Seven For a Secret Read online

  ‘Could be shrapnel,’ Barbara had conceded reluctantly. ‘Perhaps it got lodged Down—’

  ‘In his head somewhere. Then it moved and he got ill and died. Probably,’ Heather had decided, and slammed shut the fattest history book, gathered the little heap together and filed them quickly away on the bottom shelf in the wrong place. How ridiculous it must seem to every generation that their parents do it, she thought. And in turn, she thought, all these years later, looking at her mother who was neatly folding the last crust of toast into her mouth, how outrageous it must seem to every generation of parents that their children should get round to a sex life, too. I’ve got it all to come, quite soon, with Kate, she thought, feeling a sneaking sympathy for her mother as she was twenty-five years ago, coping with the chaotic hormones of a teenage daughter, with no man around to deal with her own.

  Outside, a magpie started its aggressive, football-rattle sound. She looked out and saw the pushy, spiteful bird, bullying robins away from the bird table on the terrace. It was past the season when magpies were in pairs, and superstitiously she muttered, ‘Good morning Mrs Magpie, I hope your family are well,’ to stave off the bad luck.

  ‘Is it one for sorrow?’ Delia asked from the table.

  ‘Yes, frightening the robins away,’ Heather told her. ‘Magpies are such pretty birds, I always think,’ she went on, carrying cups to the sink. ‘You wouldn’t think something so lovely could do such damage, stealing baby birds and eggs from nests. I’ve seen them out there taking on a whole treeful of sparrows and trampling quite ruthlessly through all the nests after the babies. The poor parents were frantic.’

  Delia started rinsing plates at the sink, somehow sure that dishwashers didn’t really get things properly clean. ‘They remind me of mackerel, just the colours of them, all that gleaming bluey-black and the pale underneath. Smoothly turned out, good-looking and dangerous.’ She paused for a moment, the water running unnoticed over her wrists, then added with an expression of miles-away thought, ‘Like men in evening dress.’

  Kate had to admit to disappointment. She’d got there well ahead of Lisa Gibson, who probably wasn’t even awake yet. Lisa, when she wanted to be noticed, would be loud and unmissable, wagging her double-D tits at whoever glanced her way. Kate looked forward to pointing out that being on film was well known to add at least 10 lb to one’s appearance. Out by the cricket pavilion, the early signs had been good, all those trucks arranged in a circle like a traveller’s illicit convoy, at the edge of the recreation ground, on the rough area where the mothers always parked to collect their children from the pavilion playgroup. The lorries and buses reminded her of a circus. They weren’t like ordinary goods trucks, there was that slight otherness about them, just like romantic fairground wagons, that made you wonder where they spent their off-road time. No-one saw vehicles like these actually travelling around, using motorways like any old Pickfords furniture truck or an ordinary Habitat van, they just appeared where they weren’t before, like fairy rings on the grass in the early morning. There were converted buses with shabby curtains, luxurious magenta coaches with racks and racks of clothes, a catering wagon with the kind of fold-out flaps and cleverly built-in equipment that would, if it was in miniature, make a small child satisfied that they’d been given the perfect good-value toy.

  A semi-circle of six or so men sat around on upturned boxes with mugs of tea, eyeing a cavernous bus-load of lighting as if putting off the moment when it must be unloaded and dealt with. Kate hovered shyly outside the ring, her eagerness wavering now that she didn’t quite know what to do, who to approach, how to ask if she qualified as star material. Couldn’t the right person simply take one look at her and realize?

  ‘Cup of tea love?’ one of the men called to her. He looked like one of Margot’s builders, with baggy jeans slung under a beer-belly and a grey T-shirt that looked as if it had been used to clean a fly-smeared windscreen. Kate hesitated, wondering if this was a gathering she should, as she normally would, avoid – they reminded her of the workmen who’d taken three whistling, leering weeks to mend a small hole in the school fence. Yet one of these smirking, slurping men could be just the one to help her towards fame and fortune. Perhaps film directors were like rock stars: impossible, till you got a full dose of their ego, to tell them apart from their entourage.

  ‘Two sugars please,’ she then said suddenly, catching sight of Simon emerging from his gateway. When he found her, she would already be an old hand, sitting among these early-morning men as if she’d travelled with them, she thought with happy satisfaction.

  Simon was dithering on the pavement, looking up and down the road as if searching for something. Kate, perched on an upturned plastic crate inside the men’s magic circle, watched him covertly. She felt very much as she had as a small child playing at camping in the pony paddock. Once inside her tent, or in winter under the shelter of the huge old viburnum that sprawled against the stable wall, it had been as if she was keeping watch on the rest of the world, from a hidden one which was entirely her own. Beyond the cricket pavilion she could also see Julia Merriman walking her labradors and staring with frank curiosity at the collection of strange vehicles.

  ‘Bit of local colour,’ commented one of the men, indicating Julia who, as if dressed for the part by an over-efficient wardrobe supervisor, was wearing the Compleat Countrywoman outfit of Barbour, green wellies and a misshapen tweedy fishing hat of her late husband’s. There was probably, Kate guessed, a pair of unravelling string riding gloves screwed up in the pockets, too, stuck together with congealing Kendal Mintcake.

  ‘Good morning!’ Kate called to her, trying to keep natural insolence from her voice.

  ‘Oh! Oh it’s you Kate!’ Julia shouted back, startled. She took several hesitant steps towards the group, looking round for the support and protection of her uninterested dogs. ‘I thought . . . well goodness you are up early! Should you, er, be here?’

  ‘Mum knows, it’s OK. These are some of the people who are doing the filming.’ Kate felt rather grand saying this, as if she was not only one of them but actually in charge. The men muttered greetings and the one with the fly-spattered T-shirt actually stood up and offered a plump hand for Julia to shake. ‘Brian – nice to meet you, and you are . . . ?’

  She took the hand with her automatic good manners overcoming what looked like a tremor of secret horror, ‘Er . . . Merriman,’ she conceded.

  ‘Is your house one of those that we’ll be using?’ Brian asked. ‘Are you going to be totting up the tax-free after we’ve gone?’ He winked at her, and Julia backed away.

  ‘No. Absolutely not my sort of thing,’ she answered coolly.

  ‘Money is most people’s sort of thing,’ he replied with a knowing grin, returning to his mug of tea. Julia returned to her circuit of the rec as Simon crossed the road and joined them.

  ‘I thought you’d be here,’ he said to Kate, scuffling his feet awkwardly, his hands half-thrust into jeans pockets that were too small to take them, waiting to be introduced.

  He’s so clean, she thought, gazing at his damp, freshly washed hair. On anyone else she would be suspicious that the dampness was really grease, but with Simon it was out of the question, for without fail he would have Washed and Gone. She could smell oatmeal soap on the breeze. Even at this hour he must have had a shower and taken time to choose the right clothes. She’d done the same, she admitted to herself, but that was different, that was quite an exception, a special occasion. Perhaps Simon had become so thoroughly conditioned by his boarding school that he couldn’t even contemplate starting a single day without a complete all-over scrub.

  ‘Are you coming to our house?’ Simon asked the men, giving up on Kate and introductions. ‘We’re renting it out for a few weeks, Mum said. And the man who wrote the script is coming to stay, too.’

  ‘Aha. You’ll be Margot Carpenter’s son then,’ Brian said, grinning at Simon. ‘Now there’s a lady with no objection to a bit on the side, as it were, in th
e cash sense I mean, of course. We’ll be along to you later with all this lot – just across there isn’t it?’ He gestured towards the far side of the road and the dense greenery that protected the houses from casual view. ‘You’re in for a spot of upheaval.’

  Kate was bored by the lack of activity. During the morning a few people arrived in the village by car and went either to the pub or to see Margot. The early morning men she quickly dismissed as mere crew and of no real use to her at all. Hanging around on the rec, she began to feel like a nosy child, and she worried that she’d be noticed in the wrong way – to be laughed at. Even Lisa hadn’t shown her pink-and-white face. Obviously the people to see hadn’t yet felt the need to arrive. So fed up was she that she found herself agreeing to accompany her mother and grandmother on a visit to the dying uncle later that afternoon.

  Heather was amazed. ‘There’s no end to how much they can surprise you when they’re completely and utterly bored,’ she told Tom, who barely glanced up from the Test Match on TV.

  Heather had an idea that Uncle Edward wouldn’t have changed a bit, that she’d have no trouble recognizing him. He’d seemed old enough in her childhood for there to be no scope in the process of ageing for him to look any greyer or frailer. He wasn’t in a hospital, it was more of a nursing home with medical facilities added on, perhaps in much the same way as the sauna and spa option in a luxury hotel. She wondered if he’d remember her; the last time she had seen him had been at her wedding to Tom, when Delia had rounded up as many relations as possible to bulk out their side of the family and make the register office seem respectably full. Delia had spent that day beaming determinedly at everyone with an expression underlying the smile that challenged its startled recipients to dare, just dare, to mention Heather’s elopement. She’d overheard, at one point, the words ‘unfortunate mistake’ and she’d had to be firmly reassured for a good fifteen minutes that the speaker was referring to a guest’s choice of hat. Delia felt that Iain had been present at Heather and Tom’s wedding like Banquo’s ghost, and she was only truly happy that day when she packed them both off to New York for the honeymoon.

  Heather remembered Edward’s slithery, liver-spotted hand on her wrist and his wetly whispered comment at the time: ‘Not in white then?’ – as if his brother Harold had bequeathed him the role of leery old goat in his will. It was far more likely that Edward wouldn’t recognize her. That morning she’d stared carefully into the mirror and wondered how much of the schoolgirl-Heather was left that Iain, if they should chance to run into each other in the village, would remember. She’d been happy to decide that there was very little: her hair, which had been as long and golden as Kate’s, was now fringed, bobbed and streaked with the kind of metallic highlights that were a hairdresser’s tactful preparation for a client’s seamless transition to grey. She was still slim, but on the larger, more comfortable scale that was to be expected in her forties. She wondered briefly if Twiggy, with whose ironing-board flatness of front it had been bliss to be compared before the days when anorexia was to be feared, had also filled out a bit. She reckoned she could, with luck and some careful avoidance, get away quite safely with living unidentified a few yards away from her ex-husband. But there was the dangerous presence of her over-inquisitive mother to consider. Keeping Delia ignorant and uninterfering was going to be tremendously difficult.

  Heather, whose knowledge of hospitals was gained from only a couple of visits to casualty with Suzy’s broken collar bone and Kate’s febrile convulsions, had expected the nursing home to smell of cabbage and urine. She sniffed cautiously at the air as she, Kate and Delia went in. She could smell polish and air freshener but neither lunch nor pee. ‘Smells OK,’ she commented, surprised, looking round at the reception area that wouldn’t have been out of place in a good country house hotel. The peachy striped wallpaper was fresh and clean, no torn edges or discoloured patches. The caramel-coloured carpet had no mysterious stains to challenge a squeamish imagination.

  ‘So it should at these prices!’ Delia retorted, clutching both hands around her bag as if expecting Uncle Edward’s fees to be snatched from her the moment she crossed the threshold. ‘Do you know,’ she went on, ‘Edward’s had medical insurance since way before it was the thing to do. He must have been one of BUPA’s first customers.’

  Heather was surprised; the pair of uncles had seemed so pre-war somehow, as if they wouldn’t either know or be bothered with such late twentieth century calculations. She remembered how they’d grumbled when The Times took their personal column off the front page. But then, she remembered, they were also part of the pre-welfare state generation, perhaps with the notion that using the National Health Service was like a shameful acceptance of charity.

  ‘Never a day’s illness till that stroke. He wasn’t the type to bother the doctors,’ Delia said, admiringly.

  ‘You’re supposed to bother the doctors,’ Heather told her gently. ‘Especially at that age. Perhaps they could have prevented the stroke if he’d had regular check-ups.’ Not to mention done something about the leukemia, she thought, which reminded her, the leukemia was exactly that; according to instructions, not to be mentioned.

  ‘No green paint,’ Kate commented as they were led by a pink-uniformed nurse to Edward’s room. ‘I’ve never been to a hospital with no green paint.’ She was clearly impressed and asked in a tone of hope, ‘Have we got private insurance, Mum?’

  Heather was still wondering about the germ-trapping qualities of the clinic’s lavish soft furnishings when they were shown into her uncle’s room. It had a cheering, non-hospital lack of embarrassing paraphernalia – no badly disguised commode, no odd-shaped cardboard pee-bottles, no drips, kidney bowls, catheters or privacy-destroying bowel-movement graphs. Was Edward even ill at all, she wondered, or just having a supervised vacation? Among the generous, non-institutional furniture – the bed, sofa, TV, table – she didn’t at first see him. Then came a shocked moment of recognition – the paper-coloured man, who quavered thinly from deep inside a navy-blue paisley dressing-gown on the edge of a rose velvet armchair, was a shrunken, desiccated version of her old relation. He looked as if all his body fluids had been drained away, as if in premature preparation for embalming, leaving him looking like an empty leather duffle bag. He’d once been so very big, she’d been certain. How else could his leathery hand have prevented her, as a strong, feisty child, from escaping its grasp? Surely, too, he had had to stoop to whisper in her ear, or had it just been that he’d liked to get close? Then there was his hair. ‘Grey’ she’d always imagined, was a terminal, unchanging old-age colour. It was what you went, with no deterioration, hair-wise, beyond that. Now she realized that in her childhood Uncle Edward had sported a fine, distinguished shade of deep badger, no trace of which now remained, all pigment having gradually leaked away, leaving a few limp, bleached-out tendrils.

  ‘Hello Edward,’ Heather said, giving a social smile and deciding she was far too old to call him ‘Uncle’. The old man’s speckled blue eyes, pale mottled as the surface of a duck egg, looked at her with beady interest and a very slowly gathering recollection. ‘Jack’s little girl,’ he at last said huskily, his long pearly finger shaking out towards her after only a few moments thought. His yellowed, half-bald head nodded slowly, on and on as if, once started, he had no power to stop it till the action wore itself out.

  ‘Well this is nice,’ Delia said, bustling her way to the sofa and looking around the room taking in, with satisfaction, the way the flowers she’d sent had been prettily arranged. ‘And this is Kate. You’ve not met her, she’s your great-niece,’ she told him, grabbing Kate’s hand and pulling her rather forcefully to stand in front of Edward for his inspection. Heather held her breath, praying for Kate to be polite – she didn’t at all like being pulled about, wriggling out of hand-holding even at the most dangerous road crossings as a small child. But Kate beamed down at the old man, and his rheumy eyes glittered back at her with appreciation.

  ‘Like your
mother,’ he said. ‘Just like your mother round about the time she went off and got married. I don’t remember much, but I remember that.’ He gave a crackly snigger and turned to Heather and his voice strengthened along with his memory. ‘Where is he then, that chap you ran off with?’

  ‘Shall we go and have tea in that nice conservatory? The nurse said we could . . .’ Delia interrupted, fussing awkwardly for her bag under the sofa. ‘It’s about the right time.’

  Heather helped to raise Edward from the chair. Should hospital chairs be this deep and squashy, she wondered distantly, seeing how difficult movement was for elderly patients. ‘Tom is at home, watching the cricket,’ she told him firmly as they left the room.

  ‘Tom? Who is Tom? In the News of The World they didn’t call him Tom.’ Edward chuckled.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Why did he say all that stuff about Dad?’ Kate asked in the car, as Heather had known she would – Kate would never let a comment like that pass unquestioned. All through the conservatory tea, during the stroll to admire the clinic’s flowerbeds, the pause for Edward to rest on the terrace bench, she must have been waiting, keyed-up with curiosity, to ask. Heather was concentrating on pulling out into a busy stretch of rush-hour motorway, which unfortunately left Delia to seize the moment and get in first.

  ‘Just an old man’s muddle dear,’ she cut in firmly, with a long, hard warning stare at Heather by way of the rear-view mirror. Heather glared back, though at the same time thinking that at least her mother hadn’t replied with the ‘Never you mind’, with which she’d answered so many of Heather’s own teenage questions. Kate wouldn’t have put up with that; such a tantalizing brush-off would have been a challenge to her. Kate immediately lost interest, preferring to stay fastidiously ignorant of unpalatable senile failings, and was slumped over with her head vibrating against the window, trying to see her reflection in the wing mirror. Delia liked to sit in the back of the car, from where she could give imperious directions and prod at the driver’s seat as she changed her mind about which way to turn.