Seven For a Secret Page 8

  ‘Shouldn’t think they’d need me, surely, they’re more likely to want a florist,’ Heather replied, rather reluctant to show much interest in case Nigel recommended her and she was forced to come face-to-face with Iain over a hastily pot-plunged bed of full-bloom Madonna lilies.

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ Nigel said, wagging his composty finger at her. ‘I should get in there if you’ve got the chance. Who knows where it might lead? Even if it’s just to some bone-idle co-star who can’t be bothered to rearrange their own patio, it’s all work.’

  ‘Well why don’t you go along and leave a few business cards with the right people, locations managers or whatever they are and then you can do it,’ Heather suggested, pretending she was being generous.

  ‘Not me, deary. Got enough here to keep me going,’ he gestured round the tip of a room, ‘even if it’s just a spot of tidying up. You’re the one with the design eye. Get Margot to suggest to the director that her garden’s Lacking Colour, most gardens are by August. We have all suburban England thanking God for Anemone Japonica and the appalling ubiquitous Lavatera Barnsley.’ Nigel’s blue eyes twinkled craftily at her, and he said, as if he’d only just thought of it, ‘And of course, everything you might just happen to need, you can get from me – can’t you?’

  Kate wished she hadn’t chosen to take the Afghan hound for a walk. She daren’t let it off its lead, because she knew it would disappear and chase rabbits in the wood, or steal chickens from someone’s back garden hen-run. A note pinned to its kennel had warned that it was ‘lively’, which she took quite rightly to mean that, given its freedom, it would take off, deaf to any commands, and turn up two days later on the other side of Oxford. She’d chosen it because it was so pretty, its fur was flowing and blonde, brushed to gleaming show-standard under Margot’s doting care. Secretly, as she was hauled energetically round the village pond while the dog attempted a hopeless chase of the ducks, she thought the pair of them made a rather gorgeously complementary couple: both long-legged and slim, both with flowing golden hair. Perhaps Shane Gibson’s older brother Darren and his less attractive, jeering mates would realize how stunning she was, and in a desirable class way above the slaggy bus-shelter girls. Unfortunately, Darren was nowhere to be seen that day, and by the time she’d strode several times round the council estate, through the woods (nervously, in case of stray lone men) and across the recreation ground, where he might be smoking on the swings, she and the dog were both trailing their feet and drooping their flaxen heads.

  ‘Rather a stunning pair of blondes,’ A smooth, appreciative (at last) voice could be heard saying in the orchard as Kate unleashed the dog and sent him, exhausted, to the water bowl in his kennel. Kate shoved her hair out of her face and smiled up at Margot and the man with her. She assumed he must be one of the actors – he had the craggy, over-large features that look so good on the screen. She could just imagine him playing the sort of rather dated ruthless spy who never failed to lure beautiful women to his bed. She could feel herself glowing under the smiling warmth of his all-over scrutiny of her, as he looked her up and down in a frankly sexual way. He was too old, way, way too old, even the fully ripe Margot looked quite spring-chickenish beside him, but she was happy to have him inspecting her like that, as if he could spread her on toast and nibble her like an expensive, savoury delicacy. The most she could have hoped for from Darren was a brooding glare from under the shadowy peak of his baseball cap. She thought of this as good practice for later – learning how to react without either girlish simpering or a tarty reciprocal leer.

  ‘This is Kate – she lives along the road and comes to walk the dogs for me. Little holiday job till school starts again,’ Margot explained.

  Kate thought that was catty, but managed not to scowl with fury and retort, childishly, that she wasn’t going back to school but on to college. Margot might then explain that it wasn’t real college, just sixth-form, for A-levels – or at least she would if, as Kate suspected, she fancied the man herself. And who, of that ancient age group wouldn’t, she thought condescendingly.

  ‘She’ll be coming to your party, won’t she Margot, if she’s a neighbour? I do like to have the young ones around on social occasions, so enlivening,’ he said.

  Kate squirmed with glee, loving being discussed as if she was a pretty piece of desirable confectionery.

  Margot grinned at her. ‘Of course. And her parents, we’re great friends – you must meet them.’

  Kate skipped off home feeling that all her insides were tingling. Too letchy and old, practically grandfatherly, she thought, not what I’m looking for at all. She stared in useless hope across the rec to see if Darren was lurking. Surely he’d notice how glowing she was feeling? How lovely, how delicious to be noticed, she thought.

  Chapter Six

  On his way to the kitchen Tom wandered past the phone, looking at it sideways and willing it to ring. He didn’t want to call Hughie, that would look eager, but he very much wanted to know if Hughie was still interested enough to call him. Really, this sort of thing should be kept for the stopovers – he had never before overlapped work sex with home sex. Really, he knew quite well and with delicious guilt, this sort of thing should stop. There shouldn’t be a double life. I’m too old, he thought, glancing in the mirror and trying to decide which was his best side as he filled the kettle. There were deep lines running from the edge of his nose to his jaw. The grained-in tan that went with his job was beginning to look falsely tawdry; the view in the mirror was like unexpectedly seeing an ageing television presenter in real life, whose off-duty face still has studio pancake unevenly plastered over it, and powdery hair. He looked all right at work, the uniform demanded an effort at glamour: the passengers expected it still, even in these blasé days, needing to feel they were being flown by someone more super-human than an airborne taxi-driver. Hughie was too new in the flight crew to look anything more than Home Counties pale, and was still tending to be quietly nervous with the passengers. Tom was far more used to hearty, confident stewards swanning like Julian Clary up and down the aisle, competing for giggles from the passengers. (‘Silly me, you weren’t the chicken were you, far too bovine. Another juicy big steak here please, Carol!’) They hid behind the bulkhead, greedily gobbling too much of the plastic food and then complained about putting on weight. Tom didn’t like that; the whole desirable point about their bodies was the skinny hardness of them. The moment they went soft and girlish, he had no interest. Hughie had a body so slender that, exposed to Holiday Inn air conditioning, it went as goose-fleshy as newly plucked poultry. Even in the hottest climate, his shivery body distrusted the luxury of the sun. Tom, lazing away a Hong Kong afternoon on a lounger, had watched enthralled as Hughie dipped a wary toe into the waters of the hotel lagoon, as if fully expecting the disheartening chill of an English municipal outdoor pool. Experienced crew never did that – they knew full well that you got what the airline paid for, and were confident that they would always plunge into at least 80 comfortable degrees.

  When the phone did finally ring, Tom felt a startled panic, like a teenager longing for a first-love’s call. He skittered nervously across the hall rug, chased by the yapping Jasper, rushing in case Heather or Delia got there first, and wondered who on earth Hughie was, had they met him, was he local, was it work – all the usual women’s questions.

  ‘Oh you’re home!’ Margot trilled into his ear.

  ‘I live here, Margot,’ Tom reminded her patiently.

  ‘Not often you don’t. Always arrivals and departures.’

  ‘Goes with the job—’

  ‘Yes, I know, I’m sorry. We always seem to have this conversation, don’t we? Anyway I’m glad you’re here, tomorrow is party time and I’d like you all to come. Children too, seeing as it’ll be outdoors mostly, weather permitting, of course, as usual in England. Been meaning to do this ever since Russell had that barbecue thing built out by the pool, and of course we’ve got our house guest and lots of interesting people f
or you . . .’

  Tom thought it sounded as if Margot intended to cook the house guest along with all the interesting people. He imagined them threaded on skewers, separated by the tools of their trade: musical instruments, easels, cameras, books, Formula One racing cars like hunks of lamb alternated with onions, tomatoes and mushrooms. Margot was still in full flow, having moved on to describe the seductive warmth of her pool and how wonderful the garden was looking (thanks to Heather). He interrupted. ‘Margot, we’d love to come, but we’ve also got Heather’s mother—’

  ‘Oh do bring her! All the Parish Council Committee are coming, I’m sure they’ll have lots in common, well at least their age-group, I mean. They all do golf and church flowers, or whatever it is you have to be over 65 for these days . . .’

  ‘Well of course you want to go! Don’t be silly!’ The two sentences were familiar to any parent persuading a shy young child that they really would enjoy a friend’s birthday party. Coming from one adult woman to another, they sounded bossy and inappropriate. Heather had last used the formula-words herself when Suzy was perhaps seven, scared to go to the circus in case the clown picked her to be the one who was bounced in a blanket, or made her balance on the slithery back of a Shetland pony. Heather and her mother faced each other across the kitchen table, where Delia was opening a can of dog food and releasing from the tin an odour so awful that Heather had trouble breathing, which made it very difficult to come up with the necessary spot-on lie for a reply.

  ‘But Margot’s your friend!’ Delia continued, just as she would have done thirty-five years before. She was puzzled, peering into Heather’s eyes for a clue to the real reason why she’d claimed casually that she didn’t really feel particularly partyish, would rather stay at home with a tuna sandwich, could feel a headache coming on, why didn’t they all just go without her. Instinctively, Delia was no more inclined to believe her than she had when Heather, aged eleven, had complained of earache every Thursday morning in an attempt to get out of a bone-chilling hour of lacrosse. Jasper jumped and snarled around their feet, anxious to be fed.

  ‘What party? Who’s going to a party?’ Suzy came into the kitchen and grabbed an apple from the bowl, ignoring the tension in the air between the two women.

  ‘We all are!’ Delia said, beaming at her as she forked out the dog food. ‘Even your old gran! Isn’t that nice?’

  Heather recognized the tone in Delia’s voice, a small but distinct crow of victory. They would all go to the party – Delia would not now have to plead that she couldn’t possibly go with just Tom and the girls, not knowing anyone, that she didn’t get out much these days . . .

  ‘Oh yeah. Oh you mean Margot’s barbecue,’ Suzy said between apple-crunches. ‘Kate told me about it, she said Margot’s trying to bribe the village into not minding about these people filming all over the place.’

  Later, Heather wallowed in the bath, trying to work out which aspect of Margot and Russell’s party bothered her the most. Unless Margot had somehow scooped up the film’s leading man, Iain would undoubtedly be there, being towed around the terrace and introduced to all and sundry as if she’d won him as first prize in a raffle. She could just imagine him being charming to every female over four years old. Russell would get drunk very early, complain merrily about how much Margot had spent and then later magnanimously urge everyone to eat more, drink more, life’s too short etcetera. She could probably avoid Iain somehow, if she stayed wary and kept a safe distance between them; there would be a big enough crowd to hide in, and with her hair tied back and an indecently sparse amount of make-up, he was hardly likely to recognize her.

  Women, luckily, had so much more scope for changing appearance than men did. Last time he’d seen her, she was pretty sure she was still at the stage of painting on thick, black fishtail eye-liner and cute dolly-freckles across her nose. Delia was the big problem, she decided, as she scrubbed earth and compost out from under her nails. Delia had never actually met Iain, but she had his name, so she had once theatrically claimed, burned into her brain, like a red-hot stake carving into brimstone. Someone might mention his name within the boundless range of her hearing – a sense that seemed to have developed a highly tuned acuteness in old age, as if it was God’s apologetic compensation for fading eyesight and uncertain balance. But even then there was a chance of getting away with it. Iain, Heather knew, wrote as Iain Ross, not using the family name of MacRae. Delia knew nothing about the lurid books he wrote, but would have been satisfied, if she did, to find that totally in keeping with her so long-held opinion of him.

  ‘That Terrible Man, that Deceiver!’ she had ranted, years ago, at Heather after her inglorious return home.

  ‘But I wanted to go. He didn’t kidnap me, I could’ve said no,’ Heather had protested, insulted that her mother thought her quite incapable of having chosen the elopement option all by herself.

  ‘You were led,’ Delia had insisted. ‘You always were easily led,’ she’d continued damningly. Heather hadn’t bothered to argue – to argue properly, you needed a worthy opponent, one whose mind was capable of change, otherwise it was completely exhausting, like trying to fend off a raving Rottweiler with a sock full of cotton wool, a waste of effort. You might as well lie still and play dead till the savaging finished.

  ‘You can invite a friend or two if you like, we don’t mind, you know.’ Margot, her face gleaming with rejuvenating cream, hovered in the doorway to Simon’s room and tried to cheer him up. Through his bedroom window, she caught the highly satisfying view of caterers arriving to do expensive organizing out on the pool terrace. Simon had thought of asking Nick or Alex from school, but wanted neither competition nor a sniggering audience in his pursuit of Kate.

  ‘S’all right,’ Simon replied, ‘everyone’s too far away to organize this late. It’ll be so much better when we can all drive.’ He looked up from playing computer snooker and grinned at her.

  ‘Oh will it?’ Margot replied. Of course Simon would get a car – Russell would make sure his showroom at Upwardly Mobile had in stock just the right racy little girl-pulling GTi job round about the time of Simon’s seventeenth birthday.

  ‘You spoil that boy,’ he kept telling her whenever Margot bought him something new. The last thing had been the leather jacket, a lovely scuffed-up soft one from the Harley Davidson shop in Chelsea. ‘You could have got one like that on the market,’ he’d moaned, when he caught sight of the receipt stuffed not quite far enough into the kitchen bin, forgetting that the day Margot married him he’d bragged that she need never worry about bargain-hunting again. Giving Simon a car would be justified as ‘a sound marketing decision’. ‘Spend a bit, make a lot,’ he would say, the idea being that all Simon’s friends, turning seventeen, would be able to tell their parents what a terrific deal they could get, investing in a trouble-free little motor from Russell’s high-status dealership.

  ‘What shall I wear?’ Heather murmured as she gazed into her wardrobe.

  ‘Do you really want an opinion, or is it just rhetorical as usual?’ Tom said, grinning at her from the bathroom doorway. ‘Whenever you’ve asked me that before, you’ve always completely ignored what I’ve suggested. Women do, and I know I’m not supposed to say that.’

  Heather laughed at him. ‘I just mean, do you think it’s going to get really cold later, which means layers, or is it worth risking it and wearing something strappy in which I might freeze?’ She didn’t mean that at all. Her fingers were trembling slightly as she examined possible outfits. She wanted to look good, but not overdone – it was a casual sort of party. But if she was recognized by Iain, she felt a healthily vengeful urge to stun him, to make him think he’d really missed out on something all these years, wasted something special. In the end, while Tom was climbing into linen shorts and a wash-faded T-shirt, she chose a short black skirt and a long white collarless shirt. She tied her hair back with one of Kate’s big velvet scrunchies and added a pair of silver hoop earrings. Shoes had to be the flattest she
could find, so she could be as short and unnoticeable as possible. She considered wearing her reading glasses too, but thought that might result in her tumbling theatrically down Margot’s terrace steps and rather defeat the object of passing unnoticed.

  ‘You’ll get barbecue sauce all down that shirt,’ Tom warned her as they went downstairs.

  ‘You sound like my bloody mother!’ she warned him back.

  Delia liked going to mixed-age parties. The great consolation for her age and frailty was that she felt like the queen arriving. Often she was the oldest guest, which gave her a satisfying gravitas, but if there turned out to be a glut of pensioners present she felt a mean little stab of pique. People tended to be kind, take an elbow to lever her over small doorsteps, make sure she had somewhere comfortable to sit, knew where the loo was and had a constantly topped-up drink. They felt this was the best they could do, and she accepted that and was content with it. No-one knew how to speak to old people; she was accustomed to being treated as if her mental faculties had died off ahead of the rest of her and as if English was only her second language – second, presumably, to fluent geriatric ga-ga. There was plenty of solicitous courtesy and a regard for comfort, but little chance to exercise her powers of conversation, as if by living a long time she was likely to have exhausted both vocabulary and opinions. She didn’t mind this at all, having long ago decided that age conferred a restful right to be entertained by others rather than being burdened with doing it herself. Party small-talk was a waste of time, and watching people, especially if they showed signs of potential misbehaviour, was far more rewarding. Often, at neighbourly gatherings in Putney, she and her friend Peggy clucked like ancient gossiping extras from a BBC costume drama, lined up against a wall with an extra-large Amontillado each, allowed to witness preadulterous goings-on, on the grounds that surely they were too old to have all their wits, add two and two and make it a judgmental four. If there had been a guillotine, they would have happily knitted beside it.