Want to Know a Secret? (14 page)

‘That you come and stop here. You’ll be much closer to the hospital.’

‘Hardly,’ she disagreed, sharply. ‘The Ackerman’s the other side of Peterborough from this house. If you factor in extra traffic the petrol consumption’s probably the same.’

‘No, ’cos you can park your car here and come for visiting every night with us. I’ll drive you.’

Diane laughed. ‘What about our house? What about my work?’

‘Well, that’s what Gareth wants,’ said Melvyn, decisively, in a
so that’s that
tone.

Diane turned back to Ivan. ‘How long have you known that Gareth had found his father and sister?’

Although his eyes widened and his lips parted, Ivan didn’t look any more ready with an answer this time than last.

She turned to Melvyn. ‘How long?’

He shrugged.

‘Since before the crash?’ she guessed.

‘It’s not our business, Diane. It’s between you and Gary.’

‘Since before the crash.’ She picked up her mug to take to Megan in the kitchen, then changed her mind and put it down. Megan had a nasty habit of throwing her arms around people and hugging them close. Diane felt as if she reeked of sex and Megan would know that Gareth was in no condition to provide it. She wiped a haze of sweat from her top lip.

‘But when are you coming?’ Melvyn frowned as Diane retrieved her bag from under the table.

She straightened. ‘Where?’

‘Here, while our Gary’s in –’

‘I’m not.’ She fished out her keys.

Ivan’s brows beetled in exactly the same way as Melvyn’s. ‘But Gary said –’

‘I’m not coming.’ Calmly. She raised her voice. ‘Thanks for the tea, Megan!’

‘You going, darlin’?’

Megan scurried out of the kitchen with her embrace ready but Diane was already on her way through the front door.

She whizzed home, mind racing. Why would Gareth want her to stay at Ivan’s house? Ivan had only three bedrooms, all presently occupied; a guest would be an inconvenience. The petrol/wear-and-tear argument was an insult to her intelligence.

She pulled up outside the house.

So it must be ... She frowned out of the window at the dark lane.

So it must be ... Come on, Diane.

So it must be ... it must be ...

The light in her brain came on slowly.

More stuff he didn’t want her to find out.

Chapter Nine

Rich, dawn-pink fabric. Anything too pale would’ve been a mistake with Tamzin’s bloodless complexion. Glass buttons, black embroidery silk, chrome rings in two tiny sizes, thread. The new-fabric smell enveloped her along with the steam as Diane ironed out the folds ready to mark out the garment on the laminate floor. She didn’t have a table. Cutting on the floor saved space and money, both of which were at a premium in this house, although it did also mean fluff bunnies that collected in corners and rolled out to attach themselves to her fabric at the least draught.

A hard blue cushion was stuck with pins, red tailor’s chalk lay beside the one-metre wooden rule and, pinned to a cork tile on the wall, the measurements that demarcated Tamzin’s waif-like figure were written onto a female outline.

Diane looked at the materials around her. She felt scratchy eyed and light headed; not remotely like starting on Tamzin’s mammoth order. But the garments wouldn’t make themselves. Tamzin, although Diane hadn’t seen her for over a week, had seemed to be looking forward to the new clothes and it was apparently a miracle for her to look forward to anything. Diane had an itch to help her if she could.

But she’d lain awake for too many anxious night hours recently asking herself what she’d done and feeling her stomach turning over at the answer. Twenty-five years she’d been faithful to Gareth, through thick and thin (or thin and thinner), good and, latterly, bad. After the row about Diane’s inheritance – or lack of it – sex between them had faded until abstinence was habitual. Until then Gareth had never let anger interfere with his desire for her.

But there was something of which she was in no doubt: even if he no longer wanted her, he wouldn’t want another man to want her.

She could just imagine his cold rage if he ever discovered her back-of-the-car sex.

How sordid it sounded! But it hadn’t seemed it. James, both caring and urgent, had wanted her. And wanted her. She’d run with her instinct and satisfied a craving for human contact of the kind she hadn’t even realised she’d been missing so badly. Waves of desire had washed her onto a dangerous beach.

But that had been then.

Before the cold light of several days had illuminated the fact that she knew almost nothing about James and only had his word for it that he and Valerie hadn’t, um, met in the middle for years. And he hadn’t said anything about meeting anybody else’s middle. Casual sex could be his norm. It had seemed to come easily enough, complete with suggestions about hotels. She had come easily enough, too: one cheesy chat-up line and she’d hopped into his backseat like a curious teenager.

Carefully, she checked that her lengthways fold ran accurately along the warp of the fabric, then pinned and pressed it, a bad hang to a garment grating on her like a screeched note would on a musician.

She sat back on her heels and surveyed her sketch and the pattern she’d cut for a double-breasted shirt with collar and slightly gathered sleeves. Tamzin needed to avoid anything too fitted until she regained some weight. Either side of the centre panel Diane would embroider whorls of tiny stem stitch and French knots, working in and around the little chrome rings as she went. Subtle and unusual, Diane’s offbeat ornamentation would suit Tamzin better than ribbon or ruffles.

She examined the cutting edge of her scissors. They’d soon need sharpening, and Gareth normally did them.

Downstairs, the phone rang.

Motionless, she listened. If she got to it before it stopped ringing, it wouldn’t be James. He hadn’t phoned on Tuesday. Or Wednesday or Thursday. The man didn’t phone a woman after a one-night stand, she’d come to realise. That’s what made it a one-night stand. Dur! So what did he do? Probably, he smiled with vague friendliness when he next happened to encounter her and maybe asked how she was. If he didn’t mention the sex unless the woman was misguided enough to oblige him to, then it had been nothing special. He whistled in the shower as he swilled away Scent of A One Night Stand Woman and he forgot the whole thing.

The man certainly didn’t swear and panic and attempt a belated douche job as an optimistic form of contraception, trying grimly to calculate when his period was due before hurrying off to Dr Cooke for advice.

The phone continued to ring.

Diane lunged inelegantly to her feet, a leg buckling because she spent too much time on her knees on that hard floor. She raced for the stairs, wishing she had telephone handsets all over the house so that she didn’t have to drop what she was doing and fly to where the phone was fixed to the wall.

She jumped into the narrow hall. The phone still rang. She snatched up the receiver with a breathless, ‘Hello?’

‘Can we swap hospital visiting slots with you, today?’ It was Ivan, blunt to the point of rudeness, typical of him that he didn’t even bother with ‘Hi, how are you?’ Of course it wasn’t James.

‘OK.’ She matched his economy with her own.

‘You can go in the evening.’

‘I can, can’t I?’

‘Only we want to go to the footie tonight and we’ve got half a day off.’ Ivan and Melvyn worked at the same mammoth packaging plant.

‘Have fun.’

‘And you can stay over at ours.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘But our Gary wants –’

‘It’s very thoughtful of you all to worry but I’ll drive home.’

‘It’ll be dark.’

‘I’ll put the headlights on.’

Staring through the kitchen window after ending the call, she didn’t immediately return to Tamzin’s shirt. Clumsy and incompetent, Ivan was attempting to manipulate her. She would discover why – she’d had years of practice. It was just a question of being methodical. It would give her something to think about other than James.

OK, first – kitchen drawers.

No.

Sideboard. No. Gareth’s wardrobe. Nothing remarkable in, on, underneath nor behind. Under one of the mattresses? No. Chest of drawers, bedside locker, behind the bath panel, under the bed, no, no, no, no. Every other nook and cranny, no. Purposefully, she clattered the stepladder up the stairs, heaved her way through the overhead hatch and into the loft.

Three hours later she was in the shower ridding herself of the dust from rifling every box and suitcase and cobwebby pocket of roofing felt that looked as if it might be a hiding place.

But, no.

Thoughtfully, she returned to the shirt, wielding the shears carefully along the pattern pieces, pinning the darts, tacking for the gathers at either end of the sleeves. She switched on the sewing machine and threaded it to wind the bobbin.

A car stopped outside in the lane.

She paused. Then stretched up like a meerkat to peep over the sill. A little white hatchback had pulled up and a young man stepped out and made for one of the neighbouring houses. She turned back to her work, wanting to spit like a camel. What had she imagined would be out there? A black Mercedes?

She paused. Her eyes returned to the view from the window.

In a moment, she’d stamped her feet into her canvas shoes and was jogging downstairs and outside, snatching up the car keys en route.

Why hadn’t she thought of the damned car?

Glove compartment, door pockets, seat pockets, under the seats. Nothing. She threw open the boot, tipping out the contents of a plastic toolbox with a shrill scream of spanners. No. She halted, for the first time uncertain. No?

Then she saw a little loop, just below the boot catch. Pulling it up sharply, she found the floor of the boot came up and she was staring at the spare wheel.

And there, cradled by the hub, was a blue canvas pouch, neat and new.

She slid open the nylon zip. Inside laid a mobile phone, a set of keys and a blue building-society passbook.

Her fingertips went numb. She hadn’t had much experience with mobile phones but knew enough from Bryony and George to switch it on and locate the phone book. The only entries read:

Dad

Ivan

Melvyn

STM

This phone

Valerie

The keys looked like a front door key and a back.

The opening balance in the passbook had been £200,000.

About £120,000 of it remained.

Diane sat in the car for several minutes outside Harold’s lovely house, admiring the fish-eye dormers and the sweeping lawns. Gareth’s father’s house. It compared badly to Gareth’s mother’s house on the Brightside Estate – and that had been the best of a lifetime of bad lots. In the huddle of L-shaped terraces slotted like a jigsaw around car parks, greens and graffitied play areas, the Jenner house on the Brightside had been in a row with maroon front doors and a dustbin alcove alongside. The Brightside. The councillors must’ve been on something when they’d dreamed that one up.

When Gareth had first taken Diane home she’d been wiping sweaty palms on her jeans, she’d been so nervous.

‘It can’t be as bad as meeting your parents was for me,’ he joked.

They found Wendy, a large, tired-looking woman, in her sitting room, setting small stitches in a ripped shirt pocket. At Gareth’s laconic introduction, ‘This is Diane,’ she removed black-rimmed glasses to stare. Simultaneously, Melvyn and Ivan appeared, each as dark as Wendy, to have a peep at what Gareth had brought home.

The room was long and narrow with a dining table at one end. A brown suite surrounded a smoked-glass coffee table on a mottled brown carpet, and the walls were beige. With five people there, three of them strapping lads, the room seemed small.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Diane offered, into the silence.

‘You’re easy pleased, then. Gareth says you’ve got your own car?’

Diane flushed at Wendy’s offhandedness. ‘A mini.’

‘You must have a good job. Well, sit down.’

Diane, unused to having her life picked over so rudely, sat slowly. ‘I work in a boutique. My parents bought me the car.’

Melvyn and Ivan exchanged grins.

Wendy stared harder. ‘Must be nice to have things like that fall in your lap.’ She set her mending aside. ‘I suppose I’d better put the kettle on, you’ll expect a cup of tea.’

Stiff with embarrassment at such ungraciousness, Diane refused. ‘No, thank you.’

Gareth said, ‘She takes one sugar, white.’

Wendy returned with a tin tray of mugs and continued her blunt interrogation. ‘So what kind of a house do your parents live in? I suppose your friends are lawyers and bank managers and they all have cars, nice new cars. It’s all right, isn’t it, when you’ve got a bit of brass in the family?’

Gareth took a green mug bearing a picture of an improbably yellow, doleful sausage dog. ‘We’re getting married,’ he said, quietly and without particular emphasis. He laced his fingers through Diane’s.