Secrets (43 page)

‘I had some advice about – well, you know – my situation. I know I've shied away from telling you too much and I've probably glossed over what I have told you. But anyway – there appears to be a way out, a legitimate one.’

‘I'm all ears.’

‘A friend of Joe's is a financial advisor. He came to see me – and he was so kind. He's going to set up a meeting for me with an Insolvency Practitioner. About whether I can avoid bankruptcy by choosing this thing called an Individual Voluntary Arrangement. Lisa – it may just allow me to settle my past debts and give me a future too.’

Lisa listened thoughtfully. ‘So – will it enable you to set up again? You could do the same skincare recipes under a different name, perhaps?’

‘Well, I could,’ Tess faltered. ‘But you know what, Lisa, I don't know if I'd want to. Not just because my confidence has had a knock – just that it's not something I think I want to do any more.’

‘Salon work?’

‘No – not salon work either.’

‘I mean, have your
own
.’

‘I don't want my own salon.’

‘What then? Seems a shame to let your talent and training go to waste.’

‘But it wouldn't – I like doing my voluntary work. I just don't like the trouble it's now got me into.’

‘Listen to me, love – it hasn't got you into trouble. The problem's with him. It's not your problem. And if he's got any sense he'll see that if he shares it with you, rather than blames you, then the problem won't be as big. Like you did with him – with yours.’

‘I know. But he said—’

‘Men – they're bastards, the buggers! They don't know how to argue properly. They just lash out with stupid one-liners.’

‘But lashing out hurt. What he said – about me being an emotional squatter.’

‘Sticks and stones, Tess, sticks and stones. Didn't they use just sticks and stones to build the earliest bridges?’

Chapter Thirty-eight

Oddly, for the first time the hill didn't feel particularly taxing. In fact, Tess had to consciously slow herself down. Then she realized this might be because she was unusually buggyless. What a novelty that was. She quickened her pace, hoping she'd be arriving back just in time to bath Em and she had strict instructions to phone Lisa whatever the time should she need to. She'd walked in time to a mantra –
I haven't done anything wrong! please let me explain!
Her grandmother had been a great believer in marching rhymes – but hers had never had any personal dimension. As she walked, Tess remembered journeys home from school with her grandmother, both of them chanting,
Left! Left! I had a good job and I left!
It never mattered to her that schoolmates saw, heard and sniggered. A quarter of a century later, she was stomping up the hill in time to
I haven't done anything wrong! Please let me explain!

The gate. She took a deep breath. The drive. Surreptitiously, she scanned the windows, relieved to see no face or faces looking out for her. Once again, she wished she still had a mobile. She could text Lisa or Tamsin – or send the same text to both – Shit! wish me luck! Txxx

The front door. Its usual groan. Tess stepped inside. The hallway was inviting and cool after the hot walk home and she slid off her shoes and stood still, settling her bare feet into the undulations of the stone slabs. The kitchen door was open but she sensed the room was empty. Tess knew Wolf well enough by now to be able to detect his presence in a room even if she couldn't quite see him. The sitting-room door was shut so they couldn't be in there. Were they in the garden? She'd already closed the front door as quietly as she could and she wasn't sure whether she wanted to go to the effort of easing it open again. Then she heard the pipes start up their clangorous objection to the hot water making its spasmodic journey from tank to tap.

They're upstairs, Tess thought to herself. Joe's running Em a bath. And for a moment, the notion of what he was doing allowed Tess to feel bolstered that maybe, just maybe, everything could turn out just fine.

On the first landing, Joe's bedroom door was open and she was helpless not to pad along the corridor to look inside. Her heart plummeted at the sight of his holdall on the bed all zipped up. Suddenly, the fact that he was doing the family thing of bathing a baby carried little weight. Nor did it matter to Tess any longer that Lisa and Tamsin both thought Joe owed
her
the apology and explanation. She simply didn't want him to leave and, just then, she thought if she could say sorry and tell him why, then maybe she could persuade him to stay. She felt anxious; adrenalin coursed through her body in erratic surges, like the hot water in the pipes in the house. As she trod the stairs up to her floor, all attempts at planning a soliloquy failed. She couldn't even remember her marching rhyme though it would have little impact on her faltering footsteps now. She couldn't remember what Lisa had said that made so much sense. And she didn't know if she trusted herself not to burst into the bathroom in sobbing disarray.

But she didn't. Because she heard Joe's voice first. And it was so calm, sweet and focused yet conversational, that it settled her nerves.

‘Bath-time for you, Miss Emmeline,’ she heard him say.

They weren't in the bathroom – she could see that. The door was open and Tess looked in and thought, he's used too much bubble bath. They were in Em's room. She made a slow passage towards the door, which she could see was ajar. It opened as she approached and Em appeared with her trademark chattering waddle, naked except for her nappy. Joe was just behind her. And Wolf was behind him.

‘And here is Mummy,’ he said, as if he'd been expecting to see Tess right at that moment all along, as if he'd told Emmeline that this was precisely what was going to happen. But he couldn't meet Tess's eyes, keeping his firmly fixed on the top of Emmeline's head.

‘Em,’ Tess said as she scooped up her child, ‘your nappy's on back to front.’

But Joe turned very obviously to Wolf and he said, ‘Didn't I tell you I thought it went the other way round?’

Tess couldn't meet Joe's eyes either. ‘I'll do the bath,’ she said and she bustled down the hallway to the bathroom, leaving Joe and Wolf glancing at each other on the threshold of Emmeline's room.

She couldn't avoid it any longer. Her baby had fallen sound asleep a full ten minutes ago. With an extra kiss to her index finger, which she transferred to Em's cheek, Tess left the room. She went to hers. She sat in the Loom chair and looked out of the window. Wolf was mooching about outside and Tess thought that from this almost aerial perspective, he looked like something hiding under someone else's coat. The sound of Joe's low whistle called Wolf to attention and it also made Tess leave the chair and tuck herself to the side of the window. She eased herself forward, millimetre by millimetre until she could just see him. Was he on the verge of leaving? Was his holdall now in the car? Was he taking Wolf with him? Though she could very well have continued to watch, unseen, she needed to verify the urgency of the evening. She left her room for a fleet-footed visit to his and all but rejoiced on seeing the bag still on the bed. She wasn't sure where to go next: upstairs, downstairs or outside. What she knew was that she wanted to talk and she wanted to listen and neither of those could be accomplished with the protagonists so far apart. She was not going to run away and she was not going to allow him to do so either. Warily, she went outside the long way round – exiting through the utility and boot rooms off the kitchen. She walked to where she had last seen Joe and Wolf. It was light, the evening sky was clear and the breeze had dropped. Wolf gruffled conversationally, seeing Tess before she saw him or before Joe saw her.

‘Oh, hullo, Wolf,’ she said as if he'd appeared from nowhere.

‘Hi,’ said Joe.

‘Oh,’ said Tess though she knew it sounded contrived, ‘hullo, Joe.’

‘I –’ he stopped. ‘Had a nice day.’

Tess nodded. ‘Fine, thanks.’

‘I meant
I
had a nice day,’ said Joe. ‘Sorry about the nappy.’

‘Well, it seems to have done the job,’ said Tess. Then she said, ‘I see you're all packed.’

‘Yup,’ Joe said, ‘I'm just about ready to hit the road.’

‘OK,’ said Tess.

‘Right,’ said Joe and he walked past her and into the house.

She stood outside and looked at Wolf.

‘Shit,’ she whispered. He butted his snout into her hand and managed to unfurl the tight clench of her fist to give her a sweet lick.

‘Right then,’ said Joe.

‘OK then,’ said Tess.

‘I'll be in touch,’ said Joe.

‘OK,’ said Tess.

And that was it.

He shut his car door and drove off, leaving the gate for Tess to close.

He made it to the airport. He put his car in his usual long stay. He queued to check in. He checked in. Hand luggage only. He was going back to Belgium. He wasn't entirely sure why. They didn't need him there. It was simply the place he'd come from and it was as if he wanted to retrace his steps, to rewind the last twenty-four hours so he could do it all differently a second time. He made it to the gate. They were boarding the plane. And that's when he thought, no, I'm not doing this. I'm not bloody doing this.

And he apologized, over and again to the airline staff and the security staff, telling them how sorry he was about all of this, and how much he regretted inconveniencing them – but he'd just been made aware of a family crisis that only he could sort out. He was escorted from airside back to the land-side, by a burly official who really didn't seem bothered whether Joe spoke or not. But Joe spoke. Joe could not shut himself up. Joe only hoped he wouldn't run out of energy or words by the time he arrived home.

Chapter Thirty-nine

Tess wrote to Joe. She wrote pages and pages. She started off on two sheets of A4 that were on the kitchen table and had crayon daubs by Em on one side only. Then she continued on the blank scraps of paper she used for shopping lists and to-do lists which she'd taken to keeping in a cone-like furl in one of the mugs on the Welsh dresser. When these ran out she rummaged through the drawer in the table on which the phone stood in the hallway and ripped out the back pages of two of the address books. They said
Notes
on them. These weren't notes, though, that Tess was writing, but the detailed story of her life – her regrets, her hopes, her ambition, the three wishes she'd love to have granted, and something that oughtn't to be a secret but which, hitherto, she'd kept from Joe. No more secrets, she wrote.

It was almost midnight when she wrote,
I'm sorry to have hurt you
. There was room for little more than the final full stop. Her fingers ached. She had no need to read it through, she knew exactly what was written because it was everything she wanted to say. But the silence of Joe not being there was hard on the ears so she wrote more; her words to fill the emptiness in his house.
I love you
, she wrote. And, after that, there really was nothing she could add.

‘The only problem is I don't know where to send it, Wolf.’

And then she thought perhaps that wasn't relevant. It was written, it was said, it was the truth and it would last as long as she did. Whenever it was that Joe came to read it, wherever she might be by then, nothing would have changed. It had been cathartic and exhilarating and revelatory and liberating and draining and painful; she had to haul herself upstairs, collapsing onto the bed without the energy to undress or pull the covers over herself.

She was in a fug of thick, dreamless sleep when she felt something on her cheek. Her eyes sprang open and her consciousness beat back her reverie with a nauseating shove.

‘What's –?’

‘Shh.’

Joe was sitting beside her in the darkness.

She jerked herself into a semi-seated position but he just said shh again and pushed her shoulders gently so that she lay down.

‘What are you –?’

‘I've been with the woman I love for the last two hours,’ he said. ‘I had to wake you to tell you so.’

Even though Tess was still in a woolly-headed blear from being abruptly woken from an exhausted sleep, she told herself, listen up, you need to hear this – this will be key in forcing you to move on. Because of this haze, she didn't consider it the least bit crazy for suddenly wondering whether KL was Kate Ell after all and whether this was the woman of whom Joe now spoke. It seemed ludicrously plausible just then. But then she thought if this was the case then she'd rather be alone and could Joe please go now. She suspected she needed to wake up a little more to be able to cry herself back to sleep. She tried to block out Tamsin saying, well, at least he was honest. And she tried to block out Lisa saying, so sorry for you, pet – but you'll be OK.

Cry. Sleep. Wake up. Run away again.

‘It's three in the morning and I've been sitting here, all this time, just watching you.’

The Tamsin and the Lisa in Tess's head were at once awed into silence.

‘Watching
me
?’ Why would he do that?

‘Watching you.’

And then Tess thought, right, I really have to wake up. She thought – could it be? The woman he's been with for two hours – did he really mean –?

‘
How
long have you been here?’ she asked.

He illuminated his watch. ‘Two hours,’ he said, ‘and a bit. I was at the airport. I was about to get on the plane and then I was just – I don't know – I was
consumed
by this need and this power to make right all the wrong.
All
the wrong, Tess. Because all the wrong has lasted too long and that's not right. They should rename the bloody A66 the Road to Damascus, I tell you. They had to escort me back through passport control and people were staring and I was grinning like an idiot because I was on my way back home to you.’

As he sat and thought about it, Tess noted how he was rocking slightly and smoothing his hands along his thighs. She touched his wrist lightly and he stopped moving and continued to speak.

‘I'm not going to let anything – from the past or in the future – jeopardize the blindingly obvious fact that you and I should be together,’ he said.

She put her finger up to his lips to say, it's OK, Joe – you don't need to say another thing. But he took her hand and kissed it. Then he laughed. Then it sounded as though he was about to cry.

‘I need you, Tess – you make sense of everything, you
are
everything, to me.’ He was stroking her arm, taking her hand between both of his. ‘I have to find a way – and I know now that you are the only person on this earth who can bridge over the hostile gorge that's kept my future at bay by my past.’

‘Joe –’

But now he put his finger against her lips.

‘We can do this together. You have all the raw materials that I need, Tess. I can build it now. You have a love that won't crack under the strain, that will weather any storm, that won't bend to the torsion of my weaknesses and inadequacies. I need these things that your love brings. Will you entrust your love to me, Tess – let me use my love to engineer a future on the firmest foundations that will span the way?’

‘Joe.’ She pulled him down to her, cupping his face as he came closer. She kissed him very lightly on the lips and rubbed her nose gently against his.

‘I'm so tired,’ he said and his voice was now hoarse and slow. He lay next to her and there they slept, in their clothes, on top of the covers, side by side, holding hands.

After breakfast, during which Tess thought to herself that anyone looking in on the kitchen might well think this family had been a strong single unit for a long time, she spoke to Em though she looked directly at Joe.

‘We're going to go to the pier, Em. Wolfy, Joe, Mummy, Em. We'll buy an ice cream on the way and then we'll find that magic bench.’

She saw Joe's eyebrows give a quick twist of confusion, so she continued. ‘We'll find the magic bench again, won't we? Where we all can sit, where things can be said, where secrets have no power because all the bad is washed away by the sea.’

It did strike Tess, when they were within sight of that bench, their ice creams now down to the rim of the cornet, that she could just turn to Joe and say, it doesn't matter what happened, all that matters is ahead of us. She was apprehensive about what he might say, whether he would tell her everything and whether everything might be too much for her to handle. It wouldn't be sweeping it under the carpet, she thought, it would just be letting sleeping dogs lie. And then she thought, enough of the clichés, if Joe wants to speak then let him.

But when they'd been sitting on the bench for long enough to be at the stage of nipping off the point of the cornet to suck the last of the ice cream through, Tess gave Joe a nudge. She had to give him another. She looked at him, he was staring way out beyond Huntcliff. Whatever was on his horizon was very different from the two tankers on Tess's. She put her arm around his shoulders and lay her head lightly and briefly against him, and she waited.

‘I didn't have a particularly happy childhood,’ Joe began. And that's all he said for a good few minutes.

‘In fact, it was pretty bloody miserable.’ And that was that, for a long while too.

‘But of course, no one would think it – not of the Doctor and the Doctor's Wife.’

Then his sentences came as a series of statements, each one self-contained. They could not flow into a single passage of speech. Their content made that impossible.

‘I couldn't say anything to anyone because I knew no one would believe me.

‘My mother had a succession of lovers who came to the house when my father was out.

‘Eventually, she didn't even bother to send them on their way before he came home.

‘Mind you, I caught him with his receptionist once. I was running an errand and I'd gone in to the surgery for Mrs Theberton's ointment. I was nine, I think.

‘Everyone hit everyone else in my house. But if they missed each other, I was a convenient bull's-eye.

‘The bathroom was cold and dark and dank and I hated it and they'd lock me in it. They'd lock me in it not just when I was naughty. She'd lock me in it when her men came round. He'd lock me in it if he was in a bad mood. I was locked there when they wanted to have their flaming rows without having to lower their voices in case I came into the room.

‘But of course he was the Doctor and she was the Doctor's Wife and men coming to the house could just be picking up prescriptions for their wives.

‘And it would be preposterous to even think, let alone suggest, that those welts on Joe's backside, or across his back, or along his thigh were from the hand of the Doctor or the Doctor's Wife. He's a lithe, sporty lad that Joe. Must've fallen running across the moors or larking on the beach or swimming ‘gainst the tide, or summat.’

Joe glanced at Tess and shrugged as if he'd said little more than that he never had pocket money as a child. She was open-mouthed, her eyes smarting. He smiled sadly at her.

‘Thank you for changing the bathroom, pet. It's a lovely room now.’

Joe sat there and felt that some of the badness had indeed drifted out to sea but, by the look on Tess's tear-streaked face, much of it had fallen on her. He wanted to be able to sweep it away from her shoulders as if it was little more than dust. She was sucking her bottom lip and blinking hard against the tears that appeared to be queuing across her eyes.

‘I'm OK, Tess,’ he told her. ‘You've helped me there. You've made that house a home for me for the first time in my life. You've shown me how beautiful a family can be – I mean, there may be only the two of you but to me you and Emmeline are textbook perfect. You with all your love and your lists and your potty systems and routines that suit the both of you. Emmeline with all that sunshine she radiates and the trust she shows because she knows that she's loved, she knows the world is a good place, she knows her mummy'll keep her safe.’

‘It must be so hard.’

‘I coped. I found a way. I had my sport. My pals. My studies.’

‘No, Joe – it must be so hard for you
now
. Your mother, to the world at large, is a sometimes stroppy but usually vague elderly lady.’

Joe looked at his lap then took one of Tess's hands and held it there. He nodded.

‘But before the dementia she wasn't the sort of woman, nor he the sort of man, with whom you could sit down and heart-to-heart it out.’

‘You and I,’ said Tess, ‘we're learning to do just that.’

Joe nodded. ‘Thank God.’

He paused. ‘My father died when I was in my mid-twenties. My mother became bitterer by the month, really. Then five years ago she fell – probably a mild stroke. But that's when her mind started to go. Just small things at first and, as a witness, you'd end up chastising yourself for thinking such things of her.’

‘You know she comes back?’

‘I know. That's a relatively new thing of hers. The strange thing is that before Swallows, she'd actually been living in a small terrace on Amber Street for a number of years. She said she hated this place but she refused to sell. So I moved back – sold my cottage in Carlton and came back here, for the convenience. I'm a bloke – I can compartmentalize. I can chuck secrets into old boxes like I dumped all that crap into the old boxes you sorted through in the utility room. I employed house-sitters – I swept my secrets and memories into the rooms I never went into.’