The Secrets We Keep (16 page)

Mike,

When you died there were a lot of things I had to do that I didn't like. Go to your funeral. Look into your poor mother's devastated face every day and understand that it was a reflection of what my own face looked like. Read letters with the words “late” and “deceased” in them. Go to sleep on my own, every night—or try to—and wake up on my own, every morning. Not be able to talk to you, or at least not have you talk back to me when I did. Look at your weird beer in the fridge and your horrible sweet cereal in the cupboard and know you wouldn't be back for them.

And I know that there are decisions I will have to make that I won't like either. Mel wants me to think about going home with her, she says for a change of scene, but I know what she's thinking. I'm refusing, for now, but the day might come when I have to really think about where I want to spend the rest of my days, and whether to move back to Australia or not. One day I might have to make decisions about Pepper without you—he's started limping, sometimes, when he's been running too hard, and it makes me think that one day he'll have something really wrong with him. It was hard enough to make the decision about Salty together, and then to take him to the vet and leave without him. I remember how you wouldn't let me go into the consulting room with you. I said good-bye to him in the waiting room and then you did the hard thing. I can't imagine losing Pepper, let alone having to be the brave one when the time comes.

I can't even bear the thought of the mundane things, replacing the double glazing, renewing the insurance, buying a new car before our beloved banger rusts itself to death during another crappy, damp English autumn/winter/spring. But I've come to accept that I can manage to do these things without you, when I have to, because I tried lying down and dying and that didn't work, and so now I don't have a lot of other options.

One thing I never thought I'd have to do—something that wouldn't have crossed my mind until I got ambushed into that vile conversation—was to stand up for your good name. I didn't think I'd need to tell people who loved you too that you didn't screw a teenage girl, that you're not the father of her child. Because it's so blindingly obvious. Why would anyone even think that you would do such a thing? Everyone knows we were happy. Everyone knows that we loved each other and that we didn't need anyone else. For crying out loud, it's Throckton. Your mother once asked me why you'd been buying white bread when we normally had brown. Someone would have known if you'd so much as looked at Kate Micklethwaite. And even if they hadn't, I would have known. I was your wife. I loved you. You loved me. I would have known.

I know that you probably don't care about this stuff anymore, because you're all made of grace and starlight now, or whatever, and human suffering is something that you've forgotten, or are seeing from a long way away, like watching a rainstorm through a window.

But, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, I need you to know that I care, and I don't believe it, really don't believe it. I won't believe it. It's not true. I know that.

I'm standing up for you.

I love you.

E xxx

The trip was meant to be blissful. “Remember,” Michael had said when they booked it, a break before IVF began and therefore, very possibly, their last time away as a couple rather than a family. “My darling Elizabeth, we are going to relax because you've worked hard all summer and we need to top up your sunshine before winter comes. We are not going on a baby-making expedition.” She'd laughed, and said no, of course not, but she did rather hope there would be some sex, and she'd kissed him, but she'd wondered if he had been reading her mind. Because just at that moment she'd been thinking about the advice she'd been giving Mel—that the best way to find a man was to stop looking for one, and just go and enjoy having her own life—and she'd thought,
Yes, perhaps the best way to get a baby is to forget that that's what we're trying to do. All those teenagers with baby carriages who thought it could never happen to them: maybe that's what we need, to be forgetful of the consequences.

And Michael and Elizabeth had tried. Elizabeth hadn't taken her temperature; Michael had tried not to watch her for signs of excitement, disappointment, premenstrual syndrome, tried not to step carefully around her, calculate dates and times—although at this point it wasn't really possible for him to unlearn everything he knew about cycles and timings. They had lazed in bed in the mornings, gone to markets, gone snorkeling, lain in hammocks, reading, during the hottest part of the day, settled on the balcony at night. All in all, they did an excellent impression of people who didn't have the baby they had yet to make on their minds all the time.

Elizabeth had tried to remember how much she loved, simply loved, her husband; he had tried to appreciate her, turning golden in the sun, beautiful and fit and strong, although her shoulders drooped when she thought he wasn't watching, and her eyes took on a fairy-tale hunger as she watched toddlers splashing in the shallows on the beach.

They had drunk too much on the last night. Elizabeth had been bright and brittle during dinner, but afterward, walking along the shoreline, warm evening water lapping at their ankles, she'd confessed how much easier it was for her to be happy here, at night, when all of the children were safely tucked up in bed. How she dreaded the flight tomorrow, the babies who could only be comforted by their mothers, the fathers proudly pretend-apologizing as their big-eyed offspring tried to play with everyone around them. Elizabeth tried to explain how it's the assumption children have that they will be loved that broke her heart: because she would love—oh, how she would love—a child of her own. Of their own.

Michael had held her and they had stood in the warm tide until the water lapped at the backs of Elizabeth's knees, tickling her into the now again. They'd walked up to the hotel hand in hand, and Michael had told her that he thought they were getting some help with this, just in time, before they both got broken, and she had nodded and smiled and said, “Yes, Mike, it's time. I know I'm breaking. I know you're holding me together, and that's not fair on you.” That night they had both slept better than they had in a while, and in the morning they'd smiled straight into each other's eyes.

During the flight home, Elizabeth had played peek-a-boo with the toddler on the seat in front of her for what seemed like hours, and Michael had watched her: the patience on her face, the smile in her eyes. The child's mother had thanked her as they got ready to get off the plane; Elizabeth, still smiling at the child, had said that she was getting some practice in. “Oh! Congratulations,” the mother had said. “You'll make a lovely mother.” And somehow, in that moment, it had been easier for Elizabeth and Michael to smile at each other and squeeze each other's hands and say thank you than it had been to embark on an awkward correction.

“It's a sign,” Elizabeth had said in the car on the way home, and although Michael didn't believe in signs, he'd just smiled and said, “Well, you will be a lovely mother.” And then they were back in Throckton and it felt as though everyone was lining up to tell them how well they looked, how relaxed, how happy, and the baby seemed no longer a distant, fading possibility, but a little plump gurgle of newness waiting just around the corner.

• • •

Two months later, the first cycle of IVF had a certain novelty value to it: the daily injections, the appointments, the schedule, all meant that Elizabeth and Michael had a sense of purpose. Things were happening at last.

Elizabeth was shining with excitement. The baby-naming conversations started again.

“Does it have to be a flower, for a girl?” she'd asked.

He'd said, “What's more beautiful than a flower?”

Elizabeth had shrugged and said, “OK, but I'm crossing Rose off. Too thorny.”

Michael had known he should have said something, just a cautionary word or two, but he couldn't quite bring himself to remind her of everything that the consultant had told them—that it might take a while, that it might not work, that Elizabeth's body would strain and that their relationship would be tautened and tested, that it would be hard, and unpleasant in places, and that the success rate was a lot better than it used to be, but it was not guaranteed.

Elizabeth had smiled and said, “We think we've waited long enough,” and, well, that had been it. They were off. Blood tests, pills, injections, dates in their diary. In the coldest November Elizabeth had experienced since she came to Throckton, she glowed with warmth and excitement. Patricia had kept commenting on how well she looked, even risked the word “blooming” a couple of times, but Elizabeth had stuck with their resolve to tell no one anything until they had something to tell. As she injected her thigh every morning, she reminded herself that there didn't seem to be anything wrong with either of them, so what they were doing was a boost. Michael kissed the little circles of bruises on her thighs better and brought her flowers. And so she bloated, and she ached, and she waited, and she was absolutely certain that she'd taken the stern advice of the nurse to heart: that on no account was she to think that she might be pregnant during the two-week wait to see if an embryo had implanted. That there was no way to know. That she must put the whole question out of her mind.

But when the bleeding started, and the scan confirmed the gaping black emptiness of her womb, tight and cramped inside her like a clenched fist, something in her broke a little bit more.

Still, that first time, it was almost easy to talk about bad luck. They had known it might take more than one go. Elizabeth could find a brave face, although she started to go to bed earlier and earlier and sometimes didn't wake when Michael got in beside her after a long shift or a late dog walk.

Salty died two days before they went back for the embryos to be implanted the second time—he'd gone from being a little bit off his food to being put down in the space of two weeks—so it always seemed unlikely that a baby would come from those sad days. When the bleeding had started, Elizabeth had felt sad but not surprised.

It was during the third try that Elizabeth and Michael started to struggle. With their new pup Pepper a force of scuttering, chewing enthusiasm for life, and bluebells everywhere on their walks, and a feeling of warmth returning to the world, they couldn't quite believe it when a baby still didn't materialize. To not be pregnant seemed perverse. To sit, weeping, over blood once more, while everywhere Elizabeth looked there seemed to be growth and newness, was wrong. But it was what happened.

Sitting in front of the consultant like two bright high school students who hadn't done as well as they should have done in their exams, Michael and Elizabeth had talked about options again. Their NHS-funded treatment was at an end. Michael remembered being a boy at a fairground, looking at his empty hands where three hard rubber balls had been a minute ago, the coconut still obstinate on its stand. His father, clapping him on the shoulder, saying some things are harder than they look, son.

The consultant had advised a break and suggested that they could come back in six months and fund their own treatment, if they wanted to. Elizabeth had cried. The consultant had offered tissues, with the gesture of a man who mopped tears with great regularity. And Michael had said thank you, and taken his wife by the hand, and walked her to the parking lot, and put her in the car, and tucked the belt around her. And in many ways he had felt not a lot different from the way he felt when he spent a day at work dealing with the aftermath of a car accident, a house fire, a sudden death. He was sorry; he was helpless; he was hurt; he was strong with the strength that comes of having a role to play. These things were all the same, whether he was taking his distraught wife home or doing his job on a difficult day. But there was a difference that made all the difference. At work, he was not responsible for whatever had gone wrong to begin with. At work, he could hand over to someone else, and go home, to a life that had once been so perfect he could barely believe it would last. Well.

“Maybe we should have a weekend away,” Elizabeth had said, in an attempt at making an effort, a couple of days later. Michael had agreed, although he used to like it when such weekends were fun, rather than attempts to recover from the last failure of trying to make a baby or prepare for the next. But neither of them had the heart to organize anything, and if they were going to pay for IVF they'd have to watch their money. So Michael bought a set of all the James Bond films on DVD—he couldn't remember so much as a single baby in a Bond film—and they watched them, one a night, and when they had worked their way through them all, they went back to the fertility unit and started IVF again.

Mike,

I've started driving to work. I don't talk to anyone any more than I have to. I drive home and I come upstairs, to our room, and I wait for all this to pass.

Because it will. It will. All I have to do is wait. I can wait.

But when I close my eyes, and I want to see you, instead I see her.

Standing in our garden with that look on her face.

Leaving the flowers.

Help me.

E xxx

It was one of Michael and Elizabeth's trips that brought everything to a head. Michael and Kate had just bumped into each other, in a way that could have looked casual, Kate coming out of the café at the entrance to Butler's Pond just in time to see Michael arriving with Pepper, Michael setting off slowly on his walk so that anyone walking quickly would have been able to catch him up just out of sight of the parking lot.

Kate had had a lot to say about waiting for exam results, and how far away university seemed, and how boring her parents' arguments were, how repetitive, and how every time they whined or shouted each other's names she was glad that they had, at least, given her a sensible, easy name. “Although my middle name is Eris,” she'd said, “so I didn't get off completely when it came to weird names.”

“I'm Michael John,” Michael had offered. “You can't get much more functional than that.”

“Like bread and butter,” Kate had said, and she'd smiled.

Up until then, that smile, Michael had been pleased with how things were going. It had all been as he'd been determined it would be, what he had in mind when these walks started. These conversations made what he was doing a sort of public service. He was striving to mentor a teenager who was under pressure, to show her that there was life beyond exams and parents arguing. He knew what it was to be an only child; he knew what it was to feel the borders of Throckton as restraints and frustrations.

But then there was that smile. It gave him a glimpse of what she was feeling. That smile, that in another man—a man less devoted to his wife, his beautiful, generous, sweet-natured, unreproaching wife—might feel an answering glint for.

By mutual consent, they had seated themselves on a fallen tree a little way away from the main path. On warm days like today, Michael would pour some water into Kate's cupped hands, and she would stretch down her arms so that Pepper could drink before he settled at their feet. No one would be passing close enough to see who they were.

Michael had unlaced his boot to take out a stone, and as he'd done so, he'd said, “I won't have this problem next week. Next week it will be flip-flops all the way.”

Kate had looked at him, an animal alert for danger, and he'd said, as casually as he could, “Oh, Elizabeth and I are going to the Canary Islands for a fortnight. Just to get her some sun before the hotel gets really busy in July. Even after all this time, she can't completely get used to the climate.”

Kate hadn't been able, in that moment, to fathom what was worse: the thought of two weeks without seeing him, or the way he had talked about his wife, so casually, the way you'd talk about your arm, so much a part of you that you barely think of it. She had watched Michael's foot being swallowed up by his boot again, and watched his hands, lacing, pulling, back and forward, back and forward, snap, snap, snap.

She'd thought about how, if he'd cared for her even the smallest bit, he would have explained it better, added some preamble, tried to let her down gently. He wouldn't have told her that he was going away in a blurt like that. He wouldn't have flung it in her face.

Kate had wanted to get up and go but she felt weak all over, and the tears came without announcing themselves in advance so she had no chance to dig her nails into her palms and stop them.

Michael had fastened his boot again, stood up, and turned to Kate to suggest that they head back, before he noticed that she was crying. He sat down again, cursing his stupidity, knowing that he knew better than this, and he said her name. It was meant to be a coax, a teacher to a student, but it came out as a plea, a man to a woman.

But Kate wouldn't look. She kept crying, every now and then the heel of her hand swiping up her face to knock the tears aside. When Michael put an arm around her, she sat solid, not showing that she noticed.

So he put out his free hand, and he turned her face toward him.

It was the way his thumb fitted so exactly along her cheekbone that did it.

And once he had kissed her, he was done for, and he knew it.

When they had walked back to the parking lot, he said, “This can't happen, Kate. You know that, don't you?”

And she had said, “I know, Mike.” It was the first time she'd ever dared to shorten his name.

• • •

When Michael had walked away from Kate that afternoon, he was sure he'd never put himself in that position again. He'd planned to rearrange his shifts, persuade Elizabeth to do more dog walking with him, get organized to go out with Blake and Hope more often. He'd stick to busy places. He'd explain to Kate that it was inappropriate for the two of them to spend so much time together and apologize if he had hurt her feelings or misled her in any way. By the time his hand was on the gate at home, half an hour later, that kiss had felt like a thing of the past, or an ill-judged moment in someone else's life.

But it hadn't stayed that way.

The Canary Islands had been fine. Good, even. Elizabeth had read books and slept and been charmed by local bits of tourist nonsense, and she had worshipped the sun. Michael had read a bit, and gone to the gym once or twice, and stroked Elizabeth's hair while she lazed and dozed. They went to couples-only resorts these days, so everything had felt quiet, and calm, and civilized. They had swum in the mornings and chatted over cocktails and meals and promised each other that they would cook fish more often when they got home. It had been every bit what they had planned, the kind of trip they always had these days.

It was two weeks designed not to remind them of the fact that they didn't have a child, or two children, or three. Designed to remind them of how lucky they were, to have each other, to have love, to have a happy home, to have the money to do this sort of thing.

Except…maybe it wasn't the thumb/cheekbone. Maybe it was the eyes, or the soft, waiting unsureness of two mouths new to each other. All Michael knew was that, all the time they were away, Kate Micklethwaite filled his mind. He didn't think that she was anywhere near his heart, but he didn't trust himself. Because he had already done something he had been certain he would never do.

He was a loyal man, a true man, a faithful man. He loved his wife, and since the moment he'd set eyes on her, standing behind the hotel reception desk with her uncomplicated eye contact and her unforgettable smile, he'd thought of no one else. No one. It had felt like madness. It had felt like walking toward those flames, the heat building, the cries behind him, powerless to stop.

• • •

When he and Elizabeth had gotten home, Michael hadn't been able to wait to take Pepper out and see whether Kate would appear. He knew how much could happen in a fortnight, and he half hoped that she had found herself a boyfriend—there was someone she mentioned sometimes, a lad who worked at the restaurant where she waited on tables on the weekend—and the other half he ignored.

But Kate was nowhere to be found, although he walked Pepper in all the familiar places, and dawdled past the end of her road. It's for the best, he told himself, imagining her hand in hand with someone nearer her own age, single, full of things to give her. It's for the best, he said to himself, as he came home from work late and curled in bed, wrapping himself around his beautiful wife in the way they knew worked best for their bodies, Elizabeth waking only to mumble something with the words “love” and “night” in it.

And after five days without so much as a whisper of Kate anywhere, he had given in, and he had texted her. He had remembered as he'd done so how he'd protested, politely, as she'd put her number into his phone. He hadn't wanted to say, “But why would I ever need to call you?” So he'd just said, “Well, we often bump into each other, so I shouldn't think I'd need it.” And Kate had smiled and said, “You never know,” and then rung her own number from his phone so she had his number too.

And Michael had paused before sending the three little words that he knew would change his world. But he had sent them.

• • •

Kate had been waiting. After two weeks without seeing him, and another week since he'd gotten home—she'd checked the flights and worked out exactly when he would be back in Throckton—she was starting to wonder whether her strategy had failed. Her decision to let him find his way back to her if he wanted her had been much easier when he'd been out of the country. Since he'd been back in Throckton, tanned and smiling, she'd found it much harder not to put herself in his path. Much harder to press Delete rather than Send after writing another text message.

And then Kate's phone beeped, and she was looking at three magic words: “Dog walking tonight?” She didn't reply. But she went. And they sat on the tree trunk, and they kissed, and Kate smelled limes and fresh sweat, and Michael tasted lip gloss and breath mints, and they were both of them lost.