The Secrets Between Us (2 page)

‘Six and three quarters.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Good.’

I wondered if my son would have been anything like this boy if he had lived six and three quarter years. He’d have been darker in his colouring, certainly, and less intense. I always imagined a sunny, cherubic child when I thought of my boy as he might have been; bright-eyed with rosy cheeks and sticky fingers squirming solidly in my arms as I hugged and tickled him, demanding kisses.

No, he would not have resembled this child at all.

Jamie, pale and solemn, his legs pedalling beneath the ice-blue water, held my eyes. He said: ‘Watch.’

He put his palms flat on the surface of the pool, dainty little fingers with seashell nails splayed, and moved them slowly as if he were playing the piano, or the guitar. On the floor, the sunlight was reflected in the patterns of the water Jamie choreographed above. It danced on the little tiles, rippled, shimmied and waltzed, and made flowers, spirals and circles. Jamie had turned the bottom of the pool into a kaleidoscope. I watched, as he had told me to, and after a few moments he looked up at me, expectantly, and I realized he was waiting for praise.

‘That’s clever,’ I said. ‘Who showed you how to do that?’

‘Mummy.’

‘Where’s Mummy now? Is she having a rest?’

Jamie shook his head. His eyes were glassy in the light and the pale, freckled skin on his cheeks and nose was slightly sunburned. He gave a little sigh as if he were tired of answering this question, tired of being asked.

‘Mummy’s gone,’ he said, and from the way he said it I knew he did not mean ‘to the shops’ or ‘for a lie-down’. He meant ‘gone for good’.

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN HIS PHONE
call was over, Jamie’s father came into the pool. He walked down the steps and pushed off underwater, surfacing beside me. I studied him as if he were a figure in a painting. He had taken off his sunglasses and his eyes were deep set, brown, hidden behind his lashes as he squinted in the light. His hair was long; it reached his shoulders and was almost black. He had not shaved for a few days and his skin was a sallow colour, as if he were recovering from an illness. Something was not as it should have been. As he drew closer to me, I pulled away.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Listen …’ he said, and at exactly the same time I said: ‘Anyway …’ and we both smiled at our mutual clumsiness.

‘I’m Alexander, Alex,’ he said.

‘Sarah.’

I didn’t know what else to say and I had no inclination to share the pool so I gave a little shrug and I said: ‘I have to get out now.’

He said: ‘OK.’

I was relieved he didn’t try to engage me in conversation. I dreaded being asked friendly questions about myself, and having to lie because the truth would make the other person
uncomfortable. Having so much to keep hidden made me feel ashamed; I was contaminated by my situation and I far preferred to be left alone.

I moved away towards the steps. Jamie and his father watched me. When I reached the end of the pool, Alexander sank down under the water.

I climbed out and went to stand on the wooden slatting beneath the pool-side shower. I arched back my neck to run the clean water through my hair and felt the sunshine warm on my face. Then I straightened again and opened my eyes and saw him watching. He gazed at me while Jamie splashed around him in the pool. Alexander’s face was expressionless and composed. Flashes of light refracted from the water on his cheeks and chin. I paused, for a moment, with my hands in my hair, to watch him back, and he caught my eye and held it for a moment. Why was he staring? Could he tell something was wrong?

I broke the eye contact and turned away. I wrung the excess water from my hair and wrapped myself in the big yellow hotel towel that I’d left on the fence beside the shower, tucking it in at my chest, and then I picked up the purse that had been hidden beneath it and headed back across the lawn. The grass was prickly against the soles of my feet. The mobile was ringing again on Alexander’s sun bed. As I walked by, I could see the name of the caller illuminated in the window: Rowl. At the side of the lounger a small blue teddy bear lay face down in the grass. I leaned down to pick it up, and make it sit, propped against the pile of clothes, looking out over the swimming pool.

I asked the man in the kiosk for a glass of lemonade and drank it at a table in the shade. A little lizard ran up the wall beside me and stopped dead still at eye level. It was a pretty little thing, the pads of its toes like sequins pressed against the whitewash of the wall. I gazed through the hedging that bordered the sea edge of the garden at the blue, blue sky
that canopied the bay and the hazy outline of the coast on the other side of the water. I tried to lose myself in the colours and the distance but was distracted by the movement in the pool, and by the sound of Jamie’s father calling him out.

I passed them on the way back to my lounger. Alexander was rubbing the child’s head with a towel; the boy was whining, complaining that his father was too rough. Jamie stood on one leg, scratching the back of his knee with his toes. He wrapped his skinny little arms about his chest, and shivered. Alexander had his sunglasses on again; I could not see his face, but his back was an arch of muscle and bone and the hair in the hollow of his arms was long and dark. A nasty scar, still gleaming slightly purple at its perimeter, dissected the place beneath his arm just under his lowest rib. The swimming shorts were stuck to his buttocks.

I kept my back to them while I wriggled my sundress over the top of my damp bikini and packed my stuff into my bag. I put on my sunglasses, stepped into my sandals and clipped across the paving stones set in the lawn back through the conservatory doors into the air-conditioned cool of the hotel.

I held my head high and did not look back.

CHAPTER THREE

IN MY ROOM
, I arranged the pillows at the foot of the bed, and lay on my front with my face resting on my crossed arms. I watched some Italian television, but I must have fallen asleep. When there was a knocking at the door, I didn’t know where I was. For one giddying moment, I thought I was still in the hospital coming round from an anaesthetic and that maybe everything I thought had happened had not. Perhaps when I opened my eyes, there would be a healthy, dark-haired baby swaddled in the cot beside my bed nuzzling his fist and blinking back at me. My heart accelerated at the thought and I felt a squeeze of hope that it might be true and at the same time a rush of panic in case it was not.

I rolled on to my side and opened my eyes and recognized the colour of the paint on the hotel-room wall and the gilt-framed still life of fruit and wine, and I struggled to contain the disappointment, heavy as a boulder inside me.

The knocking came again, a little more loudly.

I rolled off the bed and tried to arrange my face into a normal expression before I opened the door. It was May, my lovely sister, all flushed from her shower and made up beautifully. She smelled of shampoo and baby powder. I saw a flicker of concern cross her face when she saw me, and I smiled, but my lips didn’t feel as if they were in the right place.

‘You’re not ready yet?’ she asked. I looked down at myself. The damp imprint of my bikini was silhouetted on the sundress and I knew my hair must be wild where I’d lain on it. May reached out and smoothed my hair with the palm of her hand. ‘Are you OK, Sarah?’

‘Mmm.’ I nodded brightly. ‘I must’ve dropped off.’

‘You’ve got pillow creases on your cheek.’

‘Sorry.’ I reached up to touch the hot ridges in my skin. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Shhh,’ said May.

She was wearing a floaty, pale-green top over white jeans that were a little on the tight side.

‘You look lovely, May,’ I said. ‘Is it late?’

‘We booked the taxi for eight,’ she said. ‘Remember? So there’s time for a drink in town before the restaurant?’

I remembered.

‘What time is it now?’

‘Quarter to. It’s OK, don’t worry. Neil’s gone down, and if the driver won’t wait we’ll find another. You take your time.’

May walked over to the open window and gazed out at the sunset on the sea. Inside, a mosquito hummed. I reached down to scratch a trio of bites on the back of my left calf, then I opened the wardrobe door and took out a navy maxi-dress. In the mirror fastened to the inside of the door, I could see May, reflected, watching me, rubbing her lower lip with the tip of her index finger like she always did when she was worried.

‘You were thinking about the baby again, weren’t you?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘I was dreaming, that’s all.’

‘Has something happened?’

‘No.’

‘You haven’t spoken to Laurie?’

‘No.’

I pulled the damp dress off over my head and folded it over the bed-frame to dry.

‘Did he text you? I thought he might text you. I know you told him to leave you alone but I thought …’

I shook my head.

‘No, he didn’t.’

I turned my back while I took off the bikini top and slipped the blue dress over my head.

‘Well, anyway, you’re looking better,’ May said so brightly that I knew the opposite was true. ‘Are you feeling any better?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

‘Sarah …’

‘Honestly, I am.’

‘I shouldn’t have left you by yourself in the garden earlier. I knew I should have stayed with you.’

I wriggled the dress down until it hung properly with the straps crossing my back and sitting in the dip in my shoulders.

‘Actually I was glad you left me. I had a nice time by the pool,’ I said. ‘I swam and I sunbathed. I met some English people.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘A man and his little boy.’

I sensed May tense. I knew what she was thinking: that the man and his child had reminded me of what I had lost. I knew her concern was borne entirely of love, but at the same time I hated being the cause of her anxiety. I carried on quickly, as if the obvious parallel had never entered my mind: ‘He’s not that little, the child, he’s nearly seven. I watched him for a few minutes in the pool while his father took a phone call. He’s called Jamie, the boy.’

‘And what about his mum? Did you meet her?’

‘No, she isn’t with them. Jamie said she’d gone away.’

‘Maybe she’s visiting friends or had to work while they’re on holiday,’ May said.

‘Maybe.’

May stepped back to look at me.

‘You’re a bit burnt,’ she said. She picked up her bag, rummaged inside and passed me the jar of expensive after-sun cream she’d bought in the airport duty-free shop. ‘Use this.’

Obediently, I unscrewed the lid and dipped my finger into the lotion. It was cool and sweet-smelling. I smoothed it on to my sun-hot face, concentrating on the half-circles of parched flesh above and beneath my eyes. I tried to smile at May and this time I must have been more successful because she smiled back at me.

‘I shouldn’t have left you by yourself,’ she said softly. ‘I should have looked after you better.’

CHAPTER FOUR

THE NEXT DAYS
passed slowly. During daylight hours, May and I stayed in the hotel grounds. I would have been happy to spend every moment beneath the trees by the pool, but the heat always became too much for May and she didn’t want to leave me on my own so, every afternoon, when she began to puff and flag, we both went inside.

We ate oily fish, olives and tomato salad in the chill of the air-conditioned dining room and then sat on reclining chairs in the deep dappled shade of the terrace, listening to piped music – an Italian tenor singing love songs that we didn’t understand. We sipped iced water, switched away the flies and talked of this and that, nothing much. A large fan blew warm air towards us, turned its face away, and then returned in a soporific rhythm.

As the afternoons wore on, and the heat became a little less intense, May and I followed a steep, winding footpath cut into the cliff at the back of the hotel. It led down between waist-high walls of sharded grey, volcanic rock with little silver and lavender-coloured plants creeping and growing in its crevices to a private bathing area. A wooden platform stuck out over the green-blue sea that lapped against the rockface. The sea was teeming with busy little fish. I liked to sit on the edge of the platform, with my legs hanging down
over the cool water, watching the way the sunlight dazzled the waves, its patterns fragmenting and dancing. I liked the smell of the sea and the feel of the lively air immediately above it. May lay on a towel on the platform, reading her book. I stared at the facing coastline across the bay. Sometimes it was very clear, I could make out trees and buildings; at other times the heat haze over the water obscured it from view.

It was so peaceful, and I didn’t have to talk to anyone or explain anything or even think too much about my situation.

May’s husband, Neil, was a journalist with the Manchester-based news and features agency NWM. He had been sent to Sicily to work on the shoot of a drama that was being filmed there. Neil’s role was to interview the stars, the producer and director and write background features to distribute to the media, generating publicity in advance of the film’s release. It was easy for me to be in Sicily with him and May. I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I certainly didn’t want to go home.

Home was the house I shared with Laurie. Home would mean endless talking, negotiations and explanations and, in Laurie’s terminology, turning the spotlight on the issues that were affecting our relationship. He, I knew, would be suffering from a combination of guilt and frustration that would manifest itself in a stream of tiny accusations towards me, pinpricks of anger disguised as expressions of concern. Because, what he would be thinking was that, if I had let him look after me, if I’d shared my feelings with him after the baby, none of this would have happened.

In all the time I was with Laurie, which was all my adult life, I had been regarded more as his girlfriend than as an individual in my own right. We were Laurie-and-Sarah. He didn’t mean to be demanding or controlling, but there was more of him than there was of me. He was older, cleverer, more knowledgeable and gregarious; I was quieter,
shyer, less educated, and I was happy to swim in his wake. I couldn’t remember how I was supposed to look, or be, or even what my voice sounded like when I was on my own, without him. Laurie had always looked after me and looked out for me, but something changed after our son was stillborn. I hadn’t wanted to analyse my feelings as he did; I’d just wanted to be left alone. And he, feeling abandoned, had turned to Rosita.