This Secret We're Keeping (29 page)

Debbie sighed, and finally the truth came out. ‘We’re about twelve weeks away from repossession. Ian’s been in arrears on the mortgage for months. If I don’t sell the cottage now, the bank’s going to take it anyway.’

Jess stared at her sister. ‘Fuck,’ she said eventually.

‘As you can see, for once, Jess, it’s not all about you,’ Debbie said, firing her final shot.

‘Why don’t you leave him, Debbie? How much more of his bullshit can you take?’

‘If
I could find someone rich enough, I’d be gone in a heartbeat,’ she retorted. Not for the first time, she eyed the remaining chunk of Jess’s croissant. ‘Aren’t you going to eat that?’

The
following lunchtime they all decamped to the beer garden of the Three Mariners, where Debbie began to work her way through a bottle of overpriced Petit Chablis on the basis that hair-of-the-dog had at some point been medically proven, while Jess (who suspected it hadn’t) stuck judiciously to cola. Smudge settled into a contented doze beneath the table and Zak went inside to order the food, an early lunch since they’d all skipped breakfast. Jess had offered to cook a traditional Sunday roast, but Debbie – in much the same way as she’d suddenly developed an irrational fear of coconut – was now claiming an aversion to meat on the bone, so they’d decided to come out to eat instead.

The morning’s already humid air had thickened in the space of a few hours, and Debbie was using the menu to alternately fan herself and bat away flies.

‘You’re quiet today,’ she remarked. ‘Stay up late last night, did you?’

Actually, Jess had stayed up late – it had been almost two a.m. by the time Zak had finally fallen into a wine-infused slumber on the sofa, mouth slack and legs splayed, the tickle of a snore vibrating in his cheeks. Jess had left him there and padded barefoot with Smudge to the bottom of the garden, where she’d fashioned a hole in the hedge two summers ago to give her a better view of the salt marsh. And although they were shrouded entirely in darkness – too cloudy for stars – she pulled up a garden chair and turned to
face the sea, tucking her knees under her chin and staring out into the blackness. The only sound to be heard was the faint rumble of the pushing tide in the distance, overlaid with Smudge breathing heavily, nose against the grass. Occasionally she caught the edges of a ghostly shadow, the dark wings of a barn owl passing over as it silently swooped for prey.

And then it began to come at her, the echo of Anna’s voice, a relentless reverberation.
You need to choose between them, Jess
.
Will, or Zak
.

Will, or Zak.

Jess looked over at Debbie and shook her head. ‘Not for the reason you’re thinking,’ was all she said.

‘We had a nice day yesterday. What’s so wrong with him?’

It was true – they
had
had a nice day yesterday. After Debbie had finished barking orders at her new estate agent, Zak had suggested taking a boat out of Burnham Overy Staithe to Scolt Head Island for an impromptu picnic. Jess had packed them up a feast (roasted potato salad, shredded crab and lemon-lime chicken, left over from Friday’s client pitches) and had thrown in a bottle of Prosecco at the last minute too, a kind of insurance policy against wanting to smother herself to death under Debbie’s Union Jack beach towel by lunchtime.

But, in the end, the day had been okay. The three of them had lazed about together on the sand dunes between clumps of whispering marram grass, devouring the picnic while Debbie read out extracts from Saturday’s
Guardian
, most of which were from the Family supplement and involved her sneering at somebody else’s parenting techniques. Later, back at the cottage, Jess cooked a posh chilli made with slivers of steak and bitter chocolate, and because Debbie had sunk at least a whole bottle of Pinot Noir to herself by
that point, she even forgot to object and claim she’d developed an allergy to chopped tomatoes or steak in slices or something.

Jess had trodden carefully around Zak all day, unable to shake the effect of his knowing glance and flu remark by the front door that morning. She was wary of upsetting him, conscious of having deceived him, and half expecting Debbie to announce to him her grand plan for them both to move in together at any moment.

‘There’s nothing
wrong
with him exactly,’ Jess said now. ‘Things are just a bit complicated between us at the moment.’ She took a sip from her cola. It had evidently been mixed with the wrong quantity of syrup, coming out so sweet it made her tongue flex. She winced and set the glass back down.

‘So, what’s new?’ Debbie said with a shrug, wiping graffiti into the condensation on the wine chiller with her thumb. ‘It’s not like you’ve always gone for straightforward. You’ve always plumped for complicated.’

Jess refused to take the bait. ‘Well, maybe it’s time for a change then.’

‘Or maybe you should stop trying to find the perfect man. Maybe he doesn’t exist.’

Actually, he does.

‘Zak can be … I mean, he has his faults,’ Jess mumbled, unsure even as she was speaking why she would ever confide in Debbie.

‘So do you,’ Debbie sniped smugly, with enough of a smile to be able to pretend she was joking.

‘You only want me to be with Zak so you can feel less guilty about making me homeless,’ Jess said, leaning back in her chair and squinting against the sun, wishing she’d remembered to bring her sunglasses.

‘I don’t feel guilty about it,’ Debbie replied simply, picking her glass up and taking a supercilious sip.

Jess looked beyond her sister’s bloated face to the children’s playground, which was positioned conveniently in front of the main dining-room windows so that all the full-time working parents could have five minutes to themselves to sink a weekend vodka and tonic relatively guilt-free. The children were shouting with delight and intermittently standing on each other’s heads as they battled for supremacy, swarming like brightly coloured ants over the monkey bars and climbing frame. But then a streak of dark brown curls and a high-pitched squeal stirred something in her mind. She frowned and narrowed her eyes.
Is that … ?

‘Fuck,’ she breathed out loud.

Debbie turned to look. ‘What?’

Jess swallowed. ‘Oh, nothing. I thought that boy was about to fall, but …’ She smiled brightly. ‘He’s fine.’

Turning in her seat, she made a quick scan of the tables out on the lawn. There was no sight of Will and Natalie – they had to be inside, she concluded with relief, in the main dining room. Not that she wasn’t desperate to see Will, but she didn’t really fancy a five-way showdown with her sister and Zak taking centre stage.

Debbie frowned. ‘What boy?’

‘Never mind. He’s fine.’

Debbie shrugged and turned back round. ‘I never let Tabby or Cecilia play on climbing frames. Too much potential for falling the wrong way and ending up paralysed. And that would be
all
I need right now,’ she added, as if paralysis was on a par with turning her whites wash pink or succumbing to a bout of hay fever.

Jess resisted the urge to suggest to her sister that this embargo on fun was probably the exact reason her
daughters found biting to be so entertaining. She attempted to offer some constructive advice. ‘A little bit of danger isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, Deb.’

Debbie laughed bitchily. ‘You know, funnily enough, it’s only ever childless women who come out with claptrap like that.’

Childless
. It was not only the word, but the way she pronounced it with utter contempt that made Jess want to issue her sibling with an impromptu but very thorough Petit Chablis shower.

Zak unwittingly reappeared just in time to save a smug-faced Debbie. ‘Here you go.’ He set down a block bearing a numbered wooden spoon and stuffed his over-stocked wallet back into his pocket. He was playing it suave today, in a fitted denim shirt and aviators.

‘Wine, Zak?’ Debbie schmoozed sweetly, retrieving the bottle from the chiller.

‘Better not, thanks,’ he said, nodding at his own glass of cola. ‘Driving back to London later.’

‘Ooh, going anywhere near Wanstead?’ Debbie crooned as she topped herself up, knowing that he was.

‘Well, I’m in Belsize Park, so I can happily drop you off,’ Zak said charmingly, and Jess got the idea he was trying to prove to her what an Awfully Nice Chap he could be when he wasn’t in the mood for belligerence. She massaged her temples with her thumb and index finger while Debbie started twittering on about how to get to Wanstead, like Zak didn’t already live in London and have a hard-disk navigation system built into his brand-new four-by-four.

Zak took a sip from his glass. ‘Mmm,’ he declared. ‘Delicious.’

Jess rolled her eyes.

Ten minutes later, their food arrived. ‘So, go on,’ Debbie
said to Zak, plucking a couple of chips from the mountain on her plate and stuffing them into her mouth. ‘Say something in Spanish.’ She chortled. ‘Bet you get that all the time, don’t you?’

Jess cringed inwardly while Zak smiled serenely. ‘Not really.’ Speaking Spanish on demand was one of his greatest pet hates, rivalled only by Mormons on the recruitment trail and dawdlers in the outside lane of the M25.

As for Jess, she was well aware that her general indifference towards Zak’s linguistic abilities set her apart from the rest of the female population. It was one of the (admittedly more minor) reasons she suspected that Zak might not be the man for her. He deserved to be with someone who would go weak at the knees whenever he declared
Estoy enamorado de ti
, surely?

‘Go on then,’ Debbie goaded.

Zak cleared his throat. ‘Er, okay.’ He took a breath. ‘
Lamento tener que decirte que estás clínicamente obeso
.’

Even Jess could make out what the last couple of words meant. Despite herself, she smiled and looked down at her food.

‘Oooh,’ Debbie fluttered, gooey-eyed. ‘Swoon alert.’ She pretended to fan herself with her hand in the manner of a middle-aged woman being shown a photo of Gary Barlow.

Already resigned to the fact that she was completely and utterly at odds with her own sister, Jess shook her head and took a mouthful from her lunch, lukewarm chargrilled vegetables shoved carelessly into a slightly burnt baguette. It was bland, and the burnt bits weren’t helping. She got up. ‘Anyone else want salt? Ketchup?’

Debbie simply put up a hand and shook her head, as she was by now busy gabbing to Zak through mouthfuls of cheeseburger about hooking him up with Ian for a game of
golf in Essex (Jess knew this to be pointless because Zak played golf in Hertfordshire, and only on a particular type of grass). Zak looked as if he might want to ask Jess for something but was suddenly doing a good impression of being the sort of person who was far too polite to interrupt people when they were talking – never mind the fact that he had just called Debbie obese to her face without so much as blinking. Jess wondered momentarily how much covert abuse he dished out in Spanish while attempting to jump-start people’s hearts in A & E.

She headed back towards the pub, sticking close to the flint wall along the boundary of the garden to minimize any chance of being spotted from the window. It was pretty, this idyllic country pub, with its facade of brick and flint, and crimson roses bejewelling the arch of the doorway.

Fortunately, the condiments table was positioned just inside the main door, next to a slightly grubby stack of menus and a Visit England information rack. Jess picked up a salt cellar and some sauces, and was just about to head outside again when the dining-room doors swung open behind her.

Somehow, she knew it was him, and turned round. The sound of clinking cutlery and Sunday-lunch chatter was bubbling gently away behind them like an orchestra tuning up.

‘I’m not stalking you,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

‘That’s okay. I’ve been known to do a bit of casual stalking myself from time to time.’

He looked lovely. Brown, handsome, lovely. His arms were slightly pumped, like he’d spent the morning in his garage doing bench press. She swallowed away a vivid flashback to the last time she’d seen him, when he’d been naked on top of her in a budget hotel room.

‘Something very weird has just happened to me,’ he said then.

His face was set straight, almost strained, and she knew at once that he didn’t mean good weird. ‘What?’ she asked him, though she suddenly felt afraid.

‘I bumped into Steve Robbins.’ He spoke quickly, like the name would be familiar to her.

She stared at him. ‘Who? Steve who?’

‘Steve Robbins. Mr Robbins. He did IT at Hadley.’

Jess flipped urgently through a mental index of faces but she couldn’t recall who he meant. ‘Steve Robbins … I don’t …’

‘You do, you do – white trainers. Hair like he glued it on.
Red Dwarf
T-shirt.’

The image fell unexpectedly into place. ‘Oh my God,’ she breathed. ‘I do. I do remember him. Mr Robbins. He used to … set up projectors and things.’

Will nodded. ‘I just bumped into him. We were good friends.’

‘Oh, fuck.’

‘Really good friends,’ he said, like he was still struggling to take in what had happened.

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘Um, barely. We walked past each other outside. He must have been going back to his car. He didn’t recognize me at first, then we both looked back at the same time, and he just put his hand up, like …’ He swallowed and shook his head. ‘Wow. Sorry.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, I just … Steve’s the first person I’ve seen here who’s definitely recognized me.’

‘But if he’s a friend …’

‘Well, he was. I haven’t spoken to him since, obviously. And he was never exactly the most subtle of people.’

The flicker in his eyes was betraying his urge to panic. ‘Don’t worry,’ Jess said quickly. ‘He doesn’t know your name. No one can find you. Has he gone?’

Will nodded. ‘I saw him drive off. I’m a bit worried he might come back though. Steve’s the kind of person who would really need to know if prison’s what it looks like in the films. Nice guy, but about as tactful as a tabloid journalist.’ He caught her eye. ‘Sorry, Jess. Sorry. Let’s … talk about something else. It’s fine,’ he said, exhaling. ‘Nothing happened.’

Shaking her head to dismiss his apology, she glanced down, noticing as she did that his bracelet was safely fastened back round his wrist. ‘You fixed it.’

‘Well,
fix
is overstating it,’ he said, following her gaze. ‘It’s a patch job. And by patch I mean superglue.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Natalie thinks I should bin it. She not-so-secretly hates it.’

‘Where does she think you got it?’ Jess couldn’t resist asking him.

‘I told her Richard gave it to me.’ He paused. ‘Emotional attachment is the sole reason it’s not yet met an untimely death-by-Hoover-nozzle. Good thing she doesn’t very often bump into Richard.’