The Husband's Secret (32 page)

Dear Tess, she read. This is probably a silly gift for a girl. I never did know the right thing to buy you. I was trying to think of something that would help when you’re feeling lost. I remember feeling lost. It was bloody awful. But I always had you. Hope you find your way, Love Dad.

Tess felt something rise within her chest.

‘I guess it’s quite pretty,’ said Lucy, taking the compass and turning it this way and that.

Tess imagined her father searching the shops for the right gift for his adult daughter; the expression of mild terror that would have crossed his leathery, lined face each time someone asked, ‘Can I help you?’ Most of the shop assistants would have thought him rude, a grumpy, gruff old man who refused to meet their eye.

‘Why did you and Dad split up?’ Tess used to ask her mother, and Lucy would say airily, a little glint in her eye, ‘Oh, darling, we were just two very
different
people.’ She meant: Your father was different. (When Tess asked her father the same question, he’d shrug and cough and say, ‘You’ll have to ask your mum about that one, love.’)

It occurred to Tess that her father probably suffered from social anxiety too.

Before their divorce, her mother had been driven to distraction by his lack of interest in socialising. ‘But we
never go anywhere
!’ she would say, full of frustration, when Tess’s father once again refused to attend some event.

‘Tess is a bit shy,’ her mother used to tell people in an audible whisper, her hand over her mouth. ‘Gets it from her father, I’m afraid.’ Tess had heard the cheerful disrespect in her mother’s voice, and had come to believe that any form of shyness was wrong, morally wrong, in fact. You
should
want to go to parties. You
should
want to be surrounded by people.

No wonder she felt so ashamed of her shyness, as if it were an embarrassing physical ailment that needed to be hidden at all costs.

She looked at her mother.

‘Why didn’t you just go on your own?’

‘What?’ Lucy looked up from the compass. ‘Go where?’

‘Nothing,’ said Tess. She held out her hand. ‘Give me back my compass. I love it.’

Cecilia parked her car in front of Rachel Crowley’s house and wondered again why she was doing this to herself. She could have dropped Rachel’s Tupperware order off at the school after Easter. The guests from Marla’s party weren’t promised delivery until after the break. It seemed she simultaneously wanted to seek Rachel out and avoid her at all costs.

Perhaps she wanted to see her because Rachel was the only person in the world with the right and the authority to speak out on Cecilia’s current dilemma. ‘Dilemma’ was too gentle a word. Too selfish a word. It implied that Cecilia’s feelings actually mattered.

She lifted the plastic bag of Tupperware from the passenger seat and opened the car door. Perhaps the real reason she was here was because she knew Rachel had every reason in the world to hate her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone hating her.
I’m a child
, she thought as she knocked on the door.
A middle-aged, perimenopausal child
.

The door opened faster than Cecilia had expected. She was still preparing her face.

‘Oh,’ said Rachel, and her face dropped. ‘Cecilia.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cecilia. So
very, very sorry
. ‘Are you expecting someone?’

‘Not really,’ said Rachel. She recovered herself. ‘How are you? My Tupperware! How exciting. Thank you so much. Would you like to come in? Where are your girls?’

‘They’re at my mother’s place,’ said Cecilia. ‘She felt bad because she missed their Easter hat parade today. So she’s giving them afternoon tea. Anyway. That’s neither here nor there! I won’t come in, I’ll just –’

‘You sure? I’ve just put the kettle on.’

Cecilia felt too weak to argue. She would do whatever Rachel wanted. Her legs could barely hold her up, they were trembling so badly. If Rachel shouted ‘Confess!’ she would confess. She almost longed for that.

She walked across the threshold with her heart in her mouth, as if she was in physical danger. The house was very similar to Cecilia’s home, like so many of the homes on the North Shore.

‘Come into the kitchen,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ve got the heater on in there. It’s getting chilly in the afternoon.’

‘
We
had that linoleum!’ said Cecilia when she followed her into the kitchen.

‘I’m sure it was the height of fashion all those years ago,’ said Rachel as she put teabags into cups. ‘I’m not one of those renovating types, as you can see. Just can’t get myself interested in tiles and carpets, paint colours and
splash-backs
. Here you go. Milk? Sugar? Help yourself.’

‘This is Janie, right?’ asked Cecilia. ‘And Rob?’ She’d stopped in front of the refrigerator. It was a relief to say Janie’s name. Her presence was so gigantic in Cecilia’s head. It felt like if she didn’t say her name it would suddenly burst out of her mouth in the middle of a sentence.

The photo on Rachel’s fridge was casually held with a magnet advertising Pete the 24 Hour Plumber. It was a small, faded, off-centre colour photo of Janie and her younger brother holding cans of Coke and standing in front of a barbecue. They’d both turned around with blank, slack-mouthed expressions, as if the photographer had surprised them. It wasn’t a particularly good photo but somehow its very casualness made it seem all the more impossible that Janie was dead.

‘Yes, that’s Janie,’ said Rachel. ‘That photo was up on the fridge when she died and I’ve never taken it down. Silly, really. I’ve got much better ones of her. Have a seat. I’ve got
these biscuits called macarons. Not macaroons, oh, no, if that’s what you’re thinking. Macarons. You probably know all about them. I’m not very sophisticated.’ Cecilia saw that she took pride in not being sophisticated. ‘Have one! They’re really very good.’

‘Thank you,’ said Cecilia. She sat down and took a macaron. It tasted like nothing, like dust. She sipped her tea too fast and burned her tongue.

‘Thank you for dropping off the Tupperware,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m looking forward to using it. The thing is that tomorrow is the anniversary of Janie’s death. Twenty-eight years.’

It took Cecilia a moment to comprehend what Rachel had said. She couldn’t work out the link between the Tupperware and the anniversary.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cecilia. She noticed with almost scientific interest that her hand was visibly trembling, and she carefully placed her teacup back in its saucer.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Rachel. ‘I don’t know why I told you that. I’ve just been thinking about her a lot today. Even more than usual. I sometimes wonder how often I would have thought about her if she’d lived. I don’t think about poor Rob that often. I don’t worry about him. You’d think after losing one child that I’d be worried about something happening to my other child. But I’m not particularly worried. Isn’t that awful? I do worry about something happening to my grandson. To Jacob.’

‘I think that’s natural,’ said Cecilia, and suddenly she was overcome by her own breathtaking
audacity
. To be sitting here in this kitchen, delivering platitudes along with Tupperware.

‘I do love my son,’ murmured Rachel into her mug. She shot Cecilia a shame-faced look over the rim. ‘I’d hate you to think I didn’t care for him.’

‘Of course I don’t think that!’ Cecilia saw to her horror that Rachel had a triangle of blue macaron right in the centre of her bottom lip. It was horribly undignified and made Rachel seem suddenly elderly, almost like a dementia patient.

‘I just feel like he belongs to Lauren now. What’s that old saying? “A son is a son until he takes him a wife, a daughter is a daughter for all of her life.”’

‘I’ve . . . heard that. I don’t know if it’s true.’

Cecilia was in agony. She couldn’t tell Rachel about the crumb on her lip. Not when she was talking about Janie.

Rachel lifted her teacup for another sip, and Cecilia tensed. Surely it would be gone now. Rachel lowered the cup. The crumb had moved off-centre and was even more obvious. She had to say something.

‘I really don’t know why I’m rambling on like this,’ said Rachel. ‘You’re probably thinking I’ve lost the plot! I’m not myself, you see. When I came home from your Tupperware party the other night I found something.’

She licked her lips and the blue crumb vanished. Cecilia sagged with relief.

‘Found something?’ she repeated. She took a big mouthful of her tea. The faster she drank, the faster she could leave. It was very hot. The water must have been boiling when Rachel poured. Cecilia’s mother made the tea too hot as well.

‘Something that proves who killed Janie,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s evidence. New evidence. I’ve given it to the police – Oh! Oh, dear, Cecilia, are you okay? Quickly! Come and run your hand under the tap.’

chapter forty-one

Tess tightened her arms around Connor’s waist as his bike swooped and dipped around corners. The streetlights and shopfronts were blurry streaks of coloured light in her peripheral vision. The wind roared in her ears. Each time they took off at a set of traffic lights her stomach lurched thrillingly, the way it did when she was in a plane taking off from the runway.

‘Don’t worry, I’m a safe, boring, middle-aged bike rider,’ Connor had told her as he’d adjusted her helmet for her. ‘I stay under the speed limit. Especially when I’ve got precious cargo.’ Then he’d dropped his head and gently banged his helmet against hers. Tess had felt touched and cherished and also idiotic. She was too old, surely, for helmet-clinking and flirty little remarks like that. She was too married.

But perhaps not.

She tried to remember what she’d been doing the previous Thursday night, back home in Melbourne, back when she was still Will’s wife and Felicity’s cousin. She’d made apple muffins, she remembered. Liam liked them for his morning tea at school. And then she and Will had watched TV with their laptops on their knees. She’d caught up with
some invoicing. He’d been working on the Cough Stop campaign. They’d read their books and gone to bed. Wait. No. Yes. Yes, they definitely did. They’d had sex. Quick and comforting and perfectly nice: like a muffin; nothing like sex in the hallway of Connor’s apartment of course. But that was marriage. Marriage was a warm apple muffin.

He must have been thinking about Felicity when they made love.

The thought was as brutal as a slap.

He’d been especially tender when they made love that night, she remembered. She felt particularly cherished. When in fact, he wasn’t cherishing her, he was
pitying
her. Perhaps he was even wondering if this was their last time together as husband and wife.

The hurt spread instantaneously throughout her body. She squeezed her legs tighter around Connor’s body and leaned forwards as if she could press herself into him. When they got to the next set of lights, Connor put back his hand and caressed her thigh, giving her an instant jolt of sexual pleasure. It occurred to her that the pain she was feeling over Will and Felicity was intensifying every sensation, so that what felt good, like the swoop of the bike and Connor’s hand on her thigh, felt even better. Last Thursday night she was leading a soft, muffled, pain-free little life. This Thursday night felt like adolescence: exquisitely painful and sharply beautiful.

But no matter how badly it hurt, she didn’t want to be home in Melbourne, baking and watching television and doing invoices. She wanted to be right here, soaring along on this bike, her heart thumping, letting her know she was alive.

It was after nine pm and Cecilia and John-Paul were in the backyard, sitting in the cabana next to the pool. This was the
only place where they were safe from eavesdroppers. Their daughters had an extraordinary ability to hear things they weren’t meant to hear. From where she sat, Cecilia could see them through the French doors, their faces illuminated by the flickering light of the television. It was a tradition that they were allowed to stay up as late as they wanted on the first night of a school holiday, eating popcorn and watching movies.

Cecilia turned her gaze away from the girls and looked at the shimmering blue of their kidney-shaped swimming pool with its powerful underwater light: the perfect symbol of suburban bliss. Except for that strange intermittent sound, like a baby choking, that was coming from the pool filter. She could hear it right now. Cecilia had asked John-Paul to look at it weeks before he went to Chicago; he hadn’t got around to it, but he would have been furious if she’d arranged for some repair guy to come and fix it. It would have indicated lack of faith in his abilities. Of course, when he
did
finally look at it, he wouldn’t be able to fix it and she’d have to get the guy in anyway. It was frustrating. Why hadn’t that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program:
Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn’t feel like a nag
.