Secrets (47 page)

Wolf was bounding between the latticework of the legs of the pier trestles. Em, it appeared, was eating sand off the spade. Joe was walking over to her; turning every few steps to walk backwards so he could check on Wolf and Emmeline. Tess held onto the railings, looking down at him.

‘Tess,’ he said, squinting at her. He was slightly breathless. ‘Tess.’

He sucked his lip pensively.

‘Tess, let
me
hold
your
hand. Look – you don't have to if you don't want to but if you do feel you are able, you don't have to go any further than you feel comfortable.’ But she stayed clinging to the railings.

‘This is our life, here,’ Joe said, ‘this is our playground. This is where Emmeline will grow up – healthy and fit, her skin kissed by the sun, the sea breeze in her hair.’ Cautiously, Tess took one hand away and Joe gently reached up for it.

‘Please join us,
please
.’ He didn't pull and she didn't move. ‘You can trust me, Tess. It is my mission to keep you happy – and safe. And not just on beaches.’

Gradually, she let go with the other hand which Joe slowly reached up to take.

‘That was your “then”, Tess – this is our “now”.’

He glanced quickly over his shoulder. Dog was fine. Child was fine. ‘I just want us to discover and share the many things that can make us happy which previously we'd been conditioned to believe would make us miserable.’

Slowly, she pulled one hand away from him but she didn't back off. While she held his other, she descended the slope as if it was treacherous with black ice though the sun was beating down from a cloudless sky.

‘Beaches. Love. Money. Family. Dogs. Kids – neither of us need fear these things a moment longer, Tess.’

She took her first steps onto sand in almost quarter of a century. At first, it felt like she was walking on shattered glass though she was wearing trainers. Joe had not let go of her hand and now his other arm was around her waist, his hip pressed against hers, his lips close to her forehead.

And it occurred to Tess that Joe was the only person she'd ever told about all of this and not only did he believe her, he was actually as appalled as she had been. More, he felt for her, he'd taken on her pain. Best of all, he wanted to show her that she could feel much, much better because he carried the cure.

‘You OK?’

It was Tess who asked this question of Joe.

‘Very OK,’ he said.

That night, tucked into Joe for
News at Ten
, Tess looked up at him when the programme ended and, with the volume muted, Joe was flicking through channels.

‘I feel like I've climbed some mountain, or run a marathon, or taken all my exams again – I'm exhausted,’ she said.

He looked down at her. ‘I guess rampant sex is off the menu, then?’

She punched his chest with mock indignation but he caught her fist and said, I know what you mean, I know how it must feel – it was your own personal challenge and boy, did you triumph.

‘Next time,’ he said, ‘next time we may get you taking your shoes
off
. And if I'm very lucky, it won't be long before you're prancing through the surf to me in a minuscule bikini.’ He had a tight hold of her hand. She wouldn't have punched him anyway – she loved what he just said and she thought, yes, maybe.

‘Tess?’

‘Yes?’

‘That explains the beach,’ he said, ‘I now know the reason. But what about your fear of heights?
I don't do beaches and I don't do heights
is one of your mantras. What happened up high? You didn't find a leg on some twenty-first-floor balcony, did you? A severed foot on top of a mountain?’

Her laughter was a relief for Joe to hear – his blunt approach had been a calculated risk.

‘No,’ she said, ‘no leg. No foot.’ She paused. ‘But an ear.’

‘A
what
?’

‘My ear.’ She sat upright and stroked gently where her cheek met her left ear. ‘I burst my ear drum when I was in my early twenties – I had a really bad middle-ear infection. Ever since then, I've had distorted balance – vertigo, I suppose. That's why I don't do heights. I
can't
.’ She thought about it. ‘Or depths, for that matter, for the same reason. So don't take me diving when you whisk me off on our luxury tropical honeymoon.’

Joe thought about it. ‘Are you going to marry me then?’

Tess didn't have to think about it. ‘It depends,’ she said.

‘On what?’ he said.

‘On whether you ask nicely.’

Chapter Forty-three

And so a beautiful summer, whose seeds were sown earlier in the spring, remained in constant bloom for Joe and Tess. For Wolf, the combination of warmth and seawater – now that Tess was prepared to explore the beach – aided an almost complete recovery. He looked odd without his tail – but he'd looked odd with it. He'd always have a slight stilt to his gait, but it wasn't really noticeable on account of the movement from the shreds and tassels and stringy swings of his coat. And anyway, a familiar section of Saltburn society had a certain stiffness or wobble to their limbs too – the elderly and the toddlers. It was the people in between who cared for both ends of the age spectrum in town: just regular folk like Laura and the other care workers, like Lisa and Tess and the other local mums.

Joe continued to travel for work but ensured he was never away for more than ten days at a time. He liked the home-comings – the discordant thrill voiced by Tess, Wolf and Emmeline simultaneously, the physical challenge of them all clambering over him, the way Tess laid claim to his kisses because she could reach whereas Emmeline had to tug at his trouser leg and Wolf could only head butt his waist. He liked how, after a day's excitable chatter and frantic, realigning sex, he and Tess settled into their dynamic.

‘It's always like the start of a three-legged race, the first day I'm back,’ he told her on one occasion. ‘All over the place at first – and then we fall into step with one another. And we could walk that way for miles.’

But they didn't walk for miles. They stayed close to home. They threw an extravagant barbeque in the garden, which provided lunch, tea and supper (or dinner, tea and teas according to everyone apart from Tess) for everyone they knew.

‘I didn't know you could be so sociable,’ Tess said to Joe while they were clearing up at gone midnight.

‘I didn't know you could scrub up so well,’ he said to her, holding her fingertips and making her twirl under his arm so he could admire the pale-patterned cotton halterneck dress he'd bought for her on his recent trip to America.

Their hospitality was reciprocated with dinner in Stokesley at Andy's. The deep creases in Tess's finances were now in the very slow process, but steady progress, of being ironed out.

‘Why not make like a supermarket?’ Andy suggested much to Tess and Joe's initial bewilderment. ‘You know, buy one get one free?’

‘Buy what?’

‘Your services, Tess. I know you say you want to work voluntarily – but until you're in the black you can't afford to raise suspicion. So why not charge for one session and do the other for free?’

‘And please
please
consider a little freelance pampering,’ Andy's wife said. ‘There are plenty of us who'd gladly come to
you
for a facial, or for fingers or toes.’

‘You know,’ said Joe, ‘you could make it even easier by inviting them to bring their own preferred products and giving them a pretend discount for doing so. Then you'd have no outlay costs at all.’

She ate her pudding while mulling over the advice, then she turned to Andy's wife.

‘It's funny, isn't it,’ Tess said, ‘you don't work either, do you? But you did – didn't you say you were something in publishing?’

‘Once upon a long long time ago,’ she laughed.

‘But that's part of my point – it's odd, isn't it, that with the emancipation that feminism brought, women had the choice to work rather than the confines of being just homemakers and child-raisers. But there's a strange backlash – our generation feels obliged to work. We feel guilty if we don't – so we must juggle home and kids so that we can work too. Too often we're made to feel we're wasting ourselves if we don't go back to work whether we need to financially or not. The craft of homemaking and the art of child-raising has been demoted. They're not considered much of a career. I dispute that.’

‘I agree,’ said Andy. ‘I worried about her giving up her job when the kids came along – but then I thought, if she says it's what she wants and if she's as good at making a career at home as she was in her industry then she'll be just as much of a success.’

‘I will work,’ Tess looked at Andy and Joe, ‘because I want to set things straight, settle my debts, close my current account with the past. I'm honest and I want my pride back. But actually, since living here, I've come to realize that I really like being a home bird and I'm really good at it. I never thought how utterly fulfilling I'd find it.’ She paused. ‘I want to learn by my mother's example – and work my damnedest to do everything completely differently for me and Em.’

‘And me,’ Joe said to her when they set off for home that night.

‘And you what?’

‘You said, when you compared yourself to your mother, that you wanted to do everything differently for yourself and Emmeline.’ He paused. ‘You forgot to add me to the end of the sentence.’

‘Actually,’ said Tess, ‘I ballsed up that sentence completely. What I meant to say was
we. We
want to do everything completely differently from the examples we were set.’

‘Ah,’ said Joe.

‘Just a slip of the tongue,’ said Tess and she put her hand on his leg and left it there all the way back to Saltburn.

Summer eased into autumn, visitors still came down Saltburn Bank on sunny days in September but when it was overcast or rainy the locals had their town to themselves. The cliff lift and the miniature railway followed their low-season timetable and some of the kiosks along the parade began slowly to batten down their hatches for the year. People still came to surf and Seb was still there to loan out boards and wetsuits and training. He came across Tess on the beach one day. He noticed Wolf first, stilled his board and sank his body down into the water to rub the sea salt from his eyes and check that Wolf's dog walker was who he thought it was. He'd come from the sea looking half human half seal in his wetsuit, all slinky black. She'd seen him on his board; she was with Joe that day. For a moment, she hoped Seb wouldn't notice her but when he gave her his expansive wave, she waved back. Who's that? Joe asked. Oh, that's Seb from the Surf Shop, Tess told him. Is there anyone in this town you don't know? Joe asked though he remembered now how Seb had come up to the house. But Tess just laughed while Seb walked towards him.

‘Now here's a sight I didn't think I'd see,’ Seb said as he approached. He turned to Joe. ‘How did you manage that, mate? Tess – on the beach?’

‘Hard cash,’ said Joe.

‘Come on, Tess,’ Seb said, ‘what'll it take to get you up on a board?’

‘Do they do wetsuits in pink?’

Joe and Seb looked at her in disbelief until she winked at both of them and changed her answer to, ‘Only a bloody miracle.’

As October approached, the shops tempered their window displays; a couple of businesses closed for the season, a couple of others closed down to change hands before the next one. Tess felt that it was the townsfolk who were being provided for and prioritized once more; the tourist industry was in semi-hibernation. The hanging baskets in the Italian Gardens were removed, the decorative stone pillars from which they had swung in such a glorious profusion of colour now stood bare and plain. The beds were turned and bulbs were planted for the spring. The nature centre closed its decorative iron gates and Wol looked like he needed a lick of paint. It was as if all the activities of the summer had taken their toll on his shorts, much as had he been a real ranger and not a wooden cut-out. Tess still referred to him as Wol though Em was now happy to call him Owl.

She was now working five mornings a week – three paid, two voluntary. There were five different playgroups and singing groups that Em could attend. Tess dropped her off and Em was happy to be chaperoned by Lisa who herself was more than happy to take the job because Tess paid her with a treatment of her choice. Consequently, Lisa had the nicest nails in town and her skin was radiant. Tess did four or five private treatments a week, either when Em was having a nap or in the early evening. She'd started to provide a glass of wine for her private clients and sometimes they'd phone and ask if they could bring a friend. A glass of wine and a giggle. They'd sit and sip and gossip while Tess did their fingers or toes. And she thought to herself that the only difference between these ladies and her pensioners was simply a few decades in age. It was lucrative and because it was lucrative, it was enjoyable and Tess thought to herself that life seemed good. For the first time, she found balance between what she wanted to do and what she could do.

She'd had one blazing row with Joe when he'd given her an envelope full of cash, telling her it was for August.

‘I don't want you to pay me any more,’ she said.

‘That was the deal,’ he said. ‘Nothing's changed apart from the fact that I fell in love with my stroppy house-sitter.’

‘Right. Fine. I'll pay you rent, then.’

‘Bollocks you will, Tess. If you think about it, you're using less now than before. We're in the same bed, woman – that halves the amount of laundry and it's one less room to heat and sometimes, when I'm lucky, you sneak into the shower with me and that means we've saved on the hot water too.’ He'd paused and observed her silently rummaging around for an objection. ‘Makes me think I should have slept with my other house-sitters,’ he said.

The glint in her eye belied the attempt she was making with her mouth not to smile but still she looked at the money unhappily.

‘Look, Tess – how about this? How about I put the monthly wage into a separate bank account with Emmeline as beneficiary? Would you allow me to do that? It would be in my name – in case there's any problem if we were to set one up with your name. But I'll give you the card and the pin number and that way, what you need for Emmeline can come out of that money.’

Tess took a while to digest the concept.

Joe thought, oh God, I didn't mean to make her cry.

He needed to take his calculated risk with bluntness again.

‘I mean, poor little fatherless mite,’ he said.

This didn't stop Tess crying but it did make her hug him and thank him and tell him that Em was so lucky to have a man like him in her life.

October came.

The month arrived on a Thursday and it brought with it the greatest shock of Tess's life. She'd been at Swallows in the morning, had collected Em from Lisa's and was walking home, jabbering to Em about the afternoon's plans though her daughter was on the cusp of nodding off.

As she approached home, something in her peripheral vision struck her as odd. Something had changed since this morning. Something was different. She couldn't work out at first whether something had been added or taken away. Had the council come and trimmed the verges? Had a neighbouring house had its window frames freshly painted? Was that gate over there always that colour?

No.

No.

Yes.

And then she saw it. The sight paralysed her. She remained stock-still with shock and abject horror. Then, she ran and as she did she shouted, no! no! no! and she wasn't aware that the buggy was careening about with her daughter rudely awoken and now crying.

For Sale

For Sale

There were two estate agents’ boards either side of the gate to the Resolution. And both of them were emblazoned with
For Sale
.

Tess was beside herself. She didn't know what to do. She paced the entrance hall in the way Wolf did when a bluebottle flew in.

‘It must be a mistake!’ she cried. But she thought to herself how one errant board might be a mistake, but two of them couldn't be. Phone and check, she chanted to herself, phone and check.

Em and Wolf were banished to the sitting room with rice cakes and the TV. Tess ran out of the house with a biro and scribbled the telephone numbers down onto her arm. She told herself to steady her voice; she told herself to calm down, she told herself not to worry. She told herself no bloody way could this be true. She sat down by the phone then stood up, sat down again and dialled.