Secrets (12 page)

She was a house-sitter who called his place home. Who'd filled it with a baby and constantly clean, line-dried washing. Who'd scrubbed out his cupboards and alphabetized his books. What was he
thinking
? He simply didn't know. But what he did know was that he was
feeling
more than he was thinking.

Think London, think London. He thought tomorrow couldn't come soon enough. He thought, I'll phone Rachel – she's always game when I'm in the city. He thought how tomorrow he'd be safely en route back to the way of life he'd cultivated over twenty years; feeling no greater link to London than he felt to France or anywhere else where he had a bridge and a girl.

‘Joe?’ He'd been lost in thought. ‘Tea?’

He cleared his throat but he still sounded hoarse from his long conversation with himself. ‘Please.’

The sound of the kettle busily boiling echoed the fast rattle of his thoughts. Ping. I'll take myself right out of her equation.

‘Maybe Dick'll make his millions, come back, swoop you up and take you to live with him on his ranch.’ (Joe decided that, just as he chose to call Em Emmeline, he'd be referring to her father as Dickle from now on.)

‘Dick? On a
ranch
?’ Tess baulked. ‘Dick's just a gorgeous, useless, beautiful, crazy dreamer. Even I can see that he's an utter waste of space.’

And, though Joe wasn't too keen on the swoon to Tess's voice, her conviction – heaped as it was with affection and generosity – made Joe quite certain that this Dickle was one area of her life that she really had worked out.

Chapter Eleven

Tess awoke feeling she'd been deprived proper rest. Her sleep had been so busy, so detailed, so involving, that she woke assuming she'd overslept because it felt that her dreams had ensnared her for so long. But the clock said six o'clock and the light, filtering through a gap in the curtains but not making it far into the room, verified this. She knew she had around twenty minutes before Em would wake and these she spent bemused that after over two years during which sex hadn't really crossed her mind, let alone featured on her agenda, three men had infiltrated her sleep in explicit dreams.

She thought back over the details. Dick was in all of them wearing the same beatific smile he famously employed, along with touch, to override the need for much cogent dialogue. In reality, it had irritated her; in last night's dreams it had her fooled. She recalled Dick and Seb together in one scene; that she was running along the pier, coming across the two of them at the end, fishing. Buddies, it appeared. They turned to her and closed in on her and she wasn't entirely sure who kissed her first and who it was kissing her then, and whose were those hands on her breasts, in her hair, grabbing her bum.

Switching on the bedside lamp, Tess dipped into the John Irving paperback that she'd taken from Joe's collection. But drifts of the other dream soon distracted her. Dick again, but this time, Joe too. They weren't in Saltburn. They were crowded with her in the kitchen of the Bounds Green flat. The three of them, pushed against the units. An overriding sense of furtive urgency. Someone, Dick, Joe – she couldn't tell – lifting her onto the work surface. A mouth against hers. A hand between her legs. The feeling of a man's hardness rubbing up against her thigh. One of them taking her hand down to the bulge in his trousers. The feeling of flesh. Her softness. Their firmness. The wetness and the heat. Being about to come.

Tess frowned. She shook her head because she really didn't want to do any more remembering. She didn't want to think about it, because thinking about it was undeniably arousing. That her hand was absent-mindedly between her legs proved the point. The buzz, the release, the sexual attention bestowed on her in the dreams – but she could only chastise herself for being turned on. You should be appalled, she told herself. Because the conclusion to both dreams had been horrible, unimaginable.

Em fending for herself.

Em neglected.

A small distressed baby toddling off down the pier while her mother made out with a surfer and a musician. A tiny tot, alone in the sitting room of a rented flat in Bounds Green, crying while Mummy was having a threesome in the galley kitchen with a musician and a bridge builder.

Tess stared hard at the Loom chair with yesterday's clothes that would have to do for today. What a load of crap. She decided that analysing dreams was as ridiculous as heeding horoscopes.

Mystic Bloody Meg and Sigmund Effing Freud.

This made her smile though still she felt discomfited. If there was meaning to these dreams, what was it exactly? That her desires as a woman, a grown-up, were not compatible with her responsibilities as a mother? That she could be one or the other but not both? In reality she'd all but dispensed with the sexual side of her nature. In the dreams, she'd actively chosen to forsake being a mother. She had heard the baby, seen the baby, been aware of the baby in both – but her lust had ridden roughshod over all sense of maternal duty.

Only stupid dreams.

I am wide awake.

So why am I feeling so wretched?

Because it felt good. I forgot how good it feels to come.

Because it's been a long, long time.

She couldn't afford to consider that these long-dormant cogs, now starting to turn, had come not from dreams, but from events preceding them. Talking about Dick. The realness of Seb. And whatever it was about Joe.

She left the bed to sit cross-legged on the floor, having opened the wardrobe door to see herself in the mirror and give her reflection a stern talking-to.

It doesn't mean anything. Once I had a kinky dream featuring that ugly old bloke who does the weather on TV. It does not mean that I fancy him in reality.

So Seb is cute but that's it. He's about a decade younger than me and lives a life of surf and beaches. And Dick left me high and dry and he's just a stupid boy who thinks he's Jim Morrison but he doesn't even come close.

Tess left the room in a hurry and went to her child's room, chanting to herself ‘Come on Baby Light My Fire’, which was totally inappropriate but it was the only Doors song she could recall just then.

Em was sitting quietly in her cot, bashing the toy lion against a cardboard book, its bead-eye making a satisfying tap. Tess scooped her up and whispered, Emmy Emmy Emmy into her neck.

And I don't fancy Joe. I absolutely cannot fancy Joe. Not just because he can be arrogant and sharp and he takes his beautiful house for granted. But because I'm only his house-sitter. It's like having a stupid crush on the boss. Ridiculous.

‘Aren't you staying around to give me a send-off, then?’ Joe asked an hour or so later, seeing Tess preparing the dog and the child for a walk.

‘Things to do,’ Tess said, busying herself with the zip on Em's cardigan, squatting down on her heels, inadvertently giving Joe an enticing view of the small of her back and beyond. ‘
Carpe diem
, and all that.’

She was preoccupied but Joe sensed this wasn't caused by a child's zip or a dog in a tangle. Just then, he wanted to crouch beside her, still her hands, say, hey – you OK? But he felt he couldn't very well do that, not least because his departure was imminent.

‘I'll call – if you like,’ he said instead, ‘to let you know when I'll be back.’ He paused. ‘Or just to say hi.’

Tess stopped fiddling, though the dog and child continued with their fidgeting regardless. She looked across and her gaze came to rest at Joe's lower legs. He was standing relaxed, leaning against the wall, his arms folded, looking down at her. He could see the top of her knickers from here. From this advantage point, he thought to himself.

‘OK,’ she said, glancing up at him, wondering why he was smiling like that.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘I'll keep in touch, then.’

She stood. ‘Bye then,’ she said but she loitered. She tickled Em under the chin. ‘Say bye bye to Joe, Em. Bye bye Joe. Say – bye bye.’

But the baby just stared at Joe.

‘Goodbye, Emmeline. Look after Wolf.’ And Joe gave her a little wave that she mimicked.

Ultimately, it was Joe giving them the send-off. He'd be gone by the time they were back.

‘Hey, Tess!’ he called down the driveway. She was just beyond the gate, just about to disappear from view. ‘I'll leave you my mobile number.’ She gave him the thumbs-up.

‘Hey, Tess!’ She turned again. ‘Shall I take yours?’

‘Don't have one,’ she called, ‘not any more.’ She paused. ‘Just call the home phone if you need me.’

Returning to the house, Joe thought he must be losing the plot for thinking how the house seemed deserted without that little lot. Then he scolded himself as a soft sod for again liking the way Tess said ‘home’. She never referred to the Resolution as the house, or your house – nor to the phone as the landline or house phone. Home was the word she always employed, whenever she could. Conversely, he chose not to use it much – the word or the place. He didn't want to hang around; he wanted to be on his way, with his London head on. But still he looked in at Tess's room and Emmeline's before he went. The doors had been closed but he left them ajar; as if inviting the new spirit those rooms now exuded to emanate through the house.

He'd miss them.

For fuck's sake, what was he thinking.

It took the rest of the day for the residual feelings from her dreams to dissipate and by the following morning, Tess felt restored. She also felt more than ready to tackle the tasks she'd set herself. One of which was to keep the doors to Joe's study and bedroom firmly shut.

It was fine and dry and Tess decided to make a start on the boot and utility rooms, taking all the old boots and coats into the garden. She pegged the jackets on the washing line, chucked onto the bonfire heap a waxed jacket so old and neglected that the fabric had cracked, shook out a dusty jumper and decided it still had life in it and just needed a wash. She thought about adding the gumboots to the bonfire pile, so ancient that the rubber had blanched and disintegrated, but she decided to dump them directly in the bin. The same fate awaited the single flip-flop. As it did the golf umbrella that, when opened, rattled and spewed its broken spokes like a science-lab skeleton that had come unscrewed. Anyway, Tess didn't think Joe was the umbrella type. He probably just turned his collar up against inclement weather. Or donned one of those yellow hard hats. She'd come across two already, had tried one on but resisted the urge to fit the straps and take a look.

With all the footwear out on the lawn either airing or awaiting their fate by fire or bin, she came across a bootjack. It was in the shape of a beetle, its antennae forming the heel grip, and she liked it so she gave it a reprieve. It would only need a clean and a lick of black gloss paint. However, the boot scraper resembling a hedgehog with a thatch of old coir as the spines was dumped without a second thought. It had turned mostly green, was covered with cobwebs, with evidence of large spiders lurking beneath. Sizeable ones had already made their displeasure known when Tess first started to clear out the utility room, putting themselves and Tess into a scuttle of panic.

On the shelves above the washing machine and tumble drier, crates were stacked; some plastic, some wood, some full, some empty. So
that's
where the spare light bulbs are. And batteries. Now Em's little singing tortoise could finally make music again! Jesus, how many packets of fuses does a man need? Rat poison? Meths? And what the hell is
this
stuff, with the skull and crossbones emblazoned all over it? Tess bagged it before she binned it.

She sorted through myriad items. Many were destined for the bin. A few would be better off living in one of the kitchen drawers. Some would stay in the utility room. Others needed to go into one of the garden sheds – but she'd have to sort those out too and they were currently padlocked. It amused her trying to correlate this Joe-of-the-Utility-Room with the Joe-of-the-Study. She wondered what Joe-in-London was doing. Then she told herself to change the subject.

As if reading her mind, Wolf scrambled up from his snooze in a barrage of barking and belted past Tess out into the garden. That mangy cat, no doubt. She was too engrossed in her sifting, and knew Wolf well enough by now, to think much of it. Into an old wooden wine crate (which she thought would scrub up nicely itself and could be re-employed elsewhere), she piled the items that were to live in the kitchen and took them through.

And there, she froze.

There
was
someone outside.

This time, there really was. It wasn't a shadow. It wasn't her imagination. It wasn't her reflection.

There was definitely someone out there looking in at her, and this time they weren't darting away.

So why wasn't Wolf continuing to bark?

And what could an elderly lady want? All the way up here? Was she lost?

And if she was smiling benignly, why did Tess feel rooted to the spot?

It was because something she couldn't yet decipher was oddly familiar.

The woman knocked on the window, as if unsure whether Tess had seen her though they were observing each other directly. She waved; the kind of gesture that suggested she was popping by for a prearranged cuppa. Then she disappeared from view. This was like a starter's gun for Tess and she hurried out through the utility room taking Wolf's route.

And there he was, the great oaf. Some guard dog. There he was, sitting beside the intruder looking very relaxed by the state of his lolling tongue. She was wearing sturdy lace-up shoes and dark tan tights and she had no ankles to speak of. Her hair was styled in a vague approximation of the Queen's and, though she was quite upright in figure, her coat was buttoned up wrong and her eyes were pale and searching. Though Tess realized she certainly was not ancient, she did appear infirm. One arm lolled by her side. The other hand was busy in her pocket. She was sneaking out treats for Wolf while she looked at Tess, as if she was waiting for her to make the first move. She certainly didn't have the air of a trespasser about her.