The Secrets We Keep (24 page)

Mel takes the phone, glances at it, hands it back to Kate, and says, “Thank you for coming. I think you can go now.”

Richenda helps Kate up, a hand under her daughter's arm, and they are almost at the door, Elizabeth crying in a sad defeated keening, when Mel says, “Actually, one more question.”

Richenda, who has tears clawing at her own throat, would have kept Kate moving, but Mel's voice is quiet, pleading, and so it seems safe to turn around.

“Is that everything? I think we need to know whether that's the lot. We don't have the resources for any more revelations.”

Kate says, “That's everything. That's all I have of him,” and it's an easy lie, because what she is still keeping to herself is so buried, so ugly and ignored, that she couldn't immediately put words to it if she wanted to. But as she watches Mel and Blake go to Elizabeth, it kicks a few words out. “So I don't know why everyone feels so sorry for her.”

Elizabeth is on her feet before she knows it. Mel sees a flash of the sister she used to know, who couldn't bear life on a farm in the middle of rural Australia anymore, who raged to be free. This time there are words, ready and biting at one another in their eagerness to get out. “Because I was his wife and he and I could not have a child of our own. Because, whatever you think, he loved me and he loved our life together. Because within two years you'll be off-loading your baby onto your poor mother every evening and screwing your way around Throckton in the hope of finding someone to love you.”

Richenda takes a step forward, Elizabeth one back, but she doesn't stop talking, couldn't if she wanted to, but she doesn't want to because for as long as she's talking she can't listen to the terrible things that her soul is screaming, “And by the time you're twenty-five you'll be scraggy and stupid and you won't have a thing to look forward to.”

Richenda is turning, trying to turn Kate, but Kate isn't going anywhere until she's said, “I'll have nothing to look forward to, except my baby growing up.”

“If it grows up,” Elizabeth says.

The room inhales, a sharp, shocked breath.

Kate, tears jumping from her eyes, is movable again.

Richenda has a novel feeling of wishing her husband was here. This would be the perfect place for all the unpleasant, unkind rants about Michael Gray that she's had to endure lately. She says, “That really is enough, Elizabeth. I'm sorry for your loss, and for your pain, but that's enough. Kate, come on.”

Elizabeth nods.

Kate leaves, followed by her mother.

Mel says halfheartedly, “Well said, Sister. I couldn't have put it better myself.” And then to Blake, “Text messages. From Mike. Before you ask, no, nobody wants tea. I want a cigarette and when I come back in I'm bringing whiskey.” She gives him the look that says,
You
look
after
her
for
a
minute
—it's a look that she's passed, caught, passed, caught more often than she wants to think about in the last few months, dropped only once or twice when Elizabeth has intercepted with a “For heaven's sake, you lot, I'm not about to throw myself under a bus”—and she goes.

Elizabeth looks as though someone has not only switched out her light but removed the bulb and the fuse. Blake guides her back to the sofa, sits her down, sits next to her. Waits. He doesn't have to wait for long.

“He did it, Blake,” she says, turning stamped-on eyes to him. “Mike did it. He did it with a girl just over half his age. He did it over and over again. He did it in the dark and the cold at Butler's Pond. He did it in the place we walked the dog together. He did it with the dog there. He did it with her and then he came home and did it with me.” Her voice is growing softer and softer. “He did it, presumably, without a condom. He did it and he made a baby.”

Blake thinks of the man he knew. “But he loved you,” he says. “You can't doubt that he loved you.”

“I can doubt what I damn well like,” Elizabeth says, and she gets up and heads for the stairs.

Mike,

I don't know why I'm writing to you because you're dead, you bastard, DEAD. And anyway there are no words for this. No words. Just colors. Spikes of colors when I close my eyes, echoes of them when I open them. Blood red and filthy orange and shades of mud and earth and the winter water that you drowned in.

I think what I'm angriest about is the fact that you're not here so I can't scream and shout at you. I can't take the fists that my hands make whenever I'm not doing anything else with them and beat them against your stupid cheating chest. I can't hold your face and make you look at me so you can see exactly what it is that you've done to me. I can't have you sitting there while I cry my heart out, again, over some stupid fuckwitted thing that you've done, again, the fire then the dying and now the—this. I don't get to push you out of the door and slam it behind you and listen to you pleading to be let back in.

I can't ask you questions. Well, I can ask, but you'll never be able to tell me the answers. And I wouldn't, couldn't, ask her, and she wouldn't tell me, and even if she did, I wouldn't believe her.

How did it happen? Where did you meet her? Who kissed who first? Did you plan it or did it sneak up on you? Was it sex or did you love her? Did you ever bring her here? Did you drive her anywhere in our car?

What, in the name of all that's holy, did you think you were doing screwing a kid? I mean, I know she's technically an adult, but she's just left school, for Christ's sake. All she's ever done is go to school. What did you talk about? Pythagoras?

What was wrong with me? Did you think I was too old? Was I starting to get fat? Too sterile, too familiar, too demanding? Why wasn't I enough for you?

If you were here I'd be telling you that I never wanted to see you again. I haven't even got the satisfaction of doing that.

You bastard. You cheating, lying, unfeeling, bastard. You dead bastard.

E

November had always been a hard month for Michael. Midmonth saw the anniversary of the day when, at the age of nine, he had come home from school to find his mother refusing to let him into the living room where his father had collapsed of a heart attack. Michael could remember, still, the sight of the boots, the table turned over, that he'd glimpsed through the doorway and then immediately wished he hadn't. Patricia had screamed at him—up until then, she'd been the woman he'd never known to raise her voice—screamed at him to wait outside for the ambulance so that it would know where to go.

In the first few years after his father's death, Remembrance Day came to mark the beginning of his mother being withdrawn and silent, which was horrible, except when she was weeping, which was worse. They always put the Christmas tree up on the weekend before Christmas, the two of them dragging it valiantly home on a tarpaulin because they didn't have a car and Patricia refused to pay to have it delivered, and that was the beginning of the return to normality. Michael would put the star on top; Patricia would switch on the lights and step back and say, “Your father loved Christmas. He used to say that if you couldn't enjoy Christmas then there must be something wrong with you,” and that was their permission to smile again.

Even more than a quarter of a century later, Michael still felt the anniversary squatting like a hungry demon in the middle of the month. Although his mother claimed to be pragmatic, she always became gaunt and quiet and looked at her son with tears in her eyes.

Elizabeth, who had made a point of refusing to mark the anniversary of her mother's death—“It was spring,” was all she would ever say; “there were lambs when we moved to the farm”—had never understood quite how important, how pervasive, this time was for Mike and Patricia. She was preoccupied anyway with remembering what the damp and dark of an English winter was like: remembering, it seemed to her husband, as thoroughly and willfully as she had forgotten it through summer and early autumn.

Without having noticed that he was doing it, Michael had brought his lackluster November mood to his time with Kate. Meeting her, during faked overtime, at the waterside, kissing her and listening to her, appearing by her side as she walked home from a shift at the restaurant, spending, if anything, more time than he had yet with her, he was nevertheless vague, unavailable.

Kate had had a lot of theories about this; she had kept Bella posted ever since her time in Paris with her friend. They spent late nights and long afternoons messaging each other about it. The only thing Kate wouldn't say was who it was. “No one you know,” she would type. “Older, involved, that's all you need to know. And that it's love.” On good days, she was sure that he was brooding over how much he loved her and how he wanted to be with her. “Has he said he loves you?” Bella, with all of her newfound Parisian wisdom, had asked, and Kate had replied, “No, but he sees me twice a week, sometimes. If people found out he'd never hear the end of it.” “Maybe that's what he's thinking about,” Bella had said.

On the grayer days—the days when he had said almost nothing, held her hips too tightly, kept his eyes closed, nodded a good-bye—Kate had wondered whether this was the beginning of the end. But that was unthinkable. They seemed bound so tightly together. Each body had learned the geography and geometry of the other; the thought that their hearts might not understand so well had made no sense to Kate.

In the end, she decided that this was just the place in their relationship when they were getting into a routine. She had thought about tiredness, coldness, stress at work: all of the things that were masked in the early days, but showed through sooner or later, like a scuffed heel painted over with nail polish. She had tried to make things more comfortable, bringing blankets, a hot water bottle, whiskey pilfered from her father's hoard, making a nest with them. Bella had suggested that she try making things “more exciting,” and so, late one afternoon as the gloaming was beginning, she'd asked, snaking a finger down the middle of his chest in a way she considered unmistakable, if there was anything he'd like to do. Mike, lying on his back with his hands behind his head and his eyes closed, had said, “Have a really good night's sleep.”

And Kate, her need to keep from showing her disappointment distracting her from watching her tongue, had said, “When you come to stay with me in Oxford we can lie in.” Michael affects not to hear, but there's a moment when his body tenses, and her body feels it.

“All I meant,” she says, “is that when I'm at Oxford, if you were to come to stay, we would have a bed to sleep in.”

In her mind, the room was furnished in much greater detail. Wooden furniture. A desk under a mullioned window. A framed photograph of the two of them on the sill. A drawer where Mike could leave some clothes so he didn't have to bring a big bag every time. A bottle of wine on the floor, a plan for dinner later, and then maybe a drink with friends who accepted them as a couple and thought nothing of the two of them being together.

When Michael gets home, Patricia is sitting in the kitchen, granite faced, while Elizabeth looks up from slicing carrots to smile brightly at him.

“You hadn't gotten back to your mum about what you wanted to do tonight, so she's brought a pie around, and we thought we could all eat here.”

Patricia adds, “I called the station and they said you'd finished work for the day. I went to your father's grave but you weren't there.”

“I went for a run,” Michael had said. “I hadn't forgotten that the anniversary was today.” It had seemed an easier lie than,
I've thought of little except my father and what he would think of me over the last couple of weeks, but all of my days and nights seem to be running into one, so I truly don't know what day it is most of the time.
“I thought I'd rung you, Mum.”

Elizabeth had chipped in, “He's always like this the week after night shift.”

He had kissed his mother, who had said, “You smell as though you've been dragged through a hedge,” and his wife, who had whispered, “I'm on your side,” and then he'd gone upstairs to have a shower and he had stood under too-hot water, scrubbing himself too hard, until he felt something close to clean.

That night, curled around Elizabeth, he slept without moving, his arm heavy across her waist. He slept the sleep of a man coming out of the other side of a fever.

The next day, he had arranged to meet Kate, and he held her hand, and he looked straight at her, and he had said, “I'm sorry, Kate, I can't do this anymore. I can't see you. I never should have started this. It has to end.”

She had been quiet for a long time, watching their hands as though there was something secret, or maybe sacred, in the places where their skin touched.

And then she had taken a deep breath, and he had braced himself, but all she'd said was, “I promised you I wouldn't tell anyone about us, and I won't.”

Mike had opened his mouth to reply, but she'd pulled her hand from his then, and said, in a voice that belonged to someone younger, more afraid than she had ever shown herself to be, “Please don't say any more. Please don't try to make it better.”

And she'd walked away. And Mike hadn't known whether she looked back or not, because his head was in his hands as he sat, overwhelmed by relief, sure that in his wife and his work he had everything he needed, after all.

Mike,

I have questions for me too. Why couldn't I tell? Why didn't I know? What did I miss? What did I forget to do for you, show you, tell you that meant it was OK for you to do this to me? Why can she be pregnant and not me? How can I go on, not knowing the answers?

I was your wife. Your wife, Mike. We didn't have any children. We were everything to each other. And yet.

I'm staying in my room. I hear Mel and Blake and Andy talking. Sometimes I go down and make tea when they're all there, because it makes them stop talking about me, because if I think I can show them that I can walk and talk and drink—I can't eat, everything makes me sick—they might just let me be.

Andy told me that if I'm not coping we can try “other approaches.” I said, “Andy, right now, I just feel like lying down and dying. Can you blame me?” “No, not really,” he said.

I still hate you.

E