Past Secrets (26 page)

She’s in my office now and if you’ve some free time, come on in. She’s going to do a consultation on me.’

A few days ago, Faye would have loved to meet this woman, but not today. She couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm for life coaches or even her beloved business.

‘Grace, you don’t need a consultation. Nobody has more confidence than you and they don’t do any better ball-busting office suits than the sort of things you wear. What help can she give you?’

‘Well, I’d love to know if longer hair would suit me,’ Grace said, thoughtfully, fingering her short, expertly highlighted blonde hair. ‘And Ellen has such an eye. You know, my hairdresser says he likes the way my hair is, but he would say that, wouldn’t he? He cuts it. Come on, meet her.

‘Just for ten minutes,’ countered Faye. ‘I’ll follow you down to your office.’ She shouldn’t have come into work at all - she should have phoned in sick.

How could she make polite conversation in the midst of her grief?

She delayed following Grace, hoping that by the time she arrived in Grace’s office, Ellen might have gone. No such luck.

‘Hello,’ Faye said. ‘I’ve really only got a minute, Grace, because I’ve got to …’

‘Hey, sit down,’ interrupted Grace, in a voice that brooked no opposition.

Faye knew when she was beaten. Still, she could say hello, be charming and leave in five minutes.

‘Meet Ellen.’ Ellen was not the tall and exquisite creature that Faye expected. All the life coaches and stylists she had ever seen had exuded as much glamour as confidence. Ellen was remarkably normal-looking, around Faye’s age and was simply but elegantly made up. She was beautifully dressed in a fitted skirt suit in a lovely pale grey that Faye wouldn’t have looked at in a million years. Her eyes shone with a wealth of experience and innate selfconfidence.

‘Hello,’ said Ellen. ‘Nice to meet you, Faye.’

Even her voice was elegant.

They talked about the business for a few moments, with Faye eager to be gone. This was Grace’s area of expertise.

Grace liked nice clothes and high heels because she liked attracting attention, sexual allure was part of what made Grace tick. It was a part of Faye that she’d ruthlessly ripped out. She never wanted a man to fancy her again.

No man would ever call her honey or Silver or touch her again. Men were not on her agenda, ever.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she said finally, when she judged she could leave.

‘It was nice to meet you,’ said Ellen, and Faye could see the other woman’s eyes on her, perhaps itching to do a makeover on her.

It was all so superficial - style your hair, weir better suits, have a make-up lesson - who cared?

Faye thought, rage from somewhere deep inside her bubbling up. Who really cared what people looked like? The outside didn’t matter. It was the inside that counted - didn’t anybody understand that? Never mind that Faye’s inside was a mess.

Five miles away, in the comfort of Karl’s admittedly rather fusty-smelling bed, Amber stretched and luxuriated. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and she wasn’t sitting in crappy old Irish class, bored out of her brain, thinking of the exams and what she was going to do for the summer.

No, she was lying beside the man she loved, the man who was soon going to wake up and start kissing her gently, nibbling her neck and making love to her.

Then, maybe they’d get up and have a late, luxurious breakfast, padding around the flat together in their bare feet. She might wear one of his shirts: people did that in films, it was sort of cute. Then they could curl up on the couch and watch old movies and it would be blissful.

She and Mum used to love the afternoon movies when she was growing up, all those blackandwhite classics. It was especially nice on winter weekends when the rain pelted down outside and they’d sit, cosy in their home, and …

Amber didn’t want to think about Mum, because then she’d feel guilty. But it was all her mother’s fault really. Her obsession with never upsetting the neighbours and having to always be whiter than white because ‘you’ve got no dad and we don’t want anyone looking down on the Reid family, making assumptions and remarks’.

What sort of assumptions would they make? it used to drive Amber mad.

If only Mum hadn’t been so obsessed with all that crap she might have noticed Amber changing, or she might have understood why Amber had wanted to change.

None of it mattered any more anyway. She was with Karl and that was what mattered, as she’d told Mum. It had been horrible but it was over.

Amber had kept her mobile phone off since, afraid her mother would ring, demanding that she come home. Or worse, crying and looking devastated, as she’d been yesterday. It had been weird to see her like that, all sad and pleading. Not like the strong mother she knew.

‘Hiya, baby,’ murmured Karl, half awake. He rolled over in the bed, closed his eyes and appeared to sink back into sleep.

Amber stroked the back of his neck hopefully.

She didn’t want to lie here with her feelings for company: she wanted Karl to take her mind off them.

But Karl was asleep again.

Maybe she’d ring Gran, just to tell her to keep an eye on Mum, because knowing Mum she wouldn’t tell anybody that Amber had left. That would be so her.

She’d ring Gran and explain, then Gran could explain to Mum, who’d get over it and perhaps, even fly out to New York to meet them when she and Karl were settled. Amber hoped the record company could sort out an apartment for them to stay in, something with a balcony, perhaps.

Or maybe a modern house, with huge glass windows that looked out on to the sea in the Hamptons. Now that would be major league. Ella could come and stay too, when they were back talking to each other again.

Time, Amber decided, was all it would take and everyone would get used to the idea. Stan answered the phone at Gran’s house and he sounded as he always did, relaxed and laid-back, as if every day was a joy to be savoured, which indeed it was, according to Stan.

Ella and Amber thought Stan was a howl. The complete opposite to Gran, who fired on all cylinders and never stopped moving or talking. Stan could sit in his chair and listen, without saying anything for ages. He was a good step-granddad, Ella used to say, seeing as Amber couldn’t really remember her real granddad.

‘You don’t have much luck with male relatives, do you?’ Ella had said one day. ‘I mean, your dad’s dead, your granddad’s dead, you don’t know your dad’s family, what’s all that about?’

‘Dad was Scottish and he was only working in Ireland, I told you that,’ Amber said, annoyed at her friend’s thoughtlessness. ‘Oh, it’s complicated.’

Ella was such a pain sometimes. Just because she had all her family around her with relatives coming out her ears, she thought everyone else should be the same.

‘But it’s romantic, isn’t it?’ said Ella, wistful now.

‘Make up your mind,’ Amber said crossly. ‘One minute it’s weird and strange, the next minute it’s romantic, which is it?’

She’d often wondered about her dad, and what sort of father he’d be: strict and tough, or pretending to be strict, a bit like Ella’s dad, who was a total softie under all that crosspatch, ‘I’m your father and listen to me’ stuff. Amber’s mum didn’t talk enough about Dad, she felt. She knew so little about him. Even Gran said practically nothing about him.

She just knew he’d loved her. They hadn’t known each other long when Mum got pregnant.

‘We wanted to bring you up properly, together,’

Mum had said. And then Dad was killed in a car accident, and he’d only a few relatives left and they’d moved, so Amber and her mum had lost touch with them. She’d like to search for them sometime.

‘Your gran’s in the kitchen baking,’ said Stan now to Amber. ‘Yet another church event she’s been asked to make cakes for.’

Just like Mum, thought Amber, another tinge of irritation hitting her. What was it with her mother and grandmother and all this church baking, holier than thou stuff?

‘I’ll get her for you,’ said Stan.

‘Hello, love,’ said Gran cheerily after a long period when Amber could imagine her dusting off her floury hands and sitting down on the tapestry stool in the hall where the old-fashioned round dial phone sat. ‘I can’t talk for long. I’m about to put my cakes in the oven and you know how cakes can flop if you hesitate. How are you, love? And why are you ringing me now? You should be at school - is something wrong?’

‘No, I’m fine. The thing is, Gran,’ said Amber, and suddenly it seemed quite hard to say this, ‘I’m not at school because I’ve left home and …’

‘You’ve left home?’ The tone of her grandmother’s voice didn’t change, but something steely came into it.

‘Yes,’ said Amber. This was definitely more difficult than she’d thought. ‘I’ve left home because I’ve fallen in love with somebody and Mum doesn’t understand. I want to go to America with him. I just thought I’d tell you so that you’d keep an eye on Mum, because she’s really upset.’

‘Really upset, was she?’ asked her grandmother, still steely, and Amber winced. ‘That’s not surprising if you told her you were leaving school to go to America with a man. When did all this happen?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘I meant,’ Gran said, when did you fall in love with this man?’

‘Over a month ago.’ It seemed such a short

length of time and yet, Amber felt as if she’d been with Karl for ever. Like Romeo and Juliet. Heloise and Abelard. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.

‘His name is Karl. He’s a musician, Gran, he’s so talented. You’d love him, really you would. And he loves me. Oh, Gran, say you’ll be on my side?

Mum doesn’t get it, you know what she’s like. I told her yesterday and, well, we had a row.’

‘Hold on and start from the beginning,’ her grandmother instructed.

So Amber did, leaving out the bit about how she and Ella had got into the club illegally and leaving out the sex stuff, obviously, because she couldn’t tell her grandmother that, but giving her the basics. How she and Karl were each other’s futures, how he really wanted her to come to America with him because he wrote better songs when she was with him. It made so much sense.

She could study art any time, that was a gift you never lost, wasn’t it? She could paint in America just as well as she could paint in Ireland and, as for the exams, she didn’t need a bit of paper to prove that she was going to be a doctor or a scientist or a teacher. She wanted to paint, it was simple, and she could do that anywhere.

Education was a fine thing in principle, but really what was the point of putting people in little boxes, so that you could decide what they were going to do for the rest of their lives, when you knew already what you wanted to do?

Amber finished this explanation in a rush and there was a pause. A long pause, that she found a bit uncomfortable.

‘Are you still there, Gran?’ she said, anxiously. ‘You haven’t gone off to put your cakes in the oven?’

‘I’m still here,’ her grandmother said with a certain coolness in her voice. ‘The cakes have shifted down my list of priorities, Amber. I’m trying to work out why you can’t be in love and be somebody’s muse without finishing your exams first, or perhaps without telling your mother in such a way that the two of you ended up in a big fight.’

Amber flinched at the way Gran said ‘muse’, much the way people said ‘door-to-door doubleglazing salesmen’.

‘That doesn’t sound like you, Amber, and it certainly doesn’t sound fair to your mother. You know how much she loves you.’

Amber did and this wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

‘Look, Gran, I’m not telling you this so that you can change my mind, I’m telling you so that you can keep an eye out for Mum. Obviously she doesn’t want to talk to me right now.’

‘I think that’s highly unlikely. I’m quite sure she has been ringing you on the hour, every hour,’

snapped her grandmother.

Amber flushed. She knew there were probably millions of messages on her phone but she didn’t want to listen to them, didn’t want to hear her

mother’s anxious, pleading voice. Everybody was blowing this whole thing out of all proportion: it was getting bigger and bigger, and it was going to be harder to sort out.

‘Look, all I’m saying is that you can be a grownup, live your own life and do what you want with the love of your life, but you can do it gently, in such a way that it doesn’t break your mother’s heart, Amber. And you can do your exams while you’re at it. You’ve spent your whole school life working towards this moment. What’s another month?’

‘That’s what everyone says,’ Amber said furiously. ‘It’s my life, I can make the decision. Isn’t that what you and Mum have always told me? To be in charge, to make my own decisions, not to follow the crowd.’

She knew that they hadn’t wanted those same words and ideas turned against them.

Gran sighed.

‘Without your father,’ she said delicately, ‘it was a very hard time for your mother.’

‘Yeah, well, I didn’t ask her to bury herself for me,’ Amber insisted. ‘That was her choice, Gran.

She built her life around me, but I can’t be responsible for that, so don’t try to make me feel guilty, because I’m not.’

That was what Karl had said when he told her she shouldn’t feel guilty. ‘You’re going off to have your life and she’s got to get it together on her own.’

Except that she did feel guilty and nervous: everyone was furious with her. What had she started?

‘Amber, why don’t you come here and I’ll ring Faye and get her to come here and we can all talk and get over this and maybe move on and …’

‘No,’ said Amber, thinking of Karl and how she couldn’t risk not being with him. If she contacted her mother, Mum would stop her and she had to be with Karl, she had to. ‘It was a mistake ringing you, Gran. I just wanted you to check up on Mum. I wanted you to know what had happened, that we’d had a row, but that’s it.

I’m going, OK?’

‘Call your mother, please,’ Gran begged. ‘Does she even know where you are? If you give her a chance to talk to you, you might understand.

You’ve got to see her side of the story, Amber, promise me you’ll phone her.’