The Secrets We Keep (6 page)

Mike,

I'm wired all night, my mind won't stop, my heart just breaks over and over again and the noise and the pain of it are unbearable. I can no more sleep through this than I could sleep through being kicked in the ribs every two minutes. But every night I try. Stupid.

So this morning I was standing at the back door while Pepper had his morning scuttle—Blake takes him out when he walks his dog, which is just as well, because I don't think I'll step out of this house voluntarily ever again, despite your mother's incessant attempts to get me to go to one of her clubs or the library, and Mel's pleas for a change of scenery before she goes mad.

So, the back door is as far as I go. But this morning there was a patch of sunlight at the end of the patio. It was so pathetic and feeble that I sort of recognized it, and I went and stood in it, and then I saw the snowdrops.

My feet got wet as I walked through the last of the frost to pick them up: just half a dozen nodding white heads, tied with a piece of silver ribbon.

They were just in the corner of the garden, by the gate, the place that got the last of the sun in summer and where we'd sit with a glass of wine on warm evenings. I stood there with them in my hand and I remembered you, just back from work, just half an hour after I was back from work, walking toward me as I sat there. You smiled and said, “I see you're already in our happy place.” I thought of how, one winter, when I was so low, you bundled me up and walked me around to Butler's Pond because you said you had something to show me, and there was a tiny crop of snowdrops, huddling under a tree. “You see,” you said, “there's always hope.”

So I knew that these were my sign. I knew, straight away, that these snowdrops are from you. They are what you'd leave. That's the place you'd leave them.

If you could. If I believed in that sort of thing.

I've put them on the windowsill in the kitchen, and I'm going to sit at the table all day and look at them.

Thank you.

E xxx

“Is this your first time in Sydney?” Elizabeth had asked the next guy in line.
Brit
, she said to herself. Something about the pallor, and the haircut. Michael smiled.

“Don't tell anyone,” he'd said, looking around the lobby full of people who seemed to know how to do this traveling business a lot better than he did, “but I've never been out of the UK before.” He'd handed over his passport, which was fresh and inflexible in her hand. Valid from the month before. He wasn't kidding.

“Your secret's safe with me.” She'd smiled, quietly upgrading him to a room with a sea view. “And welcome to Australia. You picked a great place for your first trip overseas.”

“Well, it was my New Year's resolution to travel more, and if you're going to do a thing, I think you should do it right,” he'd said, and he'd smiled a tired smile as he headed for the elevators.

Over the next few days she'd kept a lookout for him. She saw him standing in the door way, studying a map. Buying postcards and water from the hotel kiosk. He always seemed to be on his own. On his fourth day, he approached her at the desk with a leaflet about the city, and a question about public transport. The skin on the bridge of his nose was peeling but his shoulders, broad and thick, were turning a pleasing gold. She noticed that his eyes were as brown as his hair, and that one of his front teeth was ever-so-slightly crooked.

“How are you finding Sydney?” she'd asked as he'd picked up the map and made ready to turn away.

“Honestly?” he'd replied. “Big and hot.”

Elizabeth had nodded. “Fair comment.”

Michael had rested an elbow on the desk and leaned in, a man with a terrible secret. “The place I come from has two bus routes through it and no more than six burglaries a year, unless someone comes in from another village for the hanging baskets and window boxes. I'm a little bit lost, if I'm honest.” Seeing her eyes offering something like pity, he adds, “It's not as though I've never been anywhere, or anything. I've done London, and Edinburgh, and I've been on training courses all over the place. But everything here is just different. More different than I thought it would be.”

“I grew up somewhere like that,” she'd said, “but without the buses. It was cycle or die of boredom, where I come from.”

Then Elizabeth did something that she hadn't done in four years of working in hotels, four years of at least once a day talking to a guest who was fit, flirtatious, and obviously ready for a fling with a pretty Australian girl. She offered to show Michael the city. He accepted.

At the end of the day, he kissed her on the cheek and thanked her. She was charmed. The next night, she showed him the nightlife, and they walked on the beach in the darkness and he took her hand. “Are you being a gentleman?” she'd asked him as he walked her to her door, and he'd said, “No, I'm being a man who really doesn't want to blow it.”

• • •

Michael left after a week and a half for a two-week escorted tour of “Australia's Highlights,” although he told Elizabeth that he'd already found his highlight. He'd be back in Sydney for two nights before his flight home. By the time he got on the coach, Elizabeth had shown him the city, the beaches, the harbor, and a few of the restaurants that the tourists didn't know about. She'd walked over the harbor bridge with him even though she didn't much like heights. She'd taken him to Luna Park where he'd laughed like a child on the rides, and she'd cooked for him and introduced him, casually, to her sister. She'd looked at photos of where he lived and tried to imitate his accent. She'd been charmed when he'd offered to come running with her—she was training for a marathon at the time—and liked how, although he was a head taller than her, they'd found a matching stride. She'd had sex with him, noisily all over his hotel room and quietly, gigglingly, in her little shared house. She was having, she told herself, a short-term romance.

Michael wasn't. He was smitten and he didn't care that she knew it. He felt ambushed by love and told her so. She laughed at him, telling him that he had sunstroke, infatuation, a bug. He curled her hair around his finger and shook his head. She told him she'd be forgotten as soon as he was back in the England he kept telling her about, rain clouds and gravy and all.

“No,” he said. “No, Elizabeth, you've got me all wrong. You'll see.”

She asked him how, if he'd never been out of his country before, he knew it was her and not Australia he was loving. He explained how he'd felt, this last year, that there was something missing from his life, but that at the same time he loved his job, and his home, and when he saw the TV ad for Australia he'd felt something speak to him, something telling him to come here.

“There you are then,” Elizabeth had said, rolling herself closer to him. “The universe wants you to get a tan. That's all it is.”

“No,” he'd said. “It was you.” But she'd refused to accept it. Refused the idea that she could tie her existence, her happy, easy days, to someone who would, by dint of his birthplace, make her life awkward, complicated, in need of compromise and planning and all of the things she had deliberately removed from it when she came to the city and started anew.

While he was away he texted her every day: good nights, good mornings. He called and left cheerful, thinking of you messages on her answering machine.

“He's behaving like my boyfriend,” Elizabeth had said to Mel.

“He's behaving like your soul mate, Sis,” Mel had said, scrolling through the messages, “and you need to decide whether you want that or not. He's not the casual sort.”

“No,” Elizabeth had said. “I suppose he's not.”

“And neither are you,” Mel had added.

“No. I know.” She had been mostly happily mostly single since she came to Sydney, and could hardly believe that five years had gone by since her school sweetheart gave her an ultimatum about settling down and getting married, and she gave him the answer he didn't want. She'd known then that he wasn't really the man for her, although it had felt as though everyone except Mel had known better and had been lining up to tell her she had made a mistake. She had been sure that she hadn't. But now she came to think about it, she wasn't sure that the life she had made since was really the life for her either. It wasn't that she didn't like Sydney, and her friends, and running and swimming and working too many hours and saving for a deposit on her own place. She did. But perhaps it wasn't really right; perhaps that was why she was thinking about Michael the way she was.

But it was best to be sure. Elizabeth had spent the next week making a list to herself of all the reasons it wouldn't work. Not really knowing each other. Distance. Culture. Expense. Time apart. Away-from-home self, different from at-home self. The countless times she'd mopped the tears of brokenhearted colleagues when their One True Love had gotten on a plane home and never been heard from again.

Compared to the reasons for the relationship—getting on well, great sex, both like running, the feeling that, as she struggled to put it to Mel, she “just couldn't not”—the “against” list seemed overwhelming. So Elizabeth had ignored Michael's texts—or, at least, she'd not responded to them, which didn't stop her from reading and rereading them. She'd filled up her diary, booked some more shifts, started planning a trip of her own, and made a future with no Michael, and no space for Michael in it. She'd agreed to go on a blind date with a friend of a friend. She'd persuaded herself that the last ten days—only ten days, barely enough time to decide whether you like someone, let alone anything else—had been a madness that was over.

By the time Michael returned, Elizabeth had been so sure of her infallible heart that she had stood in the shadows by the hotel doorway and watched him get off the coach: a game of emotional dare. He had been more than she remembered him. More tanned, of course, but more imposing. More upright. More confident. Happier. She'd realized that he had no doubts about her, about them. She saw that he
knew
, and that was what made him aglow with something special. And in that moment she had recognized that she
knew
too. Unmoving, unspeaking, she had let herself love.

He had seemed to sense her change of heart. Just as she had thought about stepping toward him, about his mouth and his hair, he had looked straight at the place she was going to step into.

• • •

He'd insisted on a plan. “Can't we see how it goes?” she'd asked.

Michael had said, “No. You can see how it goes on a picnic, you can see how it goes with a test drive, but this deserves a plan.”

So they had made the rules. Some sort of contact—a text, an email—every day. A phone call at least once a week. No going to bed on an argument. No more than three months without seeing each other. An understanding that long-distance relationships were hard and they wouldn't lose heart too easily or too soon. Elizabeth was to come and take a look at Throckton before the year was out. And, if they were still together in eighteen months, a serious conversation about The Future.

“This feels like quite a serious conversation about the future to me,” Elizabeth had said, and Michael had turned a solemn face to her and replied, “Elizabeth, there's nothing wrong with serious.”

And for a moment, falling for some guy from the other side of the planet had felt not only good, but perfectly reasonable. She had groped for that feeling as she'd watched his flight leave, but there was no finding it again until the three months were up and she was stepping onto a plane herself.

Mike,

People are still coming, and I try to listen, and I try to talk, but I can't seem to. Especially since the snowdrops. Mel is so good. She's like a sort of filter; she sits next to me and touches my hand when she thinks there's something I might want to listen to, and the rest of the time I just look at the wall. Everyone says such lovely things about you.

Sometimes I wish everyone would go away and leave me alone, but then the thought of being alone is too much. Which is stupid, stupid, because I am alone, alone, alone all the time, because you're not here, and you should be. You should be. You know that, don't you?

Blake says Kate still doesn't remember anything after going into the water. Mel said, “Has anyone tried turning her upside down and shaking her until the memories come out? Because if they haven't, I will.” Blake said, “Sometimes these things take time.” I said, “Mel, accidents happen. We of all people should know that, after what happened to Mum. Tires blow out.” “Yes,” she said. “I've never understood how you were so accepting of that either.”

I didn't say anything else to her, but I'm not accepting anything, here. Some days I can't bear not knowing. And then some days I couldn't care less, because it's not as though her remembering anything else is going to bring you back.

But I don't accept that you're not here, Mike. And I think—I know—you should come back. I can't believe you won't. This was never in the plan.

Come back. Come back to me. I don't care how. I'll wait. Because I can't, won't, don't want to be living my life—our life—without you. I absolutely refuse.

I've pressed the snowdrops in our wedding album. And I'm waiting.

E xxx

It's hard to know what to do on Michael's birthday. Mel tells Elizabeth that next year she will be able to remember her husband and find happiness in those memories. Elizabeth agrees but doesn't really believe her, in the same way that she doesn't really believe that she's in the air when she's on a plane: it seems too impossible, too ridiculous, and looking down and seeing clouds only makes it all the more unlikely, somehow.

Patricia brings her photograph albums around.

Elizabeth hesitates before looking, but can see nothing in the chubby boy with the curly hair that she can relate to her husband. Until Patricia turns a page and there he is, only nine, eyes looking straight into the camera, mouth a solemn line. “I remember that year,” Patricia says. “It rained and we had to have his party indoors, and so we couldn't have races. He wasn't very pleased.” And everything the man will be sings out from the boy, and suddenly Elizabeth is gasping, gasping at how vivid he has become.

“I thought it might be too much,” Mel says to Patricia as she holds Elizabeth's hand, Mel's other hand rubbing a rhythm up and down her sister's spine. Elizabeth's eyes are closed, her body shaking. Her head has dropped and it's impossible to see whether she is crying or not. There's no sound, but Patricia and Mel know that this means nothing.

“She's going to have to start making an effort, Mel,” Patricia says in a half whisper that would carry through a stone wall. “Look at me. I've lost my son and I'm still going to the WI tomorrow. I don't much care about spring jams at the moment, but I have to keep going.”

Like so much she tries to say to or about Elizabeth, it doesn't come out quite the way she means it to. If Patricia had more parts of her heart that weren't aching, if the constant battling back of the desire to give up and lie down would just stop for a minute or two, she thinks she could work it out. Somewhere in the air around her drifts the understanding that the generations grieve differently, in the same ways that they love differently, dress differently, raise their children differently. Close by is the feeling that if she could cry for help the way that Elizabeth does, by letting all of the desperate wordlessness out of her, then she would. But Patricia will do what she has always done: manage. She can tolerate enough sympathy to make her feel as though she isn't alone, but not so much that she can't take care of other people. When friends touch her arm, she smiles and nods. If she thinks anyone might try an embrace, she takes a step back. When people ask her how she is, she shakes her head but says she's bearing up.

Patricia would never tell you about her baby sister who died, because she never speaks about it. It's no secret: Patricia was five, little Sheila only two. She would never tell you, because she never thinks of the way that her mother gave herself over to her grief, becoming a shadow mother, ineffectual, incapable, insubstantial. She never thinks of it, but the memory is everywhere within her. And even though Elizabeth has no children—even though, in this house, there is no five-year-old being woken in the night by the strange, sad sound of muffled crying—she wants to save her from her mother's fate. She wants to do it with the kindness and the gentleness that, if she was the wishing sort, she would have wished for her five-year-old self.

But she can't do it. And when she tries, she says something that she shouldn't, and she could bite out her own tongue. In her heart she is saying,
Seeing my friends, having them touch my arm and say kind things will make me remember that I'm not as monstrously alone as I think I am. Taking home a recipe will mean that on one of these mornings when I wake up and I don't know quite how I'm going to make the day go by, I'll get out my jars and take the last of the elderberries from last autumn out of the freezer, and there'll be something to fill up the time, and there'll be a jar of warm jelly to take to a friend, and that's the only way I can do it.

Elizabeth pauses for a moment and Mel looks at Patricia as if to say,
Well, here it comes
, but nothing happens. Or rather, nothing happens outside Elizabeth. Inside, she thinks about making an effort—about lifting her head and explaining her world to her mother-in-law, who she knows doesn't have a cruel bone in her body, not really, but that doesn't stop the things she says from sounding cruel, at a time when Elizabeth has nothing with which to protect herself from even unmeant cruelty. She thinks about how much of an effort every day is, that sometimes she feels as though she's going to have to reach into her own guts and move her own diaphragm up and down because her lungs can't find the strength to fill and empty, or her heart to pump and pull.

Instead, she says, “I think I'll have a lie down,” and she goes upstairs and puts on her husband's sweater and waits for enough strength to get up again.

• • •

Andy, Blake, and Mel have discussed the protocol for tonight and come up with a simple strategy for what should have been Michael's day: they will follow Elizabeth's lead. So when she comes downstairs, showered, hair brushed, and with the palest of smiles, Blake opens wine, Andy makes much of his allergy to dogs—Blake has brought Hope with him, and two dogs seem like one too many for the doctor as he sneezes and blows—and Mel begins some cautious reminiscing.

It's the closest thing to normal, or what any of them remember as normal, that there's been in the five weeks since Michael died. Elizabeth is unpredictable—sometimes present, sometimes worlds away, as quickly as if she is being switched on and off—but she is herself too, hand gestures and smiles breaking through the encrusted grief as if to remind her companions that she's in there, still, and might come out one day.

Every now and then she remembers that she will have to have her own birthday without Mike this year, and the next, and the next. Grief stacks itself up, waiting.

It's after eleven o'clock when the very-definitely-not-a-birthday-party breaks up. Mel walks home with Blake, taking Pepper, she says, “to give him some air.”

The sound that comes from Elizabeth shocks them all with its strangeness. She's laughing. It's a rusty half laugh, but a laugh none the less.

“To give yourself the chance to smoke all the way home, you mean,” she says. “I hear what you call Pepper when you think I'm asleep.”

• • •

As soon as Blake, Mel, and the dogs have gone, Elizabeth looks straight at Andy and asks the question she's sworn she doesn't want to know the answer to. Except that, after a drink and a loosening of the fear that binds her, it's all she can think about.

“What would it have been like,” she asks, “for Mike?”

His expression tells her that he hasn't understood, and so she has the chance to back up and off this path, but she doesn't.

She just takes a deep breath—diaphragm up, diaphragm down—and says some words she doesn't want to have to use so close to one another. “Mike. That night. I keep wondering, Andy. What would it have been like? To drown?”

“Oh.” Andy looks into his glass, and into Elizabeth's face—her eyes are alert, concentrating, sure—and takes a deep breath too. And he tells her, gently, calmly, simply, the way he knows he should.

Tears roll down her face and gather in his eyes but he keeps going. What he says is part medical opinion and part thirty years of friendship.

He says that, once the shock of the cold was over, Michael probably wouldn't have felt much.

He says that Michael would have been so focused on getting Kate out that he wouldn't have been thinking about his own body.

He says that physical strength and the instinct to save both himself and Kate would have taken over.

He says that the weight of Michael's own wet clothes and the weight of Kate and her wet clothes would have been a huge burden.

He says that Michael would have struggled but there would have come a point when he couldn't struggle anymore.

He pauses and looks at Elizabeth, touches her arm, a question:
Is
this
enough?
She nods.
Keep
going. I'm OK.
Her eyes say,
Despite
appearances, this is OK.
Her heart screams for him to stop talking, but something stronger in her needs to hear this.

He says, “Michael probably lost consciousness.” He says—he falters as he says it—“He might not have known. About the dying. We can't know.”

“No,” says Elizabeth. “No. We can't know.”

Later, in the dark, knowing how well Mel sleeps after a drink, she takes a blanket and sits on the stairs, listening to Mike's voice on the answering machine, over and over and over until it's a beloved white noise. She's consented to the machine being switched off, so that unwary callers don't have to hear her husband's voice, but she won't have the recording replaced. As she said to Mel the last time they talked about it, it's not as though she isn't here to answer the phone. Mel had made a face that said,
Well, I'll let this go for now, but this isn't the end of it.

Andy's words have been partly reassuring: she likes knowing that Mike wouldn't have known, wouldn't have been thinking about dying, would instead have been focused on getting Kate out, getting himself out. But the conversation has also reminded Elizabeth of what she'll never know.

She wonders how he felt, what he thought about, whether he panicked or was calm, whether he thought about her. She goes upstairs and gets into bed and holds her breath, just to see if she can discover how it might have felt, but something more primal even than grief makes her pant and panic before she gets anywhere close.