Seven For a Secret (16 page)

Heather rushed home, superstitiously eager not to let Tom leave home for work without saying goodbye to her. It was all that talking with Julia about dead husbands. The automatic gates were opening just as she arrived, and Tom was about to pull out into the road. ‘Wait, don't go yet!' she called out of the window to him as he waved casually, showing no signs of stopping. Heather gave the horn an urgent blast and she pulled up on the grass verge by the gate, blocking Tom's exit. As he got out of the car Heather noticed that he didn't appear too thrilled to be stopped. He looked grouchy and defensive, as if he expected her to be about to ask if he'd remembered something mundane, such as had he put the dustbins out or paid the electricity bill.

‘I just wanted to say goodbye properly,' she told him as she wrapped her arms round his surprised body, and wondered if it was the fact that she smelled of warm compost and sweat that made him seem reluctant to touch her. He was so clean and crisp, as if both he and his uniform shirt had been triple starched together. ‘You will be careful up there in the sky won't you?' she said by way of a
bon voyage
blessing.

‘Course I will. Always am, not that much can go wrong.'

‘Don't say that!' Heather laughed and held up her crossed fingers. Over his shoulder she could see a large car slowing as it came out of the centre of the village towards the riverside houses. It was the cherry red Mercedes. She clutched Tom tighter to her and felt him positively twitch with surprise.

He put an awkward arm round her carefully as if afraid of causing creases. ‘Hey, it's OK, I'll miss you too,' he was muttering into Heather's hair as Iain, with a passenger, drew level, slowed almost to a halt and grinned mischievously at her. She uncrossed her fingers behind Tom's back and rearranged them into a rude V-sign. Leery bastard, she thought as he swished past as slowly as a kerb crawler before turning the huge car into Margot's gateway.

‘You know a secret that I don't know,' Margot's voice sang accusingly down the phone to Heather like a child taunting in a playground.

‘What kind of secret?' Heather inquired carefully. It could be anything; it could be that Margot suddenly wanted to be told how to grow tomatoes that didn't split their skins while they were still green, or to tell her about a diet guaranteed to lose ten pounds in a week without giving up gin.

‘I'll come round and we'll talk about it. Down by the river with a drink where no-one can hear us.' Margot's exaggerated whisper sounded gleeful, and Heather's spirits dropped. Margot was capable of great excitement about both diets and plants, but not to any extent that required tiptoeing to the river's edge to discuss them privately.

From her chair on the terrace, Delia could see Suzy and Tamsin swimming like lithe porpoises in the pool. When she was young, swimmers had breast-stroked steadily up and down and up and down a pool, purely for the exercise, or had rushed in and out of the sea at Eastbourne, gasping at the chill before bravely plunging into the waves for a bracing good-for-you swim. Water had been too cold for playing in then. The two girls lazed, and wallowed in the warm water, luxuriating, twisting, floating and diving like seals under and about wherever they fancied. Delia regretted suddenly that she had never opted to be one of those busy, determinedly athletic old people, the ones she saw from her flat going out after the bus-pass hour in pastel tracksuits and unsuitable tennis shoes that bounced like whitewall tyres, to take part in OAP step'n'stretch classes. She'd always thought they looked so ridiculously, well, American, was the only word that came instantly to mind. They reminded her of Florida, of the old people who banded together to enjoy their Golden Years in hearty packs. What, she thought as she watched the two girls effortlessly flexing their endless strength, was so golden about crinkled skin, muscles that took till lunchtime to regain a full range of movement after a night's sleep, and an ever-growing list of pleasurahle things that one was sure wouldn't be done again this side of the next life?
I'll buy a swimsuit
, she resolved,
and cross one thing off that list
.

Margot wasted no time, Heather thought, as she watched her stride up the drive. For a bulky woman she could certainly get around fast when she chose, and she reminded Heather of a floral carnival float breaking the speed limit on its way to the parade. Her mass of strawy hair was flying around as she walked, and her scarlet silk skirt splashed with yellow and white daisies streamed out behind her, filled with air like a racing yacht's spinnaker as she bustled across the gravel path.

‘Glad I caught you,' Margot said breathlessly as sheer enthusiastic momentum carried her past Heather and on into the kitchen.

Heather thought these words were ominous. At
what
had she caught her? She feigned bewilderment and busied herself with the intricate preparation of a couple of strong spritzers. ‘What's the great mystery, Margot?' Then flinging down the lemon she had been slicing, she gasped dramatically, hand to throat, and teased ‘Oh no, you haven't found out about me and Russell and the trip to Rome have you?'

‘What? Oh don't be silly,' Margot scolded, not even pausing for a second to allow for doubt. ‘Whoever in their right mind would want to go to Rome with my husband? He'd spend all his time pricing up Ferraris. No, no. What I want to know is what it is you've not been telling me and, please, don't pretend there's nothing going on,' she ordered, wagging her gold-painted fingernail at Heather. ‘I know there's some big mystery, and I can't
wait
to hear it.'

‘Let's go down to the river. We'll feed the ducks,' Heather murmured as she gained time by rifling through the bread bin.

The two women strolled down the garden, Margot giving an excited little skip every now and then and grinning in a keyed-up fashion that Heather thought almost charmingly childlike. It gave her a few moments to think about what to tell her, but that, of course, depended on what Margot already knew. She must know something, after all. She was positively keyed up with the burden of guessed-at gossip.

‘So what's got you all inquisitive then? What am I supposed to have done?' she asked as they settled themselves on the bench looking out over to farmland across the water.

‘You're very naughty, you know that?' Margot said. ‘You knew him all along, didn't you, and you let me rattle on about Iain MacRae and him being a Sir and all that, and you knew him all the time.'

‘Not all the time. Not for a very long time, actually,' Heather corrected her, and took a long sip of the cool drink. ‘But why do you think so anyway? Has he said something?' It occurred to her she should have known better than to trust him.

‘I was in his car. I saw you give him quite a nasty deliberate v-sign, pretty spiteful for you, you're not usually like that. And I know it couldn't have been meant for me because we haven't had words. Not yet anyway. We will if you don't tell me anything,' she giggled. ‘So I reckoned, and with a sod of a husband like Russell you get to be quite a detective, I reckoned that meant you knew Iain well enough to dislike him. But of course when I asked him, he did that awful thing of just tapping his nose and saying “Aha, wouldn't you like to know.” I
hate
it when people do that, don't you?'

‘Yes I do,' Heather agreed. ‘They always look so pleased with themselves. I can just imagine Iain.'

‘Ah, so I was right, you
do
know him,' Margot leapt in quickly. ‘How well and where from?'

‘He didn't tell you then?'

‘He said I should ask you. He said it was no secret as far as he was concerned and that it was entirely up to you.' Margot had calmed down now and was placidly lighting a cigarette, confident that she could settle back and wait for a truthful reply. ‘It was a terrible thing to say, you know, guaranteed to make me far more curious than if he'd told some suitable lie. So you can blame him.'

‘Oh I will, I will.' Heather herself was thinking about a suitable lie. He could hardly be an old childhood friend, Iain was so obviously a perfectly sanded-down, smooth-cornered ex-public school type. If it wasn't that lust was more or less classless, their paths would hardly have crossed out in suburban Staines. Someone she'd met on a holiday? That wouldn't merit a lasting up-yours loathing. ‘He's my ex-husband,' she said simply, smiling her honesty directly into Margot's astonished eyes.

‘He isn't!' Margot exclaimed. ‘I don't believe you!'

‘OK, that's fine. You asked, I told you.' Perhaps she should have said that to Tom when he'd asked, and if he'd reacted in the same way then at least he couldn't complain later that she'd been lying. She'd found it a useful trick, when young and still living at home and trekking daily to the college, simply to tell her mother the dreadful truth about what she was up to. It saved having to remember what lies she'd told to cover her tracks and which might need to be recalled on the inevitable cross-examination. When Heather arrived home sleepily on a Sunday morning from a party the night before, her mother would concentrate her inquisitive gaze on the washing up or something interesting in the fridge and ask things like, ‘And did all the boys stay the night too? I'm sure Wendy's house only has three bedrooms.'

Heather would yawn and stretch and languidly answer, ‘Oh we all just slept together, some on the floor, some on the beds. Just like an orgy, you know?'

‘Now don't be silly,' Delia would say, tutting. ‘Wendy's not the type to allow that sort of thing.' Wendy
was
the type, though. It was just that Delia wasn't the type to believe it.

And now here was Margot, sitting under Heather's willow, admiring the feathery-fronded astilbes and niggling for a more credible answer. ‘No, really. How
do
you know him?'

Heather frowned. This wasn't supposed to happen. Margot was supposed to laugh and then politely give up. She got up and threw chunks of bread to a pair of cruising mallards trailing three half-grown ducklings, the remains of their fox-ravaged family. ‘Actually it's true. I told you about it on the way to speech day. It was Iain that I married and I haven't seen him since the day he put me on the train in Edinburgh and sent me back to my mother. Must have been, ooh, all of three months later. And before you ask, I haven't
wanted
to see him, either.'

Margot became unusually pensive. ‘What does Tom think of him suddenly turning up here?' she asked.

Heather fidgeted with her glass and picked out a piece of ice to melt over her hot fingers. ‘Tom doesn't actually know,' she confessed. ‘I sort of didn't quite manage to tell him last night, and today was a bit of a rush and now he's gone off to work.'

‘You didn't
tell
him? Your mother must have seen him at the party, what did she think?'

Heather felt very shifty confessing to Margot, ‘Well she doesn't actually know either. I'd rather she didn't. All that stuff was over years ago. Years and years ago. It was just a few months out of a lifetime, that's all.'

It didn't feel like ‘that's all' the next morning, when Heather was getting ready for the lunch with Iain. It annoyed her enormously that she seemed to be caring quite a lot about what she wore. Neither dowdy nor dressy, but something effortlessly stylish in between was the impression she was aiming for, as she stared blankly into her wardrobe and pulled out a few possibles. He's already taking up too much of my thoughts, she complained to herself as she tried on a sandy linen shirt over a cream body and a long, side-buttoned toffee-coloured skirt. After putting on make-up and then crossly scrubbing most of it off again to ensure that she looked a lot less than eager, she escaped quickly into her car. On the way out she promised Delia, who had a left-out face on, that she wasn't missing a treat, just a boring business lunch at which the relative properties of cow manure versus horse were likely to be the most fascinating topics of conversation. It's not far from the truth, she thought, as she drove through the village, Iain will probably talk a lot of crap.

Kate, on her reluctant way to the kennels, had to wait on the pavement while the scarlet Mercedes glided out through Margot and Russell's massive iron gates. Iain's hand came up and waved a regal greeting to her, but Kate couldn't fool herself that his eyes were on anything but the road. His absence was a disappointment – it left nothing to lighten the tedium of walking two moody basset hounds and a Pekingese with a bladder problem. ‘With all that fur, it's hard to tell when he's actually lifting his leg, so be patient with him,' Margot warned her as she searched through the shaggy pelt to find somewhere to fix the lead. Kate hung around on the edge of the orchard long enough for the three dogs to become thoroughly tangled while she watched some of the film crew attaching cables as fat as fire hoses to something in a lorry. Brian, his jeans drooping to expose road-digger's bum-cleavage, was shouting something about a ‘jenny'.

‘A generator, to you and me,' Margot explained, proud to show off the new knowledge she was acquiring. ‘Nothing's happening yet, nothing worth watching. No actors or anything,' she told her as she patiently helped Kate to sort out the leads.

Kate wandered across the recreation ground towards the woods, hoping she wouldn't come across Simon. She hadn't seen him since the party. Hadn't seen him, she reminded herself, since he'd sneaked into the garden and wandered around in the dark like a lovesick swain.
Gutless idiot
, she said to herself, tugging at the lumbering basset hounds, didn't even have the nerve to throw stones at her window. The worst he could have got was a sleepy ‘Fuck off' from her; surely he should have had the nerve to risk that. Darren wouldn't have been so pathetic. If he'd gone into the garden in the middle of the night, she was sure he wouldn't have expected to go home without what he and his mates called ‘a result'.