Skeletons (12 page)

‘You obviously don’t know Jessie,’ Jen said, attempting a joke.

Cass just looked at her.

Jen fished in her bag for her phone. ‘I’ve brought photos, look. Jason and I have been married for twenty years, by the way … well, I suppose you know that.’

‘That’s a long time, these days. I’m a fuck up at relationships myself,’ Cass said. ‘It’s hard to trust anyone when you really know what people are capable of.’

‘I suppose you’ve seen pictures of them already,’ Jen said, finding a recent one of Jason, anyway.

‘Of course.’ Cass took the phone, and studied the picture. ‘Wow, he’s getting old.’

Jen realized Cass couldn’t have seen him lately. It seemed to her that Jason had got older in tiny, almost imperceptible, increments. It wasn’t like he woke up one morning last week and suddenly looked middle-aged. Even despite the
radical haircut.

‘Charles hasn’t shown you any recent ones, then?’

‘I don’t think he likes to be reminded of his double life too often.’

‘That’s Poppy,’ Jen said, showing her a snap she had taken of herself and Poppy gurning up at the camera, in a slightly drunken embrace, Jen straining to hold the phone far enough away to include them both in the picture.

‘She looks like Dad.’

‘I don’t think I have any pictures of Jessie …’ Jen felt herself babbling on, couldn’t stop. ‘This phone is quite new, so –’

‘Jennifer … Jen, what do you actually want?’

‘I have no idea. The idea was to tell you Charles had a
loving family at home and to ask you to break it off with him.’

‘Well, that went to plan.’

Jen exhaled loudly. ‘Please, don’t tell Charles I was here.’

‘You really think Amelia has never known all these years?’

‘God, no. Of course not. And she mustn’t. It would devastate her.’

‘It’s OK. I’m used to being Dad’s guilty little secret.’

A slight edge crept into her voice as she said this. Almost undetectable, but there, nonetheless.

‘Do you know why I haven’t seen any recent photos of Jason?’ she said, and then she carried on, not waiting for an answer, ‘Because I asked Dad not to show me any more. Do you have any idea what it’s like knowing all
your life that your dad has three other children who get all his attention? Ones who can actually be seen out in public with him?’

Jen didn’t say anything. There wasn’t really anything else she could say.

‘I’m sorry, Jen, you seem like a nice woman, and I’m sure Jason is a good guy, if you say so. I’m sure all of them are.’

‘I don’t know what to think. Jesus. That is really fucked up.’

‘Well, it isn’t
The Brady Bunch
, that’s for certain.’

‘They mustn’t ever find out.’ Jen realized that this secret was going to have to stay just that, a secret.

No one would benefit from it being brought out into the open. Not Jason, who had spent his whole life idolizing his dad, not his sisters, who would probably never get over finding out that their whole happy upbringing had been a sham, not Amelia,
who would surely crumble in
the face of the truth. And, if she was being honest, not her either. Because if Charles’s secret came out, then how could the family –
her
family – ever stay together?

A flicker of irritation, or even anger, passed across Cass’s face. ‘God, no, the chosen ones must never be disabused.’

‘How would it help anyone, if four more people had their lives ruined? More, actually, because my kids … they love Charles.’

‘Ah yes, the grandchildren. That just about sealed the deal. Once they started coming along, there was no question my mum was going to get her happy ending. Even if they did drag it out for a few more years.’

‘They’re just kids still. They’re not to blame in any of this.’

‘They’re not that much younger than me, are they?’ Cass snapped.

‘They’re eighteen and twenty,’ Jen said. ‘They’ve barely even left home.’

‘Sorry, that was uncalled for. Sometimes it just makes me angry, that’s all, but I have to remember it’s Dad I should be angry at, not the rest of them.’

‘I shouldn’t have come down. I don’t know what I thought I was hoping to achieve, but I’ve just managed to upset you. I’m sorry.’

‘Stop apologizing. You weren’t to know.’

They sat there, not saying anything for a moment.

‘I should go,’ Jen said, leaning down to pick up her bag. ‘I have to get back to London.’

She could hardly think straight, her mind was so crowded with images of Charles with another woman, Charles
bringing up a strange little girl who called him Dad, him arriving at their house after a day
at work, slinging his coat on a hook, fixing a gin and tonic, putting on his slippers, sitting in his favourite chair, temporarily forgetting he had a wife and three children at home because he had what amounted to another wife and a daughter here. How was it possible to carry that off for
sixteen-odd years, and still have your family believe you were the perfect father?

She wondered, briefly, whether Cass was a fantasist, making the whole story up to be dramatic. It was something she could imagine Jessie doing to get sympathy. But there was no doubt in her mind, really. There was no question that this whole
thing had turned out to be a bigger, much more complicated mess than she had ever imagined.

Cass was celebrating. A house she was looking after on the Hove seafront had just set off a bidding war between two parties, and she’d managed to get one of them to agree to pay £44,000 above the asking price. The owners had been delighted,
of course, because these were credible buyers too. Cass had checked out their financials. There was only a chain of one. The sellers hadn’t yet exchanged on their new place but had agreed to put their things into storage and rent a flat for a while, if they had to. Not that the
recession really seemed to be affecting the buying power of the kind of people who bought houses from Masterson Property, but it had made them more cautious in one way. No one was going to risk missing out on a great deal.

Of course, she knew from experience that anything could still go wrong. She had encountered every kind of road block in her years on the job. Surveys, neighbours, schools, the wrong kind of light, bad feng shui – anything could cause people to
pull out, it seemed. Some just flat out changed their minds, decided to stay put or move to a different city altogether. She had a good feeling about the Stanhopes, though. And her intuition was usually pretty reliable.

Of course, she hadn’t spotted that Jennifer Blaine aka Jen Masterson was a faker on the phone. Her sixth sense had been caught napping. Taking a day off.

She had been desperate to tell someone about what had
happened, but it was out of the question that she share her story with any of her colleagues. No one at work knew she was Charles’s daughter,
and she wanted it to stay that way. Not least because she didn’t think any of them would appreciate having been lied to for three years. That left either her mum or Kara, who were the only people who had been party to every grim detail. She knew her mother would only worry. Barbara
lived both in hope that Charles would rekindle their relationship one day, and fear of it being discovered, thereby ensuring there was no chance.

So she’d called Kara and persuaded her to drive down from Haywards Heath for a drink. And then the offer on the house had come, and they had decided to turn it into a celebration. They were sitting drinking tall glasses of champagne from
extravagantly shaped flutes, at a table looking out over the dark seafront.

‘What did she look like?’ Kara asked, dropping an ice cube into her champagne. Kara always asked for ice cubes on the side with any drink, and would plop them in, one by one, swirling them around until they melted. She thought it
helped limit her alcohol consumption and therefore her calorie intake.

‘Pretty, I suppose. Red hair.’

Kara was a looks fascist. She believed that appearance was everything. Super skinny and groomed to perfection, she worked hard to disguise the fact that her face was a little on the plain side, too square and with a nose that was a touch too
prominent to be considered conventionally beautiful. She had very specific criteria on which she judged other women’s looks.

‘Thin?’

Cass shrugged. ‘Normal, I guess. What does it matter, anyway? She’s not the one who’s related to me.’

‘I just want to get the full picture. Who would play her in a film?’

Cass struggled to think. It was always much easier to play along with Kara than to ignore her. ‘Julianne Moore? She has red hair, doesn’t she? But younger.’

‘I have no idea who that is.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘What about Nicole Kidman? She’s on the red side of blonde.’

‘She looks nothing like Nicole Kidman.’

‘That girl in
The Help
?’

‘For God’s sake, Kara. I’m trying to tell you what happened –’

‘OK. Well, I’ll just picture the one from
The Help
, then.’

‘Fine, if that makes you happy. Not so pale, though. And forty years old.’

She told Kara the whole story, from the phone call through to her and Jen saying an awkward goodbye. She hadn’t known how to leave it, really. Once Jen had discovered that she was Charles’s daughter, rather than his lover (God, that
didn’t even bear thinking about, although it had seemed quite funny later on, and Kara thought it was hysterical. ‘I’ve always had a bit of a crush on your dad, actually,’ she had said, and Cass had held up her hand: ‘Enough’) it had been clear she had no
idea what to do next, what she should say. It had been obvious that her instinct was to protect her family, the real family, and who could blame her? Cass had been irritated, though. Pushed to one side and made to stand in the wings, again.

She had offered Jen a lift back to Brighton station. It had been pissing down, after all, and it would have seemed heartless not to. Jen had refused, though. Eager to get away and process the new
information she had discovered, no doubt. Eager to put some distance between them. She had asked Cass to direct her to a bus stop, and the last Cass had seen of her she’d been slogging along the road leaning into the almost horizontal rain. Cass had at least managed to persuade her to
accept an old umbrella she had in the boot of her car, and Jen had clutched it close to her head in an attempt to stop it blowing inside out. She had waved as Cass drove off.

It was a shame, really. She had seemed like a nice enough woman, and Cass could do with having a few more friends who knew about her situation. Kara was great – they had known each other since forever, since secondary school, and Kara
didn’t just know about Charles, she had met him several times at the house in Iver Heath – but she could be hard work. And sometimes Cass just felt like offloading all her frustrations and resentments without having to play twenty questions. Especially after she and her dad had had one
of their fights.

They were always rowing. Usually initiated by her. Cass knew, deep down, that what she was doing was pushing him as far as she could to see if – when – he would reject her completely. It was classic insecure behaviour. Make that classic insecure
adolescent behaviour; she had just never managed to outgrow that stage.

She adored her dad. Both adored and hated him. He had created a life for her and her mum that could never have had a happy ending. Of course, her mum had been
as much to blame. What had she been
thinking, taking up with another woman’s husband? In Barbara’s mind it had been some kind of all-consuming romantic impulse she had been powerless to ignore. To Cass it had always seemed a bit sad, a bit tacky. Not to mention deluded. They were always destined to be the poor
relations.

When she got to the end of her story, Kara reached out across the table and took her hand.

‘He’s got a lot to answer for, your dad.’

Cass smiled at her. She knew that, for all her faults, Kara completely got it, completely understood her anger and sadness and confusion, without her having to spell it out. There was a lot to be said for a shared history, and Kara was the
closest thing to a sister she had ever had. The others, Poppy and Jessie, didn’t count.

She had been thinking about what Jen had said about her own father. Was it worse to have grown up not knowing your father at all from the age of eight, because he hadn’t cared enough to keep in touch? Or to grow up knowing your dad cared
about you, but not being able to claim him as your own? It was a toss-up.

‘Let’s not talk about him any more. I’ll get another round.’

Jen could barely take it in. On the way home, she had stared out of the window at the passing countryside and tried to get things straight in her head. Was Cass being Charles’s daughter better or worse than her being his mistress? On the
one hand, it was a relief to know that Charles wasn’t sneaking out to have sex with a woman young enough to be his daughter. On the other hand, the woman
young enough to be his daughter – the woman she had thought he was sneaking off to have
sex with –
was
his daughter. A mistress could be got rid of. A daughter, Jen assumed, was for life.

And a woman who was Charles’s daughter was also Jason, Poppy and Jessie’s sister, like it or not. Nothing could change that now.

And even if Charles wasn’t cheating on Amelia now, he had spent sixteen years doing so. Cass’s mother hadn’t just been a passing fling that he may have regretted immediately. She had held as significant a role in his life as his
wife had. Well, almost. He must have loved her, anyway. Moved beyond the sex to the companionship and comfort of a real relationship. As betrayals went, it was about as bad as it got.

But the point was that nothing could change it now. Charles had another daughter. Whatever Jen did or didn’t do couldn’t make that fact go away.

‘Margaret from work’s just found out she has a half-brother from her dad’s first marriage,’ Jen said to Jason, trying to sound gossipy rather than giving the information any gravitas.

She wanted to test the water, check that she was doing the right thing if she decided to keep Charles’s secret to herself. OK, so the scenario she was positing wasn’t quite the same but the key issues were.

She knew that if she had more family somewhere herself, however remote or unconventional, she wouldn’t want to be kept from them. Jason had numbers on his side, though, enough to go around. Hopefully, that might make a difference.

‘Really?’ Jason said, taking his eyes off the TV for a moment to look at her.

They were settled down in front of
Autumnwatch
, glasses of wine in hand, dinner cleared away.

She nodded, trying her hardest to look as if she was just telling him an interesting snippet from work. ‘She’s trying to decide whether to track him down, or not.’

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean, why? Because he’s her brother.’

‘Well, he’s not really, is he? I mean, they share a bit of DNA but that’s about it.’

This took Jen by surprise. Jason was so big on family that she’d expected an entirely different response. ‘But, you’d be curious, wouldn’t you? I think I would.’

‘Maybe to see what they looked like, but that would be about it. I mean, if he was her full brother who got adopted, then, yes, maybe, but a half … I don’t know. It’s not that big a deal, I don’t
think.’

Jen had thought about it, thought about nothing else, it seemed, since her meeting with Cass. She didn’t agree – she would have been happy to grasp on to anyone who was a half, a quarter, anything. But then she didn’t even have a
cousin to speak of, so she would probably have laid claim to a monkey in a suit if someone had told her it had agreed to be her family. Hearing him say this definitely made her decision less burdensome, though.

‘I think I’d want to,’ she said.

She needed to make sure Jason was adamant. No room for maybes.

‘That’s because it’s different for you,’ he said, stretching a hand over and patting her leg.

She felt a little as if he was treating her like the family dog, or even a horse.

‘Miss Only-Child-Of-Only-Children-Of-Only-Children.’ He smiled at her, so she knew he was teasing.

‘Probably.’

Luckily, Cass had expressed no interest in hooking up with her second family. If Jason didn’t think he would have any motivation to meet a half-brother or -sister either, then she didn’t feel as if she was depriving him by not telling
him his father had had a child with his bit on the side. All that would achieve would be to break up both his family and his heart. OK, panic over. She knew what she had to do.

She had opened a can of worms but now she was closing it again. Quickly, before any of them escaped. Sealing the lid, nailing it down, hiding it under the bed.