The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets (10 page)

There were also other inconveniences. Audrey couldn't drive and had no car, so Tom had to take her everywhere she wanted or needed to go: to the dentist, to the theatre and cinema, to the post office. Once, after a particularly gruelling day at work, he had arrived at the show home and slumped in a yellow chair with a beer, only to be told by Selena that he had to take Audrey to visit the grave of a famous sculptor who was buried in the next town, ten miles away. He'd had to take her immediately. Selena hissed that it couldn't wait; Audrey had been stuck in the show home all day and needed an outing.

Clive sometimes told excessively gruesome stories about corpses he'd met that day in front of the children, and gave them nightmares. ‘When we know him a bit better, we'll ask him to stop,' said Selena.

Petra was at college and often needed help with her
coursework
. Selena had volunteered to oversee her media studies projects, and Clive was helping her with her IT assignments,
but the task of supervising and editing all the history essays had been allocated to Tom. ‘But I don't
know
anything about the causes of the French Revolution!' he'd pleaded with Selena.

‘Well, find out,' she'd suggested. ‘Or take an inspired guess. I mean, they're bound to be pretty much the same as the causes of all revolutions, aren't they? “Let them eat cake”, “Can you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men”, that sort of thing.'

‘But why can't Petra..?'

‘Venice, Tom.' That was all Selena ever had to say. ‘Venice, Tom' was synonymous with ‘Shut up'.

Tom found, to his utter bewilderment, that he didn't begrudge the extra money and the extra effort nearly as much as he thought he ought to, not only because of Venice but because he genuinely liked having Audrey, Clive and Petra around. He felt bolstered, consolidated. He hurried back from the office to the show home every night, and was greeted with cheers of ‘Hey! Tom's back!' And, every time, he felt a proud glow. He doubted very much that Idris Sutherland had complete strangers queuing up to form lifelong bonds with him; for the first time in his life, Tom felt like the lucky one. He had an accessory that noone else had: the Kilkennys, a solid band of voluntary relatives.

He loaded the shopping into the back of the car and drove to the memorial hall to collect Audrey from an afternoon event that had something to do with the celebrity chef Amy Dennison. Audrey was waiting for him on the steps when he arrived, wearing a sleeveless denim dress, red sandals and a red shawl. She was holding a Tupperware container.

‘Amy's special heart-of-ice biscuits,' she said, as she climbed into the car. ‘Joe and Lucy will love them. Only after my lentil and okra casserole, of course – they've got to eat that first.'

‘Oh, they will,' said Tom. The children ate whatever Audrey put in front of them. ‘So, how was your…thing?'

‘Very interesting indeed. I think Amy Dennison must
be a lesbian. There was a very pretty young woman in the audience, and Amy kept looking at her.'

‘Probably is, then,' said Tom. Because he was in a good mood, he added, ‘I was really disappointed when I met a lesbian for the first time. I was quite old, really – in my early twenties. You'd think I might have met one before. But I hadn't. The only lesbians I'd ever seen were in…well, porn films.' He looked at Audrey out of the corner of his eye. She was grinning. ‘And, you know – well, you probably don't – but in porn films, lesbians are all slim and blonde and gorgeous and submissive, and only bother sleeping with other women in order to please men. I kind of liked that idea. And then I met Virginia – this real lesbian I mentioned – and she was all butch and self-righteous, and never once offered to bonk a nubile friend in front of me…'

Audrey began to laugh. She laughed so hard that the biscuits banged against the sides of the Tupperware box on her lap. Tom laughed too, until a frightening thought stopped him: he had said what he honestly thought about something. Surely that wasn't good. When it all fell apart, this new family charade, when Selena was fired and he was fired and they were all turfed out of the show home, he was bound to regret having let a virtual stranger see any part of his true self, even just a tiny fraction, the minute segment of Tom Foyers that was dedicated to reacting to lesbians.

‘I'm gay, you know,' said Audrey, once she'd stopped laughing.

‘Really?' Tom's new sense of freedom expanded even further. He was beginning to feel fluffy-headed, the human equivalent of a meringue. He and his wife were pioneers in the field of experimental living. They had created a new family, and it wasn't the usual conventional model – oh no, there was no danger of that. It included an elderly lesbian. When Nora and Gillian at work found out about this (Tom would make sure they did by telling Ruth the secretary), they would see his
letters as evidence not of insolence but of a sort of bohemian sophistication. He couldn't wait to return to the office.

Tom stood on the balcony of the show home. Clive and Petra had moved the coffee table to prop open the door and were now sitting side by side on the yellow leather sofa. Selena sat in the big yellow chair. Audrey, Lucy and Joe sat cross-legged on the floor. Even with the door open, it was stifling. There was no breeze, no air, just heavy heat. Other people's noise was all that blew in from outside.

‘Do I have to?' said Tom.

‘Yes,' said Selena.

The balcony was his stage. All eyes were on him. Everyone expected a performance. Audrey had made some lumpy pancakes, using one of Amy Dennison's recipes. Lesbian pancakes, Audrey had called them, winking at Tom. And Petra had poured everybody a glass of Pimms and lemonade, cranberry juice and lemonade for the children.

‘All right, then.' Tom took a deep breath and shuffled the papers in his hand. Then he began to read, starting with Nora's first letter to him. He read it all aloud, the whole correspondence. He read with no expression on his face and no feeling in his voice. He did this because he was
embarrassed
, not because he wanted to achieve any particular effect or manipulate his audience into having a certain reaction. But after a while he became aware that to read his and Nora's injurious memos to one another in this deadpan way made the whole business seem utterly hilarious, almost clownish in its absurdity. Until this moment, until he heard Audrey, Clive and Petra hooting with laughter, he had taken it for granted that the little situation he had brewing at the office was deadly serious: a minefield, a catastrophe waiting to happen, a horror on a par with global dimming and the execution of Derek Bentley for saying something ambiguous to a policeman. Tom had felt rather like Dreyfus (about whom he had read in one of Petra's history essays), exiled to Devil's Island for a crime he hadn't committed. The man who had committed the crime was named Esterhazy. In Tom's mind, he had been Dreyfus and Nora had been Esterhazy.

I need to lighten up a bit, thought Tom. I need to lighten up quite a lot.

Selena wasn't laughing. When Tom had finished his recital, she snapped, ‘I wish you'd told me about this earlier.'

‘Why?'

‘All that stuff you wrote – I mean, it's all very entertaining,
but presumably you didn't really send copies to Condoleezza Rice and the Gipsy Kings.'

‘Of course I didn't!'

‘So it's just a joke. That's her come-uppance, a joke. It hardly hits her where it hurts, does it? And what a waste, when it's such a brilliant idea!'

Tom, Audrey, Clive, Petra, Joseph and Lucy all looked confused.

‘She's obviously a total wimp, desperate to have
everybody's
approval. What better way to get her back than to do properly what you've only pretended to do!'

‘What, send all these to Ike Turner and Morph from
Take
Hart
?' Tom waved the bundle of papers in the air.

‘No. Don't be facetious!' Selena snapped. Tom didn't like the sound of that. Over the past few weeks, he had come to believe that he had a unique talent for being facetious, a talent he'd planned and hoped to nurture, whether he stayed at Phelps Corcoran Cummings or not. He no longer wished he were a straightforward person. Facetiousness was infinitely preferable to straightforwardness.

‘What does she care what Morph and Ike Turner think of her?' Selena addressed the room. ‘She doesn't know them. Think about it. Would
you
care if Ike Turner disapproved of you?'

‘No,' said Tom. Audrey, Clive and Petra also said that they would not.

‘But are we saying that because we don't know him, or because he beat up Tina?' asked Petra.

‘Look, my point is: Nora would care an awful lot more if Tom wrote a letter that made clear what a complete fucker she is and sent copies to all her friends, her colleagues, her family – the people she knows and cares about. Imagine how embarrassing it'd be for her to have to explain to all of them. And they might pretend to take her side because they're her people, but privately they'd all wonder, wouldn't they? How awful a boss must she be, they'd think, for one of her team to
write this about her and send copies to all of them? They'd always wonder. She'd be tarnished for ever.'

Tom liked the idea of Nora Connaughton being tarnished for ever. He liked it very much indeed.

‘You've got to steal her address book,' said Selena.

‘When, exactly? I'm going to be sacked tomorrow morning,' Tom pointed out.

‘Then we'll hire a private detective.'

‘Wow!' yelled Joseph.

‘That would be quite an adventure,' said Audrey.

‘It'll be no problem for a detective to get us a list of everyone who's important to Nora…'