Keeping Secrets (2 page)

‘Well, if you don't like it,' Alice heard herself saying in a shaky voice, ‘you know what you can do. I never asked you to ring me up in the first place.'

‘I only thought we might go for a walk,' Tony said mildly.

Alice, embarrassed and confused, found she was crying.

‘I mean – to start with,' he said. ‘I mean I didn't want to rush in and upset you … Christ, you've got me in knots now, please don't cry.'

Alice put down the phone and wept.

Now, countless conversations later, years later, she rested her head on Tony's rather too thin chest and said: ‘Do you know what I was thinking, earlier on?'

‘No,' he said, inquiring.

‘When the girls were in the bath – for the first time I thought that I'd like to have another.'

‘Did you,' he said, flatly.

‘Do you think …'

‘No. No, I really don't.'

‘Why?' Alice raised her head and looked at him. ‘You said you wanted a large family.'

‘Did I?' He put up a hand and stroked her hair. ‘Did I say that?'

‘You know you did. When Hettie was born we couldn't wait to have another.'

‘We've got another. She's a nightmare.'

‘No she's not.' Alice made a face. ‘Just one more? Please?'

‘What
has
got into you? I thought you were tired out.'

‘I am, I don't mean necessarily now, I just thought one day …'

‘One day,' said Tony. ‘Ah. I thought for a moment you were expecting to start tonight. Mind you …' A hand moved down under the duvet, stroking her bottom. ‘Mmm. How about a quick one? Just to see us through the weekend.'

Alice laughed. ‘I thought
you
were tired out.'

‘I was. Come here.' His hand moved down further, gently tugging up the long cotton nightdress. ‘But no babies, not tonight. Are you suitably equipped?'

‘No,' said Alice, suppressing another yawn. ‘What do you take me for?'

‘For my loving wife, who should be always on the
qui vive.
' He sighed. ‘Oh, well, I suppose I'll have to resort to primitive practices.' He rolled over, drawing the length of her against him, slipping a warm hand between her legs. ‘You do want to?'

‘Yes,' said Alice, feeling nothing at all. She reached over him, switching out his light, and gave herself up to his pleasure.

When it was over, she fell asleep at once, woken at some dark indeterminate hour by Annie, crying in her bed, waiting for one of them to go to her. She stumbled out and snuggled in with her, not wanting to wake Tony, who was usually so good about getting up.

When they woke in the morning he had already gone, leaving the duvet flung back, pyjamas on the floor and a half-eaten bowl of cornflakes in the bathroom.

‘Where's Daddy?' Hettie asked, coming downstairs in her nightie.

‘In Manchester, a long way away. He's got to work this weekend.'

‘Oh.' Hettie hitched herself up on to her chair, and reached for the cereal. ‘What are we going to do?'

‘I haven't thought yet,' said Alice, putting the kettle on. Annie tugged at her. ‘Hang on a minute, Annie, I'm just coming, go and sit down.' She looked out of the kitchen window at a sky threatening rain. ‘Tomorrow Hilda's coming to lunch. If it's fine we can go to the playground first. Annie – go and sit down!'

From the top of the common, near the tennis courts, church bells sounded: on Sundays it felt as if they were in the country, or living in the eighteenth century, when the houses on the broad paths bordering the common were full of families, not flats. Who went to church here now? It had rained during the night and the air was fresh; hand in hand Alice and the girls walked slowly through the side streets, bringing Hettie's striped umbrella, just in case.

The plane trees round the playground were just in leaf, and after the rain the ground cover of broken bark beneath the swings and climbing frames smelt of damp wood. Hettie and Annie let go of Alice's hands and ran to the gate. The playground was a big one, new, with a twenty-foot slide and a Tarzan contraption where teenage boys swooped, yelling.

‘Don't go anywhere I can't see you.'

‘We won't!'

There was a large sandpit for little ones, and picnic tables set out at intervals on brick paths. Alice sat down at one, parking Hettie's umbrella, and pulled the newspaper out of her bag. She skimmed the headlines absently and began to read, looking up every now and then to check on the girls. The playground was filling up. Children clambered and swung, shouting; little ones dug in the sandpit, and played shops and homes: there was a small red and blue house in the middle with a pitched roof, open doors and windows.

Parents – a few fathers, but mostly mothers, who had left fathers to lie in with the papers – pushed and helped on and off, and urged discarded coats and jackets on passing offspring, who shook their heads and ran off. ‘I don't
need
a coat!'

Hearing a child cry, Alice looked up from the paper, but it wasn't one of hers. Everything looked cold and bright, under a sky with scudding clouds. Some of the parents had brought flasks of coffee, and were sipping from plastic cups. She put her hands in the pockets of her duffle coat, and wished she'd done the same.

In the old days, seeing Alice out and about, you would have thought her in need of no one, choosing to be alone – that was her defence, an air of preoccupation and detachment covering long years of unease. Even now, you would think twice before going to join her at her table in the playground. She did not look as though she were in need of anyone's company, and now it was true: she was watching her daughters, content.

Hettie, the elder, would be six in the summer, a sturdy, square-faced child, with shiny brown hair beneath a dusty pink crocheted hat which she had chosen herself. She was sensible, and had kept her coat on; she sat at the top of the slide with her legs in navy tights stretched neatly out before her, waiting for the child in front to reach the bottom. When the slide was clear she came down with solemn enjoyment, hands in her lap; she got neatly off, and went straight round to the steps, waiting her turn to climb again. If people jostled Hettie, she walked away; if she fell over she picked herself up. She had slept all night since she was six weeks old and usually woke in a good mood; when Alice asked her to take something upstairs, or fetch Annie's beaker from the kitchen, she usually did it without a fuss. From the beginning, it had been as if a space with exactly Hettie's shape had been waiting all along for her to occupy it, and settle in. Now she was here, Alice, who saw nothing of herself in her first-born, marvelled at her, rejoicing in her ordinariness.

Annie was different. Annie was what Alice would have expected, and could cope with only because of Hettie. Annie was a screamer. She clung. From the beginning, where Hettie could be left with almost anyone, Annie cried, and would not be comforted until Alice came back. The second child, now almost three, she was more like a first: loving only Alice, bellowing to be picked up and made a fuss of when she fell, thumping other children when they took her toys or refused to share theirs. And perhaps Alice was, perversely or in response, more like a first-time mother with her – watchful, anxious, protective. Though Annie was exhausting, Alice understood her; from time to time she was a little in awe of her elder daughter, who seemed to need her less. Annie could, in fact, be more sociable than Hettie, who had never hit anyone: where Hettie would happily play by herself for half a morning, Annie needed a friend – she needed her sister, or her mother, or someone from playgroup. Alone, she had a pleading, disconsolate air, and nothing was ever quite right.

Much of the time, Alice coped with Annie by switching off. When she switched on again she had to force herself to be patient. But although she heard herself snapping at least once a day, for much of the time she did manage patience, more than she would ever have thought possible. For the first time in her life she was able to forget herself, a priceless gift for someone who used to be conscious of every passing moment. For much of the time she was tired – from nights broken by Annie, from early mornings, simply from being with two small children. But often, despite all this, she found herself thinking: my children have redeemed me.

Being Alice, when she did so she felt also a wave of guilt: that she should have found peace to be so simple, after all – all those wasted years before; that she should find it by bringing children into the world, instead of in herself, or in her loving husband; should even have dared to bring children into the world, polluted and corrupt and dangerous. Unlike the old Alice, however, she did not allow herself to dwell on such thoughts. She had one particular regret which grew rather than diminished but, this aside, she did at last allow herself to be happy, relishing solitude, privacy behind her own front door.

It was almost eleven o'clock. Annie and another little girl were passing each other cups of sand through the window of the red and blue house. The sun had gone in again and Alice put up her hood. Annie was beside her, wanting something. ‘I'm hungry, I'm hungry!' She clambered on to the bench, and pulled at Alice's open bag. ‘I'm
hungry!
'

‘All right, Annie, don't do that. Would you like an apple?'

‘Crisps.'

‘Crisps,
please.
' Alice pulled out a packet and looked at her watch. Annie tugged open the packet, spilled crisps everywhere and began to wail. Alice bent down to pick them up, and gave her the packet again. Annie munched, and Alice put her arm round her, watching Hettie on a swing, and wondering what Hilda was doing now, before she came. Wondering, too, as before most visits, if Hilda, whom she hadn't seen for weeks, who was so different – always working, always knowing what to do – would for ever have the same effect on her, turning her back from grown-up mother, wife, to the little girl who watched, and knocked at doors, and waited.

Hilda was tall and dark, her hair shaped beautifully into a short, sloping pageboy, her features finely cut where Alice's were soft and vague. She wore the same round glasses she had worn since she was twenty, and dressed in dark colours – charcoal, navy, and slate jackets and trousers worn with expensive shirts. She lived at the top of a Victorian house in Hackney, in a square, from where she was able to walk to work.

The houses in the square were tall and narrow, porticoed, with railings and steep steps to the front door; in the late seventies, when they had become faded and rundown, the developers had moved in, knocking through and opening out. There were sanded floors, and picked-out cornices, basements turned into kitchens fitted in country pine; there were burglar alarms, and boxes of geraniums at gleaming windows.

Not everything had been redeveloped. At intervals, on all sides of the square, stood houses which looked as though no one had opened the front door for twenty years; some of them were visited by council meals-on-wheels vans, district nurses and debt collecters. Hilda, walking to and from work through the square, speculated on the dwindling lives of the people inside. Her house, Anya Novakova's house had been occupied by the same family for decades; unlike them, it had succumbed neither to neglect nor to a developer's chequebook.

Anya and Hilda had met at the choral society they both belonged to, rehearsing once a week in a church hall near Mare Street.

In the spring of 1983 Hilda, talking in the coffee break to a pale soprano, saw Anya approach from the altos and wait, smiling, diffident.

‘Hello.' Hilda towered over Anya, five-foot-three in low heels, into her sixties, her spectacles clipped on to a chain which hung over a flowery shirt.

‘Excuse me.' Anya had bright brown eyes; she brushed back her straying hair with a mottled hand. ‘I hope you will not think I am intruding, but I hear you are looking for somewhere to live?'

‘I have somewhere to live,' said Hilda, whose manner could be off-putting. ‘I am looking for somewhere to buy. I've been left some money by my father, and want to use it sensibly.'

The soprano went to put her plastic coffee cup in the bin; Hilda and Anya eyed each other, neither easy women.

‘I have a flat at the top of my house,' Anya said carefully. ‘We had it converted last year. My husband was an antiquarian bookseller, we were going to let this flat when he retired. He died in January, it was very sudden.' She spread her hands uncertainly. ‘Now I am thinking of selling it.'

‘I'm sorry about your husband,' said Hilda. From the corner of the hall the piano sounded; people were moving back to their places, scraping chairs on the bare floorboards. ‘Perhaps I could come and see the flat? I'm living in a basement at the moment; it was all I could find when I came to London.'

‘And where are you from?'

‘Northamptonshire. And you?'

‘Czechoslovakia,' said Anya, moving back towards the altos. ‘But that was a very long time ago.'

Hilda went to see the flat that following Saturday. She followed Anya up the flights of stairs carpeted in a fading Axminster held in place by stair rods. This reminded Hilda of her parents'house: stair rods were something from her childhood, shared in some sense with Alice and her mother, guided mainly by her father. She felt at home, and full of emotion. Ahead of her, Anya was panting a little.

‘We bought this house in 1949,' she said. ‘Our first married home.'

‘How nice,' said Hilda politely; she looked at faded brown photographs hung on the walls along the landing, of parents and grandparents, stiffly arranged in long-ago sitting rooms in Prague.

‘Two years we saved for the deposit; in the day we were working in Foyles, all day on our feet, and then in the evenings in Lyons Corner House.' Anya led Hilda up a second, narrower flight of stairs, and unlocked the door at the top. Light fell on to the landing, and a bookcase, standing in the corner.