Lilia's Secret (4 page)

Bill was leaning against the door of the refrigerator, spooning chocolate ice cream straight from the carton into his mouth. Hardly had he finished licking the spoon than he plunged it back in for more. He liked the suck of it as he pulled the spoon out of the tub. He'd eaten a lot of ice cream in the last few weeks; he was thinking about installing a small refrigerator in his den. A soft tap against the window caught his attention – a fern frond wafting to and fro in the breeze outside. The sun was so bright that it made star shapes on the glass.

Bill smiled. He remembered seeing the sun do exactly that when he was a kid, in the good days, before the good days ended. He'd been lying face down on the verandah watching an ant crawl across it. The ant had been alone and held a small yellow crumb in its front legs, and Bill had blown at it from behind to give it a boost. That was when he'd noticed the sun stars on the glass of the small round table. His dad had come out of the front door and let it swing behind him.

‘What a life, hey, Willy?' he said as he ruffled his son's hair. ‘Nothing to do and all day to do it in.'

The memory of the weight of his father's hand on his head
made him smile. More than fifty years later he had nothing to do again and all day to do it in. He should really take advantage of that.

He tossed the carton into the bin. ‘Goal,' he crowed to himself and threw the spoon into the sink on his way past. He strolled through the dining room into the entrance hall, admiring the sense of space between the sweeping twin staircases, and went through to the sunroom at the back of the house. The white wicker chairs with their oversized lemon and mint cushions were where a man of leisure should be; he slumped into one with a sigh and the chair slid back a couple of inches. It was the extra weight he'd put on. He supposed that was natural now he didn't have so much to do. Sometimes at the office he'd go all day without eating, without even thinking of the plate of baguettes waiting for him in the refrigerator. Jessie, his secretary, would scold him at the end of the day.

‘I tell you over and over to eat that food,' she'd say. ‘I don't need to waste my time ordering it for nothing.' Bill had enjoyed being bossed about by Jessie. She reminded him of his next-door neighbour when he was a kid, after he and his mother had moved to that apartment on the other side of town. Mrs Turnbridge was always scolding him or his mother for something.

From the white chair Bill looked out at the green. In the summer the room could be opened up so that it was part of the garden, but he didn't want to go to the bother of doing it right now. He was happy to look out on the decorative garden wall, massed with climbing pink roses. The red brick underneath showed through in charming English style. Even with the glass doors closed he could hear the burble of water from their
stream running over the stones on its way to a small waterfall further into the garden.

Suddenly he was back in a tiny room with mould-spotted walls where the damp couldn't be kept out, a mug of milk sitting beside him on the floor. His mother would hate that he hadn't even taken a sip. Even though he was seventeen, she still insisted on making him hot milk every evening. He tried to lift the mug to his lips, but it was hot in his hands and he wanted to put it down again. He took the merest sip, most of which formed a moustache on his upper lip.

‘I need you right here,' his mother was saying to him, and he'd got up and raced to the fireplace where he spat out the milk. He knew his mother needed him; he knew he couldn't go to college. He didn't know why he'd even bothered talking about it.

Back in his sunroom, so many years later, Bill blinked and shook his head. He stood up quickly and went out through the French doors into the garden, ambling over the lawn, past the swimming pool and through the tennis courts. Even the way he walked had changed since he'd stopped going to the office; he lumbered now, like a bear.

Reaching the duck pond, he collapsed on to the wooden bench put there for meditative viewing, which nobody ever indulged in. A yawn shook through him. He felt wrung out and emptied, but he felt the pull of the water. What would it be like to sink into that silver stillness and let it seep into his pores? A wave of ease moved through him like a blush. He was hot with the possibility of letting go of everything.

A duck launched from the island, squawking and flapping. It had been just him and the seductive water but now this duck,
this other thing, was here. Panic rose. He doubled over, seeing the red blurs that were there the night he'd woken up at 3 a.m. He had to get away, and he rubbed his face as he walked. The fear of weakness filled him with the energy to stride back over the lawn and into the house. Esperanza stared at him as he stormed past her through the kitchen without a word.

He took the stairs down to his den two at a time and plunged into a billowing sea of plastic bags and foam filling and things still in their boxes, which he'd bought from the mall in the last few weeks. It was time to get his house in order. He stuffed foam and plastic into trash bags; he sorted and stacked and swore. He cut his finger on the sharp edge of a cardboard box but didn't stop for a band-aid. He hurled his new beer-mug holders on to the shelf beside the silver ones one of the girls had given him for his last birthday.

Gradually, shoving and stalking turned into sorting and pottering. He squinted at the label on a rectangular box of hair-dye. The man was at least twenty years younger than Bill, but it wasn't the dark hair that made it obvious. Bill tossed it into the trash.

A leather-bound book fell out of a box he upended. He had no memory of buying the book – on compiling a family tree. Its pages were smooth. He rubbed his cheek against the paper and traced his finger along the red in the fake sixteenth-century border snaking around the page.

Down the years he fell. He could see his mother's hands smoothing ribbons across her lap. They shone against the blue of her dress. He sat beside her on the floor in front of the fire playing with the engine his father had given him for his eighth birthday a couple of months before. His mother picked up a
mauve ribbon and set to sewing it on to a round, smooth box, which looked like a piece of very large candy. He had made his mother laugh when he'd told her that, and her laughing had made him feel good.

‘When your father gave me that hatbox I was eighteen and it was just as good as candy,' she said, pulling the needle through the fabric.

He snuggled into her skirts.

‘What're you doing?' she laughed.

‘I'm smelling to see if you're still my mommy.' He closed his eyes with his head on her lap. ‘Mmm, my mommy.' She stroked his hair and Bill looked up at his mother's face. She smiled back and put aside her sewing. Then his father was in the room, bringing in the energy of the outside world. He ruffled Bill's hair and swept his mother up from the sofa and around the room, humming a tune Bill didn't know. The hatpin she'd found in her box and stuck into her blouse caught the light as she turned. A ruby, she'd said it was. Maybe, he thought, one of his daughters, Hil or Laura, would like it. He wasn't sure Angela deserved it. Where was that ruby now?

Bill hadn't been up here in the attic for years. He'd said often to his girls that the past belonged to the past, yet before he'd even switched on the light he could feel that past, and the forgotten, pressing in on him. Was it worth it, just for a ruby that had probably been lost a long time ago?

There were boxes, broken toys and chests four-deep piled to the ceiling. Esperanza should have been up here, sorting it
all out. It would be impossible to find his mother's special box in all the mess. He nudged the nearest carton with his foot, then gave it a kick. It rattled as it moved a couple of inches, colliding with the old high chair behind it. He turned to the next, opened it, briefly rifled through it and set it up by the back wall. When Carole called out that dinner was served he was in a rhythm and was glad to call back, ‘I'll grab a bite to eat later.'

Eventually he saw the chest his mother had stored her things in. It had been in her room at the foot of the bed – he'd liked to smooth his hands across it as a boy. That chest was the first thing she'd packed when they'd had to leave their big house.

As Bill opened its lid it groaned. In Indiana Jones movies anything can happen when you open a tomb of the dead. He didn't expect dramatics here, but he was still unprepared for such crushing ordinariness. There was a pale pink dress laid across the top, with a lace collar yellowed with age. Moths had eaten through the fabric in a dozen or more spots. He pulled it out and underneath there was another dress, the white polka dots dirty grey. As he pulled that one out he hoped for a split second that some merciful supernatural force would arise from the chest to sweep everything away – including him, including his daily crushing despair.

That's when he knew it – he was in despair. And he realised, in that moment, that his mother had despaired too. She had stared out of the window day after day after day, until the day she stopped staring and died. How did she live so long like that? How was he going to? Why should he try? Bill realised he was digging his nails into his palms. He put his hands in his lap and unwrapped his fingers one by one.

When his hands could function again he pulled another dress out of the chest, and there it was: her box. The mauve ribbon was stained. It was to be expected, he told himself, but it saddened him nonetheless.

Inside the box was a dance ticket with his father's name against every dance, several invitations to balls and three white wedding horseshoes with long, lacy ribbons. Bill picked out a photograph. He'd inherited his square jaw from his father. His mother was half his father's age, but they still looked as though they fitted together. They were holding hands, sitting on a rock with the sea spraying up behind them, leaning in towards each other, laughing as the wind whipped their hair about. A grin split Bill's face, but a moment later it was gone. If his parents had loved each other as much as he thought, how could they have ended up so far apart?

The years peeled away again and there was his mother hunched over, her back shuddering. He'd gone into the sitting room where his parents usually spent the evening. The fire was roaring but nobody had put a screen in front of it. He stood stock-still for a couple of moments before she noticed him and when she did he saw that she didn't know who he was.

‘When's my daddy coming home?' he'd longed to ask. Instead, he'd gone back to bed and lain curled in his cave of blankets. In the darkness he yearned for something to cuddle – a yellow puppy, one that would grow big.

The next day he heard his father wasn't coming back. He didn't take any notice because it didn't make sense – he'd just gone on a business trip and he'd be back like he always was. The next day and the next Bill got up in the morning, dressed, went to school and came home, going straight to his room.

‘Such a good little boy,' he heard his relatives whisper as they sat in the morning room drinking tea and eating small cakes. Bill hadn't met many of them before. His mother's smile was strained as she sat in her armchair. Bill stayed in his room as much as he could in the days that followed – he didn't understand the drama that was going on downstairs. He sat on the floor playing with his train set and thought about having a big yellow dog that would bark at anyone it didn't know.

When his father had said goodbye on the front of their big lawn, he'd picked him up and carried him to the oak tree. ‘That's better,' he'd said when they reached the shade. Bill had nodded, pleased to have his father's arms wrapped around him. His father had set him down.

‘Willy, I'll be gone a little while,' he'd said, as he slipped coins into Bill's pocket.

‘Why, Daddy? Where are you going?' Bill had asked.

‘I've got a friend called George. He went down to Mexico for business, but he never came back. He married a bad woman and he died down there, Willy. The wife he left behind wants me to find out how he died.'

‘Is Mexico a long way, Daddy?'

‘Not so far.'

‘What will you say to the bad woman, Daddy?'

‘I'm not too sure yet, son. Maybe I'll bring her back here to put her in jail.'

‘That's a good idea, Daddy. I'll have my handcuffs and my sheriff's badge ready, OK?'

His father had squatted down beside him. ‘You do that, tiger. When I come back, Willy, I'll bring you something special. How about that?'

‘Something for my doggy, Daddy. I'm going to get my dog soon.'

‘When I come back, son. That's a promise.' His father had bent down and Bill had snuggled into his neck, sniffing his father's smell.

‘Mmm, you're still my daddy.'

His father had laughed.

‘Look after your mom for me.'

A week after they found out his father wasn't coming back Bill was playing with his marbles behind the couch.