Want to Know a Secret? Page 5

  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.

  Sometimes she came across Harold and his veined face would brighten. ‘I’ll duck in and see Gareth after Valerie, my dear!’ There was no sign of the pinched pallor of the night of the accident; he was hearty and energetic.

  Occasionally she’d catch sight of James’s dark figure striding in to see his wife and he’d grin at her as if enjoying a private joke, but he visited mainly in the evenings. No doubt he had a job to do on weekdays. Once she saw Tamzin with two young women so like her – except rounded and robust – she knew even before Tamzin introduced them that they must be James’s other daughters, Alice and Natalia.

  ‘Poor Uncle Gareth!’ they chorused, corn-coloured hair swept up with bright ornaments behind their heads. ‘Bless him! His poor face!’

  ‘Yes, bless him,’ agreed Diane, wondering if she’d look as insouciant if she wore her hair so carelessly whisked.

  Her visits became more interesting as Gareth improved. His facial swelling began to deflate, sinking his eyes into violet rings. Teeth began to twinkle through his gums and he began to form recognisable words. He was just like a giant baby.

  Diane measured his progress as carefully as any nurse.

  On the day when she judged him to be adequately responsive, able to carry on a conversation and suck up liquidised food, she sat back in the visitor’s chair, cupped her knee in her linked hands and stared straight into his blackened eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you’d found your father?’

  Gareth stilled.

  She allowed the silence to stretch.

  His head sank back onto the pillow. ‘Can we leave this for a bit, Diane?’ Suddenly his voice was weak and fatigued and the clarity of his diction took a giant stride backwards: ‘Han ee eave iss ver a bi, Dia?’ And a peevish note, as if Diane should have been more considerate than to bother him with trivialities.

  She rocked a little in her chair. ‘It’s been left long enough, Gareth.’

  He closed his thick eyelids, slowl
y, as if in pain.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you’d found your father?’

  The eyes remained closed. But it seemed as if he’d accepted that the inevitable moment of confession had come when he asked, ‘Do you know how Valerie is?’ his diction clear again.

  ‘I don’t even know who Valerie is.’ Diane paused at the quiet knock that heralded the appearance of refreshments. She supposed such service was one of the things that Harold was paying for. Or it might be Gareth footing the bill, of course, with his newfound wealth. She hadn’t bothered to enquire.

  Her coffee was fragrant and freshly poured into a white china cup from a filter jug. Gareth’s was provided in a blue plastic cup with a ‘chimney’, reminiscent of Bryony’s toddler days. Diane stirred in sugar with a clinking spoon. The door hushed shut behind the auxiliary.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she repeated, lodging the spoon in the saucer.

  Gareth sipped in silence.

  She fixed her gaze on his eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ The same quiet, reasonable tone.

  His eyes closed, firmly, blocking her out.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  The eyelids flipped open to display blazing eyes. ‘Because he’s my father. OK?’ His voice dripped sarcasm.

  Diane felt the blood boil into her cheeks at the echo of her own words. They were my parents! Remembering herself shaking with determination as she confronted Gareth about the will.

  She moistened her lips. ‘It’s because of the money.’

  Irritably, he closed his eyes again. ‘What?’

  ‘The reason you didn’t tell me. It’s not because Harold’s your father, it’s because he gave you money and you didn’t want me to share it. You didn’t want my life made easier, for me to have a car, or a new TV, or clothes that I hadn’t made myself. Not even a new pair of winter boots! You gave yourself an extra two days off a week to enjoy with Valerie and Harold and told them I was mentally ill.’

  She waited. Then began again. ‘The reason you didn’t –’

  ‘Yes!’ Gareth turned his head sharply, making himself wince. ‘The money. Obviously the money. Because we don’t share decisions about money that comes to us from our parents – do we?’

  The palms of her hands prickled with fury.

  His eyes burned balefully as he massaged his fattened jaw with his fingertips. Probably it was aching now with this unaccustomed talking. Or through gritting his loosened teeth in his swollen gums.

  ‘Gareth, I had my pride.’ The familiar cry that epitomised all her confused and hurt feelings towards the parents who’d tried so hard to control her, even from the grave.

  He rolled his head on the pillow. ‘We couldn’t afford pride.’ Again, the hand, to soothe the jaw he was meant to be using only gently.

  ‘And before Bryony went to Brasilia, when I wanted to see if we were eligible for various low-income benefits and you went ballistic, it was nothing to do with not taking handouts or not being a charity case or not wanting anyone to think you couldn’t look after your family. It was because you knew your horde, your stash, the treasure that your long-lost father had given you, would come to light?’

  Silence.

  Outside the window the blue sky was ragged with piebald clouds racing before a stiff breeze. The double-glazing hushed the thunder of traffic to a whisper. Amongst the trees, birds could be seen but not heard. Diane leaned her elbows on the bed. Her heart was beating not fast, but hard, as though running in seven-league boots. ‘We could’ve afforded another car.’

  ‘We could have had another car ages ago – if you’d challenged Freddy.’

  And Diane looked at him and saw that he was ugly. Not because of the swelling or the bruises, but because of what he’d let his grudge make him do – hide his wealth and his family away like kinky perversions. ‘Do you remember when we were happy?’ she murmured. ‘When it didn’t matter that we had no money, it was us against the rest. My parents tried everything they could to come between us when they were alive and you let them achieve their aim once they were dead.’

  He shook his head. ‘You let them achieve it.’

  ‘It was only money.’

  He grimaced. ‘And we only didn’t have any.’

  Diane left the room, shaking. The traffic would be gathering impetus as the dreaded rush hour approached but she couldn’t command her disobedient legs to carry her to the car. She felt as if she were made of drumsticks, stiff and clunky, held together with brittle old thread.

  In an embrasure beside a tall window facing the hospital gardens she discovered a water dispenser that turned the sunrays into a rainbow, and a comfy little chair in plum leather with a cushion in the same fabric as the curtains. She sank down, weedy in the wake of battle. She so rarely confronted Gareth; long experience had taught her it wasn’t the best way to manage him. And the scene had been ugly with old sores and unsettled scores.

  No, she wasn’t really surprised that he hadn’t told her about Harold because of the money. It had always been about money, about the days when she had money and he didn’t.

  Not much more than twenty-five years ago, when they began to get serious, Gareth had been prepared for resistance from her parents. He wasn’t stupid. He knew how the world worked and that fitter from a council estate wouldn’t be on Peter and Karen Wibberley’s list of prospective sons-in-law. He’d expected a chilly reception when Diane took him to meet her parents.

  But they had both been shaken by the depths of Peter and Karen Wibberley’s repugnance.

  Sitting back in his imposing house with a fragile teacup in his hand Peter Wibberley hadn’t pulled any punches. ‘And what do you do?’

  ‘I’m a fitter at Greatorex Packaging.’

  ‘And where do you live?’

  ‘The Brightside Estate.’

  Peter Wibberley’s silver hair was combed straight back, his moustache darker grey. He nodded sadly, as if his worst suspicions had been confirmed. ‘I am not the sort of father,’ he pronounced, ‘to expect to vet my daughter’s friends. Normally, I trust her judgement.’ He sipped his tea.

  Diane felt her palm sweating, where it lay in Gareth’s hand as they sat side-by-side on the sofa.

  ‘However,’ Peter continued, ‘I think we might as well be straight from the outset. We had envisaged something – someone – very different for our daughter. I can’t imagine your relationship with Diane lasting and my wife and myself will not be acknowledging it.’

  Karen Wibberley turned to stare at Gareth, her hair permed into a fuzz of mousy curls. ‘She’s only eighteen. Eighteen! We have to protect her from … people like you. From herself,’ she added, as if Diane wasn’t even there.

  A crackling silence. Then Gareth rattled his cup and saucer onto the coffee table and strode from the room.

  Diane flew after him in tears of fury, hair sticking to her cheeks. ‘Gareth, I didn’t know –’

  ‘Well, now you do,’ he said, without breaking stride. ‘Now you fucking-well know.’

  Gareth had sulked for a fortnight, a fortnight during which Diane’s parents had been kind but unyielding. Gareth Jenner was out of her life. Good. If she accepted that then they would forget the whole unfortunate episode and things would go on just as before, with Diane bathed by her parents’ approval.

  But then Gareth rang Diane at work, from a callbox. ‘Let’s talk,’ he suggested. That night she lied to her parents about her movements and met him at a restaurant. ‘It was a bit of a sodding shock,’ he said, grimly, ‘that shit your parents handed out. I thought that if I kept my nose clean and worked hard it would be enough in this so-called classless society. I didn’t think it mattered where me mum brought me up. I thought what mattered was what I made of myself.’

  Diane was forlorn. ‘I thought they’d be OK when they met you.’

  Gareth sliced through his steak with suppressed violence. ‘Some bloody hope! I suppose that there’s no point in asking you to marry me, now.’

&nb
sp; Her mouth dropped open.

  ‘No, I shouldn’t have asked.’ He took a slug of his beer. Diane drank wine in restaurants but Gareth hadn’t taken to it. ‘Blood’s thicker than water. You have to please your parents.’

  Anger set her face on fire. ‘I’m not twelve, you know.’

  He went back to his steak, shrugging her off, dismissing her point of view, just like her parents had. ‘But you’re a bit of a hothouse flower. Not exactly hardy. No, you’d do better to wait for the right bank manager to come along. Or doctor, or accountant. Do right by your mum and dad.’

  And, somehow, she’d found herself flinging his bitter resignation back in his face. ‘Rubbish! And don’t tell me I’m a hothouse flower; I’m perfectly resilient. I’m not like my parents, valuing people for superficial reasons.’

  He let his eyes lock with hers, took her hand and raised it to his lips. ‘So you’ll marry me, then?’

  ‘Yes!’ The word had spurted from her in triumph. How victorious she’d been as she stalked in to demonstrate to her parents and, perhaps, to Gareth, that she wasn’t to be dictated to. ‘We’ve something to tell you. Gareth proposed tonight and I accepted.’

  She’d felt the first stirrings of uncertainty as her father’s face went puce and the newspaper slipped from his lap.

  Gareth even went forward to offer his hand. ‘I know I’m not what you want for your daughter, you’ve made it quite clear. But we’ll stick together and have a bunch of kids and give them a grand life. Not like me, who never knew his father.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ breathed Karen, through fingers spread across a horrified mouth.

  And there were no congratulations or sherry or questions about the future. There was just that horrified, disappointed hush. And a squirming in Diane’s belly that wasn’t completely joy at her betrothal.

  That very night, they planned a wedding for six months ahead, at the register office, of course, because Gareth had never been christened and never went to church. It all felt quite unreal but, fuelled by her parents’ anger – ‘We’re waiting for you to come to your senses!’ – Diane took to the marriage a determination to make it work, a savings account just big enough for the deposit on an ex-council house in Purtenon St. Paul, and a green Mini.