The Secrets Women Keep (16 page)

‘Perfect,’ Rose replied, leading the way out. As they reached the aisle, she looked upwards again. ‘I thought I saw Dan. Him.’ She gestured towards a man reading his
programme. ‘It isn’t, of course, but don’t you think they’re alike?’

Eve stared at the man in question, trying to spot a resemblance. Perhaps the shape of the nose in profile. A bit. Perhaps the chin at a certain angle. Dan with a haircut, maybe. But swarthier,
greyer, older. Perhaps. ‘No, not really,’ she concluded.

‘When we come back, and the lights go down, take another look.’ And Rose started up the stairs. ‘I often see him.’

Startled, Eve watched her back, her shoulder blades visible under her lavender jumper. Was Rose deluded with grief? Still? Four months after Dan’s death and Eve had hoped that she was
coping a little better now the first wave of terrible debilitating sorrow had broken.

They stood squashed together as the crowd swelled around them. Rose, seeming untroubled, looked about her. ‘I didn’t notice that,’ she said in reply to Eve’s criticism of
one of the actors. ‘I still can’t concentrate on anything, but at the same time, I do want to get back to normal. Well, the new normal. Seeing Dan threw me. It shouldn’t,
though,’ she went on without giving Eve a chance to interrupt. ‘I’ve seen him before.’

‘You have?’ For once, Eve didn’t know how to react. What she wanted to do was sweep Rose, who still looked so fragile, into a hug, but even had there been room, she would not
have welcomed the gesture. Publicly demonstrative Rose was not.

‘Mmm, yes. It’s funny. I don’t find it upsetting, not any more. At first it was, well . . . odd, I suppose. I’d see him walking down the street, in a passing car or
waiting for me. But then I’d get up close and realise it wasn’t him at all. In a funny way, it’s rather comforting.’

‘Comforting? It’d scare the bejaysus out of me.’ Eve took a sip of her very welcome wine.

‘It’s the same when I’m at home,’ Rose went on. ‘But different, because of course no one’s there. But I keep expecting him to appear, just like he used to. I
imagine a door opening and him standing there.’

‘Are you all right living on your own?’ Eve was feeling slightly out of her depth. ‘I rather thought you’d go and stay with Jess.’

‘She offered. So sweet of her.’ Their shared but unspoken thought was of Anna, who had done no such thing. ‘But I wouldn’t want to get in their way. She’s got so
much on her plate now Dan’s not here to oversee everything. And to be honest, it’s hard spending too long with her or Anna when my decision about what to do with the hotels is hanging
over us. Obviously they know that Dan left me his share in the business, so I own two thirds of it now. And they know that Madison Gadding have increased their offer for all three, thanks to Terry.
I should make a decision before they withdraw their interest, but equally I don’t want to rush into anything. I want to be sure I do what’s right.’

‘People say you’re not meant to do anything for a year,’ Eve advised, then added as an afterthought, ‘I hope Terry hasn’t been pressurising you?’

Rose shook her head. ‘How is he?’

‘Unmanned might be one way of describing it,’ Eve suggested. ‘I know redundancy is always a terrible shock, but he’s taken it so badly. And on top of Daniel’s
death.’

‘I’m sorry I haven’t done more.’ Rose ran the tip of her finger around the rim of her glass.

‘For heaven’s sake, woman, you’ve had enough on your plate without this. He’ll get through in the end.’ But remembering the Terry she’d left at home, Eve was
less sure than she sounded. ‘He didn’t see it coming at all. He needs to work, for his own self-esteem more than anything, but there are no jobs around. And he’s hardly in the
first flush.’

Before she could say any more, the bell cut their conversation short. Back in their seats, Eve followed Rose’s gaze to the man in the circle.

‘How funny,’ Rose said wistfully. ‘He’s not like Dan at all.’ She wrapped her arms around her body as if comforting herself.

Afterwards they emerged into the freezing night and trudged through the frozen slush, the last bleak reminder of the snowstorms that a week earlier had thrown the country into chaos. They headed
towards the French restaurant Eve had chosen.

Tucked into a side booth, they got the ordering out of the way – two steak and chips and two glasses of house red – before Eve asked, ‘How are you, Rose? Really.’

Rose leaned back against the seat, her bony left hand flat on the table, the other playing with her engagement and wedding rings that slid up and down her finger as easily as they twisted round,
much looser now. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I was so shocked, so bewildered at first. My life seemed to have stopped dead while everyone else’s was going on without
me. Now I feel as if I’m slowly coming to my senses. I’ve got to keep putting one foot in front of the other; it’s all I can do.’

‘Will you be all right for the memorial on Wednesday?’

‘I think so. I’ve had so many lovely letters, some from people I’ve never met, who are all coming. The weird thing is they all talk about another Dan rather than the one I
knew.’ She stopped playing with her rings and waited while the waiter poured their drinks. ‘No one says a bad word about him! Of course they wouldn’t, but they all conjure up some
kind of saint. And that he wasn’t! It’s as if there were two of him. In fact, sometimes I think I like their Dan more than the one I had.’

‘You’re not still worrying about that affair? If that’s what it was.’ Over the intervening months, Eve had wondered whether the whole text message thing hadn’t been
blown out of all proportion.

There was a pause as the waiter put their food in front of them.

‘Not worrying, no. It’s over. But sometimes I feel so angry with him for screwing everything up just before he died. How could he do that?’ Rose gripped her knife so her
knuckles turned white.

‘He was trying to tell you,’ Eve reminded her, remembering her own final conversation with him. ‘Us all being there made it impossible. We’ve talked about this.’
And they had, time and time again. In the confusion of the days following Dan’s death, Rose didn’t remember their conversations. She forgot them in the same way she forgot arrangements
she had made, or went to keep appointments at the wrong time, or left the iron on, or forgot to leave the money for the cleaner. Then she’d make Eve laugh by confessing her latest slip-up,
unable to believe she could have been so stupid, smiling at her own incompetence.

Afterwards they would return to the ghastly business of registering the death, repatriating the body and telling friends and family back home. Eve hadn’t flown back to England as planned
but had left Amy to manage the agency after all. Somehow the four of them – Rose, Eve, Terry and Anna – had negotiated that ghastly evening together: the visit to the hospital, the
nightmare of not being able to understand clearly what they were being told, of waiting for someone who could translate for them, the sight of Daniel lying alone, cold. None of them knowing what to
do.

‘Was he?’ asked Rose, sawing at her steak. ‘Wasn’t he just a man with a thirty-one-year itch who thought he could get away with it?’

This was new. During the couple of weeks since they had last seen each other, the old Rose had apparently lifted a corner of her shroud of despair and begun to peep out. During the immediate
aftermath of Dan’s death – a brain haemorrhage, they’d said once a doctor who spoke fluent English had been found, which translated as a massive stroke – Rose had shut down.
In those first terrible days, Eve had found it hard to control her own grief while she tried to support her friend. Meanwhile Rose herself remained stony-faced, concentrating on all the necessary
administration as if that would stop her from going under.

‘I’m not sure that’s the attitude you should have just before his memorial service!’

‘True,’ Rose agreed with a smile. ‘But they’ll all be there celebrating the life of the man I thought I knew when I obviously didn’t really and now I never will.
That’s quite a thing to come to terms with.’ She paused as a thought struck her. ‘You don’t think she’ll be there, do you?’

‘Who? “S”? She wouldn’t have the nerve.’

‘But we wouldn’t necessarily know. It happens in films all the time.’ Rose mused. ‘She’ll be wearing a black suit and a tiny black hat with a veil . . .’ She
picked up a French fry in her fingers and stared at it.

‘And looking deranged,’ added Eve, warming to the theme. ‘She’ll be peering out from behind a gravestone, or standing almost hidden by a yew tree, watching us all file
into the church . . .’

They laughed, then Eve raised her glass. ‘To Dan. Whoever he was.’

‘To Dan,’ Rose echoed. ‘And the fine mess he’s got us into.’

‘You don’t mean Jess and Anna? Can’t they see there’s a world where they’re not at its centre?’

‘That’s not fair. You know that Jess blames herself for his death, thinks that if they hadn’t argued he’d still be here.’ Rose moved the remains of her food to one
side of her plate and placed her knife and fork together beside it, perfectly aligned.

‘That’s crazy. Finished with these?’ Eve stretched across and helped herself to a couple of Rose’s discarded chips.

‘I know, I know. And she’s devastated that she wasn’t there. But whatever I say doesn’t make a difference. So she’s working incredibly hard to make herself worthy
of him. She wants me to keep the hotels so she can run them for him, eventually.’

‘And Anna?’

‘With immaculate timing, she’s found the “ideal” property for her garden centre and is desperate for me to sell and release some cash to her.’ She paused as she
sipped her wine. ‘I honestly haven’t a clue what to do.’

‘Do nothing,’ said Eve firmly. ‘One day you’ll wake up and you’ll know what’s right.’

‘At the moment I feel as if I’m being blown about by the wind. So I hope you’re right.’

Some time later, Eve having dashed off to catch the train back home to Cambridge, Rose let herself into a silent house. Her only welcome was the hall light that she’d
left on. Hanging up her coat, she shivered in the bitter draught of air that had entered the house with her. The corridor and stairs were shrouded in shadow that disappeared as she twisted the
dimmer switch. She rubbed her hands together, then opened the kitchen door, half expecting Daniel to be waiting for her.

Alone, she had no one with whom to discuss the mildy amusing play she had insisted on going to. Friends had rallied round excessively in the months after the funeral, but now they had backed
off, as if they felt she should be back leading an ordinary life. Such a thing felt impossible, but she had to try. Would she ever get used to Daniel’s absence?

She went through the motions of making a mug of tea before realising that she didn’t really want one. That was something they did together when Dan was alive. They would take their tea to
bed sometimes, last thing at night, or just sit here and talk about their evening until one of them made the first move upstairs. That was never going to happen again.

She tore off a bit of kitchen roll and blew her nose, then sat at the table. Exhausted. Alone. Burying her head in her hands, she sobbed.

When she had finally run out of tears, she looked up. Everything was so familiar and yet curiously unfamiliar at the same time; different without Daniel to give it meaning. She pulled a brown
ceramic vase towards her and removed the dead roses. The buds had never opened; just flopped over in the warmth and hung forlornly. It cost her all the energy she had to cross the kitchen and bin
them. Returning to the table, she picked up the vase, turning it in her hand, letting the light catch the richness of the glaze. She remembered how, years ago, towards the end of a trip around
Morocco, she and Dan had caught the bus from Marrakesh to Safi. Somehow this vase had made it back home with them intact. The small shop where they’d found it was thick with cooking smells
wafting through from the back. When they’d commented on them, they’d been invited to stay to eat. Buying the vase was their thanks. Life had been so simple then. They could go where
they wanted, when they wanted. But then they’d had Anna, their much-wanted first child, and shortly afterwards inherited Trevarrick. Rose and Terry’s parents had died in quick
succession only months apart, surprisingly, as if her mother couldn’t live without her father. And then Jess came along.

She returned the vase to its place in the centre of the table. The digital clock on the oven flicked to 12.30. Getting late. But she didn’t want to go to bed. Lying awake in the middle of
the night, waiting for the hours to pass, was when everything became unbearable. Then, Daniel’s death and its consequences seemed insurmountable. Lying on her back, as if in her own coffin,
next to the cold space beside her that Dan had once filled, her nights were long and sleepless. But what was the alternative? The doctor had given her sleeping pills immediately after she’d
eventually returned to England with Dan’s body, but after a couple of months she had stopped taking them. They did their job, knocking her out at night, but every morning she had woken unable
to function properly until almost midday. In those early days of grieving, she had found a certain comfort in their shared bed.

Beside her were the shelves filled with books and a row of family photos. His was in the centre, one he’d once had taken for a hotel brochure, and surrounded by photos of Anna, Jess and
Dylan. He’d brought it home to her, pleased with how distinguished he looked.

‘Oh Dan, I need you to tell me what to do,’ she whispered.

He looked back at her, his enigmatic half-smile undercutting the gravity of his gaze. He was dressed in a grey suit, hair short and smart. But this wasn’t the man she wanted to remember.
She took the photo and laid it face down on the shelf, then brought to the front an old photo of the two of them skiing. They stood, arms around one another, sun goggles pushed back on their heads,
laughing at a joke. Then she remembered those words.
Miss. Love. Come back.

‘Bastard.’ She slipped the photo to the back of the collection after all. Who was she? What would have happened to us if you’d lived? This time she didn’t speak the words
aloud, but they were as loud in her head as if she had.