aid was prominent; hence his love for Alice, by whom he had been at first bewitched.

When Alice first met him she had barely noticed him – but then, at that time, she was finding it difficult to concentrate for long on anyone except herself. She was still living in Oxford, and not long out of hospital, still taking things. She had gone to the lunch party – a summer Sunday, a dozen people with forks and glasses sitting on rugs beneath the trees, cows flicking flies in the meadows beyond – because Hilda, on the telephone from London, had told her she had to, that it would be good for her. She sat on the edge of a plaid rug, drinking too much, half-listening to the lazy talk around her, hugging her long bare legs in her pale cotton skirt. She was surprised when Tony rang her the next day, and she realized he must have asked particularly for her phone number. She remembered him only as someone listening to a girl in earrings, who laughed a lot.

Standing in the narrow dark hall of the rented house in Jericho she heard herself saying: ‘I've had a breakdown, I'm not very good company at the moment.'

‘It doesn't matter,' said Tony. ‘We don't have to talk.'

‘I don't want to go to bed, either. I've been fucked up,' said Alice, astonishing herself.

There was a pause. ‘I only go to bed with people I know very well.'

‘How sensible,' said Alice. ‘I suppose you think I'm a tart. Excuse me, but I'm not myself. I don't know who I am, if you can understand that.'

‘I can,' said Tony. ‘I was watching you yesterday – you looked very, beautiful and lost. I thought we might go for a walk, if you felt like it.'

‘You sound like quite a nice person,' Alice said. ‘I'm not very nice at all. And I don't want to be patronised and rescued, thank you. I can't even remember what you look like.' She found she was trembling, and fumbled in her shoulder bag, hanging on a hook among the coats, feeling for the small brown bottle of pink and green capsules. She'd already had this morning's; she thought it was incredible, anyway, that they trusted her with anything, considering how she'd gone into the bin in the first place. But then she'd refused to come out unless they gave her something. Perhaps they were sugar. She unscrewed the cap, swallowing just one.

‘Hello?' said the telephone. ‘Hello?'

Alice picked it up again. ‘Sorry. I'm not feeling very well, I didn't mean to be so rude.'

‘You're certainly … direct.'