The Darkest Secret (34 page)

She doesn't wake until ten o'clock; the first time she's slept this late, or this long, since the twins were born. When she looks at the clock she feels a second of panic at the oversleep, then she remembers. Relaxes her tensed muscles beneath her Egyptian cotton sheets, starfishes into the cool side of the king-size bed where he so rarely sleeps these days. Remembers again what has brought her here alone and tenses once more with rage and sadness. What has happened to my life? Is it my fault? Did I bring this on myself?

Of course I did, she thinks. I was plenty old enough when I met him to have no excuses for what I did. I know people like us like to throw around those tired old phrases.
We couldn't help ourselves
.
It was bigger than both of us
.
The heart wants what the heart wants
. But there is always – always – at least one moment when a choice is made.

I knew he was married from the moment I met him. Good God, Heather was even in the same room, looking harassed and frizzy-haired, but it didn't stop me. I just tamely handed over my business card and knew perfectly well what doing so meant. I could have stopped it before it even started, but I didn't. I made a decision at another person's expense, and I'm paying the price now. It serves me right. It serves me bloody well right. I remember several people saying it, the warning –
Claire, if he can do it to one wife he can do it to you
– but all I did was rid myself of my friends so I didn't have to see the adulteress reflected back at me in their eyes.

She checks her phone to see if he has returned her calls, though it's been sitting beside her all night and she's known since he didn't return the first one that he wouldn't. Sean likes to punish with indifference. If he feels slighted, he'll throw up a wall of silence around himself that is impossible to penetrate until he decides he's done enough. It's infuriating, frustrating; it fills her with rage and impotence.

And hang on. She sits up. What am I saying,
if he feels slighted
? Has he really trained me so totally that I'm forgetting that he's the one in the wrong?

I must make a list, she thinks. Take a leaf from Maria's book and start being organised. Make a list of all the things I must do once this bloody bank holiday is over. Get funds transferred into my bank account so he can't freeze me out. Find a lawyer. Change the freaking locks. Once he brings the girls home, he's out. He can go and live in one of his luxury condos. It's not like he has as shortage of them.

She gets up and makes a cup of coffee, takes it with her to the bath. The house is wonderfully silent, only the murmur of traffic out on the King's Road to remind her that there are other people at all. I won't be able to do this, of course, she thinks. Not for a while, till they're old enough for me to be able to leave them alone and close the door. I can bet that if it turns to war I'll be running the house, running the kids, without the help of staff. Well, so what? Other people do it. It's not as though I grew up in this sort of luxury. I know how to work a hoover, cook a meal, mend a car. Only another year until they go off to school, and then I can get a job. Get a life. See if any of the people I used to know still want to know me. My God, I've been such a fool, making myself so dependent on him, letting him cut me off, one by one by one, from the people I knew before. I think he's a psychopath, really. That thing, where one by one the old people disappear from your life because he doesn't like them, or they've offended him, or you've become so unreliable from catering to his last-minute whims, it's a classic abuser tactic. He may never have hit me, but there's more to abuse than being a punchbag.

She longs to speak to them. Her little ones. Regrets leaving in the night without taking the time to sweep them up, but she was in such a state that all she could think of was getting out. Getting away from those people and their secret smirking. Humiliation can kill you as surely as sadness, she thinks. But I'm not taking it any more. Today's the day when I start my life again.

She slides beneath the water and holds her breath.

 

At eleven, hair wrapped in a towel and body wrapped in her oversized silk bathrobe, she goes downstairs to make more coffee. She's lost her appetite over the past twenty-four hours. Stirred some pasta round a bowl at ten last night and ended up throwing it in the bin. Which in itself is more like me, she thinks. I've been eating my misery for the last few years, but a crisis always makes me want to fast. No wonder I couldn't shed the baby weight, with the drip, drip, drip of gold-plated hopelessness falling on the back of my neck.

She looks around her kitchen. Sean's kitchen. Not a room she would ever have chosen for herself. He's done it all out in white, except for the black granite work surfaces that are an even greater hell to keep clean than the cupboard doors. No handles, anywhere. Press and slide, press and slide, a man's fantasy of living in a spaceship. And the garden she sees through the floor-length windows: paved side to side to save on weeding, a horrible formless Henry Moore knock-off in a pond of gravel in the centre, the only vegetation a pair of palm trees in gigantic pewter pots. Palm trees, for God's sake. We're in the middle of London. We need a paddling pool and a sandpit for the cats to crap in and beds where the girls can learn to grow tomatoes, not a fricking
palm tree
.

She rings again. No answer. My husband is a shit, she thinks. He's probably palmed them off on Linda to look after while he enjoys his last day. Well, I hope she enjoys them. It's the last she'll ever see of them.

The coffee is good, and strong; filter, the way she likes it, not the endless fuss and spraying steam from the overlarge, overcomplicated espresso machine that looms on the work surface waiting to burn the grind. One of her fingernails has chipped in the rush to take her luggage from the car. Claire looks at it, holds her hand out to admire the damage. Smiles. And no more freaking manicures, she thinks. I'll find the nail scissors in a bit and cut them right off.

She goes to his study – takes a small, profound pleasure in invading his sacred space – and digs out a notepad from the bottom drawer of his desk. No time like the present, she thinks. I'll start my list now, in the sunshine in the garden. Once the girls get back there will be too much noise to concentrate. She pours herself another coffee and opens the door.

 

She's lost in thought till lunchtime. Planning, dreaming, thinking of all the good times ahead. I could sell this house, she thinks. Or he could buy me out. It all seemed so dream-come-true once upon a time, living in Chelsea, going to restaurants every night, swanning from shop to shop. Funny how your priorities change when you understand what these pathetic consumer dreams actually cost. A little house will do us somewhere. In the country, where the schools are nice and you know your neighbours. South, near the coast. But not near Brighton.

She is so absorbed that she almost doesn't notice the doorbell when it goes. Sean has, of course, installed a low, smooth electronic ring that won't disturb his peace and quiet when someone else always has to go. It's not until it goes again that she takes in that she'd heard it the first time. She stands up and re-ties her dressing gown. It can't be him, she thinks. No way he'd have got them up and out in time to get back to London for one o'clock. Won't be the postman, not on a bank holiday. Who is it?

She takes her time about walking up the stairs; half hopes that whoever it is will have got bored and left. And then she looks through the spyhole and sees two police, a man and a woman, their hats held in their hands and serious looks on their faces, and her world falls apart forever.

We leave straight after. We packed our bags last night and put them in the car before we set off for the funeral, and don't even bother to change back into civvies; just jump into the front and drive in our mourning weeds. Back at some hotel on the seafront in Ilfracombe, one that's been cleared of its character, Seanwise, to go with the Damien Hirsts, stout middle-aged men are spitting pastry as they laugh over Good Times Had and Good Times To Come, and Simone stands in the middle in her black satin muu-muu, smiling that smile until her face freezes. I don't know if I will ever see her again. Or Emma. I should try. Later. Further down the line when the shock has worn off and, perhaps, just perhaps, the frenzy of her bereavement has died back. I've already lost one sister, barely have contact with the other, nearly never found the third. I must try. Family matters, I understand that now. And God knows, Emma will need my help one day, if Simone doesn't get better.

We barely talk until we're almost back at Arundel. But it's a different sort of not-talking from on the way up. We've cried ourselves out for the time being, and an odd sense of peace has descended. Or perhaps it's exhaustion as much as peace. I've noticed that crying – really big, wild crying – can give you a sort of high. Endorphins, I guess. Or God's little joke.

But we have changed. Over the course of four days, my whole life has changed. In dying, in losing the control he'd exerted over his darkest secret, my father has renewed my life and given me a sister. The true story of Coco's fate has done nothing to change the way I've learned to feel about Ruby. All it's given me is a determination to protect her from it.

We try music for a bit, but west of the M25 my radio never seems to pick up anything other than Radio Two and phone-ins about incest. When we find that three stations back to back are playing Simply Red, I hit the off switch and she doesn't object. Just settles back, folds her arms and falls what seems like instantly asleep, her head against the window and her braces glinting in the light from the dying sun. Ruby, my little sister. I promise I'll look out for you. Take care and protect you. Because of you, I am becoming a better person.

And a tired one. A worn-out, wrung-out, fatherless child. My life will never be the same again. And though I know there will be bitter regrets about how I judged him, all the lost time and the wasted opportunities, I'm grateful that, in dying, he's given me at last the chance to love him. Life is a strange collage of greys. No wonder I've had such difficulty appreciating it, when all I've been looking for is black and white.

 

As soon as the road signs for Arundel get down into single digits, she pops awake, stretches, gives me the big eyes and says, ‘Macky D's.' Interweaves her fingers in prayer position and looks at me like a starving puppy.

‘My God,' I say. ‘Are you psychic or something?'

‘My last Big Mac till term starts,' she says.

‘Term?'

‘Oh, please. You don't think I let her make me do more school than any other teenager, do you?'

She waits. Sees the sign for the services come up and presses her knuckles to her chin. ‘Pleease,' she says, ‘pleasepleasepleaseplease
please
.'

‘Christ.' I put out my blinker and turn off the road towards the golden arches. I swear I'll never go near the place again, after just this one last time. Those fries must contain kiddy smack.

 

We take it in turns going to the loo and changing out of our funeral gear while the other one queues, and I give her my wallet when it's my go. When I come back out in jeans and tank top, she's already sitting at a table with the lid off her milkshake. ‘I got chocolate this time,' she says. ‘You should try it.'

‘Never,' I say, ‘in a million years.'

Ruby shrugs, and grins. ‘You'll see. One of these days, when you least expect it.'

‘Please. Hypnotist now, are you?'

She shrugs again and applies herself to dunking.

‘Are you looking forward to seeing your mum?'

She nods, and eats.

‘I'll bet she's missed you.'

‘Of course she has.' She waggles her head. It's so amazing, the way a fifteen-year-old can vacillate from twentysomething to eight in the course of a few hours. ‘She larves me.'

‘Would you like to go to school, Rubes?'

‘Oh, God, would I? I'm turning into the freak on the hill.'

‘Well, I wouldn't go
quite
that far.'

‘Yes, but,' she says.

‘This weekend must help,' I say. ‘You've been so amazing. I don't think she could possibly think you wouldn't cope if she'd seen you.'

‘Yeah, but she didn't, did she?'

I wrinkle my nose. ‘I'll tell her,' I say. I'm staying the night at Downside. I'm so tired I think I'd be dangerous driving back to London tonight.

She grunts and eats another chip. ‘Mila?'

‘Yes?'

‘Will you come back? To see me?'

‘You want me to?'

Her hand stills. ‘If you want to, yes.'

‘Okay, then,' I say. ‘I'll try and make some time in my busy schedule every now and then.'

‘Fuck off,' she says. In a good way.

 

And so we go home. Through the dark, rain flickering in the headlights. Mills Barton is all shut up for the night, glinting light through paned windows so twee I want to stop and lob a brick. Ruby is sitting forward now, tense with anticipation, peering through the windscreen as though the trees will pass more quickly if she counts them off. ‘D'you think she's been okay?' she asks.

‘I'm sure she'll be glad to see you,' I reply. I mean, how do I know? I've seen enough madness this weekend that I'm not predicting anything. But you know – suddenly Claire seems the least unbalanced of the lot of them. I'm actually looking forward to seeing her. Who would have thought?

I pull up at the gate and she jumps out to open it. The rain is coming down full pelt now and she's got her head wrapped in her coat. Swings on the gate as I pass through then runs back, laughing. ‘Welcome to the seaside!' she says. ‘We get the best winds up here.'

And we trickle through the woods, come out the other side and, as our headlights hit the house, the door opens and light floods out on to the puddles in the drive. Roughage barrels forth, turns circles, dances in the spotlight; huge white teeth flash and his tongue lolls out to catch the rain. Ruby throws the door open and suddenly the car is full of wet dog and she's crying fit to burst, smothering his muzzle in kisses as he covers my upholstery in mud. And then there's Claire, standing in the porch, looking out at us, her big cardi wrapped tight around her body, and she's smiling.