Secret Smile (16 page)

'Has Brendan decided what he's going to
do?'

'You mean, what kind of job?'

'Yes.'

'He says he's going to put Troy right
first.'

'That sounds like a really, really bad
idea to me.'

'I don't know, really.' She sounded
listless.

'Even Troy wants to be left to himself
more,' I said. 'That's why he's moved out.

'I know.' She bit her lip nervously. 'I
told Brendan that, more or less.'

'Are you two all right?'

'Of course,' she said curtly. 'Why
shouldn't we be?'

'Anyway, he should start thinking of you
two; that's where his first priorities lie. What's he done before?'

'Well,' said Kerry. 'Lots of things,
really.' She chewed the corner of a nail. 'He studied psychology for a bit, and
then he did some kind of job connected with that which didn't work out. He's
too much of a maverick. And he was involved in various business ventures; you
know. He takes risks with things. And he travelled of course.'

'Of course,' I said. 'I see.'

I tried to remember things he had said.
And out of memory's darkness came a name, spoken over a barbecue in my parents'
garden. I held on to it: Vermont. That was it. Harry Vermont and the dotcom
company. When Kerry had left, I picked up my mobile and dialled directory
enquiries.

At half past eight the next morning I was
sitting in a large, warm office with huge windows that would have overlooked
the Thames if they had been on the other side of the building. Instead, the
view was of a council estate with doors and windows boarded up. If 'boarded up'
is the right term for those huge sheets of metal. Harry Vermont offered me
coffee, but we were both in a hurry — and anyway, when it came down to it, it
didn't take very long. I told him that I knew Brendan Block.

'Oh, yeah?'

'You and Brendan set up a dotcom business,
didn't you?'

'What?'

'I wanted to find out about the work you
did together.'

He took a cigarette from a packet on his
desk and lit it. He took a drag from it.

'The work we did together?' he said
sarcastically.

'Is there a problem?' I said. 'Can you
talk about it?'

'Yeah,' he said. 'I can talk about it.'

'Did you lose much money when your dotcom
business collapsed?' I asked brightly, then popped a piece of crumbly Stilton
into my mouth. It was Bill's birthday and we were all round at his house for
lunch. Outside, it was misty and cold, but inside it was beautifully warm, and
a large fire burned in the hearth. Judy and Bill are good cooks, much better
than my parents, and they'd produced a vast game pie, lots of red wine, and now
cheese and biscuits. Kerry was at the other end of the table, trying to
persuade Sasha to be her bridesmaid, and Sasha, who's twelve but looks
twenty-one and only wears hugely flared jeans and hooded tops, was saying that
she wasn't going to wear a peach satin dress for anyone. But Dad and Bill were
listening to me, and Troy was sitting opposite Brendan. I couldn't tell if he
were listening or not because he was in one of his unreadable moods.

'Too much,' said Brendan and laughed
ruefully, a man of the world.

'What about the others?' I said. I drained
my glass and plonked it back on the table. I raised my voice so that Kerry and
Judy looked across at us. 'Did everyone lose money? Like that Harry person you
told us about once, what was his name?'

Brendan looked momentarily confused.

'Vermont, that was it, wasn't it?' I said.

'How on earth did you remember that?' My
mother laughed, pleased with me. I was taking an interest, being polite.

'Mitch and Sasha — clear the plates away,'
said Judy. They rose grudgingly.

'Because I remember thinking Vermont like
New England,' I said.

Bill refilled my glass and I took a large
mouthful and swallowed. Mitch took away my cheese plate, and dropped the
buttery knife in my lap.

'Poor old Harry,' said Brendan. 'He was
wiped out.'

'What does he do now? Do you keep in touch
with him?'

'You can't drop friends just because they
go through bad times,' he said sententiously.

'I talked to him,' I said.

'What?'

'He said he met you, briefly, but you
never actually worked together and he's never done anything in the packaging
business. Anyway, you didn't get the job.'

I took a large gulp of wine.

'Coffee?' asked Bill.

'Lovely, Bill,' said my mother. There was
an edge of panic in her voice.

'Well?' I asked Brendan.

'You went and talked to Harry Vermont?'
Brendan spoke softly. 'Why, Miranda? Why didn't you talk to me about it?'

Everyone was looking at me. I gripped the
edge of the table.

'You never worked together,' I said. 'You
never lost money. You hardly knew him.'

'Why would you do something like that?' He
shook his head from side to side in wonderment, taking in the whole watching
room. 'Why?'

'Because you weren't telling the truth,' I
said. A sick feeling rose up in me. My forehead felt clammy.

'If you'd asked me, I would have told you,
Miranda,' he said.

'Harry Vermont said...'

'Harry Vermont let down everyone he worked
with,' said Brendan. He sat back a bit, addressing all of us now; his tone was
one of sorrowful resignation. 'He wanted the glory but not the responsibility.
But I forgave him. He was my friend.'

'He said...'

'Miranda,' hissed my mother, as if
everyone couldn't hear every word. 'That's quite enough now.'

'I wanted to find out...'

'Enough, I say.' She slapped her hand on
the table's surface so hard that cutlery rattled. 'Stop it. Let's have coffee.'

Judy glared at Bill and nodded at him.
They both stood up and went out. In the kitchen, someone dropped a glass.

I thought about standing up and making a
run for it, but I was wedged between the table and the wall, and Troy would
have to have stood up to let me out. So instead I said: 'You were deceiving
us.' I turned to the table. 'He was deceiving us,' I repeated desperately.

Brendan shook his head.

'Maybe I didn't tell you the whole ugly
story because he was my friend and I felt sorry for him. I was protecting him,
I guess. But I wasn't deceiving you. No, Miranda.' He paused and smiled at me.
'You do that, though, don't you?'

Outside in the hallway, I could hear the
grandfather clock ticking. Through the French windows, I saw the bare branches
of their copper beech tree were waving in the wind.

'Like the way you deceived Kerry.'

'Let's stop this,' said Troy. 'I don't
like it. Please stop.'

'What?' Kerry's voice came at the same
time, sharp with fear. 'What do you mean?'

'I'm sure Kerry forgave you, though.
Because that's what she's like, very forgiving. Mmm?'

'What are you talking about? Tell me.' I
saw Kerry's face across from me.

'You were only seventeen, after all.'

'Brendan, I'm sorry if I...'

'And how old were you, Kerry? Nineteen, I
guess.'

'When I what?'

'You know, when Miranda went off with your
boyfriend. What was he called? Mike, wasn't it?'

The silence deepened around us.

Brendan put his hand over his mouth.

'You mean you didn't know? Miranda never
said? I had no idea. I just thought — if she told me so early on in our
relationship, and so casually — I just assumed you all knew too and it was one
of those family things...' His voice trailed away.

I opened my mouth to say I'd never told
him, he'd read it in a diary that was private. But I didn't because who cared
how he knew. It was true.

'Kerry,' I said at last. 'Let's not do
this here. Can we go somewhere and talk?'

She stared at me. 'I get it,' she said.
'Now you're trying to do it all over again.'

CHAPTER 18

I left the house, though Judy tried to
hold me back at the door, and I got in my car and drove to the bottom of the
road, where I pulled in at a bus stop. I felt cold to the bone, but sweaty at
the same time, and my hands were trembling so badly that I could barely turn
the ignition off. There was a nasty taste coating the inside of my mouth: game
pie, blue cheese, red wine, dread. For a moment, I thought I would be sick. I
sat for a while, just staring ahead but barely seeing the traffic that flowed
past me as the day just started to turn dark, as if the colour were running out
of everything, leaving the world grey.

A loud horn sounded behind me, and I
glanced in the rear-view mirror to see a bus waiting. I started up the car and
edged out into the road. But I didn't know where to go. For a while I drove as
if heading home, but that was the last place in the world I could be right now.
Anyway, it didn't feel like home any longer. I'd loved it, it had been my
haven. Not now.

I could just go back to Laura's. But I
wanted to be alone, desperately. So I just kept on going, not turning left or
right, heading east out of London, past shops selling old fridges, mobile phones,
catering equipment, BB guns, cheap videos, garden gnomes, floor tiles, wind
chimes... The streets grew poorer; there was graffiti on the bridges overhead,
dank little cafes, queasy-looking butchers still open with slabs of meat
swaying in the window, and at a set of traffic lights a young man in combat
gear banged on my window and mouthed orders at me to give him money. After I'd
passed a flyover and several arterial crossroads, the surroundings grew more
prosperous again, and houses thinned to detached properties with gardens in
front and behind. Lights were beginning to go on. Street lamps glowed in the
greying dusk. At last there were fields, large trees with scarcely any leaves
left on them, a river running by.

I took a random left up a small road, then
left again up a smaller lane, and stopped the car in the entrance to a field
where cows were standing in the far corner. In an hour or so it would be dark,
and when I opened the door I could feel the cold biting through my jacket. I
wasn't dressed for outside, wasn't wearing the right shoes, but it didn't
matter. I started to walk along the lane and welcomed the sting of the wind,
the way my hair whipped against my face. For several minutes I just walked,
fast so my calves ached. And then I started to think and to let myself
remember.

When Kerry was nineteen, she was pretty
but she didn't think she was, so of course people rarely noticed her. At least,
boys didn't. Michael wasn't her first boyfriend, but he was the first she
really let herself fall in love with, and maybe he was the first she had sex
with. She never said and I never asked, at first, because I was waiting for the
right intimate moment, and later because there never would be that right
moment. It was in the summer holidays, just before she went to university, and
in the meantime she was working in the local cafe, washing dishes and serving
customers chocolate fudge brownies and coconut flapjacks. He was about three
years older than her, studying civil engineering at Hull, but home for the
holidays, and he saw her a few times and then one day he leaned over the
counter and asked her for a cup of tea and if she'd like to go out for a drink.

Maybe it was because he knew nothing about
her, had no part of the world in which she was always on the sidelines, or
maybe she was just ready to get carried away — anyway, she was very taken up
with him. She seemed proud of herself as well because he was older than her,
and not exactly handsome but extroverted and rather a charmer, and he made her
feel more worldly and glamorous than she'd felt before. She visibly bloomed, in
much the same way, I thought, pounding along the lane with the darkness
falling, that she had bloomed with Brendan.

And then... I had spent too many years
trying not to think about this, and I had to wrench my mind round to
contemplating the forbidden memory. It didn't go on for that long between Kerry
and Michael, and after a few days it seemed obvious that she was keener than he
was. Or that's what I said then, and after. At first, he'd taken no notice of
me. I was five, maybe six years his junior. I had homework and a meagre
allowance. And I was a virgin. I don't think I flirted with him exactly, but I
remember a look he gave me one day — a suddenly appraising look, right over the
head of Kerry, and I remember even now how I was filled with a rush of triumph
and violent self-loathing. All at once, I couldn't stop thinking about him,
just because he'd looked at me like that, public-private. I glowed with secret,
guilty pleasure.

He kissed me, outside Kerry's bedroom,
very quickly, and I let him and told myself it didn't matter, didn't count, I'd
done nothing. We had sex, one afternoon after school, on my bed, while Kerry
went round the corner to buy cigarettes for him. I couldn't tell myself that
didn't count. It took about two painful, horrible minutes, and even before we'd
begun I realized I was making the biggest mistake of my life. I was no longer
able to stand the sight of his shallow, self-satisfied face. I kept out of his
way completely after that. If he was coming round, I went out. If the phone
rang, I never answered it. I waited for the flooding shame to subside. He and
Kerry stayed together a bit longer, but gradually he stopped calling her and
then he didn't return her calls either. A week or so later, when he'd gone back
to Hull, Kerry started university. I felt sure he would have left her anyway; I
tried to find ways of justifying my actions so they weren't so bad, but never
succeeded. I didn't know and didn't want to know how much Kerry minded. I
couldn't believe what had happened. Sometimes, I still couldn't believe it. I'd
never told anyone about it. Except for my diary. I had written it down almost
as a way of getting it out of my head, turning it into an object that could be
thrown away, or hidden. Because I never could throw my diary away. It would
have been like throwing away a piece of myself.