This Secret We're Keeping (34 page)

I tried to make it up to her before we went home, with a sappy belated Valentine’s present of a
Venezia
mug from the hotel gift shop.

It almost broke my heart when she opened it because she reacted like it was the best present she’d ever received.

Like, ever.

Following
a night of getting hammered alone on gin and tonics in her living room, alternating
The Best of R.E.M
with
The Best of UB
₄₀
, Jess woke up with a strong craving for caffeine, cake and Anna. For various reasons, mostly related to work, their only communication over the past two weeks had been some hastily composed texts and a couple of snatched phone conversations. So she called her.

They met at Cley in the cafe overlooking the nature reserve and sat side by side together at the window. Their seat afforded them an elevated view of the marshes, a vast green patchwork laid out like a thick rug beyond the road, hemmed at its far end by a high brown bank of flood wall and threaded along the horizon with a delicate blue ribbon of sea.

Anna was wearing a turquoise tunic yanked in at the waist with a cord belt, which only served to emphasize the fact that she really didn’t have any waist left now to speak of. She looked tired, Jess thought, like someone who’d spent the past month working nights, failing to shower and existing on a diet of microwaveable cheeseburgers and white-label energy drinks.

Jess set down two plates of red velvet cake and pushed one meaningfully in front of Anna. ‘Is everything okay?’

Stoically ignoring the cake in favour of a herbal tea and an apple juice, Anna shook her head. ‘I’ve been getting teary. I’m due on in five days. I’m not pregnant, I can just feel it.’

A familiar clench of despondency took hold in Jess’s gut, but she shook her head firmly in an attempt at reassurance. ‘You don’t know that.’

‘I do. I can recognize the signs a mile off. So much for visualization.’

‘Visualization?’ Jess sank a fork into her wedge of cake, the scent of strong coffee ballooning deliciously from the cappuccino in front of her.

Anna nodded sadly. ‘Rasleen recommends practising visualization during
viparita karani
. It’s a yoga pose,’ she clarified, demonstrating with her fingers on the side of her glass. ‘You put your legs up the wall like this, then you think about your egg attaching itself to your uterus.’

Jess held the chunk of cake in her mouth, momentarily unwilling to swallow and at a loss to comprehend how Anna maintained such faith in a woman whose increasingly inventive recommendations for conception had yet to be confirmed as either successful or scientifically sound.

Seeming to sense she should address this peculiarity, Anna began to gabble endorsements. ‘Simon and I met another client after our session yesterday who said visualization worked for her. Proud mum of two. And you know the woman who presents the local news – oh, what’s her name? Looks half asleep?’

Jess shook her head and finally swallowed the cake, allowing herself to be distracted by the combination of sweet, salty frosting and chocolate-laced sponge. The shot of sugar to her bloodstream felt almost narcotic.

‘Anyway,’ Anna was saying, brushing away the small issue of her temporarily bogus advocate with one hand, ‘she was actually visualizing
during
the six o’clock news. You know – while she was reading it.’

Jess wondered if perhaps that was why she looked half asleep. ‘And then what?’ she asked her.

Anna looked blank and shrugged. ‘Weather?’

Jess let out a laugh. ‘No! I mean, did she fall pregnant?’

‘Within six weeks,’ Anna confirmed sagely, with the all-knowing air of a pharmaceutical sales rep on commission for peddling the merits of amphetamines disguised as weight-loss tablets. Seeming suddenly brighter for her own propaganda, it looked for a moment as if she might even take a bite of her cake; but then she appeared to decide against it, slinging back some more of her apple juice instead.

‘The cake’s for you, by the way,’ Jess said, in case Anna needed some encouragement. ‘You look like you’re still losing weight.’

‘I’ve got five pounds to go before I’m at the optimum weight for conception.’

‘You don’t have five pounds to lose, Anna!’ Jess exclaimed in shock. ‘So what – now you’re too fat?’ She pushed Anna’s plate a little closer. ‘Please. Eat.’

‘Wait,’ Anna said, apparently unreceptive to calorific coercion by either subtle or overt means. ‘I have to tell you something. I bought Abbie a yoga session with Rasleen, for her birthday …’

Jess considered this to have been quite a brave move, given that Anna’s middle sister was extremely intolerant of anything she deemed to be New Age, bullshit or both. Her definition of these terms was fairly broad, in that she had huffed at the Glastonbury tickets Anna gave her for her birthday last year before sticking them straight on to eBay, and was innately suspicious of anything organic. She was about as likely to take a yoga guru seriously, Jess thought, as she would an old man with a hosepipe offering cut-price colonics to passers-by.

‘Anyway, we went yesterday,’ Anna continued. ‘Essentially, Rasleen thinks Abbie’s a control freak, and she said as much. So Abbie stormed out.’

‘Anna,’ Jess said, which was the mildest rebuke she could come up with. It was generally an accepted fact that Abbie overreacted to most things, but even Jess could see why she wouldn’t want to stick around to be insulted at random by a woman she’d only just met.

‘What?’ Anna protested. ‘She is one.’

‘Yes, but you’ve had your entire life to come to that conclusion. Rasleen’s met her once.’

‘Well, I think that only goes to show how perceptive she is,’ Anna said sniffily.

‘Or judgemental,’ Jess suggested, taking another stab at her cake. ‘What can she possibly stand to gain from causing a rift in your family?’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Unless she’s running a cult.’

Anna steadfastly refused to take the bait. ‘She still wants to meet you, by the way.’

‘Ha.’

‘I’m serious, Jess.’

‘I dread to think what she’d say about me,’ Jess mumbled through a mouthful of cream-cheese frosting.

‘Rasleen would love you,’ Anna insisted.

Having heard nothing so far to indicate that Rasleen had ever loved anyone, Jess brushed a few stray crumbs from her chin. ‘Well, I’m eating cake, and she wouldn’t love that.’

‘Once in a while’s okay,’ Anna said, demonstrating a sudden and uncharacteristic flair for missing the point of things entirely.

‘Remind me again – why is she so keen to meet me?’

‘I told you, it’s part of the holistic approach. It’s very
important she gets to know each of her clients as intimately as possible.’

Jess stared down at the walkers and birdwatchers dotted across the fabric of the marsh below them like brightly headed pins in a cushion, wondering exactly when Rasleen’s definition of holistic had evolved to include slagging off her clients’ friends and family. However, aware that she didn’t currently possess the neuron speed to handle all the verbal jousting that would inevitably ensue if she said as much, she opted to remain quiet.

‘Good?’ Anna enquired, nodding at Jess’s now-empty plate.

‘I’m hungover,’ she confessed, momentarily eyeing up Anna’s untouched cake wedge before deciding to resist on principle.

‘Carafe?’

Jess shook her head. ‘Living room,’ she said. ‘Gin and nineties music.’

Anna looked wistful. ‘Ah, gin. Was this a party-for-one?’

‘Yes,’ Jess replied firmly. ‘And as an added bonus I didn’t even need to turf myself out at two a.m.’

‘Speaking of being turfed out,’ Anna said with a frown, ‘what’s the latest on Debbie?’

Jess had been keeping Anna appraised of developments in her sister’s grand plans for making her homeless, but it had still been a shock to them both when the ‘For Sale’ sign had finally been erected in Jess’s front garden. Last night’s little gin fug had inspired her to think she might run out there and take a flying high-kick at it – but she suspected that was the sort of thing estate agents probably charged for, so she’d resisted in favour of cranking up the volume on ‘Losing My Religion’ instead.

‘They’ve lined up three viewings for this week already.
Debbie’s still working from her completely baseless theory that it’s okay to sell the roof over my head because Zak happens to be rich,’ Jess told Anna now, sipping from her cappuccino.

Beyond the window, edging away from them towards the horizon, a flock of seagulls was swooping and dancing on the light summer breeze, little white balloons against a cornflower-blue sky.

Anna set down her cup. ‘So exactly how in-the-shit are you? Financially, I mean.’

‘It’s bad,’ Jess confessed. ‘Then again … I do like to think bills are only real if you open them.’

Anna managed to frown and smile at the same time. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? We’ll give you some money.’

‘I’ve had a few other things on my mind,’ Jess mumbled, by which she meant Will. ‘And thanks, but I have so many creditors right now I think my head would explode if I had to add you to the list as well.’

‘Not a loan. A gift. You don’t have to pay us back, silly.’ She took a sip of her juice. ‘Is it just that you’ve not got enough work?’

Jess hesitated. ‘Jobs are coming in, but not enough to justify paying myself a decent wage yet. And having to move house and fork out for rent at market rates isn’t exactly going to help.’ She thought back sadly to a conversation she’d once had with Matthew, sitting on his kitchen floor in the middle of a snowstorm, when she’d joked about asking him to do her books one day. Maybe, on reflection, that wouldn’t have been such a bad idea.

‘Well, Zak’s desperate for you to move in with him. It could be the answer to all your problems.’

‘Please don’t,’ Jess grumbled. ‘You sound like Debbie.’

Anna paused for just long enough to let that little
quip slide by. ‘Well, you
know
you can always move in with us if you need somewhere to stay. We just might need to find Smudge a temporary home for a little while. Would that really be the worst thing in the world?’ she asked gently.

‘Yes, it would,’ Jess said, blinking away an image of Smudge being led off on a string to be spiritually healed or have his coat dyed purple by someone who would no doubt transpire to be a client of Rasleen’s. She looked down at her coffee cup. ‘I don’t suppose you need any external caterers at Beelings?’

Anna shook her head apologetically. ‘Sorry. Simon’s still adamant we do everything in-house. I’ll work on him. But look – I’ll tout your card around in the meantime, punt it to as many guests as I can.’

‘Thank you,’ Jess said, grateful.

Anna shuffled a bit closer to Jess as two elderly birdwatchers squeezed in next to them on the bench. ‘So what’s going on with Matthew? Or Will. Or whatever his name is now,’ she asked Jess, making a discernible effort to pronounce his aliases rather than spit them out.

Jess had exchanged only a couple of texts with Will since the incident on the marsh last weekend, of which she wasn’t about to regale Anna with the details. She’d told her briefly about the fight at the pub, to which Anna had responded by coming down firmly on the side of Zak, despite him having instigated the entire thing.

‘When I saw Will at the pub last week,’ Jess said, ‘he told me he’d bumped into Mr Robbins.’

Anna’s recollection was instant. ‘Mr Robbins,’ she said straight away. ‘As in
Red Dwarf
?’

Jess nodded.

‘How did that go down?’

‘I don’t think they spoke. They were just passing. It scared Will a bit, though.’

Anna raised an eyebrow. ‘Did it? I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before, to be honest.’

‘Will looks completely different now,’ Jess said with a frown.

‘Yet behaves just the same.’

Jess sipped from her cappuccino and said nothing.

‘And how’s Zak?’

‘I haven’t seen him. We’ve both been working.’

Anna appeared briefly to consider this before deciding not to buy it. ‘Jess, this whole Zak–Matthew thing is on a collision course. Seriously – it can’t possibly end well. You know that. I
know
you know that.’

Jess swallowed and looked down at her plate.

‘You said you were going to put a stop to it,’ Anna pressed.

‘I know. I will. I know.’

‘Jess … no matter what happens, I could never forgive Matthew for everything he put you through. So if you
did
ever get it together with him, where would that leave us? And what about Natalie, and his daughter? Not to mention Zak. The whole thing’s such a
mess
.’ She shook her head and said nothing further, presumably so Jess could take a moment to contemplate the inevitable carnage for herself.

If this wasn’t emotional blackmail, it felt like its closest relative, and Jess couldn’t remember when they had said it was okay to start slinging threats disguised as solidarity at one another.

‘You know, he’s really not as bad as you think.’

‘Try me,’ Anna replied, though it sounded like more of a challenge than a reassurance.

Jess made a taut exhale of breath. ‘Well, he stayed with
Natalie when she fell pregnant, for one. She told him she was on the pill when she wasn’t – but he did the right thing. He could have left, but he didn’t.’

‘That’s what he said?’

‘Yes, that’s what he said. And now she’s planning to do it all over again.’

‘Do what?’

‘Get pregnant. Force the whole thing on him whether he wants it or not.’

‘Sorry,’ Anna said, ‘but it
is
his sperm.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Not that I’m particularly interested in discussing Matthew Landley impregnating –’

‘All right,’ Jess said sharply, and Anna trailed off.

‘You’re wrong about him,’ Jess insisted after a short silence. ‘He’s actually a really nice guy.’

‘Hmm.’ Anna reassumed her scepticism. ‘Because nice guys are generally in the habit of sleeping with schoolchildren and playing away from home.’

‘Can you please keep your voice down?’ Jess whispered, sensing that the birdwatchers next to them were suddenly more interested in this conversation than they were in their year lists. That would be a first.

‘If you want my honest opinion,’ Anna said, which was usually how people phrased it when they knew unequivocally that someone would not, ‘I think you’re looking for a father figure.’

Jess didn’t really want to talk about her dad. ‘Because Will’s older than me?’