The Darkest Secret (9 page)

‘
Benz!
Sure! We will treat it as though it is our own!'

‘Come up to the house. Simone, you're sharing with Milly and India. I hope that's okay?'

Maria sees her daughter roll her eyes as Sean picks up Linda's bag and leads the way between a pair of giant electronic gates, newly painted in shiny black, a plaque on each one that will presumably one day hold the initials of whoever buys the place. Russian money is starting to flood into Sandbanks, a suburb of Bournemouth which has mysteriously become Britain's most expensive real estate, as it is into any bit of London within a limo's drive of Harrods, and the Russians love a gold-highlighted monogram. I'll bet there are gold-plated bath taps, too, thinks Maria. And rainforest showers. Looks as if they're doing the same at Seawings. You couldn't get people to buy these places forty years ago, when we were preparing for an Ice Age and the whole of Poole Harbour was going to be a glacier.

‘Oh, very Jackson Associates,' mutters Robert under his breath.

‘I did the interior on this one, you know,' says Linda, proudly.

‘I know,' replies Maria. She's beginning to guess who Sean's Someone on the Horizon might be.

The Stepwitch.

I actually don't recognise her voice. It's been over a decade. And something has changed in it in that time. She sounds tentative, sure; nervous, even. But it's not that. Her voice has dropped. It no longer has that shrieky edge that made you feel nagged the moment she opened her mouth.

‘Claire,' I say. Think for a moment and add the appropriate pleasantry. ‘How are you?'

‘I'm – fine,' she replies. ‘More to the point, how are
you
?'

My nose is blocked but I'm desperate not to do anything to clear it. I don't want anyone to know I've been crying. I gave up crying over my father when I gave up contact with him, and I'm damned if I'm going to let anyone know that that has changed. Especially not Claire. I don't remember crying over anything other than the normal childhood things before she came on to the scene.

‘I'm fine, thanks,' I say carefully.

She pauses again. Then, ‘I'm so sorry about your father, Milly. It must have been a terrible shock.'

‘I'm sure you know we weren't close,' I say, and let all the accusations that go with that statement echo down the line.

She doesn't take the bait. ‘No. But still. I'm sure there are… emotions involved.'

‘Sure,' I say. ‘Thanks.'

She can't just be calling me with condolences, can she? ‘How's Ruby doing?' I ask.

Another little silence. And then, ‘Not good, I'm afraid. She's in bits.'

Oh. I have another weird little surge of emotion, and it takes me a moment before I identify it as jealousy. And then I'm disgusted with myself. I had no idea that I still had that in me: that I still think of Ruby and Coco as usurpers, as though I am the only one allowed feelings in the matter.

I think about my half-sister, this stranger devastated by our common bereavement. Fifteen years old. I don't even know what she looks like now. Like little lost Coco, she is set in amber in my mind: three years old forever. I've honestly never thought about her growing up. Going through the horrors of adolescence, living with a loss so huge it's hard to comprehend. She and Coco have been no more than bit-players in my own misery. Not people in their own right at all.

‘I'm so sorry to hear that.'

Claire sighs. ‘It's not that surprising, I suppose. They hadn't seen much of each other lately, but she did love him.'

Another twinge of self-pity. So did I, once. ‘I'm so sorry.'

‘She doesn't seem to be able to stop crying,' says Claire. ‘She's in her room right now. I've tried to talk to her. But I… I sort of don't know what to say. It's hard. We… your father and I… she knows there was no love lost between us, and…'

Not my problem.
Not
my problem. You drove a wedge between my parents and took him away, and suddenly he was saying my mother was mad and he'd never been happy, and you want me to sympathise because you couldn't make it work? I'm not responsible for the world you've created, Claire. I have enough difficulty staying above the surface in my own.

‘Claire —' I begin.

‘No, look, I'm sorry. I know you don't want to hear about this. But I have to ask you a favour and I know it's a big ask, but I
can't
go to his funeral. I just can't. I can't. I
can't
.'

There's an edge of hysteria to the last few words. Claire is panicking. She must have been thinking about this for hours before she worked up the guts to ring me, and now she's started she's desperate to get her request across before she loses her nerve. But I'm not going to make it easy for her. She never made it easy for me. She wants me to tell her that no one would expect her to, that I understand, but I'm not going to do that. Each time we went to stay with them, she was more sulky, more standoffish, sniping at Dad in a passive-aggressive way that made it very clear that we weren't welcome, that there was no room for us. I know he was weak to go along with it, but I'll never forget how she wanted to edit his life so none of the stuff that happened before he met her mattered.

‘So I…' she continues. ‘I don't know what to do, Milly. I'm sorry to ask, I really am, but she's desperate to go…'

‘You want me to take Ruby to the funeral?'

Another pause. She hasn't realised that she hasn't asked. ‘Yes.'

‘Oh,' I say.

‘I'm sorry,' she says. ‘I just don't know who else to ask. And you
are
her sister.'

‘Half-sister,' I say, coldly.

‘Yes,' she says. ‘But she doesn't have anyone else now.' And Coco hovers between us, daring us to mention her name.

I don't answer. My brain is buzzing.

‘Do you know when it is yet?' she asks. ‘We're out of the loop a bit.'

‘Not yet. The coroner has to release the body.'

‘So not till after the inquest?'

‘No, it'll be before then if they find a medical cause. But I think he has to be buried, not burned, so they can dig him up again if they need to. But that's okay. He always wanted a big flashy gravestone near his mother's in the village he grew up in. No revenge like success, eh?'

Claire gulps at the bald facts and the way I tell them. I don't add that they won't be able to embalm him either. Little Ruby won't be having any final bonding sessions with the open coffin.

‘Will you think about it?' she asks.

‘I hadn't decided whether to go myself,' I say, reluctantly.

‘Oh,' she says, and I hear her throat fill with tears. ‘That's sad, Milly. I'm sorry. I thought maybe you'd… I don't know. None of his kids at his funeral? I can… I don't know. Maybe I could bring her down to Devon and ask someone to pick her up? I just. I can't. I really can't.'

She sounds so different from the woman I knew. There doesn't seem to be any anger left, just fear.

‘I'll think about it, Claire,' I say. ‘I can't say more than that.'

She sucks in a heavy breath, steadies her crying. ‘Thank you,' she says. ‘Thank you. I just don't know what to do, that's all. She's been crying and crying and I'm afraid she'll never…'

She trails off.

‘I'll let you know when it is.'

‘Thank you. Do you have my number?'

‘Yes, it's on my phone now.'

‘Oh, yes,' she says. ‘I always forget about that.'

I hang up before she can go on. Sit under the duvet and let my eyes wander over my bedroom. I've not given it a lot of love since I moved in. I didn't even bother to cover over the old owners' paintwork, just moved Granny's hand-me-downs in against the walls and bunged her pictures up with nails. Apart from my clothes, there's very little in this place that came here through my own choices. Perhaps that's why I spend so much time on my wardrobe, why I cherish my tattoos, why I like to stand out each time I pass through the front door. Even the pots and pans in the kitchen are Granny's. India was on her way across the Pacific by that point and didn't want the cargo, and Mum was in her fifties and had adult versions of most of the things you need in a house, so I was basically able to take my pick. It's a bit like living in a furnished apartment. A nice one, where the kitchenware is Le Creuset, but still a furnished apartment, like the ready-for-sale houses we grew up in. Only, I've covered every surface with books and unread mail and discarded food wrappers, as if I'm trying to disguise it. How odd that I've never noticed that before.

My tears have passed. As is often the way with bouts of emotion, I feel tired but also weirdly calm. And almost unable to fathom that such strong feelings can ever have existed, or ever could again.

I think about Ruby. I'm not so far from fifteen that I don't remember what it felt like, that horrible, confusing time suspended between childhood and adulthood, longing for and terrified by independence in equal measure. The world was a scary, exciting place, back then, and home was a place we longed to leave. Mum struggling to find her post-marital personality, Dad spawning offspring at what felt like a repellent rate in one so old, and boys sprouting extra pairs of hands. We didn't fit in anywhere much, never having had the sort of home you brought people back to. And when I was fifteen the Coco thing happened and we went from anonymous misery to total, public isolation.

My tea has gone lukewarm. I drain it and get up to make another. God, what a family. There will be a large turnout at Dad's funeral when it happens, I have no doubt of that. He's a rich man, and rich men are powerful, and people like rich men because, although trickle-down doesn't work as a society-wide principle, it sure as hell does work if you can get yourself next to the people with the money. He was a charming man, one who married four women and could probably have had half a dozen more if he'd had the time. His parties were the best parties, with the best champagne and the highest-quality canapés, and the funeral will have more of the same, and people will go a long way, and say a lot of nice things, for a sniff of vintage Bolly and some truffled foie gras.

Will they even notice that his family aren't there? That, of the four wives and five children, there's only the last one and the toddler who can't get away? Does it matter? We weren't the important thing about Sean Jackson's life. He barely even paused for breath after his third daughter vanished, before he was diving into another marriage, another set of condos on the seafront in Dubai, chewing on fat Havana cigars and slapping the shoulders of smiling politicians. Of course there will be people at his funeral. And I can't leave Ruby to brave it by herself. Standing all alone in that sea of social mourners. I can't do it.

Myocardial infarction. I've always found it a comical-sounding phrase for something so serious, but then my British ear is trained to hear the breaking of wind at a thousand paces, and the fact that it's the cause of my father's death doesn't cancel out the Pavlovian smirk. I read it several times after I got the email from Maria, and the actual meaning didn't sink in until the fourth or fifth.
Myocardial infarction
. I need to just refer to it as a heart attack. It's the only way to make it real.

I scan the email each time I stop for queues and lights and mini-roundabouts on the dreary haul through Croydon towards the M23 and Claire's ‘run-down smallholding'. If Maria's sent me the details she'll probably have sent them to Claire as well, but I need to have it all straight in my head, in case I end up being the one who has to explain it all to Ruby. The best part of five days, we'll be together, and it's not all going to be small talk.

They live in Sussex. On the edge of the Downs, outside one of those villages that have remained cute by dint of belonging in its entirety to an aristocratic estate. I'm impressed by its beauty as I pass through: front gardens neat even in winter, not a wheelie-bin or a caravan to be seen. The shop, with its cute little multi-paned window that makes it look like a Thomas Kincaid painting in a Kentucky trailer park, sells pesto and ‘locally sourced produce'. You can tell what the tenants are like.

I buy a goat's cheese and tomato tartlet and eat it sitting on the war memorial; I never feel well enough for breakfast and I'm starving now, unsure what will be coming my way for the rest of the day. Goat's cheese and tomato tartlet. Whatever happened to Cornish pasties? At least they haven't gone the whole hog and called it a
tartelette
, I suppose.

I get the print-out of the email out once more as I sit on the steps, smooth it out on my knee and read as I eat. I wonder idly if the polite woman who showed me through to the viewing room is the same person who sawed open my father's breastbone and pulled off the top of his skull. Probably. No one's got the budget to keep a show-pathologist around for the visitors. Maria's cut the name off, has just said that they're satisfied that the cause of death was the heart attack, that it was so huge that even if whoever was with him had called an ambulance it would have made no difference, and that this is enough to release the body for burial.

The inquest will be later. They don't need the body around for it. But the handcuffs, and the poppers on the bedside table, and the traces of cocaine in the blood… it's pretty obvious what happened. I wonder what the woman – I'm pretty sure, at least, that it will have been a woman – felt like, backing off as he writhed on those Egyptian cotton sheets, if she even paused to think about unlocking him before she fled. What a way to go. What a horrible, lonely way to die.

A man approaches slowly up the main street. From the holes at the elbows of his Tattersall check Viyella shirt and the fact that his trousers seem to be held up with string, I guess that this is the proprietor of the great house at the bottom of the drive. He confirms it when he opens his mouth and a tumble of vowels barely held together by consonants falls out.

‘Are you lost?'

‘Nope,' I say pleasantly. ‘I'm eating a delicious goat's cheese and tomato tartlet.'

He regards me with an assaying eye. I suspect my paisley ra-ra skirt, animal-print boots and shearling jacket are not the sorts of clothes you see often on this high street. ‘As long as you're not lost. Visiting people, are you?'

‘Nearby. I'm a bit early so I thought I'd take a break. This is a nice village you have here.'

‘Thank you,' he says, and thrashes at a patch of gnarly nettles growing out of the bottom of a signpost with his walking cane. ‘Who are you visiting?'

‘Do I need permission?'

‘Just asking.'

‘My ex-stepmother and my half-sister,' I say.

‘Name?'

I raise my eyebrows at him. ‘No need to take that attitude,' he says. ‘I'm just curious.'

‘The Jacksons. A place called Downside.'

‘Thought so,' he says. ‘We really don't like journalists around here, you know. Why can't you leave those poor people alone?'

‘Um – because they asked me to come?'

‘I've not seen you before.'

‘No,' I say. ‘It's my first time.'

He gives me another of those country-people looks. You're down from That London, it says, but I've got your measure. ‘Well, enjoy your tartlet,' he says.

‘Thank you,' I reply, and take another bite.

 

The village road leads on down to the gates of the big house, then veers off to the right into some woods and starts to climb the hill. It's one of those little trickling roads that people pay extra for with their holiday cottages. Even with the leaves off the trees, the wood is dark and enveloping. I'm surprised to find a place like this here, a place that feels this ancient. Sussex
is
ancient, of course; but I had thought that the witchy, druidic feel had long since been overrun by the onward creep of suburbia.

I emerge on to the lower grasslands that edge the Downs and the road turns to run parallel with the headland. On the other side of the hill is the sea, vast panoramas looking out to France, but here it feels as though we are sunk deep in the centre of the country. A farm passes by on the right. Must be the Colbeck farm they mentioned in the
Mail
. Not neat and chichi and gloss-painted on every window frame like the properties bought up by fleeing Londoners, but a proper farm with a stack of giant straw-rolls wrapped in black plastic towering over its chimney pots and bits of several vehicles scattered along the verge and a splendid smell of cowpat. Three hundred yards further on, the road comes to an end at a gate. Beyond, an unmetalled track dips back down into the treeline.
DOWNSIDE
, says a pokerwork notice on the fence.
PRIVATE
ROAD
.

I stop and think. Get out of the car and lean on the gate. I decide to have a cigarette to calm my nerves. I never gave her an exact arrival time, and there's still plenty of daylight left, and if I can't procrastinate on a day like this I don't know when I can.

To my right is a mailbox – literally, a box, big enough to take a case or two of wine. The lid is open and nothing sits within. I lean against the gatepost and roll my fag. Light it and look at the sky.

I'm still not convinced that this is a good idea. My mother has told me that it is, India has told me it is, Maria has said that I will ‘earn my place in heaven' by doing it, but that's easy for them to say. They don't have to do it, after all. I dread the next five days, but I dread tonight most of all. She says we should get to know each other before we set off on a road trip together, and I see the logic, but oh, God, that means spending my first night with Claire in twelve years.

There are fungi by the ton growing on the trunks of the beech trees, among the moss. I think they might be Chicken of the Woods, but I wouldn't want to hazard my life on it. The cigarette tastes great in the cold damp air, as all cigarettes do when you know it's going to be a while before your next one. If I know Claire at all, the entire property will be a smoke-free zone. Daddy used to deliberately light up his cigars within feet of the windows at home, just to annoy her. As a result I've always rather liked the smell of cigars; they smell to me like the fight for personal liberty.

‘Ah, there you are,' says a voice, and I whirl round. A woman stands twenty feet away on the drive. Small and skinny, middle-aged and dressed in a fleece and wellingtons and heavy-duty jeans. If I saw her in London I would think lesbian, God bless me for my stereotyping, what with the greying cropped hair and the zippered weather gear. It takes me several seconds to recognise my stepmother.

‘Claire?'

‘I was expecting you a bit sooner,' she says. ‘Tiberius rang to say you were on your way – well, to warn me about some journalist lurking in the village – twenty minutes ago. I was beginning to think you must have got lost, or I'd forgotten to take the chain off the gate or something.'

‘No, sorry,' I say. ‘I was just —' I gesture shamefacedly at my cigarette, a teenager once more.

‘Oh, you never grew out of that, then?' She advances, and gives me a smile. Then she's at the gate and I can't dither over how to greet her any more. We kiss, awkwardly, one cheek only, over the top bar to avoid having to work out what to do with our bodies. Her skin feels rough against my cheek. Claire Jackson's days of Crème de la Mer and weekly facials are clearly long since passed.

‘You look great,' she says, looking my clothes over. ‘Ruby will love you. You always were inventive with your clothes, though. You nearly gave Tiberius an aneurysm.'

‘Is he really called Tiberius?'

‘The Strangs have been calling their eldest sons after emperors since the 1680s,' she says. ‘His father was a Julius and his elder son is a Darius. Rumour has it he had to be talked out of calling him Khosrow.'

She unhooks the gate and swings it open. It's old but well maintained, the hinges well oiled and firmly set in the post so that it doesn't need dragging even when it reaches the verge.

‘Come on in,' she says.

 

I drive us back down to their house. Soon after it enters the trees, the track swings back uphill again; the kink is there for extra privacy, she says. And then we're out in the field and I'm stunned. It's all so… un-Claire. Well, not the Claire I remember. But of course, she was living in my father's houses back then. There's a big shelter where I can see a stack of hay bales and several dustbins and, beyond the fence, two paddocks. In one, a donkey and two goats stare at us from the dark interior of the field shelter. In the other, two smiling Tamworth pigs loll around in the mud outside a mini Nissen hut. A flock of chickens flaps away squawking as I creep through them, bolting into a large vegetable garden that has little at the moment to show for itself other than kale, early-sprouting broccoli and a few last heads of cabbage.

‘This is so good of you,' says Claire. ‘I really do appreciate it.'

I try to work out how to reply. Convention would demand that I dismiss the whole enterprise as nothing, as a pleasure, but I'm really not feeling myself there yet. ‘That's okay,' I say.

‘She's calmed down quite a lot since you said you'd do it. Just your saying yes has been a real help.'

‘Good.' I can't think why. I can think of few prospects less enticing than going to a funeral with a stranger, but there you go. It takes all sorts.

‘She remembers you, you know.'

I blush. Oh, God, we were so horrible to them. ‘Oh, dear.'

‘No, it's good. Don't worry. It's one of the few memories she has of Coco, too. Down on the Studland beach, I think. She says she went there in a boat, which I guess must have been the chain ferry. It's a bit of a weird memory, actually.' She laughs. ‘Actually, now I think about it, it might not be a memory at all.'

‘What?'

‘She says you found a jellyfish and cut a slice out of it like it was a cake.'

I remember it suddenly and with great clarity. The day before that dreadful row with Dad, when we went back up to London and had a party at home while Mum was up in Scotland at Granny's. If it hadn't been for Coco we probably would never have got busted, either; it's not like they ever compared notes with each other. As it was, we ended up phoneless and cashless and under curfew for an entire month while the search parties were scouring the Purbeck coast and flotillas of boats out of the Isle of Wight were scanning the sea. The last time I ever saw Coco. Another thing I'd forgotten. Indy found some boys on the beach and we ended up on a houseboat tripping off our tits. I got off with some boy called Josh that India had her eye on, but I was so wasted that I can't remember if I fucked him or not. Jesus, I got away with murder when I was a teenager.

‘Oh, yes!' I say. ‘I remember! That was a fun afternoon.'

‘Yuh,' says Claire. ‘I'm sorry you never really got to know each other.'

And whose fault is that? I think, and shut up.

We round several ranks of naked bean canes and the house comes into view. Another surprise. Again not what I would have thought of as a Claire sort of house. Squat and red-brick, it looks as though it's been knocked together from a pair of farm workers' cottages. Outside, a rusty Datsun and a mini tractor, an array of things you can hook up to the back of a mini tractor, and several sheds. An oil tank the size of my bedroom desultorily camouflaged by some trellis and what looks like a leafless grapevine. A patch of rough lawn dotted with early crocuses, tubs of winter pansies either side of the front door and a handful of withered hanging baskets. ‘Here we are,' she says. ‘You're not seeing it at the best time of year, I'm afraid.'

‘No worries,' I say. ‘After Clapham North everything looks glamorous.'

The Claire I knew never let any living thing more chaotic than a single white orchid clutter up her space. She was a hundred per cent natural stone and feng shui ringing bowls. Then again, you'd never recognise my mother's cosy Persian-rug-and-cushioned-window-seat set-up with Barney in Sutherland as belonging to the same woman who was married to my father.

 

There's a dog. A big, bouncy black Lab who tumbles from the front door as though he's not seen her in days. He dances around her wellingtons, wagging and panting, then walks over, looks up at me and simply leans against my leg. ‘That's Roughage,' she says. ‘He likes to lean.'

Roughage gives me a big grin, which widens when I chuck him behind the ear. ‘Hello, Roughage,' I say.

‘I got him for burglars and journalists,' says Claire, and elbows him with a knee. ‘Always important to have someone around to welcome them in and offer them a nice cup of tea, I think. Come in.'