The Secrets We Keep (17 page)

Mike,

I remember, once, we were talking about a trip, and I said, “How about a boat?” “Like a cruise,” you said, and I knew you were thinking about your mum's unending list of people she knew who were either planning a cruise, going on a cruise, away on a cruise, or coming back from a cruise. And I said, “No, not a cruise—a gulet. A little Turkish boat, maybe five or six other couples, just kind of doodling around the coast. Swimming, reading, sleeping, sex, watching the sun go down.”

And you shuddered, and you said, “No,” as though I'd suggested going clubbing in Ibiza or trekking through a rain forest or any of the other things we'd agreed that we never needed to do.

You said it was the idea of being surrounded by water that you didn't like, a tiny little boat and nothing but sea.

I asked you whether you'd looked at a map, if you knew where you lived, on a tiny little island full of people obsessed with going to the edges of it and looking at the water while they were lashed by the wind?

“I know,” you said, “but—I can't stand the thought of it.”

And you shuddered again, and I stopped laughing at you, because I could tell that you weren't fooling around, that you felt the way I felt when I walked past a pet shop and saw anything in a cage.

And I thought, How funny, I never knew that about you. We must have been married for eight years by then. I think it must have been about two years ago.

Still. I never told you about the day I thought I was pregnant. You never knew that. You never, ever knew.

So. My not-baby. Your surrounded by water thing. I think that makes us even. One secret each. No more. I know that.

I refuse to talk about the rumors or have anyone talk about them in our house. I've hardly seen your mother; she obviously can't trust herself to keep off the subject. But in our bedroom, it doesn't matter. In our bedroom, there's just me, and the memories of us.

I wish, wish, wish you were here.

E xxx

Blake feels as though he has a foot in both camps, and is fully welcome in neither. Elizabeth's eyes are hostile when he asks how she is feeling, and she snaps back that she's feeling every bit the way he might imagine, and does he ask the Micklethwaites the same question?

She'd gotten up and left the room, and he and Mel had caught each other's eyes, and Elizabeth had called, from the bottom of the stairs, that there was no need to look at each other like that—she wasn't mad, she just knew her husband.

With Richenda, Blake can't manage to have a constructive conversation either. When he tells her tentatively that there are rumors about Kate that she probably ought to know about, she holds up a hand and says, “Blake, I'm not at home to rumors. I don't need them.”

“But,” he says, and she says, “No buts, Blake, thank you.” And he stands in her kitchen while she grinds beans for coffee and then tamps them with what seems like unnecessary force, and he sees what it would be like to have this woman as a teacher, a mother, a lover, the sort you could only push so far and if you overstepped the mark you'd know about it.

“Rufus just wants to argue, because if he's making a big noise he doesn't have to think,” she says. “And Kate is so busy thinking about what color to paint the spare room that there's no getting any sense out of her, but I can see it's going to hit, sooner or later, and when it does, well, heaven only knows, and here I am, trying to keep us all together, which is a joke because we weren't even together to begin with—”

“These things—” Blake begins.

“Please don't tell me that these things can bring a family together, because I'm sure it's true, but I don't need to hear it now, while my husband is behaving like a spoiled little boy who can't believe that everything isn't going according to his plan, and my daughter is having to be way older than she should be, but I still hear her crying in her bedroom at night.”

“I won't,” Blake says. Richenda takes coffee mugs from the shelf, puts them on the countertop, then looks at them as though she has never seen them before, and has no idea what they are doing there.

“Coffee,” he says gently and is rewarded with a smile, quickly erased by a shake of the head.

“You can see,” she says, “why I don't need to hear any more bad news.”

• • •

Mel's desperation for a change of scene has brought her, Andy, and Blake to the pub. “I'm having an early night,” Elizabeth had said, and as if to prove her point had gone upstairs and started running a bath.

So they'd gone. Blake had asked, halfway down the drive, whether they ought to leave her, but Andy had said they could, and Mel had grinned and said, see, a medical opinion, then added, sadly, all she does is work and sleep and cry.

Mel manages to get what she declares to be a half-decent martini—“If I can't smoke, I need a real drink, not a pint of something cloudy”—and sits back in the corner of the corner table, a place they've chosen in the hope that they can talk. “Right. Where do we start?”

“No new rumors,” Andy says. “I checked with Peggy when I left work. I know where you can get a kitten if you want one, though.”

“Well, that's something,” Blake says. He has been over and over it. He keeps thinking about Michael: his dedication to the job, his burning need to help, to put right, to resolve. He had been a dream to work with from the beginning—punctual, willing, meticulous, able to talk to anyone. With time, a good judge of which situations needed a gentle hand and which needed to be shut down fast. Apart from the time when he walked into the burning building, the man had been everything he should have been.

“So it might just die out of its own accord, if no one else says anything,” Andy says.

“Or if the father shows up,” Blake adds.

“Or if it's not true,” Mel adds, although it's more of a moan. “Please let it not be true.”

“Of course it's not true,” Blake says.

“It's hard,” Andy says.

“I tried to get her to agree to come back to Australia with me again, but she just said she can't leave Michael behind. Not even for a couple of weeks.” They all shake their heads, helpless. Mel doesn't tell them the other part of the conversation, when she'd pointed out that Elizabeth never visited the grave, and her sister had said, with chill dejection, that that didn't mean she didn't know how close to it she was.

And they have another drink, and they try to talk about something else, they really do, but it's like pushing water uphill: it won't work, and it's exhausting.

“OK,” Mel says, returning from a smoke break with two pints and a fresh martini on a tray, “I'm just going to name the baby elephant in the bar, and if neither of you know what I'm talking about, or neither of you think we should be talking about it, then we'll all pretend I was pissed and I made it up. OK?”

Andy and Blake tip eyebrows at each other, nod.

“Right,” Mel says. “I know that Mike and my sister tried for years to have a baby and it never happened.”

“I didn't know that,” Blake says, “though I was a bit surprised they didn't have one. After the wedding, Mike told me I'd be his first choice for godfather when the time came.”

Andy says, “I knew they were trying. Michael said that there didn't seem to be anything wrong with them. They went for IVF. Still nothing.” He remembers how wan Elizabeth became, how sad. Lucy saying that she thought Elizabeth had ignored her and the twins in the street, and it wasn't as though they were easy to miss, the noise they were making. How he'd told Elizabeth that she could come to see him if she wanted any help; how she hadn't. He adds, “They were very private about it.”

Mel nods. “I think I only knew because I was over here once when they were getting ready for IVF, and Elizabeth realized that she wasn't going to be able to keep it hidden. I think it started because they didn't want Patricia to know they were trying, and the only way to make sure Patricia doesn't know something is to make sure nobody knows.” They all pause, drink, pause again at the wisdom of this. Blake opens a packet of chips, tears down the side of the packet, lays it flat on the table.

“But what I was wondering was,” Mel says, “Elizabeth always said that there was nothing wrong with either of them; it just wasn't happening. When they had IVF, I couldn't get any details out of her. She always just said it hadn't worked and it was too horrible to talk about. So I was thinking how neat it would be if she was lying to me to defend Mike's honor, as it were. That if he was the one who had a problem…”

“She could certainly be sure that Kate's baby wasn't his,” Blake agrees.

“Exactly!” Mel takes a chip, beams at it, balances the end of it on the tip of her tongue, brings it back into her mouth, crunches, beams again. Both of them look at Andy, hopeful.

Andy remembers an afternoon he and Michael had driven into Marsham together to collect some secondhand furniture that Lucy had bought for the twins' room. Not taking his eyes from the road, Michael had said, “So, a below-average sperm count isn't disastrous, right? Because that's the worst they can come up with.” Andy had told him that no, it wasn't disastrous at all, that it was the nature of averages that some people would fall below them.

“His sperm count was a bit low, but a lot of men's are. Half the fathers in Throckton will be the same. The tests didn't find anything else. Elizabeth was telling the truth.”

“Of course she was”—Mel puts her head in her hands—“so there was nothing wrong with either of them, and they wanted to have a baby, and they tried to have a baby, but no baby? That has got to fuck you up.”

But Blake is on another path. “So there was no reason why he couldn't have gotten someone else pregnant? In theory?”

“Nope,” says Andy, wondering how it is that they are talking about something they were sure could not have happened. “But he probably thought he was infertile, whatever the tests said. People do. They'd rather believe an answer that they don't like, that fits the evidence in front of them, than live with uncertainty, or the idea that there might not be an answer at all.”

“Oh, wise one,” Mel says, muffled by her own palms.

“It's true, though,” Blake adds. “Sad, but true.” He thinks of a family he knows where the mother, decades after her teenage son left home and never came back, still refuses to spend a night away from home, just in case she's not there on the day he returns.

“So if—hypothetically—a man who thought he was infertile, despite all medical evidence except the evidence that after years of relentless sex his wife still isn't pregnant”—Mel raises her head, pauses, gathers her jumbling thoughts—“if that hypothetical man was, hypothetically, shagging someone else, someone nonslutty and young and fertile, he might well not bother with a condom?”

Mike,

There's an alternative universe in which none of these things are happening.

In my alternative universe I got pregnant, and the fact that we'd had to wait a couple of years for our baby made us all the more excited about him. You watch the baby grow, and you talk to him and sing to him and we take sedate walks around Butler's Pond and just let Pepper take a run around the garden last thing, so we can go to bed together and you can have a little chat with the baby before we go to sleep.

We can't decide what to do for the baby's room and your mother knits horrible, scratchy matinee jackets in terrible pastel colors, even though we've showed her the scan picture, because she doesn't trust the technology.

In my alternative universe, on the night you died here, we were sitting on our sofa, reading TV credits in search of the perfect name. In that universe, at the moment you died here, we were drinking tea and bickering about shortlists.

But I can't get my alternative universe any further than that.

Where are you?

I miss you. Everything is going wrong without you here.

E xxxx

Patricia has known, since the night Andy came to see her, what it is that she needs to do. She's waited, though, to make sure that she can't think of a better way.

She's almost talked to Mel but thought better of it, knowing how, at times of crisis, the sisters' need to protect each other is stronger than any reason, or any consideration of others. Her visits to Elizabeth this last week have been difficult: mostly, they've been visits with Mel, who has stood at the kitchen door, smoking, while Elizabeth has stayed in her room.

Once, Patricia had been there when Elizabeth had gotten home, and she'd been shocked by her daughter-in-law's paleness, thinness, the curious look to her hair where the natural color is growing back in. Elizabeth had seen Patricia, and dropped her bag, come over and embraced her.

Even though Patricia is not a fan of hugging and caressing and hand-holding and all of the intimacies that seem to take place so casually now, she had submitted, waiting until Elizabeth stepped away, looked straight into her eyes and said, “Patricia, this must be so awful for you too. I'm so sorry. I just can't talk about it yet.”

And then she'd gone upstairs, and Mel had said, “Well, you just got more out of her than anyone else has since somebody put two and two together and all of Throckton made five.”

And Patricia had left, and gone home to her photo albums, back beyond Michael to her baby sister who didn't make it beyond two, her uncle who never got to be more than a handsome teenager, and she felt the weight of what she was going to do.

But Patricia has never been a shirker. So, this fine Saturday afternoon, she finds herself standing on the Micklethwaites' doorstep, and she takes a deep breath, and she rings the bell.

Richenda answers the door, in jeans and a paint-splashed shirt. She's expecting to see Kate, who often forgets her keys when she takes Beatle out, and makes cautious jokes about pregnancy brain. Richenda jokes back, while Rufus looks daggers at them both. But Richenda is coming around to the view that this baby is a good thing, especially now that she is no longer a secret. When she compares the Kate now with the Kate who was hiding her pregnancy, she can only see health where there was illness, anticipation where there was brooding misery. Kate is relaxed, easy, more like herself than she has been for—well, for a good year, now Richenda comes to think of it. Her sulky teenager has gone for good. Her daughter is a woman with whom she is building a more equal relationship.

It takes Richenda a moment to recognize Patricia out of her library context, although she looks just the same as she always does, neat and smart and sharp, Margaret Thatcher without the hat.

Patricia says, “I'd like to come in and have a word with you and your daughter, if I may,” and Richenda replies that Kate is out but shouldn't be long and invites her unexpected visitor in to wait.

Patricia sits, very still and erect, in the living room while Richenda makes tea. Much as she wants to dislike Richenda, she has to admire her manners, the way she was obviously in the middle of something when Patricia arrived but hadn't made a big thing of it, and she has to admire her taste. She thinks that everything here must be the best, that you can somehow tell, even if it's just a little table for a lamp or a plain white china vase holding a trio of peonies. She's surprised they can't afford a bigger television, and is looking curiously at photographs—she's not quite close enough to see them, not prepared to get up and look—when Richenda comes in with a tray.

“That's Kate when she used to horse ride,” Richenda says, seeing where Patricia is looking. “Funny to think that it was only four years ago. And that the most difficult part of parenting was getting up at five on a Saturday morning to take her to some show-jumping event on the other side of the country. Still.”

Seeing Patricia's rigid face, Richenda decides against following that “still” to the place where it might lead. Instead she pours tea, and when Patricia says, “You can always tell when someone's warmed the pot,” she feels more pleased than she ought to.

“I'm not sure whether I should mention Michael or not,” she says, these days of new conversations and unexpected turns in life making her bold. “But we are so grateful to him for what he did for Kate.”

“You may not be,” Patricia says sharply and ignores Richenda's look of incomprehension. She wants to say it all only once. So she starts to admire the rug, and as Richenda launches into the story of them buying it in Egypt, she thanks one set of stars that Rufus is off looking over something at the summerhouse this morning, and begs another to bring Kate home soon, so that they can get this over with, whatever it is.

The stars are on her side. Kate blows in the back door with Beatle, starts talking before she's looked through into the living room. “This baby is kicking me in the back like you wouldn't believe,” she says. “Either that or it's a fantastic elbowing technique. But I think it's feet. Isn't it funny, how you can tell?”

Richenda's voice is pretend-bright and heavy with warning as she calls back, “Michael Gray's mother has come to see us, Kate.”

Kate can smile at the sound of his name now and thinks how funny it is to hear her mother call him Michael Gray, as though if she only said “Michael” Kate wouldn't know who she meant. She wonders whether the grief that held her paralyzed for so long is really starting to ebb, or whether it's just masked by her hormones, her baby, her sense that all of her love is not lost. Only the nights are really bad.

She takes a deep breath and walks into the living room, and sits down next to her mother, which means she is directly opposite Patricia, who is looking her up and down as though she is trying to decide something. Kate thinks of standing with her father at the county show, watching as the horses were judged. Patricia is prodding at her with her eyes. She drinks the tea her mother passes her, even though it's too strong and not quite hot enough, and she waits. Beatle settles by her feet.

Patricia chooses her words carefully. Or rather, she recites, with care, the words that she has been choosing for the last ten days.

“I've come here to talk to you today about a rumor that's going around.” She senses that Richenda is going to try to interrupt her, but she keeps on, looking at her knees. “I hear most things, sooner or later, and I've heard a rumor that my son Michael might be the father of your child.” She moves her eyes, briefly, to Kate's impassive face, then Richenda's, not yet stricken, rather the face of someone who is working out a difficult equation in her head, not quite sure that the answer she has come to can be the correct answer. “The father of Kate's child.”

Patricia sees that Richenda is holding Kate's arm, above the elbow, and she recognizes the gesture: like a mother with a baby about to have an injection, big hand wrapping the little chubby hand, knowing that it won't stop the pain that's coming but saying, gently,
I'm here, I'm here; you have me.

“Well,” Richenda says, sliding a look at her daughter, who is giving nothing away.

“That wasn't what I'd come to say,” Patricia says, not unkindly. “I'd come to say that any child Michael did father would have to be watched very carefully, because there's cystic fibrosis in our family. In our history. I had a sister who died when she was no more than a toddler—I barely remember her—and my uncle, my mother's brother, only made it to his teens.”

“No,” Kate says. “No.” And the tears and the look in her eyes tell Patricia what she's come here to discover. Richenda is saying something, but the mother and the grandmother ignore her, facing each other, absorbing, adjusting. There's a blind panic in Kate that jolts the rest of what she planned to say from Patricia, with more compassion than she thought she had for this flighty, feckless girl.

“I don't think cystic fibrosis is the end of the world anymore, even if your baby does have it—and the chances of that are slim, I think. I don't think it can be cured but I think people can be helped, more than they used to be. And the more you know about it, about what to look for, the better. When Michael was a baby he didn't grow quickly enough for a while, and we were afraid that that was what it was, but it turned out he was just a slow baby.”

Kate is crying, nodding, crying, nodding, her eyes fixed on Patricia, her hands rubbing round and round on her belly, something she doesn't seem to know she is doing. And Patricia feels her own tears coming, but she's damned if she's going to cry in front of these people, so she stands up, and she says, “No matter what the circumstances, I would like to be able to get to know any grandchild I might have. Even if it is born on the wrong side of the sheets.”

She gets as far as the garden before the tears come, so she stands for a moment and lets herself cry and lets herself wish things were different, before drying her eyes and walking home again. When she gets there, she looks out her jam recipes.

• • •

Kate's sobs are violent and the tears go on and on. The only thing that will stop her is when Richenda looks into her daughter's frightened eyes as her breathing slows and she says firmly, “Kate, this will not be doing the baby any good.” And Kate nods, and Richenda can see her fighting, fighting, to regain some control.

“I would know,” Kate says, “if there was something wrong with her. Wouldn't I?”

Richenda remembers an afternoon, long ago, when she was lost in a daydream of blue onesies dancing on a washing line when the cramps started, another when a colleague took her aside and said to her, quietly, that maybe she'd sat in something or maybe she was bleeding. She takes her daughter's hands and tells her not to worry. Tells her that, these days, if anything was wrong, the doctors and midwives would be able to tell, and help, that it isn't the way it would have been for Patricia's mother anymore, these days. And Kate half smiles and puts her hand to the place where her baby is kicking her and says, “She's perfect. Whatever she is, she's perfect.”

She saves the tears that she has for Mike, and for the secret she promised to keep, for later. Richenda lists her questions and puts them to one side, and sits back on the sofa, strokes Kate's back, and wills calmness through her fingers into Kate, although she doesn't feel very calm herself.

Rufus gets home to find his wife and daughter on the sofa, asleep, Kate's head on Richenda's lap, Richenda's hand on Kate's shoulder, Beatle curled in the triangle behind his daughter's pulled-up knees. He leans in the doorway and looks, and watching them he has the first moment of true peace that there's been for him since Kate went into the water. He makes himself look at his daughter's changing body the way he might look at a gouge on his own leg, forcing himself to examine every detail until he's not looking at a horror but a fact, something that needs fixing.

It's the fact that Kate seems still half girl that breaks his heart. Her hair is in a ponytail, her fingernails are painted pink, her cheek is as smooth as it was when she was born, and Rufus had held her while Richenda slept and promised her that he would look after her, and protect her, and be the best dad that there had ever been.

He remembers all of the parent-teacher evenings where he and Richenda were told how bright their daughter's future was, and how she could do anything she wanted to do. And he could not believe that this was what she wanted: this domestic shackling, this deliberate shrinking of her world.

Unless she had gotten scared. Unless all of that promise, all of those possibilities, had been too much, too soon.

After a quick check on the summerhouse project, Rufus has been to Marsham to have lunch with Caroline, a woman he has lunch with whenever he can contrive it, and will do more than have lunch with if things continue as they are. Caroline has interesting theories about human behavior, something that attracts Rufus almost as much as her walk, the shape of her forearms, the high warm glug of her laughter. The fact that she laughs a lot.

Caroline thinks that everything people do they do as a way of getting something that they want, so, according to her, if Kate isn't ready to go away, if Kate feels insecure, then getting pregnant is a clever way of making sure she doesn't have to do the things that she's afraid of. The baby makes her safe from too much change, safe from being alone in the world.

But she's not alone, Rufus had said, and Caroline had said, no, but she probably feels that she will be, would be, if she went away. She has no idea that after two days on a beach or three evenings in a university bar, she'll have made friends who she feels as though she has known forever. Those of us who live in these small places, these fixed places, can forget how much the world can flex.

Then she'd reached across the table, rested her hand on his, and said, apologetically, “Of course, Rufus. I don't know Kate at all; you must ignore me, or stop me, or tell me that I'm wrong. I'm just going from what you've told me; you are her father and you know much better than I do,” and he'd said, “Honestly, Caroline, I feel as though I know nothing about my daughter. Nothing. Not anymore.”