The Couple’s Secret

James pulled himself upright and stepped off the bed. He held out a hand to me and I took it. ‘James Knight. Very nice to meet you … Holly, was it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, trying to hold his gaze but finding it difficult. It felt as though his dark eyes were staring right past my face, reading my thoughts. It was an uncomfortable sensation, but electric somehow, and part of me didn’t want it to stop.

‘Well, isn’t that nice.’ He pulled his hand back. ‘Ernest and I need to leave his sister in peace now. But I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of you soon. A friend of Ally’s is a friend of ours.’ He said it as if it were a strict rule he was fully committed to. I just nodded, hoping I didn’t appear as uncomfortable as I felt. Eventually he said, ‘Come on, Ern. Let’s take our leave.’

Ernest got up off the bed, flattening his shirt down and patting his sister on the shoulder as he passed her.

‘Thanks for the secondhand cancer,’ she said, waving a hand in the air to clear the smoke. Once the door was closed she sat down on her bed with a sigh.

‘So that was Ernest.’

I smiled, standing awkwardly in front of her.

‘And James, of course. James is all right.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and realised I was smiling. ‘He certainly seemed to be.’

She glanced at me and laughed. ‘Oh, sure he’s gorgeous. Less of a womaniser than my brother, though. More choosy.’

I wondered if she was implying he was out of my league. I thought about asking if he was single, then worried that would sound too forward, as if I was actively interested. Which I was, I realised, with a lurch in the stomach. If only, I thought, then pulled myself together. It felt silly to imagine such things, having barely set foot in the place or met anyone new. I was tragically out of my depth – even a passing stranger on the street would have been able to tell as much, been able to spot my lack of experience, my awkward approach to socialising. In the future, I would wonder what it was I did during that afternoon that led to me being singled out from the rest, chosen, made to feel both special and alone. And, after a lot of introspection and clawing back over the past, I still don’t really have the answer. I was just being me. No mask, no pretence. Being myself. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you meet people for the first time. That’s one of the main rules. Isn’t it?

Chapter 4 (#u4c1ff4b5-66a9-5c3b-89e4-f78adb8c24bb)

Julianne

Knightsbridge, 2019

James is staring at me from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Where have you been?’ he asks.

‘I was … just talking to Stephen.’ It’s the truth at least, but I avoid his eyes as I say it. My mother is currently doing her best to avoid mine. She does this – it’s one of the little games she plays. Starves people of attention, makes them crave it, then turns the spotlight on to full beam and makes you want to shrink from view. At the moment she’s moving her scarf from one peg to another.

‘I don’t want it getting all crumpled and covered in stuff when people go in and out the door,’ she says by way of an explanation to the wall, making it sound like we regularly have a pack of mud-covered dogs going in and out of the house.

‘Hello, Mom. And there’s nobody else coming, so your scarf will be safe regardless of where it is.’

She lets out a ‘Hmmm’, her way of saying I’m not convinced, then finally leaves her scarf alone and turns to look at me. ‘Julianne, dearest, how have you been? You look … haggard.’

If anyone else had said this I’d be offended, but from my mother it’s only to be expected. ‘It’s only been two weeks since I last saw you. I can’t have changed that much.’

She shakes her head and looks at me as if staring at someone who’s just been told they’re terminal. ‘It just saddens me to see you run yourself so ragged. You’re probably doing too much again. Where’s that housekeeper of yours? What does she actually do? I swear she has a holiday every other day.’

‘It’s Cassie’s day off. Her first this week. And she isn’t always on holiday.’ I hear the closing of a door upstairs and jump slightly. Stephen must have gone back to his own room. My slight movement doesn’t escape my mother’s ever-observant eye.

‘Goodness, you’re twitchy. Maybe you should sit down.’

‘No, Mom, I need to go and finish the food.’

‘I can do that,’ James says, probably considering it the lesser of the two evils when compared with making small talk. He disappears off to the kitchen, leaving my mother smiling and shaking her head a little.

‘James is such a dear,’ she says.

I stare back blankly at her. My husband always gets the compliments, the praise, the terms of endearment. It’s probably because of all the money he’s given her over the years. Helping her buy a new property when we were married. The steady money she’s become used to, going out of our joint account and into hers every month. He’s her saviour, in many respects.

‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to when the man of the house has to tend to the cooking.’ She drops her gaze as she says this and continues to shake her head, as if slightly sad.

On some days I fight back. I pick her up on her sexism, her little digs, her many prejudices, her dated worldview. But today I haven’t got the energy. I just look at her, standing there in her crisp tailored blazer, as if she’s about to attend a boardroom meeting. She’s never set foot in a boardroom in her life, but dresses every day like she’s ready to negotiate a corporate merger or try to poach a big new client from a rival legal firm. ‘Dress for success’ is what she always used to teach me as a child. I can see her now, eyeing up my plain, dark-green, John Lewis own-brand cardigan, her lips curving down slightly at the sides. She doesn’t approve.

‘Come on into the lounge, Mom.’

I walk in ahead of her and immediately go to the drinks table. ‘Do you want anything?’

‘If you’re referring to a drink, Julianne, I will have a small sherry.’

I sigh as I pour the liquid into a glass and turn round to hand it to her. She’s appraising the Christmas tree, stepping back, slowly and deliberately, as one would in an art gallery when trying to take in a painting as a whole. She nods. ‘Very nice,’ she says. ‘Very … homely.’

‘Well, this is a home, so I guess something went right,’ I say.

‘I suppose.’

I don’t know what she means by that, but I’m not about to interrogate it right now. I sit down on one of the sofas before she does. After the tree, she continues her tour around the lounge, slowly turning, taking it all in, as if she hadn’t already seen everything hundreds of times before. She stops at the TV.

‘I did always tell you, Julianne, an excessively large television can seem a little … how shall I put it …?’

I can feel myself getting more tense by the second. ‘I don’t know, Mom, probably in your usual kind and generous way.’

She glances over at me, an eyebrow raised. ‘No need to get snippy, Julianne. Maybe you should have a drink yourself. Take the edge off.’

I continue to stare back at her and she turns away from the television. ‘I just fear a large television suggests that it has too much of an important place in your life.’

‘Or that we don’t all want to be squinting at some old twenty-two-incher as if this was still the 1990s. We’ve had that for over a year, Mom, and it’s not that much bigger than your new set. You’ve never had a problem with it before. You spent most of last Christmas glued to old musicals on it. In fact, I even think I remember you remarking how good that Blu-Ray boxset of yours looked on it compared to your previous old antique.’

She makes a tutting sound and shakes her head some more. ‘It was only an observation, Julianne. You don’t have to take everything as a personal attack.’ She moves over to the single sofa seat opposite me and sits down on the edge, straight-backed and looking less than comfortable. ‘Where is my favourite grandson?’

‘Your only grandson is upstairs finishing something. He’ll be down for dinner soon.’

‘Finishing something? Not schoolwork, four days before Christmas?’

‘It’s a big year for him, Mom. A levels, you know.’

‘No, I don’t know,’ she says, picking a nonexistent bit of fluff from her sleeve. ‘I don’t know how these schools work over here, and I never get much sense from you or James when I ask. I find the whole thing a bit incomprehensible compared to the American system.’

‘Mom, even that’s probably changed since you were there.’

‘Well, how would I know? Twenty-five years on, this whole place still feels like a mystery to me. I can barely understand the young people now. Some uncouth young man served me in Waitrose the other day and slurred his words so much I had to ask him five times to repeat himself.’

‘Maybe you’re going deaf.’

‘I certainly am not. Then he had the cheek to ask if I was over here for a holiday. I said to him I’d lived in this hellhole longer than he’d been alive.’