The Summer of Secrets (5 page)

‘That’s my dad.’ Victoria had twisted to follow Helen’s gaze. ‘My uncle did the artwork.’

Helen read out the words beneath the figure. ‘Isle of Wight Festival, 1970.’ She turned a to speak over her shoulder. ‘We went to the Isle of Wight once. I can’t remember it really, except we had to walk everywhere.’ Her eyes returned to the poster and she started to read the list of names. ‘What sort of festival was it? There was a street parade in Cowes when we were there.’

Victoria fell back on the bed, holding her stomach as she let out a howl of disbelief.

‘A parade in Cowes? This was the Isle of Wight festival! Six hundred thousand people and Jimi Hendrix!’

Helen’s face was a single hot flush.

‘I’ve never heard of it.’ She looked back at the list of names. It was no use; she didn’t know any of them. ‘Was your dad in a band?’

Victoria pushed herself up again, and ran a finger down the poster.

‘Here – Cumulus. My dad was the drummer.’ She put a hand up towards the poster. ‘Well, obviously.’

‘Oh.’ Helen did a quick calculation. ‘So were you there too?’

Victoria nodded. ‘I don’t really remember it. I was only, what, two? Three?.’

‘Is he in a band now?’ Helen scanned the walls, trying to find him there.

‘My dad? Dunno.’ Victoria stared at the poster. ‘We haven’t seen him for a long time.’ Her face had darkened, as if clouds really were passing over. ‘But my uncle’s usually around in the summer. The artist one.’

‘Does he see your dad?’

‘Nobody does.’ Victoria stretched to her full length along the bed, keeping her fingers in touch with the wall and reaching for the far end with her toes. ‘The last we heard, he was in South America. He was fighting with the MIR in Chile.’ She turned her head and regarded Helen through half-closed eyes before sending her gaze back to the ceiling and giving a small sigh. Her voice was patient, explaining to an idiot: ‘
Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria
. In English, it’s the Revolutionary Left Movement.’

‘Oh.’ Helen paused, not sure if this was a good thing to have your father do or not. ‘My mum left in the spring.’ It was a relief to be able to say it to someone who might understand. She’d been the only one in her class with parents who didn’t live together.

‘Oh yeah? Where’d she go?’

‘Only to Southport.’ It sounded so commonplace. ‘I don’t see her, though.’

Victoria said nothing. She was right, Helen thought. It wasn’t much of a story. Trust her mum to leave in the dullest way possible. Her leg gave a twinge from the position it was in and she stole a glance down. Victoria was lying inches from her feet, fencing her in. She tried to shift into a more comfortable place without making too much of it, though Victoria seemed oblivious. On the windowsill, she could see a half-eaten apple, the bitten surface brown and curling inwards. A fly had come through the window, and now circled briefly before resting beside the stalk. She watched it shift, pause, and take off as the silence was broken by a shout from downstairs. Victoria jumped off the bed and ran out on to the landing. Helen could hear her calling something back down; a moment later her head came around the edge of the door.

‘Pizza time!’

Helen glanced at the poster again as she stood up to follow Victoria. The melancholy eyes of the drummer followed her out of the room. As she reached the top of the stairs Victoria, a few steps down, paused and fixed her with an intense expression on her face.

‘You can’t ever talk about it, what I told you about my dad.’ She took another couple of steps, before stopping again. ‘You have to promise.’

‘Of course I won’t.’ Helen stayed where she was for a few seconds, watching as Victoria carried on down, jumping the last section in one go. Was this all a massive windup? She recalled the expression on Victoria’s face as they’d studied the poster. If a story like that could happen to anyone, it would be this family. She’d just have to keep quiet and hope for more.

The pizzas were a communal affair, with everyone elbowing for space around the end of the table.

‘Do you do this often?’ Helen asked, shoving at her hair with the back of her wrist.

‘Only when someone can be bothered to get it started.’ Seth grinned at her as he dumped another ball of dough on the table. ‘We’ll end up picking bits off the furniture for weeks.’

Helen’s dough didn’t want to go into a pizza shape; it thickened and bulged, fighting back against the heels of her hands. She stood back for a rest, taking in the scene around her. The flour dusting the table rose up in the slanting light to settle in a fine layer over books, noses and hair. Victoria was adding arms and legs to her bases, and Seth was showing Pippa how to spin hers out on her fingertips. From under the table, she could hear Will banging something on the floor whilst giving a running commentary. It was, she thought, like being in a slightly weird dream. Cooking was something she’d been made to do at school, or tried with her mother standing there and telling her she was doing it all wrong. And with her dad, food was ready meals or stuff out of tins. Pizzas came in frozen stacks, to be heated in the microwave into a floppy fold. She would never be like that when she grew up and left home. As she let her mind wander to a future where she had a life full of colour, where exotic flavours and beautiful possessions were taken for granted, something hit the side of her face.

‘Earth calling Helen, we’re doing the toppings.’ Victoria was poised to throw another olive from the far side of the table.

‘Don’t waste them.’ Seth was bringing the saucepan over. ‘How about making some space?’

The sauce was still warm, and doing the toppings turned into a battle, getting spoons into the saucepan before it all went, grabbing the olives and cheese to layer on top. There were other odd ingredients as well, things Helen had never seen: a jar of soft peppers that slid through her fingers; anchovies; a long, mouldy-looking cylinder of salami.

They ate the pizzas in the living room, helping themselves from a huge tray in the middle of the worn carpet. To begin with, Helen slipped some of the more unfamiliar ingredients to one side, but bits kept getting mixed up and they didn’t taste too bad anyway. She gave up and tried not to worry about the trails of flour and tomato sauce and oil leading in from the kitchen. It didn’t seem to be bothering anyone else, and it wasn’t as if there were any adults to worry about. Dimly she could hear her mother’s voice in her head, fussing about fingers and crumbs; it seemed to come from another world entirely. Even so, her stomach tightened with anxiety when she heard voices at the door. She braced for the storm that must be about to erupt.

But the woman in the doorway was oblivious to the pizza on the floor and the sauce that had found its way into one twin’s hair and across the other twin’s T-shirt. She tapped them both on the head as she crossed the room to get to the stairs, but otherwise ignored them.

Anyway, this couldn’t be anyone’s mother. Helen had never seen such a beautiful face; the pale, delicate oval seemed to float against the peeling wallpaper, remote in some way, and calm. Helen gazed at the swathe of hair cascading over the woman’s shoulders, each strand a different shade, ranging from buttered toast to the most fragile baby white. She was wearing the same voluminous Eastern trousers that Victoria had, but in deep purple and with heavy embroidery at the ankles and waist. As she reached the corner she stopped, as if considering something. Helen eased herself back behind the cover of the sofa’s edge, and looked from one face to another. Pippa was leaning against Seth’s arm. Victoria’s head was down, and her fingers held the remains of a pizza crust, which she pinched and ripped into crumbs. Will was taking no notice of anyone, lying flat on his front and driving a toy car around the legs of the armchair.

Seth’s voice broke the silence. Disentangling himself from Pippa, he gave her cheek a gentle stroke before putting her to one side and standing up.

‘Was it good?’ He reached the woman and took her bag and her coat. ‘Come on, you need to go to bed.’

The woman’s eyes rested on him. The pause went on for a fraction too long.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, it was good. But there were too many people.’

As Seth steered her with a gentle hand towards the stairs, Victoria finally looked up. Her face was in the shadows and hard to read.

‘Night, Alice.’

Helen peered through the window of the oven door. The recipe book said twenty minutes, but she didn’t want to burn them. The glass was dark with the scorched brown of old meals, though, and she couldn’t see through. She reached for the handle and paused. Wasn’t it supposed to be bad for cakes if you let air in? Everyone laughing in Home Economics at someone’s disaster? She cracked it open a tiny bit but changed her mind. The warm, sweet smell wafted up towards her face as she checked the timer again. She’d better leave it a few more minutes.

The good weather had rolled out like a red carpet, one day of sunshine and blue sky after another. No, like a yellow brick road. She thought back to the emptiness of the time before the Dovers had come. Had it only been a week? She’d have died, spending the whole summer by herself. And the Helen from then floated through her mind, pale and wobbly. She rubbed her hands down her bare legs, now unmistakeably starting to turn brown, to reassure herself she was real, that this was happening. The timer started to ping, and she opened the oven door.

The cakes down one half of the tray were golden, well risen and firm. The others had fallen away a bit, with the ones in the last row barely reaching the top of their paper cases. They were a much darker brown as well, but not, she hoped, actually burned. The previous day, she and Victoria had discussed their favourite cakes. Hers was Battenberg, something remembered as a special childhood treat, to be picked apart and eaten in constituent order. Victoria had scoffed at cakes that you bought in packets, and instead described freshly cooked doughnuts from roadside stalls, and pastry shops where the shelves were stacked with delicate squares glazed with fruit. The stories of Victoria’s travels coiled through most of their conversations, until Helen could almost imagine being there as well.

Seth’s voice had broken into this particular thread: ‘They never taste as good as they look, though.’

‘Didn’t stop you eating them,’ Victoria had said.

‘Wouldn’t have them going to waste.’ He’d given Helen a sideways grin to make her feel included. ‘If you ask me, the best cakes are those butterfly ones, like you get at school fêtes.’

So these were for Seth. Over the week, she’d eaten all sorts of new things that the Dover children took for granted. Spaghetti from a long paper packet with nothing added but oil and herbs. Things from tins with French names: ratatouille, cassoulet. A sort of grain you had to pour hot water on, which they mixed with a fiery paste. She’d joined in, clumsily chopping onions, or stirring when directed. Once or twice, Seth had taken a plateful upstairs, but more often it was as if Alice didn’t exist. Sometimes Helen would find herself looking at the stairs and wondering if Alice was up there or not. She couldn’t decide on the right way to ask, and in the end, stopped noticing.

The cakes were also a way of proving she could do something of her own, and she’d found Seth’s choice in the only recipe book her mother had left behind. She pulled the book over now to check again on the buttercream filling. There was no icing sugar, so she’d had to make do with a bag of hardened caster sugar that had been hidden away at the back of the cupboard. As she pushed the wooden spoon into the block of butter, the crystal edges of sugar began to break, with a satisfying crunch. She let her mind drift, picturing Seth taking a cake, smiling at her, saying how nice it was.

She’d barely finished scooping the last of the buttercream into its hollow when Pippa burst through the door.

‘Victoria needs you to come over!’ She was panting from her run. ‘Ooh, those are pretty. Can I have one?’

It was good to hear. The cakes didn’t look much like the picture in the book. Helen broke the flattest one in half.

‘Here you are. We’ll take the others with us.’ She’d spent enough time with Pippa to guess the summons wasn’t as urgent as it sounded. ‘What’s she doing?’

Pippa shrugged her shoulders.

‘I’m going to have that one next. The one with three wings.’

The cottage kitchen was full of steam. Helen paused on the step, wondering if Victoria had been baking as well.

‘About time.’ Victoria turned from her position in front of the stove and pointed to the saucepan on the gas ring. ‘Stir!’

Helen squeezed her plate of cakes into a space on the dresser and did as she was told.

‘Is it supposed to look like this?’

The pan was half-f of a lumpy grey mass with a slowly erupting surface.

Victoria was kneeling on the sink, trying to open the window. It had been sealed with years of repainting, though, and she didn’t seem to be having much luck. She gave the frame another bang with the heel of her hand and it jerked out a few inches, one of the panes of glass falling loose. They both stopped to listen as it shattered on the stones outside.

‘Oh well.’ Victoria manoeuvred herself down from her perch. ‘At least we’ll get some air in.’

Helen looked back at her saucepan.

‘What is it?’

Victoria came back and, lifting the wooden spoon, let the mixture drip off.

‘That’s about right.’ She carried the saucepan across to the table, then took an empty one across to the tap. ‘But we’re going to need loads more. Pass me the flour.’

‘Need it for what?’ Helen went to the cardboard box in the corner where they kept their stores. ‘Dinner?’

‘Mmm, yes, does it tempt you?’ Victoria dumped the new pan on the stovetop and held out a hand for the flour. ‘It’s glue, actually. We’re going to paper my ceiling.’

‘With this? Really?’ Helen dipped the tip of a finger into the mass. ‘How do you know it’ll work?’

‘It always has before.’ Victoria emptied the entire bag into the water and turned the heat up under the saucepan. ‘Except once when we ran out of white flour and Alice said to use wholemeal. The walls went mouldy that time.’