Our Little Secret (16 page)

31

Neither Edward nor Marnie arrives back that afternoon, and Gundred is too busy with another lorryload of packing cases that arrives to be able to answer any questions. As it gets dark and the staff leave, I start to wonder if I’m entirely alone in the house. I walk around in a circuit, trying to find someone, and return each time to the kitchen. I rummage in the fridge and hastily make myself a peanut-butter sandwich, remembering the delicious gnocchi that Edward rustled up.

Will he be back soon, I wonder, to conjure another Michelin-starred supper? Will he be back with Marnie? Will it be awkward to see them together? What will the eating arrangements be in the evenings? There’s so much basic stuff that I still don’t know. My head flickers with questions.

But as the minutes tick into hours, I start to think they must both have forgotten me. I’m a grown-up, I remind myself. An employee of theirs. I don’t need them to come home and cook for me, but even so, I’m unsettled and unsure what to do with myself. And the house is so quiet.

Maybe I should explore some more. I don’t want to sit in my room all evening. Maybe there’s a sitting room with a TV? I can hang out in there.

I turn on all the lights, determined not to freak myself out, or get caught out again by Edward lurking in the shadows. I hunt down the corridors, turning each door handle, and find loads locked. There are no keyholes, though, so I guess they must be centrally locked. It’s an unnerving concept. What if the system goes wrong and I’m accidentally locked in my room? What then?

Finally I find a sitting room with a sofa and a TV, but it’s full of packing cases and an unassembled table-tennis table on its side. I’ll be hanging out in here with the boys a lot, I guess.

I make my way up the stairs and look along the dark corridor of the first floor. I haven’t been in these rooms before, or come to this floor. I turn on the corridor light and see cream carpet stretching off into the distance.

I walk along it, examining the art that has been hung on the walls, each picture with a light above it. There are oils, mainly. I study each one in turn. There are still-lifes and old-fashioned-looking portraits of women. I think of that man Harry in the gallery, and his comment about the stolen picture. Could he mean one of these? Any one of them wouldn’t look out of place in the National Gallery back home.

I really hope Edward comes good on his promise to teach me about art. That’s once we’ve got over the initial awkwardness about last night. I think I just won’t mention it. Not if he doesn’t. I think it’s best if I pretend it never happened.

As I stare at the paintings, I can’t help feeling that I wish I wasn’t so ignorant. I wish I knew more, not just about art, but about everything. This whole place so far gives me the feeling that there’s so much I can’t quite grasp.

Marnie and Edward are so cultured and have such fine tastes. They are proper grown-ups, like I always imagined I would be one day. But the gulf between my experience and theirs is huge. Even if I went to night-school every night for the next ten years, I could never catch up.

It never seemed to matter at home – my lack of further education. I’ve always thought it funny that my cultural knowledge extends to the entire back-catalogue of
Coronation Street
and no further. But what might make my team win in a pub quiz counts for nothing here, and I feel it keenly. I feel like I should be more. That I should be properly living, like the Parkers are; with money and a career and taste. I don’t want to be somebody who just gets by, like Dad does. Who scrapes through life, never getting to see anything beautiful. Who sees it all as a horrible challenge, instead of an opportunity. Being up close to wealth and class, like I have been in these past few days, has opened my eyes. It’s filled me with a kind of ambition I didn’t know I had.

There are rooms along the right-hand wall and I turn each door handle in turn, but each one is locked. I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for – I’m just curious, I guess.

The corridor stops at a T-junction, and another corridor snakes off left and right. I turn to the right, figuring that I’m probably below my room here, which is on the floor above. This house must have twenty bedrooms at least, I reckon.

There’s antique furniture in this corridor. A dark wooden armoire and a couple of intricately carved chairs.

Again, I try the door handles. They’re all locked. I see a window and glance out of it, down to the back of the house. There’s a garage part that I haven’t noticed before, but no sign of the limo or the Aston Martin. Where
is
everyone?

I retrace my steps and decide on a whim to go and look out of the furthest window, back along the corridor the other way. My tread is silent along the carpet. This corridor has modern art on its walls: a long, splodgy glass piece going along the entire length of the corridor. I want to touch it, but it looks fragile.

At the end of the corridor there’s a bay window with a small, empty bookcase in it. I stare down onto the lawn. I see a shadow on it. It must be coming from the room on my right. I reach out my hand for the handle and it turns. I push the door handle and peep around the door.

32

Mamie Parker is standing inside, on the other side of the bedroom, her back to me.

Oh God, I’ve accidentally found her bedroom. And she’s in it!

For a second I freeze with shock. Then she turns around, but she doesn’t see me. She’s wearing a pair of large black headphones and has her eyes closed. She looks like she’s enjoying some intense music. She’s wearing a floppy silk, red kimono, which gapes open at the front as she sways her body in the silence. I stare at her for a second, deliberating whether to back out.

I had no idea she was in the house. I feel a childish stab of disappointment that she hasn’t sought me out. That I’ve been wandering around like Billy No Mates and she was here all along.

Suddenly, she opens her eyes and sees me. Her eyebrows knit together. She’s obviously confused that I’m standing in her doorway. I feel caught out. I’m snooping. She knows it, and I know it.

I don’t need to even ask: this is definitely a red room.

But then her face lights up into a smile, flooding me with relief.

‘Hey, speed-freak,’ she shouts, like she’s delighted to see me. She gestures me towards her with a big arm movement, which makes her kimono sleeve flap around, like she’s a matador. Is she drunk?

I walk into the room and shut the door and, as soon as I do, I feel like I’ve been sealed into an inner sanctum. No wonder I didn’t hear her. The whole room feels cut off from the rest of the house.

The walls are decorated in a swirly dark-green wallpaper, which would be revolting anywhere else, but makes the whole room have this louche, chic designer vibe. There’s lots of low silk furniture and fluffy rugs, and a row of scented candles on a recessed shelf in the wall. Those expensive ones you get in glass jars, which fill the air with a musky smell and cast shadows up to the ceiling.

The huge bed to my left is on a raised area and has shallow cream-carpeted steps leading down into the room. The bed is one of those teak Indonesian carved ones and has a deep bottle-green silk eiderdown on it and lots of embroidered cushions. It makes me want to flop down face-first on it.

Marnie is on the other side of the room in the corner, by a carved arched doorway, which looks like it leads into a brightly lit dressing room beyond. The door is partially blocked by a large wooden packing crate. I can see an ornate Chinese-style lacquered chest of drawers, the top of which is open.

Along one wall, just like in my room, there’s a line of windows with a window seat below them, and padded cushions in pretty Chinese silk. On the other side of the room, in the opposite corner, is a silk chaise longue and an armchair. It’s like the kind of ridiculously cool apartment I imagine you’d find in Shanghai. Somehow, though, it fits Marnie.

I could be wrong, but it feels like this is just her room. There’s no sign of Edward or any of his stuff.

‘Listen, listen,’ Marnie says, smiling at me as I approach nervously across the cream carpet, waving her arm again for me to hurry up. She takes the headphones and puts them on my head. Her eyes are wide and excited.

I’m assaulted by music. The beat somehow transports me straight into an imaginary club. It’s got a sexy, cool kind of vibe. It makes me want to shut my eyes and wave my arms around, just like she was earlier.

Reluctantly, I take the cans off and hand them back, smiling. ‘Cool,’ I say, immediately regretting it. It sounds pretty lame.

‘We’ll both enjoy it,’ she tells me, grabbing a remote control from the window seat. She presses a button and soon the same music fills the bedroom with sound. She turns it down a little. ‘I like it loud,’ she says, swaying her hips to the music. Her robe gapes more. I see the full swell of her breast, but Marnie hasn’t noticed. ‘It’s my latest mix,’ she says, chucking the cans down on the window seat.

‘Oh?’

‘I DJ sometimes,’ she says. ‘I used to be serious about it, but now it’s just a hobby.’

Motor racing, DJ’ing, modelling, designing . . . is there anything she
can’t
do? She can also magically transport herself without a car, so it seems. How comes she’s here? Does that mean Edward is here, too?

‘I like it,’ I tell her, smiling and nodding to the music. I feel like I should move – dance a bit – but I feel awkward and geekish.

‘That’s how Edward and I met. In a club. Years ago. I still do a set occasionally, when I’m asked to, but I don’t know . . . It’s not really an old lady’s game.’

‘You’re not an old lady,’ I reply with a laugh. Because she’s not. She’s impossible to place. She’s at once wise and girlish. And she’s just cool. I’ve never met anyone so cool. I can’t stop staring at her.

I feel relief, too. She seems so friendly. Edward can’t possibly have told her about what happened when we danced. As the day has gone on, the horror I felt first thing has changed into something else – a kind of euphoria that I might have got away with it, which is only confirmed now by how nice she’s being.

Marnie grins at me and goes to the window seat and I notice that the diamond-leaded window is open. As she sits, she crosses her legs and stares at me, the robe falling open to reveal the length of her very smooth, toned legs, but she seems entirely unselfconscious. Her toenails have changed from this morning and are now painted in green glitter paint. What has she been doing all day, I wonder? Where has she been?

‘What have you been up to?’ she asks me.

‘Nothing,’ I lie. ‘Well, just a bit of exploring.’

‘Find anything?’ she asks. She doesn’t look at me. She knows I’ve been snooping. Is she going to tell me off about the red rooms? Does she know about me discovering the porn movie?

She can’t possibly.

‘No,’ I say, putting my hands into the front pockets of my jeans and shrugging. ‘Only you.’

I’ve found her by accident, but she’s making me feel like I’ve come here on purpose. Perhaps I have. Perhaps I’ve been looking for her all this time. I can’t deny how good it feels to have found her and not be on my own. I can’t read her mind, but I see her leaning back and pushing open the window a bit further. What is she doing?

‘It’s such an amazing house.’

‘I’m glad you think so.’

‘I’m just curious, though,’ I ask, stuffing my hands into my pockets. ‘Why are there no photos of the kids?’ I say photos, but I mean signs. Of any kind. Because there haven’t been – in this whole search.

The moment I say it, I realize how peculiar – and yes, offensive – it sounds. She looks at me, her eyebrows knitting.

‘What an odd thing to say,’ she remarks.

‘Sorry. It’s just . . . I’m so desperate to meet them. I saw the lake today and thought how wonderful it would be to see them on the rope swing.’

‘I know, darling. I’m sorry about this, and all the delay.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘You must be tearing your hair out, but believe me, this move has been hellish. They lost all our stuff. Can you believe that? I mean, they lost
two
containers. Big ones. How do they do that?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her. ‘I had no idea.’

‘You can’t imagine the stress of it. And the chaos, when we’ve both got so much on. We had to send the boys away to this amazing adventure-camp in Canada, which they’d been begging to go to. I don’t want them coming here until it feels like a home, you know. It’s not fair.’

‘Of course,’ I stutter, feeling like an idiot. I’m just a minute cog in the giant juggernaut of their lives, I remind myself. I have no right to demand any special attention when they’re in the middle of moving. The timing of my arrival was probably the last thing on their minds.

‘Anyway,’ she says, shaking her head, ‘please don’t remind me of the kids. Not right now. I can’t do this when they’re here, can I?’ she says, and I see now that on the windowsill is a long joint, which she now retrieves and brings inside the room. She takes a deep drag of it.

‘Don’t look so shocked, Miss Henshaw,’ she laughs, pointing her fingers at me and exhaling the smoke. ‘You’re young. I’ve heard of that Manchester-scene thing. Don’t tell me Miss Prim-and-Proper has never had spliff?’

She thinks I’m prim and proper?
I feel my cheeks flush.

Of course I’ve tried a spliff. I’ve had a few Ecstasy pills, too, but I went off the whole idea of getting off my head when Mum died. Besides, Scott has a mate, Derry, who smokes weed all the time and he’s such a loser, we both agreed that we’d never smoke with him.

‘I don’t, I mean . . .’ I stutter. She’s still staring at me. I can’t believe she thinks I’m such a bore. She wouldn’t, if she knew what a fool I made of myself with her husband last night.

‘Here,’ she says, handing it to me. ‘Have it. You’ll like it. It’s not that strong stuff. I just use it to help me relax. Although Edward hates the stuff. I told him I’d given up, so don’t tell him, OK?’

Another secret.

I nod and take the joint from her, and take a drag and cough. It’s strong and tastes different from anything I’ve smoked before.

Marnie takes the joint back and has another luxurious puff, as if I’ve offered it to her. As if this bonds us somehow. She watches me, amused, through narrow eyes.