This Secret We're Keeping (16 page)

‘He’s convinced he knows me,’ Will said.

‘I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. If he did, he’d have said so by now.’ This much she knew to be true. ‘Zak’s not really one for delaying gratification.’

‘Right.’ A pause. ‘He sounds great, by the way.’

‘Well, he has his moments,’ she said, feeling a sudden rush of guilt about Zak, because it wasn’t exactly his fault that Will had driven back into her life. And if it had been obvious yesterday morning from her slack jaw and halting speech how she felt towards Will – there was definitely a danger of that, after all the years she’d spent swamped by pit-of-the-stomach regret – then who could blame Zak, really, for feeling defensive? She recalled Octavia, and Zak’s brother, and was instantly overcome with shame.

‘Did Natalie say anything after I left yours?’ she asked Will now. ‘Did she wonder what you were doing in the garage?’

‘Actually, she was so pissed she virtually passed out. Spent most of Sunday in bed,’ he said, and Jess could tell he was making an effort to talk neutrally about her. ‘She honestly
wouldn’t have known if I’d treated all her guests to fifteen rounds of naked charades.’

‘She definitely doesn’t know we know each other?’ Jess probed softly, swallowing another slim spoonful of mousse.

‘Believe me, Natalie’s sole priority on Saturday night was making a good impression on our new neighbours,’ Will said. ‘Ironically enough. We had to wrestle the karaoke mic out of her hand at about three a.m.’

There was a long pause.

‘I’m so sorry I kissed you,’ Jess said again. ‘That was … really unfair.’

‘Oh, I’m not a big believer in what’s fair and what’s not these days, Jess.’

‘So …’ She wavered slightly. ‘What now?’

‘I think this is the bit where we say it’s best we don’t see each other again, isn’t it?’

She nodded into the phone, bracing herself to hear the words.

But to her relief, he hesitated. ‘Do
you
think it’s for the best?’

She shut her eyes. ‘Oh God, don’t ask me. Evidently I’m completely the wrong person to ask.’

‘Well,’ he said eventually, ‘that makes two of us, Jess.’

In the silence that followed, she felt the bag of slowly defrosting peas discharging little rivulets of water along the contour of her right thigh. ‘So what do you think we should do?’ she asked him, her voice drawn-in and low.

Will let out a sigh that sounded almost painful. ‘Well, put it this way, Jess – Natalie’s due back any minute and it’s nothing I can articulate against the clock.’

‘I
started my period,’ was the first thing Anna said when Jess and Smudge arrived for supper.

No doubt freshly ejected from a yoga session, Anna was dressed in harem pants and a T-shirt that said,
Go with the flow
. Most of her hair was hidden beneath a large woven headband and she was looking super-toned, as if someone had taken a suction pump to each of her limbs.

‘Oh, shit.’ Jess gathered Anna into a hug, holding her tightly as she began to convulse. She felt weak and delicate in Jess’s arms as she sobbed, exhausted like someone who had just been winched off a cliff face or rescued by a SWAT team from a hostage situation.

‘I’m not sure how much longer I can do this for, Jess,’ Anna gasped through a mess of snot and heartbreak.

Jess wasn’t sure either, but she knew that for now she had to brazen it out with complete and unwavering faith. She squeezed her tighter. ‘Anna, you’re the strongest person I know.’ This much was definitely true.

‘Yet completely incapable of managing the easiest thing in the world?’

‘It’s not the easiest thing, and it’s not your fault,’ Jess whispered into Anna’s hair, just in case she was in any doubt.

Anna shook her head and murmured something incoherent about Rasleen.

‘What?’ Jess drew back so she could see Anna’s face, which by now had reached a level of blotchy that would normally warrant antihistamines.

Anna hesitated, then wiped her eyes with the hem of her T-shirt. ‘Rasleen says I’m stressed. She thinks I need to iron out the wrinkles in my life and be stricter about sticking to the rules.’ With a shuddering sigh, she attempted a smile. ‘Which means no more takeaways, so … I cooked. Now’s your last chance to leg it, Jess.’

Smiling back, but privately frustrated on Anna’s behalf, Jess shook her head and followed her inside, Smudge bounding ahead of them to sniff out stray crumbs – of which Jess knew there would be precisely none – in the kitchen. She observed with sadness that the Lava Lamp and submarine mammal song had been switched firmly off, and that even the gentle tang of patchouli from the incense had now been replaced by the unusual aroma of a split-pea vegan lasagne charring slowly in the oven.

‘Rasleen’s talking rubbish, Anna,’ Jess said as they sat down together on the sofa. ‘Your life’s not … wrinkly. Unless you count being guilt-tripped by third parties.’ She dug around in her bag for Anna’s all-time favourite pick-me-up and slapped it into her palm. ‘Now have a fucking Crunchie.’

Breaking into a weak smile, Anna shook her head and handed it back, helping herself instead to a kiwi from the small harvest in her fruit bowl. ‘Better not. Thanks anyway, Jess. You have it.

‘Oh God, though,’ she groaned as she peeled off the kiwi sticker, transferring it absent-mindedly to the coffee table for Simon to swear about later. ‘I thought it was being pregnant that turned you into a complete emotional wreck, not the bit before you even get there. I am
so
pathetic now.’ She bit fiercely into the kiwi fruit, hairy skin and all, making Jess blanch slightly. ‘I mean, look at me. Pregnancy is all I talk about, and I’ve even started reading sex memoirs.’

‘You’ve started reading what?’

Anna withdrew a hard-backed copy of a memoir penned by a self-declared sex expert and slung it on to Jess’s knee. ‘You know why I’m reading this? To remind myself what it’s like to have sex for fun. I’m one of
those
women now, Jess. Reading about proper sex because I no longer actually have it.’

Grateful that Simon was well out of earshot downstairs somewhere in the bowels of the hotel, Jess smiled.

‘Never mind,’ Anna said through another hairy mouthful of kiwi fruit. She nodded down at the cream and gold embossed card marking her page in the book. ‘Are you coming to George’s head wetting?’

The card, Jess now recalled, was an invitation sent by Anna’s youngest sister, Cara, and her husband, David, for the head wetting of their third child. She had an identical one propped up on her mantelpiece back at the cottage.

‘Sorry. I completely forgot. When is it?’

‘Friday, but we’ll probably head down Thursday night. Mum’s desperate for you to be there. I think she’s getting withdrawal symptoms from not having seen you for a couple of months.’

Jess faltered. Last Wednesday she’d received a text from Will suggesting they get together on Friday. He’d not mentioned Natalie, or Charlotte, so she could only assume he was free for the day. And although the prospect of spending time together filled her with a guilt that occasionally more closely resembled dread, her overriding emotion was that of irrepressible excitement.

‘Please,’ Anna was imploring her, oblivious to the reason for her hesitation. ‘I’m going to be surrounded by people with babies talking about babies, asking me when I’m
going to have babies.’ She shook her head. ‘Urgh.
Please
come, Jess.’

Jess continued to hesitate.

Anna started reeling off the names of mutual friends in an effort to persuade her. ‘Sarah and Louise are going to be there. And Dee, and Jo.’ She gave her a cajoling smile. ‘Come on, Jess. We can take the piss out of Cara’s fascinator.’

Without looking Anna in the eye, Jess muttered something about her leg not being fit for public consumption as she picked the kiwi sticker off the coffee table and folded it up into a very, very compact half-moon.

There was only a short silence before Anna made a noise like she was dying from something horrible. ‘Oh God. You’ve got plans with Matthew, haven’t you?’

Jess braced herself. ‘I’m seeing him on Friday.’

‘Seeing as in seeing?’

‘No,’ Jess said quickly. ‘Seeing as in … spending a finite amount of time with.’

‘That’s dangerous.’

‘It’s not like that. We’re just catching up,’ Jess insisted, though she wondered if she was trying to convince herself more than Anna.

Anna expressed her scepticism nasally and got up to make a pot of raspberry-leaf tea, mumbling something about it being Rasleen’s prescription for fertility-friendly hydration and supposedly a substitute for alcohol (which Jess thought frankly to be an insult to alcohol). And as she clattered about, flinging teabags into the teapot and almost breaking the pottery mugs, Jess tentatively filled her in on Zak, and Will, and Will’s oblivious girlfriend. She told her about the party, and the kiss, and the ugly argument with Zak a week ago that had started on her front lawn and
concluded with Zak storming out, slamming the front door behind him with such force that it had knocked two picture frames off Jess’s wall.

Jess picked at a thread on her shirt sleeve. ‘I’m nervous that Zak’s heard gossip. About Matthew – Will – being back. You’ve not said anything, have you?’

‘To Zak?’ Anna said, which wasn’t exactly the confirmation Jess had been hoping for.

‘To anyone. Simon?’

Crossing back over to the sofa with a tray, Anna made a face that could equally have been antipathy or offence. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ she said, ‘but I don’t consider Matthew Landley to be particularly newsworthy.’

‘But if Zak knows, someone must have told him,’ Jess insisted. ‘What if the papers get hold of it?’

Anna frowned and passed Jess a mug. ‘If Matthew’s really that worried, he should just go back to London,’ she said, and Jess could tell she was trying very hard not to make any references to crawling or rocks. ‘Remind me why he’s here in the first place?’

Jess took a measured sip from her tea. It tasted like very weak, hot blackcurrant squash, minus the satisfying sugar kick. ‘He can’t go back yet,’ she said. ‘They’re doing up that house. It’s not that simple.’

‘Nothing ever seems simple where Mr Landley’s concerned.’ Anna shook her head, apparently baffled. ‘I can’t believe you’re having an affair with him all over again.’

‘I’m not. He loves Natalie. He loves his daughter.’ Even just to mention the other women in Will’s life brought a little thump of guilt to Jess’s chest.

‘I don’t think he loves them if he’s kissing you, Jess,’ Anna pointed out gently, though with a note of surprise that this should need saying at all.

‘I kissed
him
,’ Jess clarified quickly, ‘and it was just a stupid kiss, for a second. It didn’t mean anything.’

It was a limp excuse that Anna decided to underline by staring pointedly into her fruit tea, just as Jess was wishing silently that she had a glass of wine in her hand.

‘So, does this mean you’re not coming to the head wetting?’ Anna asked her eventually.

Jess took a breath. ‘I just –’

‘Never mind,’ Anna said, though her face betrayed her disappointment. ‘God, this all feels a bit déjà vu, Jess.’

‘Just please don’t say anything to anyone,’ Jess said in exactly the same tone of voice that she’d probably used the last time she was asking Anna to keep a secret for her.

‘Do you want my advice?’

‘Yes,’ Jess said with hesitancy, because Anna tended to express her views on Matthew about as sensitively as an environmental campaigner with a megaphone.

‘Stay away from him. He’s got a girlfriend now, and a daughter. Even if you didn’t have all that history, it would be completely inappropriate for you to keep seeing him. There’s no way this can end well.’

‘History’s a nice way of putting it,’ Jess mumbled, her face growing hot with shame.

But Anna didn’t smile back. ‘Okay – damning previous. It all boils down to the same thing: Matthew Landley is bad news.’

‘It’s Will,’ Jess said, to remind herself more than anything else. ‘His name’s Will now.’

Anna made a face that said,
Oh, he’ll always be Matthew Landley to me
. ‘So does your sister know he’s back?’

Jess shook her head. ‘I’m not giving Debbie any more sticks to beat me with. We’re still fighting about the cottage.’

Jess’s cottage in fact belonged to her older sister, who
since inheriting it from their mother and getting married had permitted Jess to live there at a knock-down rate a month (maths never having been her strong point, a trait that clearly ran in the family). But now Ian, her husband, had apparently found himself to be in something of a financial black hole, and Debbie was becoming increasingly adamant that selling the cottage was her only viable option for digging him out of it.

‘She’s really going to sell it?’

Jess nodded. ‘She and Ian are having financial problems. He’s been spending too much money on the girl he was seeing. He bought her a convertible.’

Anna’s eyes widened. ‘Christ, he’s having
another
affair? How many is that now?’

‘Three,’ Jess said, trying to ignore the voice in her head that was curtly reminding her she’d not been so different to Ian herself on Saturday night. ‘Anyway, they need a lump sum. They’re defaulting on everything.’

In fact, Jess believed that deep down, living in Wanstead with Ian and two young girls while all her friends achieved their various career goals (the highlight of Debbie’s professional life to date being a brief period organizing the diary of her now husband at a stationery supply company) was the real reason her sister wanted to sell the cottage. Booting Jess and Smudge out of their sweet little seaside home and into a bedsit in King’s Lynn was probably the only way for Debbie to feel temporarily better about her own life.

Anna shook her head. ‘Why the hell would she sell her own cottage to pay off the debts from her husband’s affair? That woman is such a doormat.’

Jess thought it was more that Debbie had a really bad aim when it came to directing her anger at the right people. She
was angry with Ian, so she screamed at the children and blamed Jess; she was angry with their mother, so she screamed at Ian and blamed Jess. In the end, it always boiled back down to Jess, which was nothing new. She’d been living with that for the past seventeen years.

‘You could always move in with Zak,’ Anna suggested tentatively. ‘You know he wants you to.’

As far as Jess was concerned, cohabiting with Zak was not likely to happen – but they’d been wrangling over it for months. Unable to understand why she refused to be turned on by fashionable London postcodes, Zak was doggedly persistent in selling the idea to Jess with all the creative fervour of an estate agent presenting top-floor bedsits as penthouses. He was particularly fond of informing her that Octavia had moved in with him after only six weeks, which Jess thought to be a slightly odd choice of sales tactic given all the irreconcilable differences that had followed.

Jess frowned and shook her head. ‘I’m still trying to build up the business. I don’t want to have to start all over again in London.’

‘What about buying the cottage from Debbie?’

From down on the rug, Smudge positioned himself so that his belly was angled skyward, his legs akimbo. Obligingly, Jess rubbed him with her foot. ‘No, I’d never get a mortgage. I can’t even go into my overdraft without the bank shining a light in my eyes. God, maybe I’ll have to move in with you.’

Anna looked uncomfortable and cleared her throat. ‘Actually, I don’t think you could, Jess. Not with Smudge.’

Smudge lazily flicked one ear at the mention of his name and flexed his paws, but his eyes remained firmly shut.

‘Anna, I was joking.’

‘Well, no. It’s more that …’ Anna released a short, tense breath. ‘Rasleen asked me last night if I spend much time around domestic animals.’

Jess felt a small stone begin to form in her stomach.

‘I mean, she’s advised me to cut them right out.’ Anna aimed wide eyes at Jess, pleading with her not to be angry.

‘Cut them out … like cigarettes?’ Jess said, feeling punctured as she wondered exactly when Rasleen had managed to turn yoga into a byword for bollocks.

‘Sorry,’ Anna said, and Jess realized that Anna was actually asking her not to bring Smudge over any more.

From his spot on the floor, Smudge registered Jess’s unauthorized break in stroking his belly and opened one almond-shaped eye as if to try and ascertain what could possibly be stopping her.

‘Anna,’ she protested, ‘I feel like Rasleen’s trying to lay all the blame at your door. Or mine. Or Smudge’s. Or possibly anyone’s except her own.’

‘It’s not that. It’s more just … a process of elimination.’