Want to Know a Secret? (6 page)

She fidgeted.

Rush hour was approaching. The thought was like cold custard in the pit of her stomach. Gareth was hardly aware that she was there ...

She slipped from the room, anxious to put the city behind her before the dreaded five o’clock brought traffic like a rush of demons from the mouth of hell.

After leaving Purtenon St Paul, James drove home to Webber’s Cross, Tamzin almost silent beside him.

‘I ought to go into the office,’ he said, experimentally. ‘I’m supposed to be in a Health and Safety meeting, this afternoon.’

After a moment, she nodded. ‘OK.’

He turned onto the A47. ‘But I could video conference it if you’d feel better with me at home.’

‘I’ll be OK. What about Mum?’

‘I won’t stay late. I’ll be home in time to take you to see her in the early evening.’

‘OK.’

He wished he knew exactly what she was thinking; Tamzin, so fey next to Natalia and Alice. How could Valerie dismiss Tamzin’s problems?

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

Still, he hovered in the hall, as she trod silently up the dogleg stairs and across the gallery landing, until he heard the sound of the television coming from her room. ‘Ring me if you need me,’ he shouted. He gathered up his briefcase and his keys. Either he had to spend some of his time in the office or give up his job. He couldn’t stay at home with Tamzin for the whole period that Valerie languished in hospital. It would be months.

But he’d talk to his CEO, Charlie Hobbs, about working from home a couple of half days a week. Till now, he’d relied on Valerie being at home with Tamzin at least part of the time. When she wasn’t flying, lunching or shopping.

His desk, when he reached it, was half-buried in paper. He frowned. Furness Durwent was meant to be a high–tech, paperless environment, but you just couldn’t cure some staff of the stickies habit. Several coloured envelopes scattered across the wooden veneer proved to be Get Well Soon cards for Valerie. ‘Pretty bloody quick,’ he muttered, flipping them into a pile and sliding them efficiently into his briefcase to take to the hospital, later. He raised his voice. ‘Lawrence!’

Lawrence, who looked about fifteen but had a first in politics and business studies and was up for the next manager’s job that became available, was already halfway through the door. ‘Here,’ he said, with an air of mild reproach that James should think he’d need to be called.

James grinned. ‘What do I need to know?’

‘Nothing urgent. You’ve got a shitload of email but everyone knows about the accident so I’ve been able to fend some people off. The Health and Safety meeting’s been put back until Tuesday.’

James halted. ‘I told you I’d be here.’

‘But Charlie went to some working lunch and has stayed behind, schmoozing a potential new big client with a toy factory. They’re looking for a new supplier of printed circuit boards.’

James grunted and sat down in his big leather chair. Damn. He could have worked from home. He dropped his BlackBerry on the desk – now that he looked, he could see a text from Lawrence in his inbox, probably telling him the meeting had been postponed – and joggled his mouse to bring his computer screen to life. ‘For their production systems or their toys?’

‘Automated toys. They do educational stuff.’

‘OK, thanks.’ He watched Lawrence return to his desk and become instantly immersed. His type of man. Saw what needed to be done and did it.

James could divert his calls to Lawrence, now that the meeting was off. Should he go home? He checked out of his window. His corner office looked straight up the Frank Perkins Parkway and he could see that the traffic was sloooooow … Might as well be here working as sitting in a queue fulminating.

The ‘street view’, as the offices at the front were designated, was meant not to carry the prestige of the rear ‘field view’, where fields could definitely be seen, over the roofs of some smaller units and a yard full of containers. Charlie had a field-view office but James preferred to see the traffic. It gave him a feeling of being connected to the real world. If he were due in a meeting with visitors, he could keep an eye out for their arrival. His life was made up of meetings. Production was the core of the company and if there was a meeting in the building, it seemed as if James, as production director, needed to be in it. Health and Safety. Training. Equipment maintenance, equipment purchase, budget, IT, HR, sales, planning and control of production, quality, timescale, costs
 
…

Did he ever do any real work, these days? He’d become a communication hub, meeting after meeting, email after email, assigning the managers to write his reports for him to edit into his own words.

He knew he was good in meetings. He enjoyed keeping everything in his head, listening silently, absorbing the reports of others, computing their decisions. Rectifying them. Nobody minded James’s input because it was never political – there were no blades between shoulders. And he rarely offended, because he took care to make his methods non-interfering. A note on someone’s pad, a text or email to their BlackBerry … the colleague would glance at it and move smoothly on to cover the point.

If Charlie was chairing the meeting he’d say, ‘Let’s just wait until James has made sure our web’s neatly constructed. James? Can we move on?’ Charlie referred to James as Spiderman. If the meeting was going well he might even joke, ‘Did I get everything, Spidey?’

At his last appraisal, Charlie had said, ‘For whatever reason, James, you were born with the ability to make things work. If I can get you to sign off on a project without frowning, I know we’re OK.’

James loved his job. Loved the feeling of being in control. In charge. And, if he were honest with himself, important.

Processes. Systems. Overviews. Anticipation and foresight
 
–

His BlackBerry buzzed. He glanced at the screen, then took the call. ‘Tamzin? OK?’

‘Should I ring the hospital to find out how Mum is, do you think?’

He checked his watch. ‘We’ll be seeing her in a couple of hours.’

‘I just want to know if she’s OK. Didn’t they say we could ring the nurses’ station to ask? I know they don’t want us ringing her room until she’s begun to improve.’

He considered. ‘If you really can’t wait a couple of hours, I suppose you can ring.’

A pause. ‘Can you ring?’ Her voice was small. Then she brightened. ‘No, I’ll ask Ally to do it. She’s off work on study leave this afternoon because of her exam this evening. I’ll ring her.’ Before he could express an opinion, she’d ended the call.

He sighed as he dropped the BlackBerry back on the desk, turning to his desktop pc and frowning at his crowded inbox. There were a lot of messages with
Valerie
in the subject line
.
Opening the first, from Amaguchi San, his opposite number in the Japanese office, he tapped out a rapid reply,
Thanks for your kind concern. It’s early days but Valerie will recover from her broken bones etc. It’ll mean quite a time in hospital, though. James.
Before sending the message he copied the text and zipped through the rest of the enquiries about Val by clicking
reply
and then pasting in the same message and clicking
send
.

He paused to text Tamzin.
If yr ringing about Mum, u better ask about Uncle Gareth, 2
.

It seemed to him that Diane Jenner was so independent/bloody-minded that if Gareth took a turn for the worse, she’d set out to cope on her own, no matter how much help she needed. It might be better if he had reports on Gareth, too, in case he had to divert any of his attention to the Jenners.

Gareth had been an unexpected branch to grow on the family tree but Val was much fonder of him than James would have expected, considering his blunt manners and his uncomfortable upbringing. Valerie was amused and entertained by Gareth. It wasn’t in her to feel compassion – leave that to Harold – but she genuinely enjoyed Gareth’s company. Once or twice she’d undiplomatically banged on about her privileged childhood but Gareth seemed more fascinated than resentful and eager to spend time in the North household. In the helicopter. In Val’s car.

James had wondered. What about his poor, mentally sick wife? He had occasionally pictured a sad-faced woman with her nose pressed up against the window, waiting for her husband, her only link with the outside world.

But all the time, that wife at home had been quite normal.

He grinned as he opened an attachment to an email, a report from Cherry in HR about training requirements in the coming quarter. Diane Jenner seemed to be coping admirably with the fact that Valerie had nearly killed herself and Gareth with her stupid antics.

The lines of Cherry’s report blurred suddenly.

Valerie had nearly died.

The thought revolved slowly as his eyes focused again and his heart resumed its normal rhythm. He tried to imagine what would have happened – the grief of his daughters. Tamzin, especially. Tamzin would have been in bits. He tried, and failed, to imagine Tamzin coping.

He shuddered. Once Valerie was well enough he was going to give her such a bollocking. Fucking Valerie.

He returned to the report’s introduction, trying to concentrate, trying to deny to himself that he had just suffered something unpleasantly like shock.

That’s what had changed his whole adult life, fucking Valerie. Made him a married man and a father way ahead of schedule, tied to a woman who had picked him as her life partner for all the wrong reasons.

Or maybe for pragmatic reasons. Maybe she’d recognised a man who would never let anything bad happen to her.

But she had overlooked a fundamental fact: it could be hard for two people who loved and respected each other, and had stuff in common, to live together without bloodshed.

Let alone those who would have been happier apart.

As a kid, he’d assumed, naively, that he would someday meet a woman he’d fall in love with and with whom he would want to be. Simple.

Things hadn’t worked out like that and, in principle, he could leave Valerie right now. But he wouldn’t, for all the reasons that he had never left Val – he had no cause to go. No hatred between him and his wife. No love between him and someone else.

And then there was Tamzin. Poor, fragile Tamzin, needing support even though, perhaps taking her cue from her mother, she sometimes treated James as if he were the enemy.

Instead of her only friend.

Chapter Four

Over the following weeks, Diane developed a routine of working at her sewing machine in the mornings and visiting Gareth in the afternoons, when the roads were relatively quiet, leaving the evenings free for Ivan and Melvyn if they wished to keep their brother company. ‘You can have some evenings, if you want,’ offered Ivan, handsomely.

‘Gareth wouldn’t like me driving in the dark,’ she responded, truthfully, because Gareth generally had some objection to make to any idea she put forward. Which left her free to do her hand sewing in the evenings while the best television programmes were on, enjoying having custody of the TV remote.

She even became accustomed to ‘going private’. The hotel-like hospital had a pleasant serenity. It was the task of the nurses and doctors to keep a close eye on Gareth’s head trauma and the things that pinned him together; Diane’s was to interact with him. As he wasn’t exactly up to games of cards or even keeping up his end of a conversation, she sat beside his bed and updated him on life as it went on without him.

‘Only bills in today’s post – I’m opening all your letters now. The lady in your wages office says that you’re entitled to three months’ on full pay before the company reviews the situation. That’s generous, isn’t it? After it stops, we’ll have to claim statutory sick pay, I suppose, because you won’t be fit to return to work in three months. You’ve always refused to claim benefit, but the bills must be paid, and the mortgage.’ She flicked a glance his way in the hopes of reaction but was disappointed.

With Gareth unable to prevent her investigations she was beginning to get to grips with the tricks he’d exerted to maintain control in their marriage. ‘I’m enjoying the novelty of being in charge of the bank account. Money’s a little less tight than before. You’re spending nothing, of course, and shopping for one is cheaper than for two. And Ivan and Melvyn aren’t likely to approach me for a sub with you in hospital, are they? Also, somehow, your salary is quite a bit higher than I understood.’

Gareth regarded her through the slit eyes in his lurid head. His expression, on that bloated face, was impossible to read.

She could have added:
‘Isn’t that funny, Gareth? Especially as you’ve only been working a three-day week. Your hourly rate must be nearly double what you told me.’
But he needed quiet and calm; the doctors and nurses said so. So she just smiled sweetly at him to let him know:
I’m on to you, mate.

At the end of the hour she patted his chest, an area that was free of plaster. ‘I’ll leave you to rest.’ And breezed from the room that he was stuck in, knowing that she’d irritated him with her cheery reports of ferreting into areas that he’d hitherto guarded from her eyes. Out in the corridor, phones rang, nurses raised reassuring voices, cheerful porters piloted gurneys and she strolled through them feeling pleasantly revenged by her liberty.