Keeping Secrets (46 page)

She had reached the end of the corridor; two young nurses in capes, just on duty, came walking towards her, and went past; she realised that she had lost her bearings. For a moment she felt so disoriented by this that it was almost like being back at the hospital in Oxford, when she had wandered many corridors, sometimes sedated, sometimes weeping, not caring where she was going. Then she saw the chapel, which she realised she'd noticed when she arrived, and knew the intensive care unit was somewhere at the other end of the corridor. She went over to the chapel door, and looked inside.

It was cool, church-like, with pews and stained glass windows, a plain brass cross on an altar. Just inside the door was a board, where people had pinned messages. Alice came in, and looked at them curiously.
Pray for my daughter, Penny; pray for my husband, my wife, my father
… She had thought only Catholics went in for this sort of thing. The messages were written on little squares of paper taken from a notebook on a shelf below the board; there was a ballpoint on a string beside it. Alice read all the messages, and then she walked slowly into the chapel and sat down. There was no one in here, and she did not believe, had never believed, that if she were to pray there would be anyone to hear her, but to sit in this silence was what she knew she needed. The restless sense of wandering about, not knowing what to do with herself, began to fade. The silence was peaceful, healing: she closed her eyes and saw what in later life she was to think of as a vision: a sunlit field, warm grass and willow trees, a river. She was sitting on a rug, with Hilda and Tony; they were watching the children, Hettie and Annie and Sam, walking along the riverbank, talking about insects. Their voices were high and clear and happy; she put her arm round Hilda and kissed her; she felt Tony take her hand in his, loving and strong; she turned and smiled at him, and kissed him too.

There was a sound behind her, quiet footsteps, someone sitting down. Alice opened her eyes and saw another woman, someone older than her, in a stone-coloured raincoat, with greying chestnut hair. She put her head in her hands, and Alice looked away, but went on sitting there, stilled. Then she got up, and walked out of the chapel. She did not leave a message on the board because even if she had believed in prayer, it was not her style. Nonetheless, when Tony the next day opened his eyes, and clearly, after a moment, knew who she was, it was hard not to think it a kind of miracle.

‘Hilda.'

‘Stephen.'

‘I – how are you?'

‘All right. How are you?'

‘We must talk.'

‘Yes.'

‘Well … where?'

‘Where are you now?'

‘In Camden, in the studio. I'm clearing my desk.'

‘Oh. You mean –'

‘There's a recession, isn't there, it's not just us. There isn't enough work for two of us at the moment. Look… Should we meet on neutral ground? I don't suppose you could leave Sam …'

‘No,' she said. ‘I couldn't. Why should I? You're his father.'

There was a pause. ‘Please – don't make it too difficult.'

Hilda put down the phone.

When it rang again, it was Alice. Hilda listened, and asked questions, and then she began to cry.

‘It's all right,' said Alice. ‘He's going to be all right. They're bringing him down to London soon.'

‘You don't understand,' said Hilda, weeping.

‘What? What do you mean?'

‘I …' But how could she tell her? How could she say to her: Alice, I betrayed you. I betrayed you! That's why Tony went where he did. Do you realise, Alice, where he must have been? Why he was driving from Saxham to Woodburgh at dawn, where he must have been staying?

‘Hilda? What is it?'

‘Nothing,' said Hilda. ‘I am not myself. Forgive me.' Forgive me. She blew her nose and said carefully: ‘When did you get back?'

‘This morning. I had to come, the girls were getting upset, and Tony's mother wanted to go and see him, she left after lunch … Hilda, are you all right?'

‘Yes. Yes, of course I am.'

‘How's Sam?'

‘Fine, lovely …' She began to cry again.

‘Do you want to come over? Come and stay …'

‘I can't, I'm teaching all day tomorrow. Anya has Sam, it's all set up …'

‘Come at the weekend, then. Will you? Please – I want to see you. And the children will love having Sam.'

‘All right, that would be very nice. Thank you.'

They said goodbye, and she put down the telephone. And sat at her desk for a long time, unmoving, miles away, thinking about Tony, about what must have happened, and what had very nearly happened.

I knew I was right not to get involved with people, she thought. Look what has come of it all. She saw herself in the old days, when her life, which seemed now to be in pieces, had been ordered, when she had gone about things sensibly, keeping her distance, and realised: only I can't think like that any more. I've changed, everything's changed. I used to think that feeling was Alice's territory, something to frown on; I used to dismiss it, to call it dwelling on things. But love is the only thing that matters, that gives meaning how could I have found it possible, before, to live without it?

She thought of her father, who had for so long been the only person she had ever really loved, and whose death, perhaps, had made it possible for her to love Stephen. She thought of Stephen, of the years they had spent together and not together, of the passion they had shared, two such different people, and its gradual diminution, until only differences remained. And after a while she got up, and went into the kitchen, where the family photographs of her homecoming with Sam were still pinned to the cork board, curling a little at the corners. She looked at Alice, shielding her pale face from the sun, and said again: Forgive me. And then she looked at Tony, standing beside her, and felt not so much passion as peace, and recognition, thinking: love is both discovery and confirmation. I have made a great journey, and come home.

There was a sound from the bedroom, a rattle being dropped. She went out of the kitchen and quietly to the bedroom door. Sam was sprawled on his back in the cot, the duvet kicked off, hands open, head on one side; she had left him two or three toys to play with he must have moved in his sleep and the rattle fallen through the bars. She picked it up and put it quietly on the chest of drawers, and pulled up the duvet, tucking it round him; she bent to kiss his cheek. It was soft and warm, smooth as only a baby's skin could ever be – impossible, after only six months, to imagine how her life would have been without him, how it could ever be without him. I loved Stephen, she thought, and now it's over. I love Tony, but no one is ever going to know about that. And as for this one – perhaps this is the deepest love of all. I suppose Alice has known that all along.

Aloud she said: ‘What are we going to do, Sam?' Asleep, he was beginning to look just like Stephen. My journey is just beginning, she said to herself, and I shall be making it alone.

She went out of the room again, leaving the door ajar and the nightlight glowing. Sitting at her desk, she dialled the Camden studio.

The first days of March, very cold. Bitter. Forsythia in suburban gardens, daffodils bent by the wind, the first dusting of green on the London trees. Stephen and Hilda meet, in the end, on neutral territory, but she doesn't leave Sam with Anya. They walk across the common near where Alice and Tony live, early on a Saturday afternoon. Children whoosh down the slide in the playground, or race on their bikes along the paths; dogs run panting after sticks and balls, and seagulls, blown inland from the Thames, flap and scream round shining puddles. It rained last night, it seems to rain every night, but now it is dry, and so cold that the obvious thing to do is wrap your arms around whoever you're with, or run.

Hilda and Stephen do not wrap their arms around each other, they do not even hold hands. They have met at the top of the common, near the church and the tennis courts; now they are walking nowhere in particular but having to keep walking – because of the cold, because it's easier to talk like this. Between them, in the pushchair, Sam is sleeping, shielded from the wind by a plastic cover, unaware, as he will be for years, that his future is being decided.

In the end, because neither of them, for different reasons, wants to talk about recent events, this is the only thing left. They make tentative arrangements: about money, and visiting, and wills. In later years Hilda will on many occasions remember this day, and feel that such arrangements barely touch on what is needed. But this is now, and for now they are doing the best they can. The wind blows in their faces, there is a sharp spring sun, lighting thick white clouds. A beautiful day. Hilda's hands on the pushchair are in woollen gloves; she puts up one of them to secure her beret in a gust of wind, and falls silent. They walk on.

Stephen says: ‘Hilda.'

‘Yes?'

‘Look at me. Please.'

She stops, and looks. A little white dog runs past. Stephen's face is drawn and strained; for the first time she notices that his eyes are paler than when they met, more like the eyes of a much older man, the colour beginning to fade.

He says slowly: ‘I did think it would be all right.'

‘Yes,' she says, ‘so did I.'

‘I –' he hesitates. ‘I'm around whenever you need me.'

‘You haven't been before. Even when I needed you terribly.'

‘Hilda, it was you who wanted a baby.'

‘Yes,' she says. ‘I know. Your baby.'

‘Well …' he shakes his head.

She pushes the pushchair back and forth, not because Sam has woken up but because she has to have something to do, something ordinary, and calming. She looks away, and they walk on again. ‘You are going back to her, aren't you?'

‘I don't know. I really don't think she wants me to.'

‘Then what –'

‘Exactly,' Stephen says flatly. ‘Then what.' His hands are in his coat pockets, he jingles his keys. They have come back to the top of the common, near where he parked his car. ‘Anyway – I'd better go.'

‘Yes,' she says. ‘Well – goodbye.'

‘Goodbye, Hilda.' He touches his lips, and drops a kiss on the pushchair's plastic hood. ‘Bye, Sam.' He puts a leather-gloved hand on Hilda's woollen one; she lifts her face to his. They kiss, perhaps for the last time. Then he walks away to the car, and she turns the pushchair round, and walks back down the windy common, towards the road leading to Alice's house.

Norfolk, where spring comes late. Stephen pulls up at the house and sees Miriam's car and Jonathan's bike in the garage; he parks inside the open gates. When he gets out, he is about to close them, then remembers there's no longer any need. He takes his bag and portfolio from the boot, leaving a pile of cardboard boxes on the back seat to fetch later: they are filled with papers and drawings from the studio in Camden. He kicks the door shut and walks along the path at the front of the house, where he finds the door unlocked.

‘Hello?' Inside the hall he drops his things and calls again: ‘Anyone home?'

There is no answer, and after a moment he goes out, and down the front path to the little gate, also left open; he notices that it's half off its hinges, and the wood, covered in damp lichen, is beginning to rot. He goes out into the lane, and looks up and down.

It is late afternoon, and even colder than London, but it has been a fine day up here as well, and the sky, streaked with dark fingers of cloud, still holds gleams of the sun going down behind the trees. He hesitates, then hears the sound of the farm tractor, turning into the lane from the Saxham road: he stands back as it draws near and raises his hand, and Mr Innes nods to him and rumbles past, turning up the cart track. It is a greeting they have been making to each other for years, no different today from any other. Stephen steps off the verge and begins to walk down the lane, past the wide entrance to the track.

The lane is full of mud; there are still uncleared branches from the storm, and the hedges are as bare as the trees and the empty fields that stretch beyond them. From the farm he can hear the tractor stop, and then the faint bleating of lambs, kept near the house. He cannot remember the last time he walked down here.

Miriam and Jonathan appear in the distance, walking towards him, their hands in their pockets; it feels even sadder than he had thought to see them without the dog. He stops, and waits for them.

‘Hello.'

‘Hello.'

‘Hi, Dad.'

‘Had a good walk?'

He can hear himself sound like an acquaintance.

‘Well … it's not very nice without Tess.'

‘No. I know. Have you been far?'

‘Not really. We've been to see the donkey, that's all.'

He frowns. ‘Which donkey?'

‘Oh … Never mind.'

They turn and walk back towards the house in silence. Birds are settling in the trees, the fingers of cloud grow longer.

‘I remember the donkey now.'

Neither of them answers.

‘Jon?'

‘Yes?'

‘How's Marietta?'

‘She's going back at Easter. I was telling Mum … I might go back with her. Just for a bit.'

‘For the holidays, you mean? Like last year?'

‘Well … perhaps a bit longer.' Jonathan is looking straight ahead, dropping offhand words.

‘But …'

‘He can do his exams next year,' said Miriam. ‘Can't he? If he wants. It's not the end of the world.'

‘No. No, of course not. Well … That sounds all right.'

They have reached the house; they walk up the path, bordered by tight, unopened daffodils.

Miriam says: ‘I'll put the kettle on.'

‘I'll get in my things from the car. Before it gets dark.'

‘Want any help?' asks Jonathan.