Seven For a Secret (2 page)

They weren't late; fresh-frocked mothers in low-heeled shoes, and office-suited, lost-looking fathers, were still filing into the hall. Among them Heather picked out Nigel from the plant nursery, arms folded, face thunderous. Someone had probably innocently enquired how his garden centre was doing, she guessed, imagining him making his usual outraged speech about absolutely
not
being a common peddler of plastic trellis, mixed summer bedding or cement hedgehogs. She looked across at the rows of younger girls and immediately picked out Suzy's face turned anxiously towards her, the girl's expression switching to relief. Always so worried, poor child, Heather thought as she waved to her. At thirteen, Suzy seemed to have an over-mature capacity for imagining disastrous scenarios: awful ‘what-ifs', like school bus crashes, night-time sparks smouldering in the thatched roof, tiny but fatal water-vole-nibbled holes in her rowing boat, the sort of thing that was only supposed to go through the minds of over-protective adults.
Doesn't get that from me
, Heather admitted, vividly remembering herself at twelve, thirteen, right through to sixteen, sublimely unaware that anything planned could ever go wrong, and somehow assuming that tragedy and misfortune were items of fiction made up by newspapers and TV reporters, to provide a bit of vicarious grief for the rest of the world to marvel at from a safe distance. It was probably a reaction to her own mother's doomy warnings, punctuating her childhood with ‘Don't touch', ‘Mind the road', ‘Watch your feet', ‘Are those hands washed?'

It was hot in the hall, as Heather had known it would be. Parents gently fanned themselves with their programmes. The geography mistress, who should have thought of it earlier, was picking her way between the rows of seats with a ten-foot pole, trying to open the highest windows. Several awkward-looking fathers made small gestures towards helping her, half rising in their seats and holding out limp, indoor-pale hands towards the pole, but were fended off firmly by the stout, capable woman. Heather could smell school lunch, and heard clanking noises somewhere in the near distance. Did they still use leftover food to feed local pigs, she wondered, recalling how, when she was at school, the girls had scraped enormous quantities of uneatable food, plus the odd escaping fork, into vast metal bins, said to be destined for the nearest suburban farm. She felt a fleeting wave of nausea, remembering how she'd been completely unable to eat pork for years, sure that pigs were somehow made up of recycled old lunches – spam fritters, mince, semolina, fish pie, jam sponge, butter beans . . .

‘Kate's leaving then? Not staying on into the sixth form?' Heather was hauled back to the present by the question from the woman next to her, a co-parent from Kate's form. The woman indicated Kate's name among the prize-winners and leavers listed in the programme, and waited to hear the story behind her premature flight from school. Was it lack of money, her frankly inquisitive face wondered, or was there a secret, scandalous something that Kate had done?

‘She wants to go to the sixth form college,' Heather told her. ‘It's mostly because they don't do psychology here.' (‘Bit of a fringe subject, don't you think?' the headmistress had judged sourly on the day Kate had presented her with her A-level choices.)

‘They'll miss her in the orchestra,' the woman next to Heather went on.

‘That's exactly what Mrs Franklin said,' Heather commented, grimly recalling that the headmistress hadn't actually acknowledged that Kate would be missed for anything else. ‘Not really a team player' had been written on Kate's first-year report, with annual variations on the same disapproving theme ever since.

The school orchestra was sitting at the front of the hall, just below the stage, facing the audience. Heather knew better than to expect a welcoming wave from Kate, who sat among the violinists chewing a nail and staring moodily into space, with her hair hanging to the side of her head like a yellow flag. She was counting the seconds, Heather assumed, till she could leave the school behind for ever and escape from its three-page list of rules, greedy obsession with Oxbridge places and ‘all those stupid bloody girlies', as Kate so scornfully put it. Heather's own last day at school had been speech day too, the difference being that her own mother hadn't had a clue that she was leaving school (and home). Only her delighted group of friends knew, sworn to thrilled secrecy.

‘You aren't
really
going to do it are you, not
really
?' They'd all got her alone, accompanying her to the loo or cornering her in the playground, and asked in turn, terrified that she might truly be so much more brutally nerveless than they were.

‘Yes, really. We love each other, we've got to,' she'd insisted, bewitched by romance, knowing two things only: the first, that she couldn't back down now, nothing would be more shaming, and the second, that having decided to go, she really had suddenly outgrown them all, become tired of childhood, wanting desperately the next thing. The next thing had been Iain of course, outside in the road, his seductive E-type revving noisily through the guest speaker's rambling, boring talk (‘In my young days . . .') and pushing the excitement level of Heather's devoted group to fidgeting fever pitch.

There'd been so much delirious squealing later as Heather, still clutching her fifth-form English prize and a bag grabbed from the cloakroom, made her freedom dash from the school grounds, leapt into the glamorous car and roared away to Scotland, throwing her battered straw hat to the crowd like a wedding bouquet. The rest of her uniform was scattered up the length of the M1, which meant that she could never go back – in those days, Heather recalled, the only sixth form dress privilege meant not having to wear the school hat. She'd wondered at the time if this was how Wendy had felt, escaping through her bedroom window and flying away with Peter Pan. Like Wendy, she'd spared neither a thought nor a phone call for a distraught parent left behind.

The speech day proceedings took their usual long-winded course. Up on the stage, bright and jolly among the PTA Committee and sedate school governors, Heather could see Margot's lilac hat nodding forward sleepily while an Old Girl (extremely old, the current lot of girls would consider her, at least 50) dragged from the back benches of the House of Commons as a symbol of what the girls should be aiming for, told stories of her schoolday misdemeanours. From the sighs of blank boredom and noisy scuffings of feet, the speaker should have recognized that the goalposts of bad behaviour had been moved since her time in the Lower Fourth, and that, apart from being unimpressed, everyone was far too hot to listen. But then, Heather realized, she was probably used to that in Parliament. Eventually the prizes were handed out, and to Heather's amazement, Suzy lined up to collect the second-year Achievement Award.

‘Didn't you know?' the woman next to her asked in disbelief as Heather gasped with surprise.

‘I'm afraid Suzy doesn't say a lot,' she told her, rather appalled at the lack of communication this proved about her family. But then, Kate was the one who communicated enough for six daughters, which didn't leave much room for unassertive Suzy to get a word in. Heather wished Tom was there to see her, to be proud of his younger daughter, but she was used to his absences. She didn't even have a clue, that day, if it was to Rio or Riyadh he was piloting a 747, and he was well-practised in experiencing home events at second-hand, with one or another of them shouting a précis version of family landmarks down the phone to him in anonymous hotel rooms.

Heather felt tense as Kate, defiantly sloppy in her uniform, with her shirt dangling below her sweater (even in this heat) and the ends of her sleeves chewed into holes, strolled casually up to the MP and collected her music prize. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she expected this to be a poignant moment. It went with the rest of the day – being old enough to have a silver wedding anniversary, old enough to have a daughter who would, that afternoon, have left school and also old enough, she added to the list, to have a husband whose thoughts had lately turned depressingly towards accepting an early retirement offer. She wasn't sure she was ready for any of these, especially Tom's retirement – he'd be home all the time and expect to join in with the gardening, as if just anyone could do it. He'd hang around in the greenhouses and decide he could re-organize her paperwork. Probably he'd unthinkingly recommend deadly datura and laburnum for gardens where small children lived, and proudly root two hundred fuchsia cuttings that nobody wanted.

Heather started fumbling in her bag for the tissues as Kate listlessly took her place at the front for the solo in the last piece of music. She casually flipped her hair out of the way and started playing. Heather waited to feel the usual mixture of pride and anxiety as her daughter played, thinking, more like Suzy than she would admit, What if a string breaks, what if she faints? But, amazingly for once, the music made no emotional impact at all, and Heather was beginning to think she was becoming numb until Kate suddenly caught her eye as the piece finished and the applause began, and sent her a rare and radiant, heart-tweaking smile.

‘I
saw
you. You were crying, everyone in the orchestra could see. You're an embarrassment.' Kate, loading her final batch of school possessions – art-work, folders of music, violin, books (most of which would have to be returned to the library with Suzy next term) – into the car, was accusing her mother. Heather didn't argue, it gave the girl something to occupy her while her friends did all their ‘see you next term' goodbyes, in which Kate could not join. Her great friend Annabelle hovered uncertainly between Kate and the other girls, her loyalties now divided. Celebratory tea in the school garden was still going on a few yards away, buzzing with conversation about planned holidays (the words Umbria and Algarve were trilled distinctly and frequently) and an undercurrent of speculation about how much the school fees were likely to go up next term. Demure hay-fever sneezes could be heard, and Heather's professional eye noted that someone could have been more thorough about controlling both greenfly and rust on the roses.

‘Aren't you coming back tomorrow for the leavers' lunch?' she asked.

‘Definitely not. I'm never coming back here again, not ever,' Kate stated decisively. ‘Besides, it's really for the Upper Sixth. They all love it because they get told how wonderful they are, getting into the best universities and all that.' Kate shoved hard at her tennis racket, stuffing it into a corner of the car boot.

‘What about the ones that aren't going to university?' Heather asked, trying to re-organize Kate's bags so there'd be enough room for Suzy's. ‘What do they get told?'

‘They just don't go to the lunch,' Kate said with finality, ‘like me.'

Heather wandered off to look for Margot and Suzy, eventually finding Margot by the tea tent on the terrace, a cup in one hand and a strawberry tart in the other, and an expression of bewilderment as to how she was to eat it without a third hand. ‘Russell's managed to get here at last, too late to hear Tamsin read her poem, of course, but there you go, I'm used to that. So we won't need a lift back with you, thanks,' she told Heather.

‘Just as well, I think we're full. You should see the stuff Kate's bringing home. You'd think she was moving house.'

‘I was wondering,' Margot said, looking around and finding a ledge for her tea, ‘does she still want a job in the kennels for a few weeks? It's just that I could do with the help, the place is going to be chaos. Russell and I and the kids are going to move into the old garden cottage. You've heard they're using the village to make a film?'

Heather had heard something about it; half the village had been complaining (in the pub) that the place would be full of trippers gawping around and getting in the way, while the other half wondered how much money they could make out of the venture. Margot had been one of the latter.

‘Anyway, they want to rent our house for a whole month, so you can imagine . . .' She waited for Heather to say the right thing.

Heather smiled. ‘Oh yes I can imagine,' she agreed, acknowledging yet another of those moments where the English, so politely, Do Not Mention Money.

‘Anyway,' Margot continued, ‘Simon is back from school on Saturday and I thought, if he and Kate could share the dog-walking, morning or evening, I don't mind which, they could earn themselves a bit of pocket money, couldn't they?'

Heather thought for a minute about the awful prospect of a pair of bored teenagers with eight idle weeks and not enough to do and agreed. ‘Good idea. And they'll be company for each other.'

Kate smiled all the way home. She opened the car window wide and beamed crazily at startled pedestrians. She grinned at her sister Suzy, who immediately worried in case it meant anything sinister. ‘I'm going to have a
wonderful
summer!' Kate declared, shaking her long pale hair free of dust, heat and five years of school. ‘I've got
absolutely nothing
to do, and it's bliss. No revision, no essays, no maths.' Her face, Heather could see in the mirror, suddenly looked ecstatic with realization. ‘No maths
ever again
!'

‘You might need to add up your change in a shop,' Suzy pointed out.

‘Or calculate VAT,' Heather contributed.
Or plan a kitchen or work out a carpet area
— She stopped herself condemning Kate to future domestic tedium.

‘
Boring.
I shall rely on honest check-out people and I'll
never ever
have the kind of job where I have to do VAT,' Kate retorted scornfully.

I used to feel like that, Heather thought. She half expected Kate, glorying in her early release from the seven-year sentence of school, to start flinging her uniform out of the car window, somehow feeling that perhaps it ran in the family. She'd have to stop her if she did – the chewed sweater might be a jumble-sale candidate, but the rest could hang in a cupboard till it fitted Suzy. Besides, she thought, slowing the car as they entered the village, Kate hadn't got in her bag a handy little purple satin Biba frock to change into as she herself had had all those years ago. Nor, she reflected thankfully, was Kate sitting next to a man of few scruples who was too old for her, believing without the slightest lurking qualm or sensible doubt, that he was whirling her away to a fairy-tale life of idyllic romance in his castle of perpetual delight. Kate, thank goodness, would never be that stupid.