Tell Me No Secrets (23 page)

After a few moments he moves away and I try to draw him back to me. He looks beyond me to the front door and when I listen too, I hear cries from outside. ‘Daddy, Daddy now!' Hand in hand we walk outside and find the girls struggling to free themselves from their car seats.

‘You woke up!' Paul lifts Ella out and they rub noses. I go around the other side and undo the buckle on Daisy's seat. She slides into my arms and settles her cheek against mine.

Just before two o'clock I load them into the buggy. They're old enough to walk but still Ella insists on having her own place to sit. They're wearing tights and skirts, wellington boots and home-knitted cardigans and hats in a Fair Isle pattern: greens, pinks and cream for Ella, blues, reds and cream for Daisy. My mum is never happier than when she's knitting and the girls have more woollens than even Scottish weather can do justice to.

I give them each a bag of breadcrumbs for the gulls and we head off along the path to the harbour. The road is cobbled and the girls giggle and squeal as they're bounced up and down over the stones. It's a beautiful day. The sea is calm, its surface like polished glass broken by gulls as they dive into the water for fish.

When I reach the beginning of the harbour wall, I stop. I don't really expect him to be here. I wonder whether I've imagined the whole of the previous evening; a kind of intense wish-fulfilment brought on by an empty stomach and a lack of sleep. I hold up my hand to shield my eyes and look along the curve of the wall. My eyes focus and within seconds I spot him. He's standing about fifty yards away talking to a group of fishermen who are mending their nets in a patch of sunshine. He glances up and sees me, climbs up on to the wall and jogs towards me, one leg perilously close to the outside edge. When he reaches me, he looks like he's going to topple over backwards and I scream, grab hold of his trouser leg.

‘Chicken.' He grins at me and jumps off the wall down beside us. The girls are regarding him with cool, serious eyes.

‘Man being silly,' Ella says, pointing at him.

‘Out of the mouths of babes.' I am smiling so much that my face is in danger of splitting in two. We rest our backs against the wall and he starts up a conversation with the girls. It goes like this:

‘I'm Euan and you must be?' He waits, his eyebrows raised quizzically.

Neither of them deigns to answer him.

‘This is Daisy.' I gesture in her direction. ‘And this is Ella.'

‘And I thought I was seeing double.'

They don't speak.

I whisper next to his ear, ‘They hear that one a lot.'

‘Is this for the gulls?' He reaches for Ella's bag of bread and she pulls it tight into her stomach. He turns my way with a help-me-out face.

I giggle and shake my head.

He stretches back, looks up and around the sky then leans forward again. ‘I know!' He rubs his hands together. ‘Who wants an ice cream?'

‘Me!' they both cry out at once and start waving their arms and banging the backs of their boots against the wheels.

‘Shouldn't we feed the seagulls first?' he asks them.

‘No,' Ella shouts, fingers working at the straps around her shoulders and waist. ‘They're not hungry.'

‘She takes after her mother,' I say, bending to help her and then Daisy. ‘No patience.'

They both run off along the path to di Rollo's, their boots splashing through the briny water that has leaked from the boxes of fish being loaded on to a lorry. Euan lifts my arm and puts it through his and pushes the buggy with the other hand. We get to the shop as Ella is pointing to the largest cone.

‘It will be melted before you can eat it,' Gianluca is telling her. ‘And look who is here!' He comes around the counter and shakes hands with Euan. ‘You back for a visit?'

‘Coming back here to live,' Euan tells him. ‘Can't get a decent ice cream in London.' He looks down at Ella and Daisy. ‘So what will it be, girls?'

Ella holds on to his jeans and jumps up and down. ‘Chocolate chip, chocolate chip!'

He glances over at me and winks. ‘Why am I not surprised?'

Gianluca loads two scoops of ice cream on to a cone and passes it to Euan who hands it down to Ella. She looks at it with a kind of startled awe then starts to suck the top of it, slurping it into her mouth with satisfied smacks of her lips.

‘Daisy?'

Daisy is standing to the side watching. She goes to speak but no sound comes out. She looks at me uncertainly. Euan lifts her up and she leans on the glass and frowns down into the trays then, overwhelmed, turns back to me again.

‘You usually have mint,' I remind her. ‘Like Daddy.'

She nods and Euan puts her down. She runs to stand beside me, wraps her arms around my legs and pushes her thumb into her mouth.

‘Are you sure they're identical?' Euan asks me, pulling money from his pocket.

I shrug. ‘I don't get it either. They're so different.' I rest my hand on the top of Daisy's hat. ‘Always have been.'

‘Daisy is the shy one,' Gianluca says, leaning across the stainless-steel counter to give Daisy her cone. ‘And there is nothing wrong with that, huh,
bambina
?'

She smiles at him, and settles back in the buggy to enjoy the ice cream.

I put napkins around both their necks while Euan holds my cone and then we say goodbye and go back out into the sunshine. We walk over to the fishermen and sit down, like they are, on upturned boxes, Ella squeezing between Euan and me. Seagulls wheel and caw above our heads then land on the pavement beside us where they squabble over an abandoned ham sandwich.

‘Making a right racket, they are,' Callum says. He frees his net of tangled seaweed and tosses the weed over his shoulder. ‘What do you reckon to that noise, Daisy?'

Daisy likes Callum and by way of an answer, she hands me her cone and places her hands over her ears. He laughs at her, leans forward to tickle her knees and she wriggles out of the buggy and tries to lift up an empty lobster net and bring it close to the others.

‘Business good?' Euan asks him.

‘Can't complain.' He threads the needle through the netting, weaving a criss-cross pattern through the tears. ‘As many lobsters and crabs as we can catch, we can sell. For all those fancy restaurants down your way.'

‘Not my way any more,' Euan tells him. ‘I'm coming back here to stay.'

‘Well, good on you, pal. Come to his senses at last, eh, Grace?' He looks over at me. ‘What do you think to that? Euan's coming back where he belongs, north of the border.'

‘I think it's great.' It's an understatement so huge that I start to tremble with a kind of bottled-up hysteria, like a fizzy drink that's been shaken and is about to pop. I stand up and help Daisy carry the lobster net. When I look back, Euan is smiling.

10

I follow Euan out of the convent. He is fuming. His hands and legs shake as he climbs into the car. Neither of us speaks until he overtakes a lorry too close to a bend and I ask him to slow down. He says nothing, just pulls into a lay-by. Clouds gather on the horizon ahead of us, the wind blowing them inward and then outward as if they are breathing.

‘Look, this isn't your battle.' I rub his left hand through mine. ‘I don't want to drag you down with me. Maybe you should cut me loose.'

He gives a short laugh. ‘How would I go about doing that? You're more a part of me than my own sisters. You're in here.' He taps the side of his head. ‘Letting go of you isn't an option. I think we have to outmanoeuvre her.'

‘How?'

‘Say we were with each other on the night Rose died. Brazen it out. She doesn't have any proof. Who's going to believe her? Look at her history – mental illness, drugs, prison. That makes her about as far away from a reliable witness as you can get.'

‘But if we say we were with each other then that will be lying. Isn't that perjury?'

‘It won't go to court, Grace.'

‘But still.' I think about it. I'm not sure I could pull it off. In spite of the way I've lived for the last twenty-four years, lying does not come easily to me. The fact is, I was never properly questioned about Rose's death. It was presumed that her death was an accident, unseen, unheard. I have never had to defend my position and I am absolutely sure I couldn't stand in front of Paul and fake innocence.

‘I can't believe she has become this person,' I say. ‘There's nothing of the girl left.'

‘She was always like that. Just not with you. Now you're seeing her other side. I'm going to have a cigarette.' He opens his door. ‘You want one?'

‘No.' I've had my mobile phone on silent and when I check it there is a missed call from Paul. I can't speak to him – not yet. I text him instead:
I'll be home later. Dinner in oven.

I sit back and chew on my nails, frustrated and dismayed with the turn of events at the convent. Nothing either of us said made any difference. In fact, it seemed like the opposite. The more she saw I wanted her not to tell Paul, the more determined she became to do it.

Outside the heavens open and Euan comes back into the car. We both stare through the windscreen. Water pours down from a heavy sky, flattening grass and making quick puddles in the hollows. Half a dozen sheep, necks tucked in, bodies up close, cling stoically to the hillside, their hooves sliding on the rocky slope.

I rub my hands over my face. ‘I wish I'd read those bloody letters.'

‘This isn't about letters,' Euan says. ‘It's about control and it's about revenge.'

‘Revenge for what?' I watch two more sheep move in close to the hillside huddle. ‘I honestly don't get why she would come back after all this time.'

‘It's like that sometimes for people, isn't it?' He turns to look at me. ‘Grievances fester for years. Then a catalyst comes along and bingo.'

I drop my hands and turn sideways too so that our faces are close. ‘What did you say to her?'

‘When?'

‘Just now. Before you had her by the throat.'

‘To back off. Crawl under the nearest stone.'

‘And what did she say?'

He shrugs. ‘Nothing worth repeating.'

‘The bit that made you really mad? When she spat at you?' I say.

He shakes his head. ‘Swearing. Nonsense. She isn't a rational human being.'

I have to agree with him. Her eyes, just before we left, were lit with an unhealthy euphoria; the kind that speaks of madness rather than joy.

‘Rain's easing off,' Euan says. ‘We should head back.'

‘I'm not going to let her anywhere near Paul on Sunday,' I say. ‘I won't stand by and watch her say it.'

‘One step at a time.' He turns the key in the ignition. ‘It's not over yet.' We rejoin the road and he settles to a reasonable speed. ‘Not by a long way.'

I try to relax back in my seat, silent, prey to my own thoughts. I feel like the past has caught up with the present. It's as if the last twenty-four years have been reduced to a single day. I'm right back where I started. I've just killed Rose. I feel the push of my hand against her chest as if it were yesterday. I am the fifteen-year-old me in the body of a woman. I feel panicked and scared and ready to jump from the car and run.

I look at Euan, now in the body of a man, but still very much the boy I remember at sixteen. For all his sober driving and fancy car, for all his money and success, his loss of control back at the convent – that wasn't Euan the husband, father and upstanding member of the community, that was Euan at sixteen, impulsive and headstrong.

Neither of us speaks until we drive across the bridge and into Fife.

‘Do you want to stop for something to eat?'

I look at my watch. It's just gone three o'clock. ‘I mustn't. I have to get started on the piece for Margie Campbell. I'm already days behind. It might even take my mind off this.'

He nods his agreement and carries on driving.

When we get inside the cabin I sit down behind my desk and immediately stand up again and start to pace. Euan has the kettle on and is making a sandwich in the small kitchen between the workroom and the bedroom. ‘Maybe I should go for a walk first,' I say. ‘Clear my head.'

‘Suit yourself.' He points to the breadboard. ‘Do you want some?'

‘No, thanks.' I open the front door and realise I don't want to go for a walk. I want to talk. I go back to Euan and blurt out, ‘Orla was right, you know, about me living with one foot in the past.'

He glances at me quickly then away again.

‘Do you ever feel like you're still sixteen?'

‘No.'

‘Not even a wee bit?'

He thinks about it. ‘I have some of the same feelings I had when I was sixteen but I don't feel like I'm sixteen.'

I hate it when he does that – splits hairs and corrects me, as if I'm simple. My stomach heats up. ‘Do you know what she said to me when we were leaving just now? She said I should think myself lucky that she doesn't tell Paul about us.'

He stops pouring milk into his cup and gives me his full attention.

‘How can she know about us? How can she know we had an affair?'

‘She doesn't know!' He shakes his head at me, exasperated. ‘She's just taking a punt and no doubt the look on your face told her she was right.'

‘It's not just
my
face that gave it away. At the girls' party she said you gave me a hungry look. That's what she said.'

He throws out his arms. ‘So what if I did?'