Want to Know a Secret? (13 page)

Chapter Eight

What have I done?

Riding back to the Ackerman, Diane felt as if she’d just become a complete stranger to herself.

She was super aware of the powerful Mercedes around her, the soft seats that had so recently been beneath her knees; their squishing swishing marking the rhythm of the sex she’d just enjoyed. Enjoyed a lot.

The tunnel vision of desire had shot past sense and integrity and she’d hurled away quarter of a century’s monogamy. And enjoyed that, too.

In the close confines, James’s thrusts had bumped her head on the roof. ‘Sorry – too enthusiastic!’ Even while he laughed, he was drawing her down to kiss her better, his laughter fading as he took up a slower, less boisterous rhythm.

What was I thinking?

I rode him as if frightened he’d stop. I didn’t want to be brought back to my senses.

James had laughed again to find that all his change had chinked out of his pockets and into the dark recesses of the upholstery. Sex seemed a merry experience for James.

And she’d shared the joy.

Back in the car park at the Ackerman, she took a breath to say so as he rolled his car to a stop close to hers. But a shout whipped away her attention.

‘Diane!’

She gazed in horror at two men barging out of the brightly lit hospital foyer, the heavy glass door closing slowly behind them.

James frowned through the windscreen. ‘Who are these guys?’

‘Shit.’ She fumbled for the door handle, heart galloping, legs tangling, panic overhauling guilt by a short head. ‘You’d better go.’ She made – casually, she hoped – for her own vehicle parked under the sodium lights, hoping to hear James purr away equally casually behind her.

But what she heard was the engine being switched off and the creak and thud of a door opening and closing.

Trying desperately to ignore James, she watched the men stride towards her. A deep vertical line engraved the negligible area between the brows of the first man, his brown hair slicked straight back from his disgruntled expression. ‘We’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

The second was a flabbier, taller, slightly younger version of the first, the vertical line less deep, the hair flicked to the side and over his face. The disgruntlement register was about the same. ‘No one knew where you’d gone and why you hadn’t taken your car. Our Gary didn’t, nor the nurses.’

Diane unlocked her door. ‘I needed something to eat, James gave me a lift.’ It would be odd not to acknowledge him as he was leaning against the Mercedes with his hands in his pockets, dark brows low over watchful eyes.

Both men turned simultaneously to stare at James with identical
who are you and what do you want?
expressions.

James simply stared back.

Diane’s pulse quickened. ‘Have you met James North?’ She managed to open her car door. ‘He’s Valerie’s husband, Gareth’s brother-in-law. James, this is Ivan and this is Melvyn, Gareth’s half-brothers.’ She inserted the ‘half’ deliberately. The Jenner brothers made such a deal of their blood being thicker than the proverbial water, none of them seemed to like being reminded that this especially thick blood was not drawn from identical gene pools.

James nodded.

Melvyn and Ivan merely stared.

Ivan was the first to look away. ‘Can you come home with us for a while, Diane? We need a meeting about our Gary. You can come in my car.’

With a quick movement Diane threw her handbag onto her passenger seat and a twist of her body put her behind the wheel. ‘I’ll follow you.’ Then, ultra casually, ‘’Bye James. Thanks for the lift.’

Slowly, James lifted a hand in farewell, exchanged one last stare with Ivan and Melvyn, and slid back into his car.

Diane let out her breath, giddy with relief.

Her hands, she noticed, were trembling. It took two goes to find the ignition with the key.

If she was a scarlet woman she was not much bloody use at it.
How the hell did people carry on affairs? Her heart was bounding about as if already dodging accusations.

Half an hour later, ensconced on Ivan’s huge sofa, she smiled, accepted a cup of tea from Megan, Ivan’s wife, and began to relax and realise that her in-laws were behaving exactly as usual, so
I had sex in the back of a car tonight!
couldn’t be emblazoned across her face as she felt it must be. Somebody would’ve mentioned it.

The sofa was constructed like three reclining chairs stuck together. Ivan and Megan liked gimmicky stuff and the room was overdone with elaborate curtains and nets and lampshades like crystal cakes.

Stella, Megan’s sister, emerged from the kitchen with steaming mugs for Ivan and Melvyn. ‘How’s Gareth, Diane? Sounds like he had a close call.’ Shadows beneath her eyes spoilt her usual prettiness.

‘He’s too cussed to die. Are you OK, Stella? You’re very pale.’

‘I’m fine!’ Stella summoned a wide but not quite convincing smile. A small, brisk, blonde cutie, reminding Diane of a beaming cherub, Stella was often around for Jenner gatherings, adding a welcome flavour of rebellion with her declared views that marriage was a prison designed to prevent women from achieving their desires. In contrast, Megan, and Hilly, Melvyn’s docile spouse, were co-operative with their menfolk in a way that brought the word ‘doormat’ to Diane’s mind and Stella’s lips.

Stella had left her own husband during an affair with an improbably young teacher. Diane liked Stella and had been sorry the young teacher hadn’t stuck around. Gareth, however, had been sanctimonious. Stella had got what she deserved, he declared, reaped what she’d sewn, eaten just desserts on the bed she’d made and must now lie upon.

Stella, presumably aware of his self-righteous condemnation, had been quiet in his presence.

And now, as Stella and Megan melted back into the kitchen, Diane nursed her steaming mug, waiting stoically as Ivan and Melvyn lit cigarettes and updated themselves on the European football results via Sky Sports. Rude of them, having invited her to the house.

Meanwhile, George, Ivan’s eldest, clopped down the open-tread stairs into the sitting room.

Immediately, Diane forgot her brothers-in-law. ‘George! How have you been?’

‘Hey, Diane. Yeah. OK.’ George grinned. So impossibly beautiful with bisque skin and gold-brown eyes to set off his tawny hair, so funny, bright and kind, Diane wondered how he could be Ivan’s son. Or, for that matter, Megan’s. George had been lucky with both looks and charisma.

No wonder Bryony called him Gorgeous George.

Diane suddenly missed Bryony with a physical pain behind her breastbone and a boiling in her eyes. ‘How are things?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Uni’s better than school. But reading and revising!
Waaaaaay
too much.’

‘Stop fannying about and get a job, then,’ Ivan demanded, without taking his eyes from the oversized TV screen.

Whether or not George went to university had been last year’s family row. George had, with difficulty and because he was eligible for the full loan, won. Ivan didn’t understand university and, as with most things he didn’t understand, rubbished it.

Diane ignored him. ‘Everyone hates revision, it’s in the rules. How’s the band?’

George flopped into the sofa and performed a yogic looking stretch to make his section recline. ‘Amazin’. Been working on some new stuff, Marty wrote some wicked riffs. Got a gig Saturday – with the new drummer, Rob.’ He’d hated having to replace Bryony and her pearl-white drum-kit. Bryony had told Diane that George sometimes sent her flyers announcing that Jenneration was to appear on Friday at The Bantam or Saturday at Dhobi Joe’s. No letter, just the flyers, a silent but eloquent message that things at home were moving on without her.

‘Hope it goes well.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Anyway. Revision. Nice to see ya.’ With a heart-stopping smile he loped from the room, chequered boxer shorts showing above the waistband of his jeans. If something that hung around his buttocks could be called a waistband.

‘’Bye,’ responded Diane, sorry he wasn’t staying longer.

She knew that George missed Bryony. When Bryony had lived at home he’d been huge in her life, so often a weekend guest that he was almost as familiar with Purtenon St. Paul as Bryony herself.

Diane thought of them making popcorn in her kitchen, a stereo playing Razorlight or The Arctic Monkeys; writing songs, arguing whether Bryony’s new boots made her look like an American high-school kid. George was a happy, larky, lippy but likeable lad who’d filled that clichéd spot in Diane’s heart of ‘the son she’d never had’.

He’d taken Bryony’s decision to work abroad personally, as if she was doing it to get away from him. Had tried frantically to talk her out of it.

Diane suspected that he felt more for Bryony than mere cousinly affection but Bryony pooh-poohed the notion, eyes big and curls bouncing. ‘What are you on, Mum? George is my bezzy, not my boyfriend.’

‘I know what he is. It’s what he wants to be – that’s the question.’

Interrupting these thoughts, Ivan pointed the remote at the flat-panel, large-screen TV and put an end to Sky Sports. Evidently, the conference was now in session.

Diane jumped in hard to put them off balance. ‘So how long have you known about Gareth finding his father and sister?’

Ivan, having opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and glanced at Melvyn. Diane recognised the look of the Jenner boys getting their stories straight.

But Melvyn wasn’t so easily steered off topic. ‘Gareth’s worried about you, Diane. Driving all that way every day.’

Diane began a snort of derision but, at the same time, she pushed back her hair and caught the unmistakable scent of sex on her hands and the snort emerged as more of an aghast sniff. After several horrified beats, she managed a squeaky, ‘Why?’

Melvyn waved an airy hand. ‘It’s a long way.’

‘There’s petrol,’ added Ivan.

‘And the mileage clocking up. And wear and tear on all your vehicle consumables.’

Diane shifted her mug to a raffia coaster on the coffee table. It was difficult to concentrate on deciphering the subtext of this interview when her heart had just performed a gallop and buck like a naughty pony. The enormity of what she’d done tonight socked her in the head.

After 25 years of – admittedly hillocky – marriage to Gareth, she’d been unfaithful.

And here she was sitting with his brothers ... A cold nausea rolled over her like flu.

She stared at Ivan and Melvyn, who were staring back at her. Discovery seemed imminent, inevitable. Panic grabbed her heart in both hands and tried to stuff it up her throat.

She’d just had sex in the back seat of a car in a public place.

What if she’d been seen? What if someone told Gareth? Or Ivan? Or Melvyn? She’d be –!

She’d be –?

Bearing in mind everything she’d recently discovered, what was the worst that could happen?

She swallowed.
If you were discovered
?
If he divorced you
?
How would your life be worse
?
He can hardly prevent you having contact with Bryony – she’s not a child.

She picked up her mug to give her hands something to do. Separation and divorce.

Living without Gareth.

Being alone ... For an instant she knew a feeling of liberation so intense that it made her feel drunk.

In actual fact, discovery didn’t seem too awful a prospect.

For her.

Shit
.
She put her mug down again before she dropped it.

Two had tangoed. Gareth would be so furious he’d run to Valerie with his tales – OK, not literally, in view of his broken ribs, pelvis, tibia, fibular, etc, but figuratively. And James hadn’t shown any desire to be divorced. There were significant issues with Tamzin’s physical, mental and emotional health and Tamzin freaked out at the merest suggestion of acrimony between her parents. There might be money issues, too, for all she knew. Divorces tended to be expensive for those with money to lose.

He was probably standing under his shower at home right now, washing away the same secretions that she felt bathed in, thinking how much he enjoyed an occasional one-night stand. She doubted very much that he predicted major changes to his marital status.

She swallowed and tried to get a grip on the conversation. ‘What are consumables?’

Melvyn assumed the role of patient adviser. ‘Your tyres and brake pads, your exhaust, everything that wears out and needs replacing. The more miles you do, the sooner you have to replace them.’

‘And that’s what Gareth’s worried about? Me wearing the car out and spending lots of money on petrol? The same car he drove on an almost identical journey every working day?’

‘He’s worried about you wearing yourself out, too,’ Ivan added generously. ‘That’s why he suggested it.’

‘Suggested what?’

Ivan gave her a puzzled frown. Maybe he’d explained all this once while she’d been suffering cold sweats about illicit sex. ‘What?’ she repeated.