Keeping Secrets (42 page)

‘Tony?'

‘Yes?' He was putting his coat on; he looked suddenly very tired perhaps he really was sickening for'flu.

‘Stay.'

‘What?'

She got up and went over to him, touching his sleeve. ‘Stay. Please. I don't mean – what you think I mean. I'm not going to jump on you or anything. I just can't bear to be by myself.' She shut her eyes. ‘Please understand.'

‘I do,' he said slowly. ‘Of course I do. I'd ask you to come home with me and bring Sam, but I can't, not with'flu all over the place, it's too much for Alice.' He patted the top of her head. ‘Open up.'

She opened her eyes, which were sore from crying and lack of sleep. ‘I'm a wreck.'

‘I know. I want you to have a hot bath, and go back to bed, and ring us in the morning, all right?'

‘No,' she said. ‘It's not all right. Please, Tony, I don't often ask for things, I just don't want to wake up in this empty house – suddenly I can't face it. Please stay. Please. You can sleep in my bed, and I'll sleep on the sofa. In the morning I'll cook you breakfast – it'll take the edge off Sunday …' She trailed away. ‘Please.'

Tony said quietly: ‘Hilda, I can't. Alice would never forgive me.'

‘What?'

‘She'd get in a state. No matter how innocent I told her it was, no matter how innocent it really was – she's too insecure.'

‘She has you all the time.'

‘I know.'

‘And she knows you adore her.'

‘I know.'

‘And she still doesn't trust you?'

He didn't answer.

Hilda could feel herself about to become very bitter. ‘I have to manage by myself all the time. I have to listen to doctors who think you're my husband, and Sam's your son, and actually I don't seem to belong to anyone at the moment.'

‘I know. I know, it's horrible. But…'

‘Don't say I should've seen it coming. Everyone makes mistakes – I just seem to have made a very big one.'

‘I wasn't going to say that, I wouldn't dream of it. I was going to say that you're different from Alice, that's all.'

‘Oh, yes? How's that?'

‘You know you are. Alice is … Alice was …'

‘Alice is selfish,' said Hilda flatly. ‘She always has been.'

‘Don't.'

‘It's true. I love her, but it's true. She lives in her head with God knows what going on in there, thinking everyone's better than she is, thinking she can't cope … She's still screwed up, she must be if she doesn't trust you. I just want you to stay as a
friend,
for God's sake! As
family.
Is that so unreasonable?'

‘No, but I can't do it.' He had moved away, he was fiddling with his glasses. ‘It would upset her too much – she's always felt threatened by you, and it's just not worth it. Full stop.'

She gave a long, defeated sigh. ‘All this for Alice.'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘All this for Alice. She's my wife, Hilda.'

Hilda felt a sudden jealousy and anger so powerful it overcame her. ‘And what does she do for you?'

‘Everything. Stop it.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Hilda … for God's sake…'

‘She lies to you, I can tell you that.'

‘What the hell do you mean?'

‘I mean,' she said unsteadily, ‘that although Alice must have had more men than I've had hot dinners, she doesn't, actually, enjoy sex at all.'

‘Stop it! I don't want to hear any more.'

‘Not even with you. She doesn't like it even with you.'

Tony visibly flinched. ‘That's enough.'

But she was on a ride now, her blood up; she heard herself go on as if she were listening to a stranger, someone cruel, and driven, and appalling, shouting in another room: ‘It's true! She told me. Last year, before Sam was born, you were away on one of your lectures, and she told me then. She fakes the whole thing, didn't you know?'

‘That's
enough!
' Tony was angry now, Tony who was never angry. ‘I'm going now, I'm going to forget all about this, and I hope you will too. You're under too much strain, but even so …' He moved to the landing, the little flight of steps leading down to her front door; he opened it and ran down the stairs.

‘Tony! Tony!' She ran down after him. ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' She was weeping again, filled with shame and remorse. ‘I'm not myself, please understand, I didn't want to come between you and Alice.

At the bottom of the stairs, in Anya's gloomy brown hall, they stood and looked at each other, out of breath, unnerved.

‘Forget it,' he said again. ‘Let's both get some sleep. Okay?'

‘Okay.' She put out her hand. ‘Thank you again. For coming.'

He waved it away. ‘Ring if you need anything. Goodnight.'

‘Goodnight, Tony. Forgive me. Please.' She let him out of the door and closed it quickly behind him, before the cold air came in; she heard him walk down the steps and get into his car, and drive away. Then she slowly climbed the stairs, drained of all feeling.

It wasn't until she was lying in bed again, holding on to her pillow for comfort, as she'd done when her father died, that she found herself saying Tony's name, and realised at last that although she did indeed think of him as family, and as a friend, he had, if she were honest, for a long time meant much more.

‘All right?' asked Alice. ‘Have you got everything?'

She stood in the study doorway, watching Tony pile papers into his briefcase.

‘Think so,' he said, reaching across the desk for a folder. ‘You're very solicitous.'

‘I've packed your case.'

‘You didn't have to do that.' He dropped in a notepad.

‘I was putting clothes away anyway, I thought I might as well. It is only the one night, isn't it?'

‘Just the one. I'll be back for supper on Friday.' He closed the briefcase with difficulty, because it was old, and the fastening was half off, and looked up at her, leaning against the door in her jeans and baggy jumper, her hair falling acrossher face. She'd lost weight with the'flu and still hadn't put it back; her clothes were falling off her, and her skin was pale. She looked about ten; he wanted to pick her up, carry her along the landing past the sleeping children and put her to bed.

She said: ‘I wish you weren't going.'

‘Why?'

‘What do you mean, why? You know I don't like it when you're away. I hear noises.'

He pushed back his chair and stretched. ‘You'll live. I'm going to have a bath, okay?' He got up and went past her, ignoring her sudden look of hurt and surprise, and went along to the bathroom, where he turned on the radio, and the taps on full.

Afterwards, in his dressing gown, he found the bedroom empty. He checked the children's room, but they were both fast asleep, and she wasn't there. He stood at the top of the stairs.

‘Alice?'

‘I'm doing Hettie's lunchbox. I'll be up in a minute.'

He went back to the bedroom, and got into his pyjamas; he pulled back the duvet and set the alarm, and sank into bed, closing his eyes. Alice did not come up, and after a while he began to drift off, waking when she came quietly into the room and began to undress.

‘Alice? You okay?'

‘Yes.' She dropped her clothes on to the chair and slipped her hand under the pillows for her nightdress. In other days he might have reached out to kiss her arm, or touch her soft, falling hair as she bent down; he might have reached out to do much more than that. Now he lay still, watching her pull the nightdress over her head, and down over her little breasts and long pale legs.

‘I'm just going to do my teeth.' She padded out; he heard her go to the bathroom and then, as always, look into the girls'room before she came back, slipping in beside him. They lay still, not touching.

‘Tony?'

‘Yes?'

‘What's wrong?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Why're you cross with me?'

‘I'm not.'

‘You are. Something's wrong, anyway, isn't it? You don't seem yourself.'

He didn't answer. Outside the house they could hear the wind begin to rise, and the television aerial, damaged in the January storms, shudder up on the roof.

‘You will be careful, driving, won't you?'

‘I'm always careful.'

‘Will you phone me from Norwich?'

‘Yes. Come on, I'd better get some sleep.' He reached for the light and switched it off, turning away.

‘Tony?'

‘What?'

‘Is it … is it because of the baby? Me going on about it so much?'

He shook his head in the darkness; he said slowly: ‘It's not just that.'

Wind blew across the campus; the afternoon sun was bright, springlike, full of racing clouds. As Tony came out of the heavy Jacobean door at the back of the law school his coat flapped open, against his briefcase; beside him, his companion, in sweater and cords, said: ‘God, it's bloody freezing.'

‘Go back inside,' said Tony. ‘You don't have to see me out, I know where I am now.'

‘Okay, then, if you're sure.' The lecturer, his host last night, was a small man with greying hair. ‘Thanks again for coming, I thought it went well.'

‘Glad you thought so. They seem a bright bunch, sensible questions on the whole. Well – that was a very good dinner last night. Regards to Kate – I'll drop a line.'

‘Oh, only if you have a moment, I know what it's like. Right then, I'll let you go. You know your way out on to the London road all right, don't you?'

‘Oh, yes.' They shook hands and the other man turned back inside; Tony made his way towards the car park. His suitcase was already locked in the boot; he slung his briefcase on to the back seat and drove out slowly, passing students coming in for afternoon lectures, scarves and hair blown about in the wind. They all looked like babies.

At the exit to the road he stopped, waiting to pull out, feeling, as always after these occasions, a kind of high exhaustion, not unlike leaving court, but with the added edge of a different setting, new faces, another part of the country. Now, though, there was more than – this – an unfamiliar undertone to everything he did: like toothache, he thought, in moments when he was trying to recover himself, experienced by someone whose teeth had never given any trouble. But he had not recovered himself, and he sat now, his hands on the steering wheel, watching the cars on the road in front of him zoom past, and when a gap came in the traffic he went on sitting there.

After a while he pulled out the road map and opened it at the turned-down page for Norwich. To get back to London he had only to leave the ring road for the All; there was no need to go into the city. He hesitated, looking at his watch; his finger ran over the page, searching among unfamiliar names. Behind him, another car drew up; after a few moments, a few more gaps in the traffic, it hooted at him. Tony looked in the mirror and nodded a vague apology to an anxious-looking woman in earrings. He pulled out, a little too fast, and drove away, but he did not turn right to the ring road and the All, he turned left, checking the signs for the B road which led north, to Woodburgh.

Heavy white clouds sailed through the wide sky; rooks flapped, cawing, across open fields, alighting in a noisy muddle on the bare trees. Many had been damaged by last month's storms – the broken branches of oak and ash, ripped away, hung from a thin sliver of trunk or lay on the grass, fallen and still unsawn. Tony found his sign and turned left, on to a long straight road bordered by woodland. Here, piles of cut logs stood in clearings and along the verge; he caught sight of a van and trailer moving slowly through the trees, carrying a great heap of branches. He drove on, and dead leaves lifted in the wind, rising again, and blew across the road.

It was a long time since Tony had acted on impulse – perhaps the last time had been when he got in touch with Alice, in Oxford, all those years ago. He had phoned because, although they had barely spoken, he had watched her, sitting beneath the trees on the edge of the picnic rugs, hunched up, silent, wanly beautiful, and known, even then, that she needed him. He had wanted her, almost from the beginning – who wouldn't have, seeing those long pale legs drawn up beneath her cotton skirt, the pale silky hair falling over her face, pushed back with slender fingers; but it was more than wanting, it was understanding, observing bitten fingernails, an air of isolation. He supposed, even then, it had been the beginning of love.

And now – now what?

The road came out of the woods, and he was in farmland again, driving alongside ragged hedges, where catkins shook in the wind. Ploughed fields stretched into the distance, and the clouds were piling more thickly, growing darker. There was almost no traffic, and what there was he barely noticed; he drove fast, as if he knew the road well, overtaking lorries, rattling vans, a roaring motorbike. There was a gust of wind, a sharp flurry of rain; and he turned on the wipers: it no longer felt, as it had done outside the law school, like early spring, but a wintry country afternoon, beginning to close in. He glanced quickly down at the map and up again; another ten miles or so. He looked at his watch; he could have been well on the way to London by now – what did he think he was doing?

He didn't know what he was doing – what he expected, what he might find, why he was looking. He was restless, unsettled, off-course, giving way to a curiosity that in other days would have been brushed aside; he would have wanted too much to get home. Now, chance had brought him up here, and he, a man who had always felt in charge of his life, gave himself over to chance and to the unknown. Why not? What the hell.

He came to a crossroads, with signs to unheard-of villages; an old man with a bicycle stood waiting for him to go over. He drove on, faster, and the car shook. Another five or six miles, another crossroads, a signpost on the verge, announcing Woodburgh. He was on the outskirts of the town – a line of cottages, a green, a war memorial. Then shops, traffic lights, a couple of pubs and a church ahead, right at the end of the main street. He drove through slowly, looking for a place to park. There were yellow lines everywhere, and no meters; he followed the sign to the car park, and paid his twenty pence. It had stopped raining, but it was very cold; he walked back to the main street buttoning his coat as the church clock struck the half hour. The sky was heavy and grey.