Keeping Secrets (3 page)

‘This is the apartment. The flat.' She climbed a little stairway, three or four steps, and stood aside, gesturing. ‘Please …'

Hilda explored two airy rooms, a small kitchen, a dark bathroom. The sitting room overlooked the square, tall sash windows framing plane trees, television aerials, sky. From the bedroom, six steps across a landing to the back of the house, she looked down on to Anya's garden, walled, trellised, well-tended, with a little terrace and an old garden table. At the far end a cat padded across the lawn and leapt through the trellis. Next door was a tangle of bindweed, and what looked like an air-raid shelter; on the right a rusting tin bath lay in a nest of long grass.

‘Blacks,' said Anya beside her. ‘They don't care.'

Hilda said nothing, thinking that this was not the moment.

Further along she could see gardens like Anya's, where roses clambered and the grass was cut. She turned back into the room, which had been given a pale, pleasing carpet, and walked through it all again, placing her desk at the sitting room window, her pictures on the walls.

‘It's very nice,' she said. ‘I should like to live here.' Already the rented basement flat in a road off Newington Green was moving into the past. There was a garage on the corner and a late-night kebab shop two doors up, where car doors banged. Here she could be peaceful.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘I have enough furniture of my own. And anyway I was hoping to buy one or two things.'

‘Come downstairs and have a coffee,' said Anya. She closed the flat door behind Hilda, bumping the bookcase. ‘I'm sorry – there are too many books, my husband's. I can move them if necessary.'

‘No, please. I shouldn't mind at all. I'll be bringing more anyway.'

‘And may I ask what work you do?' said Anya, as they went down the stairs.

‘I teach,' said Hilda, whose work was her vocation.

‘Music?'

‘No, no. I teach English in a college of further education. I've just been made head of department.'

‘Have you?' Anya was leading her through the hall downstairs to the sitting room. She indicated a high-backed chair by the fireplace. ‘Then you will want peace and quiet when you come home. Please, sit down. I will bring the coffee.'

‘Thank you.' Hilda sat, and observed the piano, the family photographs. Two cats, one tabby, one marmalade, watched her from the sofa. ‘And what about you?' she asked Anya, when she returned with a round grey metal tray. ‘You probably want company, don't you? I'm not always very companionable.'

Anya set down the tray. ‘But you are honest. It is better to know where one stands.' She poured dark coffee into little gold-rimmed cups. There was milk in a beaten metal jug and a plate of crumbling unEnglish biscuits. ‘Please – help yourself.' She sat in her chair and looked across at Hilda, in her dark expensive clothes. ‘You are not married?'

‘No,' said Hilda in her calm voice, as if: why should I be?

Anya stirred her coffee with a fluted spoon. ‘I was married for almost forty-two years,' she said. She nodded to the photograph above the fireplace, where a small bald man with glasses on a medieval nose looked absently at the camera. ‘My daughter took that.'

Hilda looked up at it. ‘He has an interesting face.'

‘He was a good man. He got on my nerves when he retired, I wasn't used to it, having him here all day, and having the builders in – what a business. I used to say to him: “Go back to work, you are driving me crazy.” Then he died – just like that. He went out to post some letters, you know, just on the corner here, and he had a heart attack in the street.' Anya's hand, holding the coffee cup, shook, chinking the fluted spoon.

Hilda said: ‘How terrible,' thinking: If she is going to go on at me every evening, I shall not be able to live here.

‘What I want now,' said Anya, putting the cup on the tray, ‘is … I do not expect company, but I should like to know that there is someone coming in in the evenings, to know that I am not going to bed in an empty house. This square is getting quite posh now but still – we are in the East End of London. Things happen. I'm nervous by myself.'

‘Yes,' said Hilda, ‘I can understand that.'

‘Then there are the cats. Sometimes I go to visit my daughter in Sussex, I need someone to feed them.'

I suppose that's all right, thought Hilda, nodding. To be in the house and to feed the cats – it's what anyone would want. So long as there is nothing more.

‘That's all,' said Anya. ‘You would of course be completely independent.' She got to her feet. ‘I will give you the address of my solicitor.'

Hilda stood up, feeling brought to her feet by the headmistress. She was used to conducting interviews on her own terms, and felt a need to reassert her position. ‘I want to make a wise investment,' she said coolly. ‘After all, one doesn't inherit money every day.'

‘Certainly not,' said Anya. ‘Poor Josef left me almost nothing, only the house. The books, I suppose are worth something, but there is my daughter …' They were in the hall, now; she pulled open the glass-panelled door and the tabby cat went out. Children were cycling round the square, shouting.

Anya held out her hand. ‘Perhaps you will let me know at the next rehearsal.'

‘Or sooner,' said Hilda, and took her telephone number, snapping shut her address book.

When she got back to her basement room, walking the whole way there because she was restless and undecided, and had nothing else to do, she stood looking at the photograph of her parents on her desk, her father tall, grey-haired, a quiet academic who had loved her mother much more than she loved him, and whom Hilda had loved more than anyone. She could imagine him in conversation with Anya, and dead Josef; she could imagine him liking the house in Hackney, with its faded rugs and yellowing antiquarian books. If I were a different kind of person, she thought, putting back the photograph, I might be thinking now that I had been guided to this point. But I am not that kind of person, so I shall simply say that it feels right, and go ahead. For a moment she wondered whether to telephone Alice, and tell her she was moving, and then she decided to leave it. Alice was with Tony now, expecting a baby; Hilda didn't feel like disturbing a married Saturday afternoon. She had been used to spending weekends with her father, catching the train on Friday evenings to Kettering; he waited there with the car to drive her out to the village where she and Alice had grown up. Now he was gone, she was finding weekends difficult.

She moved into Anya's house at half term.

Hilda lived at the top of the house, Anya mostly at the bottom, although her bedroom and bathroom were on the first floor, and Hilda, working late, could hear her call in the cats and climb the stairs. She also had a small spare bedroom, kept for her daughter, Liba, a large, silent woman, who came to stay every few weeks. When Hilda left for work in the mornings she could hear Anya's radio down in the kitchen, the chink of breakfast things, tins of catfood banged on the table top. She went out, closing the door quietly, not wanting to be buttonholed.

Leaving the square she cut through side streets, crossing two main roads and a park until she came to the high walls topped by mesh, and the tall iron gates outside the college. Asian teenagers, her morning students, were going through the gates in twos and threes, the boys in white shirts, turbans and dark Marks & Spencer trousers, the girls in neon blue and pink baggy trousers and shirts, and ankle socks. They were doing A levels in Business Studies and Information Technology; for Hilda, who brushed up their English, they wrote short, effortful essays in Biro: My Favourite Television Programme; A Story from My Childhood; My Ambition. She also taught a GCSE class to Turkish Cypriot, West Indian and disaffected British students, and twice a week she ran a basic English course for Asian women at home. Their afternoons in the college were for some of them the only time they left the house.

If she had no evening classes, Hilda went out for a drink or a meal with a friend, or to a film. If she went straight home, walking along the square in the late afternoon, she could, in fine weather, hear through the open window Anya playing the piano. Sometimes she would come out into the hall and ask Hilda in for a cup of tea.

Once a week they left the house together, to go to choir; on concert weekends they went to rehearsals on Saturday afternoons. Hilda looked forward to these, to walking in at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon hearing the orchestra tune up; it was for rehearsals that she had, before her father died, spent rare weekends in London. Otherwise, she had spent her time with him, cooking and talking and doing the garden, sleeping in the room of her childhood.

Alice had not come home; Alice had left a long time ago, in every sense, and now she was married. Hilda and her father used occasionally to discuss her: whether she was happy now, whether it would work. They did not discuss whether Hilda might ever marry, or was happy; if her mother had still been alive there would have been a great deal of such talk.

Hilda and her father read the same papers and recommended books to each other. They discussed Labour politics as if in a friendly tutorial, and in the evenings they watched television or listened to concerts; sometimes they invited friends in from the village. On Sunday afternoons, after tea, her father drove her back to the station, and waved her off from the platform. Hilda used to lean out of the carriage window and watch him walk slowly away towards the ticket barrier, already abstracted; she settled into her seat and was carried back to London, where she supposed she belonged now.

But when he died, she was forced to realise that her life here, so full during the week, had at weekends a borderline quality: without her father she could not imagine how else to spend a Saturday or Sunday, wondered who else she could ever find to talk to in the same easy and absorbing way. Certainly there was no one with whom she felt able to be silent, as they had been able to be, companionable and ordinary.

The concert this weekend was one she would not be able, the following weekend, to tell him about; she and Anya came out of the church, still humming, and walked home. In the square they passed windows with curtains undrawn; Hilda glanced at a couple curled up on the sofa watching television; at a dinner party in a candlelit basement kitchen. ‘They will all be robbed,' said Anya.

At their own house, the cats were waiting on the balustrade, one on either side of the steps, unmoving. They leapt off as the two women reached the steps and Anya pulled out her keys.

‘Come along.' They curled themselves round her legs, mewing. Light shone through the thick glass panels in the door; she always left on the lamp on the walnut table, and the hall, with its browning wallpaper and polished banister, felt as if it were winter. Anya double-locked the door and slid the bolts, grunting.

‘Goodnight,' said Hilda, from the bottom of the stairs.

Anya straightened up from the bolt. ‘You won't come in for a coffee?'

‘Will you think me very rude?'

Anya shrugged. ‘Not at all. You work very hard, you must be tired. Come another time.'

‘Thank you,' said Hilda, and climbed the stairs. She heard Anya go into the sitting room and close the door, and, a few minutes later, the sound of the piano. Up in her own flat she undressed slowly and got into bed.

She could hear the trains going through Dalston Junction: when it was very late, they carried through nuclear waste containers. Closer, somewhere across the gardens, she could hear people outside, and music, the tail end of a party. Hilda was going to a housewarming party next weekend, invited by Fanny, a friend from university who had married an ambitious accountant. They had recently moved to a penthouse apartment in Camden Town with views across Regent's Park to the zoo; an airy space constructed of glass, gables and concealed lighting, with a minstrels'gallery.

The first time Hilda had visited, invited to tea one Sunday not long after her father died, she had felt a mixture of awe and anger that Alan, so unremarkable a being, evading taxes for dubious companies, should inhabit such luxury, and on the train back to Dalston found herself engaging in a long conversation about it with her father who, had he been alive, would have been driving her down through the village to the Kettering road. She recalled all this now, drifting off to sleep, and at some indistinct moment recollection of his smile and easy understanding became the beginning of a dream, in which he was still alive, and she had someone to talk to.

The following Saturday evening Hilda walked from Camden Road station along the main road towards Parkway. It was warm and close, the end of a dusty July day; buses roared past her and pigeons sidestepped the litter, pecking at takeaway cartons and bits of bread. Outside the pubs were one or two tables and chairs; the canal looked scummy and grey. Hilda walked up Parkway and turned with relief into the quiet side streets. Cars were parked all the way along, and every now and then a front door opened and people came hurrying out in pairs, getting into one of the cars and driving off.

Later, Hilda was to find herself thinking of this walk to Fanny and Alan's as the last time she walked as a single woman. This was untrue, because she remained single, but she no longer felt it. Walking now, she was thinking half about work and half about Fanny, humming a bit of Haydn; she, was used to going out by herself, and thought that the way she felt was how most people felt – reserved and self-contained, much of the time switched off from much of the world. Only later, looking back, did she realise how lonely she had been, and by then she was experiencing loneliness of a new kind: of absence, separation, someone longed for. She had thought such feelings related only to bereavement.

She walked up the steps of Fanny and Alan's house, and rang the bell. The intercom was a very expensive one which worked perfectly and Hilda could hear laughter in the background, and music, as Fanny said lightly: ‘Hello?' and let her in. Inside, she climbed three broad flights of sea-green carpet, finding Fanny at the top holding the door wide.