The Darkest Secret (33 page)

I'm still in shock. Distant, somehow, from my thoughts. ‘And you thought that this was… better?' I say, slowly.

‘I suppose we did at the time,' says Robert. ‘And then, once it was done, and the whole hunt snowballed and everyone was looking for her and the whole world was watching, it was too late to back out. What could we possibly say that would have ended without all of us in prison and Ruby labelled a killer forever, in front of the whole world?'

I shake my head. Crazy. It's crazy. ‘But she didn't
mean
to…'

‘I know. I know. I told you, we weren't thinking straight. And it would have been the same, for Claire. Every time she looked at her, that's what she'd have seen, and what sort of way is
that
to grow up?'

‘I don't know what to do,' I say again. ‘I don't know what to think.'

I can feel them both watching me, waiting. ‘So Simone knows?'

‘Simone was there.'

‘And did you… did she help?'

Maria's eyes fill with tears again. ‘Mila, we
all
helped. Once it had happened, once the whole thing had started, we
all
helped.'

‘And no one tried to argue against it? Not one of you?'

‘I know it's hard to believe,' says Robert, ‘but you weren't there. And you know, when you're in a group, you just…'

‘Whose idea was it?'

‘Your father's,' they say, together, with a single voice.

‘He was devastated,' says Robert. ‘But all he could think about was what it would do to Ruby.'

‘And to you,' says Maria. ‘You were so young. He loved you all so much.'

Me?

I think. What
has
it done to me? Is it worse, now that I know the truth? Now that I know Ruby as an almost-adult, now I feel responsible for her, now I've come to like her? Now she's no longer an amorphous blob that represents my grievances, but a whole human being who weeps for other people and tells jokes to get through? Can I destroy everything she knows about herself, just for the sake of revealing the truth? Everything that Claire knows? If there's one thing I do know, it's that, despite their problems, those two love each other, demonstrate it, are at ease with it in a way that no one on my side of the family has ever managed. Can I really destroy that?

And Dad. To blame, all my adulthood, for everything. Keeping a secret that must have ripped him apart every day. In my head I've been calling him a psychopath, a narcissist, a borderline, and all that is turned on its head. The emotionless affect, the obsession with work, the constant search for control, the huge wheezing laugh that always somehow seemed that little bit empty… they're all different now, open to interpretation. Everything about the man is different, now I look at him through the prism of his despair.

‘I don't know what to do,' I say, once more.

‘You must do what you think is right,' says Maria. ‘I'm so sorry that Simone has put this burden on you. If you can find it in your heart to forgive her… she's not thinking straight, Mila. She's so unwell.'

‘I should find her,' says Robert.

She lays a hand on his forearm, strokes it with a thumb. Gazes at him with adoration. More people who love each other, whose lives I could destroy.

‘Of course,' I say. ‘I should go and find Ruby. I understand that Simone's not well, but Ruby's dreadfully upset.'

I don't know what to do. I really don't know what to do.

The Gavilas leave at half-past five. They had always been scheduled to leave this afternoon, and, despite being a couple of hours later than they'd intended they still hope to cover the seventy-five miles to Brighton before nightfall. The
Gin O'Clock
can easily
manage thirty knots once they're past Cowes, and though the nights are shortening they'll still have dusk until well into the evening. The rest of the party breathe a sigh of relief as they trundle their cases off up the road to the harbour. Joaquin is undoubtedly the weakest link in the plan. Boys don't notice much the way girls do, it's true, but even he would have been likely to clock eventually that there was only one twin.

Public performance has drained the women of the last of their strength. The kids' supper is a silent affair of ham sandwiches and the remains of the watered-down orange juice, a handful of grapes each. The fridge is almost bare, but no one has much appetite anyway. Ruby is back to being Ruby, and Coco is in bed already. It's very easy to fool children. They ask questions all the time, but they're really not interested in the world beyond themselves, are generally content with the simplest answers and a diversionary tactic. A bit like a lot of millionaires, he thinks.

‘So,' says Imogen, as the last crust is torn off a quarter-sandwich and shoved to the side of the plate. ‘You know what? As it's the last night of the holidays and you've all been in the pool all afternoon, I think we can miss bathtime tonight.'

A wail goes up. No bathtime means early bed; that much they have all taken in. And, though they're dropping on their feet, no child wants the day to end. Imogen waves her hand in the air. Sean is impressed by how composed she has been today, how efficient, once she understood what was needed. She has, he supposes, been running political gatherings, helping her husband pursue agendas, for nearly twenty years, and the single-mindedness shows. ‘How about,' she says, ‘we all line up on the sofas and I'll read us a story? How about that?'

‘What story?' asks Tiggy, suspiciously.

Imogen holds up a book and they all eye it. Of the six of them, only Tiggy can read, and their skills haven't got much further than cats sitting on mats. No geniuses among them, thinks Sean, and thank God for that. My Coco was no genius, either. She would never have grown up to save the world, or lead it.

He feels a lurch and waits for it to pass. Already Coco is moving into the past, a tragedy that has happened. His powers of recovery have always been little short of miraculous, and he likes that about himself. Other people weep and wail for weeks, months, years, but Sean has always had his eyes on the future. It will be difficult, the next few months, he thinks, but I will get through. And Claire: Claire doesn't even know what's about to hit her. She still thinks that the worst that's happened in her world is losing her husband.

‘Simone left it for you,' says Imogen, and holds up the dramatic cartoon cover for them all to see. ‘Look! It's the new Harry Potter!'

There's an outbreak of oohs. Not one of them can have actually experienced Harry Potter, he thinks. It's a crowd delusion, this. They all want him because they see the older children going mad for him. They'll be bored stupid listening to something so much too old for them, but they will never, ever admit it until someone else does. ‘And we can have hot chocolate,' says Imogen. ‘How about that?'

Another ooh. Hot chocolate in high summer: they've never heard of such a thing. ‘Go on,' says Imogen. ‘Everybody go and get into your jammies, and by the time you've done that the chocolate will be ready. Biggies look after littlies, yes? Take care on the stairs!'

‘Do we get our vitamins tonight?' asks Inigo Orizio.

‘No,' says Linda. She's barely spoken since they came in, moving mechanically from sink to fridge to dishwasher to island to table, her eyes puffy and her expression grim. But she's got past her protests of the small hours; seems to have taken in that it's too late now, and she has no alternative but to go along. ‘You're all better now. You don't need them. Just a little one for Ruby, because she was sick last night, but the rest of you are all sorted. Go on. Off you go. You stay here, Ruby. I'll go and get your pyjamas. We don't want to wake Coco up. First one back gets an extra marshmallow!'

The children run off, Ruby left sitting at the table.

‘Imogen, do we have to?' Sean asks.

‘Yes,' she says. ‘We need her to sleep. I'm sorry.'

‘But can't we…'

‘Christ,' says Jimmy from the couch where he has been sitting staring silently into the dead fireplace. ‘It's a herbal one. Not the same thing. You think I'm completely stupid?'

Sean doesn't answer. You said the dosage was safe, he thinks. Last night you were laughing at Claire for being unsure. But he's become strangely passive, this evening, as though the leadership has been sucked out of him. The pill is on Maria's list, so it must be taken.

‘I'll need you to clear off there, Jimmy,' says Imogen. ‘Make room for the littlies.'

Jimmy's head turns, and his face seems to follow seconds later. He has aged overnight, his skin grey and the flesh drooping. Sean could swear that the amount of grey in that slovenly stubble has increased. ‘Where should I go?'

Imogen shakes her head wearily. ‘I don't really care,' she says. ‘I think Charlie's down in the gazebo. Why don't you go and sit there? In fact, all you men should clear out, really. Let us get them settled.'

Jimmy levers himself off the sofa and sways a little. He's even moving like an old man, thinks Sean. Did he not even keep a few of those drugs back for himself when he handed the case over to the Gavilas? He looks as if he has lumbago. He follows him out through the doors, into the early evening. Another beautiful night to come. The sky is almost entirely clear, just a couple of pinky wisps of cloud high up above their heads. Like yesterday, he thinks, only so not. This time yesterday we were halfway down the second bottle of fizz and a great night of pleasure stretched out in front of us. This time yesterday I was going up to see what Claire was going to inflict on us by way of clothing. This time yesterday, I was the king of the world.

His phone rings. He glances down at the display and sees that it's his wife. I can't, he thinks. I know Maria said I should, but this much I cannot do. She'll hear my voice and she'll know that something's wrong. And tomorrow she won't believe me. He sends the call away. She's rung six times today already. To pick a fight, or speak to the girls. Should have taken them with you, he thinks. If you'd taken them with you, this would never have happened. He's already wiped from his mind the fact that by the time Claire left, Coco was most likely already beyond saving. The human mind is miraculous in its defence of the ego.

Charlie sits on a sofa in the gazebo and stares into the air, much the same way Jimmy was doing in the kitchen. He looks up as they approach, and it's obvious from his expression that their arrival is unwelcome. All day, in moments of inaction, they have been avoiding each other: taking up positions where the others aren't, each filling his head with reasons why they, personally, are not responsible.

Sean and Jimmy sit down, each on his own separate sofa. On a normal day, Sean would be reaching into his pocket for his cigars, setting about the warming and the snipping and the ritual lighting. But this evening he feels desire for nothing. I'm dead inside, he thinks. Not even pleasure will help me. He sits, and drums his fingers on the armrest. Looks at the glass table top, freshly washed and wiped and polished. There's no sign at all, he thinks, that anything happened here. No sign of the fun we had.

‘There must have been something wrong with her,' says Charlie. He speaks into the air, as though he's consulting the oracle. ‘She must have had some condition or something.'

‘Yes,' says Jimmy, his eyes unfocused. ‘She had the same as all the others. It should have been fine.'

‘If only,' says Sean, ‘she weren't so paranoid. If she hadn't picked a fight with Emilia we would have had someone to look after them.'

‘I did everything I could,' says Jimmy. ‘You saw. Didn't you? The adrenaline did nothing.'

‘It's not like we're the only people,' says Charlie. ‘People are so fond of judging, but we're hardly the only ones, are we?'

‘No,' says Jimmy. ‘Doctors do it all the time. It's totally safe.'

‘Normally,' says Sean. ‘How was I to know? You're a doctor. You said it was safe. It's not my fault.'

‘It was,' says Jimmy. ‘It shouldn't have happened. There must have been something wrong with her.'

They sit on and ruminate on their misfortune as the evening deepens. Indoors, Imogen and Linda read the children to sleep, carry them to their beds, tuck them in, ready for the morning.

‘Oh, no,' says India. ‘Oh, no, oh, no. Oh, those poor little girls. Oh, no, Milly.'

I've taken the phone down to the hotel garden while Ruby showers in our tiny bathroom. I'm weary to the bones. Ruby too. Though she slept at some point, her tears assuring it, I lay silently, staring at the dark.

‘I can't tell her, can I?'

I'm not really asking advice. I know already that I can't.

‘No,' says India. ‘I don't see what that could possibly achieve.'

India was right, about the truth. Some truths will shatter worlds. Some secrets are best kept, though the keeping can eat you up. Ruby is a sweet young woman whose burdens are already heavy. How will smashing her life achieve anything other than some clumsy tabloid interpretation of justice?

I think of Coco, bones bleached at the bottom of the ocean, and the sadness is overwhelming. Nothing will bring her back. A rash decision put her there, but no one killed her. Not with wickedness involved. A broken door lock, curious minds, an adventure turned to disaster and the idiot decisions of minds in frenzy. And nothing will bring her back. She's gone for good.

India is crying at the other end of the phone. I've not witnessed her crying since she was thirteen. She doesn't cry. We don't cry. Jacksons are not weepers, but oh, the sadness. ‘I should have come,' she says. ‘I don't believe I thought it was okay not to. But I… oh, God, why didn't they tell us? I've been despising him all this time and I never really knew him. And Claire. Oh, poor Claire.'

‘And poor Ruby.'

‘She can't find out, Milly. She and Claire, she can't find out.'

‘No,' I say. ‘No, they can't. He took the right decision.'

‘He did,' she says. ‘Oh, Camilla. Is it too late for me to do something? Send flowers? Something?'

‘I'll take some for you,' I say. ‘If there's anything of him left, he'll know.'

 

Black tights, black slip, black dress. Black shoes for each of us, flat for the uneven ground in an English graveyard. A strange calm has settled over me. I half expected to wake in tears this morning, but it didn't happen. Instead, I got up in the dark and wrote my eulogy sitting on the floor of the bathroom while Ruby slept, because I know now who he was. He wasn't the monster I'd come to believe. Self-centred and thoughtless, but in the end everything he did since Coco was intended for good. It wasn't only Claire and Ruby who lost her that day: it was us as well. I never knew her, and that's my own fault. I can, at least, make sure that I have one sister in my life.

Ruby has put her hair into a single plait that rolls thickly down her back. Her dress is plain on the top, black crêpe, the skirt pleated down to the tops of her knees. She's obeyed her mother's admonishments and wears lace tights whose only holes are the ones woven into them. I've only just realised that she is short-sighted, as she's wearing a pair of heavy-framed glasses because she's afraid she'll cry her lenses out. And after my night's no-sleep in the hotel where we decamped last night after Simone's outburst, I am filled with that eerie calm that took me over the day I went to see his body three weeks ago. Really, only three weeks? It feels like years.

The church starts to fill half an hour before the service: a parade of expensive cars nose-to-tail along the verge all the way through the village, chauffeurs gathering under the unused lych-gate in their dark coats, banging their hands together in black leather gloves and waiting for their employers to disappear inside before they start smoking. The modern pieties: tobacco
verboten
in front of millionaires, but nobody cares about smoking in the sight of God.

Simone stands in the porch like a siren, smiling, her parents flanking her on either side.
Thank you so much for coming. So lovely to see you. So kind of you to come.
The scandals – not the old one, not the one surrounding his death – are clearly not enough to put the coterie of bankers, arms-dealers, politicians and their younger wives off coming to the party. They compose their faces gravely as they pass the pair of press photographers by the main gate, only to break into beaming smiles as they recognise each other among the graves. I glimpse the Clutterbucks, glad-handing men whose quality suits declare them useful. I suppose once you're old enough, once you've been to enough of these, most funerals become social occasions. Places where you see people you haven't seen in years. And, because they're usually shorter than weddings, they're a lot more fun.

Ruby and Joe and I mill self-consciously among the gravestones, handing out orders of service and smiling weakly at all the people who don't know who we are. It's Simone's occasion; we accept that. We are essentially the bit parts, lucky to be given a few lines. Emma is passed placidly from mother to grandparents as their arms tire, dressed in powder-blue and extracting coos of admiration as people pass by. I feel Ruby tremble beside me. I don't know what she expected. I know some people see a death in the family as an opportunity for attention, but I don't think that's either of us.

And then we're going in. That familiar smell of wood polish and candlewax, of cut flowers beginning to turn by having their feet in ancient oasis, the pootle-pootle-pootle of an organ played freestyle as everyone finds their seats. We walk to the front, and I feel a little stir among some of the people.
So that's the other family
.
How many were there? Is that all of them? Is that the twin?
And then we're sitting on the right, Simone and her family on the left, nothing between us and my father, safely wrapped in his panelled oak coffin. They make them out of banana leaves these days, and cardboard and even wool, but it was always going to be the oak of Olde England for Sean. There's one floral arrangement alone lying on the top: a small white bouquet. Everything's been done by Maria, efficient Maria, taking responsibility so no one else has to. Leaving Simone and Emma alone and stately in their grief.

And then the music changes, and we're singing ‘Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer', and my hand is shaking because I remember the big deal he'd make of the rugby, how he'd take a box and go with his buddies for a good singsong, and I'd forgotten that right up until this moment. So many things I don't remember, won't remember now because the cues will never be there. Ruby doesn't remember at all. She's singing out bravely, dabbing beneath her specs with one of the Kleenexes I slipped in her pocket before we left the hotel, but to her it's just a hymn. And then Charlie is booming out a piece of Christina Rossetti and some vicar I've never met before is talking about my dad and how he's in the bosom of Christ when God knows he's probably gone the other way, and I'm walking up the aisle to the lectern and the whole world has focused in on the wodge of paper I've got in my hand, and on not looking at anyone's faces, on keeping my voice clear and steady and on sounding, above all else, like a whole real person giving account of the man. I think of all the things I thought I would say yesterday, and the deep sea-change that's gone on within me and how all the anger I've carried with me all these years is pointless, useless, in the face of this loss. And I speak.

‘I've been thinking so much about my father over these last days,' I say. ‘How there were parts that only I knew, and parts that only each of us knew, how nobody ever really knows the whole of another person. But what I do know is this. Sean George Jackson loved us, in his own rough, vibrant way, and by that we are all uniquely blessed.'

 

Language is weird. I hear my voice as I speak, and I hear the responses – the laughs, the sighs, the holding of breath. But, inside my own head, these words I've written sound of nothing; make as much sense to me as the barking of a fox in the woodland. I hear syllables and consonants and mellifluous alliterations, but the sense has flown away. And then I reach the end and my face suddenly flames as the crowd swims back into focus, and I'm desperate to get down from there, get away from all those eyes. I force myself to fold the papers, step down slowly, give a small, loving bow to what's left of Dad, and walk back to Ruby. Sit for a moment as she gives me the British arm-rub of consolation, and then the tears come, howling out from wherever I've kept them imprisoned, breaking over my head like a wave, and I'm drowning. The organ starts up again, the congregation stands and Ruby and I stay there in our seat, bowed forward together, rocking. ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,' they sing, and I weep and weep and weep.