The Secrets We Keep (5 page)

Mike,

Everything's still black.

I keep telling myself that it doesn't matter what happened to you, but it does. I keep telling myself that you're—you know, gone—and that's the only thing that matters. But I can't bear that I don't really know. I feel like a failure. Mel won't let me listen to your voice in the night—she says it's unhealthy—so, instead, I lie in bed, or sit on the sofa on the nights when I can't be in our bed without you, and I imagine.

I imagine Pepper running off and you following him and finding Kate. Maybe she was waiting for a boyfriend. Even your mother can't dig up much dirt on her. The worst thing she's done seems to have been to have her nose pierced for a dare, though she took it out when her Oxford interviews came around—she's very clever, very hardworking, quite intense by the sounds of it. (I don't think you get 4 As at exams by being laid-back.) She was supposed to be doing some fantastic gap-year thing this year, but apparently she got cold feet and canceled at the last minute. God, how I wish she'd gone. Then she'd be shagging some floppy-haired traveler right now, and we'd all be happy.

Maybe the sound of you surprised her, and she got up and moved away and slipped and fell into the water.

I'm sure you didn't hesitate. I'm sure you were in there before you'd thought it through properly. We promised we'd never mention the Burning Building Incident again, and I'm as good as my word, but you can't be surprised that I'm thinking of it. You stupid, stupid, brave, stupid, stupid man. It must have been so cold, so cold, and I bet she panicked and clung to you and made it really difficult for you. I think you got her as close to dry land as you could, and she pulled herself the rest of the way.

But then I don't know what happened. I don't know why you didn't follow her onto the bank and get yourself safe. I can't believe you wouldn't have fought to get back to me. It just doesn't make any sense.

Sometimes when I'm thinking about this, in the night, I can't breathe and I feel as though I'm with you there, in the water, and I feel so cold and so frightened and my whole body is so impossibly heavy. Last night Mel came in and shook me—she thought I was having a nightmare, she heard me thrashing about and crying. I didn't tell her that I was awake all the time.

Come back to me, Mike. There must be a deal you can do. When I asked you, in the chapel, to send me a sign, I felt so sure you would. I haven't forgotten. I'm waiting.

E xxx

Kate's recovery is slow. Her body can't seem to remember what it was like before, when it was carefree, when it could trust itself to be strong and supple and had no idea that one day something might go wrong, and it might be overpowered. Her heart labors and burns under the weight of Michael Gray's death, and when interviewed she remembers nothing more of what happened that night at Butler's Pond, despite gentle questioning, vigorous questioning, and questioning under hypnosis, during which she kept her hands curled in on themselves so tightly that her fingernails bit her palms and kept her mind well under her own control.

• • •

“She's barely coming downstairs, let alone going out, Rufus,” Richenda says wearily as her husband picks up his car keys. He is dejected because Kate has declined another of his carefully casual offers of a run out in the car, maybe some lunch; he's sure that if they could only get her to behave as if she were recovered, she would recover.

“If only she'd gone to Thailand,” he says for what must be the hundredth time in the last three days.

“Yes,” says Richenda, “or if only she'd stayed in that night. Or not drunk so much. Or not slipped. Or left earlier and come straight home. If only there had been something on TV she wanted to watch”—self-control fails, and suddenly she is on-screen, scrabbling, incapable of controlling her rising voice, her speech getting quicker—“or she lived in a home where her parents weren't fighting all the time”—the tears start—“and her mother wasn't bitter and sour and her father wasn't planning his next”—Rufus rolling his eyes makes her pause, find a better word, something to make what she is saying find a place to grip and dig instead of sliding away—“dalliance…” She runs out of steam, turning away with a what-do-you-care set to her shoulders.

“I was working that night,” he says. “I was upstairs and I was working. Planning regulations are—”

“Of course you were, Rufus. You're always working. All those nights you spend in hotels when you could drive home in an hour and a half. Just sitting there, on your own, in a hotel room, reading planning regulations. All night.”

“I thought we were talking about Kate.”

“We are talking about Kate.”

“We need to bring her out of herself. Out of her room. We need something to…to coax her.”

“She's not a sick puppy, Rufus. She's had a massive physical and emotional shock. A lunch in a country pub is not going to put her right.”

“No, but it would be a start. What's your strategy, Richenda?” And he strides out, plans for a summerhouse rolled in a tube under his arm, car keys rattling. He leaves the door slightly ajar, a move he knows is worse than a slam, by virtue of being unexpected, and obliging Richenda to get up and push the door shut. He sighs as he starts the car, allowing himself to pull this door closed with just a shade of unnecessary violence. He really does try not to be petty, he thinks as he drives away, but every man has his limits. And anyway, there's absolutely nothing going on with Caroline.

• • •

Richenda hates it when he has a point. She has assumed that love and time will heal her daughter. Rufus has made her wonder whether letting Kate sleep and cry, cry and sleep, is the best thing to do. The friends who have been Kate's world are mostly gone, digging wells to bring clean water to places that don't have it, handing out food in war zones, sleeping in hostels around Europe, working all hours in city bars to pay for the next chunk of their lives, some even at university already. While her peers are all agog at their new horizons, Kate's world is shrinking, shrinking. But Richenda has to admit that, actually, Kate wasn't quite right before this happened.

The gap-year adventure had been talked about more than anything else: more than exams, more than university, more than how dull Throckton was and how she couldn't wait to get away. Six weeks of working on a conservation project, with a break in the middle for some traveling and the option to change her ticket home so she could stay longer or travel more, was what Kate had her heart set on. When her friends had come around so that they could all revise together, more often than not Richenda would overhear them talking about how their adventures would intersect: meeting up and traveling around Australia, how once you are in Australia you may as well travel back via the States, it seems crazy not to. And Richenda, who likes her own bed and a world that she can reach out and touch the sides of, a steady, constant sky above, had been both terrified for Kate and in awe of the fearlessness that she saw in her.

And then Kate had decided, out of nowhere, to cancel her gap-year plans, and since then she'd done very little. A few weekend shifts at Benito's restaurant, some talk of going to join her friends in Turkey for a week, which came to nothing, sleeping in the afternoons. Rufus had taken the whole thing at face value and pointed out that their daughter seemed happy enough, which was certainly true, but Richenda had still wondered whether there had been more to it. She'd asked Kate and gotten nowhere. “I'm not doing anything wrong,” Kate had said. “I'm just not doing anything, and when I'm ready to do something, I will.” And so the Micklethwaites had soon settled into the line-of-least-resistance position of family life as they knew it.

As Richenda knocks on her daughter's bedroom door, she wishes she had listened to the instinct that told her there was more to Kate's change of heart than met the eye. She longs for the days when mothering was simple, when a Barbie bandage on a scraped elbow or an afternoon with a film about princesses was enough to cure all ills. She might have been tired and harried when Kate was a child, but she never had this sense of dread and sorrow as she looked to see how her daughter was doing.

“I brought you some tea,” she says.

“Thanks,” Kate replies, but her eyes don't move from the ceiling. The curtains are drawn. Richenda's eyes strain to adjust to the half dark.

“I thought we could watch a film this afternoon,” she offers.

“No thanks, Mum. I think I'm going to take a nap.”

“All right.” Richenda bites back the question of whether Kate will sleep tonight. They had that conversation yesterday, and anyway, Kate seems to be able to sleep for eighteen hours a day at the moment. “I'll be downstairs if you need me.”

• • •

Richenda is half asleep herself when Rufus comes back. He is wearing what she recognizes as his guilty look, but she knows who his summerhouse client is—Bubbles McVitie, mad as a box of frogs and well over seventy if she's a day, so not really Rufus's type. And he's only been gone a couple of hours, which is not his style either: he likes to think of himself as a romantic, misunderstood and tortured, so his infidelities invariably involve lunch, or dinner. Also:

“Is that a new shirt?”

“This? No.” He turns to face her and she recognizes the paisley and blue stripes. It's one of what Kate calls his “wallpaper shirts” although Richenda likes it. Even at this distance from the time when they loved each other, she can admit that her husband knows how to dress.

So, less than two hours and not a new shirt; it's definitely not a woman. But it's definitely a guilty face.

“What have you done, Rufus?”

“Why should I have done anything? I've been to a meeting. I've agreed to the next stage of the work. I've earned money so that you can sit here thinking the worst of me.”

“All right,” Richenda says mildly.

She's less mild when she discovers what he has done.

Rufus began by calling Kate downstairs with the promise of a present, trying to make her close her eyes. “I'm not a child, Dad,” she said, “and I'm not really in the mood. Sorry.” Then he disappeared out of the front door with the promise of being back in a minute.

“It's going to be balloons, isn't it,” Kate says to Richenda resignedly, and her mother sincerely hopes so.

But it's not balloons. It's a puppy.

And for all that he's small, he knows what it is that he's here to do and goes immediately to Kate, snuffling at her bare feet, the wet nose making her toes curl, the big puppy eyes drawing her hand down to touch, to scratch, to marvel at the softness of his ears. Richenda's mouth opens but nothing comes out. No one notices, because Kate is stroking the puppy, and Rufus is watching the two of them, proudly, as though he's just discovered how to turn base metal into gold.

“He's a beagle,” Rufus says. “Bubbles breeds them. He has a pedigree going back five generations and he's been wormed and had all of his vaccinations.”

“Our house,” Richenda says, her voice high and hot in her ears, “is carpeted in cream and most of the walls and furniture are shades of pale because you, in your architectural wisdom, want nothing but clean space and clean lines. We have never had a pet. We have never wanted a pet. Not so much as a goldfish.”

“I thought he'd be company for Kate,” Rufus says, still pleased with himself, but not enough to meet Richenda's gaze.

“And will Kate take it to university with her?” They both look at their daughter, who is laughing for the first time since the accident, as the puppy licks at her scrunched-up nose and eyes, and in this moment at least it seems that the answer is a resonating yes, barked from the rooftops. Rufus risks tilting an eyebrow at his livid wife, seeing how her face is softening. It's too soon. When she sees him looking at her, her features set back into fury.

“And will you take it with you when you go to work, or will I be looking after it?”

“He's housebroken,” Rufus offers. “Almost, anyway. He knows about newspaper.”

“Oh, good. Can he operate a door handle to put himself in the garden?” Richenda curses herself for being bamboozled into moving from
it
to
he
. “Does he vacuum furniture and shampoo carpets? I'm sorry, Rufus, it's too much. He's just going to have to go back.”

Kate, who hasn't been listening, looks up. “He can sleep in my room,” she announces, “and we'll call him Beatle.”

• • •

Later that evening, Kate coaxes Beatle up the stairs and takes him into her room. She lifts him onto the bed, in direct contravention of one of the many doggy directives that her mother has spent the evening laying down, and strokes his silken ears. Crying feels easier in his company and more complete, validated by a witness but not complicated by comfort, questions, cajoling.

When she is calm again, she strokes the dozing puppy. Every now and then Beatle angles his ears to the sound of arguing from downstairs. Most of it is just rumble and squawk, but the odd word makes it up to them,
unilateral
and
thoughtless
and
uptight
. Kate tells him the story of the gold bracelet her father bought for her mother once, after what it pleased him to call one of his indiscretions had been discovered. “Indiscretion,” Richenda had said very quietly, imagining Kate in the next room couldn't hear or wasn't listening, “is an understatement as far as you're concerned, Rufus. The new shirts. The whistling. The coming home at two a.m. and having a shower. I think I'd be slightly less furious if you made at least some attempt to pretend that you weren't screwing your way around your client list again.” Beatle's eyes seem bright with understanding as Kate tells him the next bit: how she had leaned back in her chair and been able to see, unseen, through the doorway. Rufus's offered gift, Richenda's opening of the box, the way she had held up the bracelet, twisting it through the light, then gone to her bedside table and offered Rufus an identical box, containing an identical bracelet, with the words, “This is the one you bought me last time. Your taste, if nothing else, is fairly constant.”

“He looked sorry,” Kate tells Beatle. “Properly sorry.” She hasn't told anyone about this before, afraid that in the retelling it would become comical, or trite, when it had twisted her up and made her feel so sure that, when she fell in love, she'd never fall out of it again. And before she knows it, she's crying, and she's telling Beatle other things that no one else knows.