The Summer of Secrets (10 page)

She lay there for a long time, needing a drink and the bathroom, but unwilling to get up, because that would signify that the day was happening. What was she going to say? Do? Would her dad even remember last night? Would he want to talk about it? The thought made her long to burrow under the covers and stay there for ever. Instead, she strained to hear sounds, to work out where her dad was. She reached out into the atmosphere of the house, but it gave nothing back to her. The quietness wasn’t comforting, though. Anger could be quiet, and worse still, so could awkwardness. In the end, the need to wee drove her out. The door to her dad’s room was open, the bed empty. Even so, she agonized over flushing the toilet and drawing attention to herself. She could go back to her room and pretend to be asleep, and the day would disappear. But, as she crossed the landing, she heard a door being opened downstairs, followed by the sound of footsteps from more than one person. Leaning over the banister, she strained to decipher the voices. They were cheerful, normal. Mugs chinked, the fridge was opened. Who was it down there? She tiptoed back to her room to get dressed.

Helen stopped at the door to the kitchen. They were sitting at the table, mugs of tea on the table, glass swept into a pile in the corner by the bin. The smell of whisky was almost unnoticeable. Mick was unshaven, his shirt from yesterday rucked into creases from sleep, but his face was animated, his hands busy as he illustrated some point. It felt weird, juxtaposing the man from last night with the man at the table. On the other side of the table, so she could only see the back of his head, was Piet. He slouched in his chair as if he’d been there a while. He was nodding in response to Mick’s ideas, waiting for him to stop before he responded.

‘… So the superstructure can be half ply and half canvas, using the original bars.’

Piet had a rough sketch on the table in front of him, and he was adding pencil lines to it as he talked, transforming the skeleton of the hull into a finished boat. Helen squeezed past to get to the kettle, taking a peek on her way past, keeping her eyes away from her dad. She had known, of course, that Piet was an artist, but the drawing made her catch her breath as the lines took off from the page, making the graceless shape that had been in the garage for as long as she could recall swell into a thing of beauty, her rounded base balanced with cabin and tiller.

‘And she’s how long?’ Piet tilted his head to smile at Helen, giving his mug a nudge in silent request. She picked it up. She hadn’t made eye contact with her dad yet, and didn’t have a clue what she was going to say to him. The words came by themselves, although her throat felt reluctant to let them out. She coughed to clear the way and tried again.

‘Dad, do you want one?’

‘Yes, all right, tea.’ He appeared to notice her for the first time, pushing the mug across the table and continuing with the boat. ‘Thirty-eight foot, near enough.’ He reached for the sketch and drew a thick, black line through it, bisecting the delicate image with the one downward stroke. ‘This is where the engine needs to be. Takes up a bit of space. I’ve got a line on an old Perkins, classic piece of machinery.’

She was fishing teabags out and pouring milk when Victoria’s head appeared at the window. Helen put two of the mugs on to the table, grabbed the third and eased herself round to the door.

‘Piet came by, then?’ Victoria took another glance through the window, and pointed to the mug in Helen’s hand. ‘Give me a mouthful.’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Ugh, sugar!’

‘He was here when I came down.’ Helen took the mug back and had a cautious sip of the tea herself. She was glad to leave the kitchen, have something else to think about. ‘Do you want me to make you some?’

Victoria shook her head.

‘Don’t want to go disturbing them.’ She gestured to the garage. ‘Is it open? Let’s have a look.’

The boat took up most of the garage, the sides curving out above their heads. How long had it been since she had come out here? Months? No, longer. Helen felt a sense of shock at how big it was, as if it ought to have shrunk in the time she’d ignored it. She could never see it without picturing how it should be forcing the sea or canal or river down into a boat-shaped space, displacing that exactitude of gallons. It was her dad’s kingdom, his refuge, the millstone around his neck. Victoria didn’t stop to look. She was up the ladder and swinging her leg over the gunwale before Helen had crossed the garage floor towards it. Helen heard her jump down into the base of the boat, and started up the ladder herself. She stopped at the top and peered down at Victoria.

‘Why is there an office chair in here?’ Victoria was sitting in it, spinning herself around.

‘Dad likes to sit down there. He says it’s peaceful.’ The boat was grimy, bare apart from the chair, no longer the dream on Piet’s sheet of paper. She found it hard to imagine that it would ever look any different.

‘And how long have you had it?’ Victoria’s voice jolted Helen out of her thoughts.

‘The boat? As long as we’ve had the house.’ Helen lowered herself on to one of the crosspieces that might one day support the flooring. ‘Dad found it right before we moved. It was the first thing in.’ She sometimes thought that was when it had started to go wrong, when Dad had done nothing but bring the boat over, leaving her mother to deal with the removal men. They’d never heard the end of it, anyway.

Victoria spun again on the chair, using the side of the boat to kick herself round. There was a slight shift in the boat’s balance, and she stuck her foot out to slow down, catching it on a strut.

‘It won’t fall over, will it?’ She was holding both arms out, as if she could keep it steady by mind power.

‘It shouldn’t do. It’s set up so my dad can get in.’

‘Phew.’ Victoria flexed her foot with care. ‘Don’t want to go capsizing before it even hits the water.’ She began to swing again, but with caution. ‘Especially when Piet’s getting interested. He’ll stay for longer if he’s got a project …’ Her voice tailed away.

They sat in silence for a while. Helen’s mind went back to the previous night. Out here, in the quiet of the boat, the whole event seemed so unlikely. Again, she replayed it: Mick’s shouting, the smashed plates, the late phone call from her mother, and they retreated another step towards unreality. Opposite, Victoria sat with her eyes fixed on some distant point, and Helen felt an urge to tell her about it. She was trying to work out how to phrase it when Victoria’s voice broke in on her thoughts, and it was as if she was mindreading.

‘What does your dad do, anyway?’

Helen paused before answering. ‘Not much these days.’ A picture flashed through her head: Mick sitting here, in the boat, for hours on end. That wasn’t what Victoria had asked, though. ‘He was made redundant.’

She was instantly glad she hadn’t let on about anything else. That was her dad’s business, not hers to blab about. She remembered people telling her how redundancy was hard for someone like her dad, how he was likely to be a bit depressed. Especially with her mother leaving as well. She was swamped by a surge of emotion. Guilt about how she wanted to escape from him sometimes, a tenderness that she was the one who understood, relief that she hadn’t said anything about last night. That wasn’t him. He needed someone to be interested in his plans, to help him get on with it. He’d be OK then.

‘How come you stayed with him?’ Victoria was shifting on to her knees, arms held out for balance. ‘I mean, children usually go with their mother, don’t they?’ The chair wobbled under her as she carried on upwards, first on to one foot then the other. Her head was now level with the top edge of the hull. ‘You don’t have to say if you don’t want to.’

‘I don’t mind.’ It was true. This seemed like safe ground. ‘It was all a bit sudden, actually.’

Victoria raised one foot, held on to a downward strut and lifted her leg out behind her. ‘Did your mum do a midnight flit?’

‘No. It wasn’t like that.’ She fished back through her memory to the events leading up to it. Time had smoothed them, and they now seemed equally as unlikely as last night’s outburst. Had her mother been so unhappy? Everything had been normal until something was missed. A birthday? Or was it an anniversary? She screwed the memory back down into its hiding place. She wasn’t going to think about it. ‘Mum went to stay with a friend at first, so there wasn’t room. And then I had exams coming up.’ It had been a convenient reason and one, she realized, she’d need to reinforce with something now her exams were done. She remembered how the phone call last night had ended. It would be awful if her mother turned up, telling her off about being rude. She pushed the thought away.

The conversation lapsed once more. Victoria seemed engrossed in her balancing act, and Helen let her mind drift. The air in the garage always had a smell of being kept in the dark. The big double doors at the front were never opened, so the only new oxygen was what came through the side door. And if the garage air wasn’t changed enough, what about the air in the boat? She imagined it briefly as a separate atmosphere, heavy, settling within the confines of the hull like gas in a mine. From above, it would have a surface, lapping against the inside edge with little opaque waves. It was as if the two of them were caught in their own world, sitting at the bottom of this pool of heavy air. She imagined knives pressing against the soles of her feet. Who would come to rescue them? Suddenly it was hard to breathe.

‘We’re like mermaids in a cave.’ She hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’ It was like a bubble bursting, letting in a breath of pure oxygen. Victoria felt very real, sitting across from her on the swinging chair, somehow more solid than she had been before. Not easy to explain. ‘I was thinking about air.’

‘And this has something to do with mermaids because …?’ Victoria jumped down from her chair, freezing in position at another shift from the boat. ‘I keep forgetting where I am!’

She relaxed her arms and edged herself with cautious steps to the other end. Helen followed her progress.

‘Why do you call your mum by her name?’ Again, she surprised herself by saying it out loud.

Victoria glanced over her shoulder. ‘Well, it’s her name, for a start.’

‘My mum would go mad if I called her Barbara.’

‘I’d go mad if someone called me Barbara.’ Victoria shrugged. ‘She’s left anyway. You can call her whatever you like.’

The boat’s sides were painted in a thick cream paint, overlaid by a slightly oily layer of dust. Helen’s finger slid along it, gathering up a layer of black and leaving a clean-edged trail. High up in the front end, where the edges narrowed and darkened as they came together, there was already something drawn into the dust. It was a sketch of a man’s head coming over a wall, his big nose hanging down. A familiar image, one her dad used to draw everywhere: birthday cards, steamed-up car windows. Somewhere on a beach, him dragging a stick in the sand, trying to finish before the tide came in, her mother holding a pile of towels and picnic bags and rain bouncing off the concrete steps up to the promenade. Victoria’s voice broke in.

‘Do you ever go and stay? With your mum?’

‘She keeps suggesting it. But I don’t want to.’

‘Is she that awful?’ Victoria wasn’t giving up. ‘Did you have to do all the housework and sleep under the stairs?’

‘No.’ Helen stopped and thought about the tidying up and constant buzz of vacuuming that had been the backdrop to her mother’s day. Another picture flashed up, her dad standing there with his head down whilst her mum shouted at him. ‘Dad never knew what to do. Mum would get angry and he didn’t know why. It made me sad.’

The words ground to a halt. She couldn’t explain it, how she wanted to make a forcefield around him, stop him having to listen.

‘I sometimes think I might go and find my dad.’ Victoria’s voice was casual, matter of fact.

Helen tried to remember where he’d gone. Was it South America? She imagined Victoria galloping across some dusty plain, accompanied by men with heavy moustaches. They would cross in front of the sunset, reach a wooden homestead and behind the door would be the drummer, his sideburns flecked with grey now, and his eyes narrowed by the sun. She took a breath in readiness to speak, but her words were interrupted by the sound of the garage door scraping on the concrete floor as it swung open. The boat wobbled again and Mick’s head appeared over the side.

‘Come on you two, out.’ He was more cheerful than Helen had seen him in weeks. ‘We’ve got some measuring up to do.’

Helen dawdled over her breakfast the next day, enjoying the sense of the sunshine waiting outside, the settled blue of the sky and the air warm through the open window. She had
War and Peace
in front of her, propped up against a pile of newspapers so she could finish the last few pages. The book was too thick to stay open by itself, so she had to eat with one hand and keep it flat with the other. And she read about Prince Andrei’s death, Natasha’s grief, her toast cold on the plate in front of her, and the pages turned faster as she rushed towards the end, needing to discover what happened to those left alive, the survivors of the mud and the dark and the battles.

She swam up through the layers of words, almost surprised to find herself in the kitchen, her bare toes curled around the rung of her stool and the slant of the sun hot against her forearm. She read the final lines again. Surely that wasn’t it? He couldn’t end it on that half line, with Natasha drained of her sparkle and stuck forever with fat, boring Pierre. The epilogue was all about Napoleon, but she leafed through it anyway, desperate for more. Names sprang out. Natasha and Princess Marie, smug in the countryside, poor Sonya, pretending to be happy. She let the book close. That was it. She felt drained, unable to make a decision on what to do next. The sound of a blackbird singing floated in from the garden, and she stared at her half-finished mug of tea, wondering if she could be bothered to pick it up.

As if the thought of tea had called him, the back door opened and Mick came in. He swept the newspapers to one side, sending Helen’s book flying. His presence, solid and impatient, brought her back to life.