Past Secrets

From the bedroom floor, Rocket whimpered, wanting to be included in the fun.

James got out of bed and scooped her on to the duvet beside her mistress, whereupon Rocket began to smother Christie in kisses.

‘I hope I get to come back as one of your dogs in my next life,’ he remarked, heading to the bathroom for his shower.

Christie shivered. ‘Don’t even speak like that,’ she said, but she was talking to a closed door.

Thirty years in this house. How had the time passed so quickly?

‘I love it,’ she’d told James that first day, as she stood, pregnant with their second child, Shane, outside number 34, a house they could only afford because it required what the estate agent hilariously described as ‘a wee bit of renovating’.

‘You’re sure you don’t prefer the mock-Tudor heap seven streets over?’ asked James, holding tightly to little Ethan’s hand. At the grand old age of three and a quarter, Ethan’s current favourite hobbies included trampolining on his bed and wriggling out of his parents’ grasp to fling himself in danger’s path.

Christie had arched a dark eyebrow at her husband.

The heap’s front garden had been tarmacked while the back garden contained two fierce dogs who hadn’t responded when Christie instinctively reached out her hand. There was a sinister brick-sized hole in one of the upstairs windows and when James had casually asked the estate agent why there was no gun turret complete with AK47 peeking out, Christie had had to smother her laughter.

‘Call me old-fashioned,’ she told James, ‘but I somehow prefer Summer Street and this house.’

Despite the obvious dilapidation, the very bricks of number 34 seemed to glow with warmth, and the stained-glass oriel window over the graceful arched porch was in its original condition.

From where they stood, the Devlin family could see the Summer Street Café with its aqua-and-white-striped awning and paintwork. On the pavement outside stood white bistro chairs and three small tables covered with flowered sea-blue tablecloths that looked as if they’d been transported from a Sorrento balcony.

On the same side of the street as the café there were terraced houses; then a couple of slender detached houses squeezed in; eight small railway cottages, their classic fascia boards traced with delicate carvings; then a series of redbricks including theirs; five 1930s bungalows and, finally, a handful of one-storey-over-basements. The other side of Summer Street was lined with more terraced houses and cottages, along with a tiny park: two neatly kept acres with a colonnaded bandstand, an old railway pavilion and a minuscule fountain much loved by the pigeons who couldn’t bear to poop anywhere else.

The maple trees that lined the street were flanked by colourful border plants, while even the doors to the dizzying variety of houses were painted strong bright shades: cerulean blues, poinsettia scarlets, honeyed ambers.

Christie would always remember how James had responded when she’d said she loved the house. He’d put the hand that wasn’t holding on to Ethan around hers and squeezed.

‘Then we’ve got to have it,’ he’d said.

They hadn’t even looked inside.

When Christie told astonished people afterwards that they’d decided to buy 34 Summer Street without crossing the threshold, she’d explained that you knew when you were in the right place. Homes were about more than actual walls.

‘You can’t go far wrong with a well-built redbrick,’ James’s brother said sagely, put out by all this talk of feelings.

And indeed, the house was beautifully proportioned even though it was sadly down at heel, like a genteel lady who’d fallen on hard times but still polished the doorstep every morning even when she could barely afford milk for her tea.

But James and Christie knew it was more than decent proportions or the welcoming width of the copper-coloured front door that had made up their mind. Christie had simply known it was the home for them and James had learned to trust his wife’s instincts.

When she, James and Ethan moved in a month later, they were the proud owners of a ramshackle four-bedroom pile with one bathroom, nothing resembling a usable kitchen and a butterfly sanctuary for a garden.

In those days, there was no three-storey apartment block at the bottom of the street and no unneighbourly huffing about parking since most families were lucky to own just one car. But it was also before the park was given the primary-coloured playground equipment where small children roared with both delight and temper, depending on how the arguments were going over whose go it was on the slide.

Christie used to take Ethan and Shane to the park to play. Now, she walked Rocket and Tilly along the neatly trimmed pathways. Her two beautiful granddaughters, Sasha and Fifi, had been wheeled into the park in their buggies, and Sasha, now two and a half, loved hurling herself at the fountain as if she was about to leap in. Just like her dad, Christie thought fondly.

Ethan had always had so much energy. He’d thrown himself into life at full tilt from his very first breath. And he’d adored Summer Street.

‘We’d better get the mower out,’ James had observed that first day as Ethan ran into the garden, whooping with excitement, his blond head almost disappearing in the long, wild grass. The van they had rented to move their belongings was parked on the drive and a few friends were due round to help shift all the heavy stuff. But for the moment, the small family were alone. ‘It’s like a jungle out there.’

‘It’s like a jungle in here too,’ Christie had said wryly, looking up at the corner of the kitchen where a particularly murky black bit of wall stood out amid the peeling cat-sick-yellow plaster. ‘Please tell me there wasn’t that much mould on the walls when we viewed. We should have got the infectious diseases people to survey the house instead of an architect.’

‘You think we’ll be eaten in our beds by a noxious house fungus?’

Christie smiled affectionately at her husband, who’d given their son both his blond hair and sunny disposition. The pride of finally owning their own house shone in James’s eyes, noxious fungus notwithstanding.

‘Probably. Now, are you going to rescue Ethan, or am I to shift my five-months-pregnant bulk out after him?’ Tall and normally slender, she’d carried Ethan easily with a neat little basketball of a bump that was unnoticeable from behind. This time round, her slender figure was a distant memory and she felt like a giant stretch-marked pudding, equally enormous whichever angle she was viewed from.

Her sister Ana reckoned it was second baby syndrome, where all the muscles gave up the ghost. But Christie knew that her inexplicable cravings for huge bowls of deep-fried banana with ice cream hadn’t helped.

‘I’ll go and rescue him, o Massive One,’ James said, laying a hand on her swollen belly. ‘I don’t want you so tired out that you don’t have the energy to christen the house with me tonight.’ He grinned suggestively.

A laugh exploded out of Christie. The exhaustion of pregnancy meant she was asleep by nine most nights and not even a vat of aphrodisiacs could rouse her. But then she relented, seeing the look of hope on her husband’s face.

‘Back massage first,’ she bargained. Why her back should be an erogenous zone, Christie didn’t know. But feeling James’s supple hands kneading away her aches always got her in the mood for love.

‘Deal.’

The upside of living in such a wreck of a house was that Christie didn’t have to worry about Ethan crayoning on the walls, though he was an intrepid mountaineer so she spent much of her time rescuing him from various pieces of the second-hand furniture which was all they could afford. The downside of the house was that it seemed to take for ever before the damp was banished and they could eat a meal without a bit of ceiling falling on to their plates.

Now, a lifetime later, Ethan was thirty-three, Shane was almost thirty and Christie was a grandmother twice over.

The long dark hair she’d worn in a loose ponytail all those years ago was now cut to jaw length and waved, its cool silvery white highlighting the warmth of her olive skin and dark, winged eyebrows.

She still wore a delicate flick of eyeliner, which gave her eyes a magical tilt at each olive green corner, but had swapped the block of cake eyeliner she’d grown up with for a modern miracle liner pen. She liked embracing new things, believing that living too much in the past made a person look their age.

The kitchen wasn’t showing its age, either. Currently on its third incarnation, it had been decorated in brightly coloured chic, then antique pine and was now showcasing modern maple. Many woman-hours of hard work had turned the garden into a honeytrap for lazy bees, which moved from one variety of lavender to another in the height of summer.

Now, in the last days of April, the old French rose that Christie had been nurturing to sweep over the pergola had produced its first decent crop of antique white flowers with a musky, amber scent. Her garden was so sheltered that her roses bloomed at least a month before they should and she could smell their fragrance from the open window as she stood rinsing the breakfast dishes at the sink.

Scrubbing at some stubborn crumbs of toast glued to a white plate, Christie tried to rationalise the niggling anxiety in her head.

Anniversaries brought up old memories, that was all it was, surely.

Christie had been so lucky these past thirty years. Blessed, almost. There had only been that one time in her married life when it had all nearly gone wrong, and, like catching a falling glass before it hit the floor, Christie had averted the disaster. There was a tiny crack left behind from that time, but nobody except Christie could see it. That couldn’t trouble her now, could it?

No, she decided firmly, as she slotted the clean plate into the drying rack. That was all in the past.

She knew she was blessed. James was as good a husband as he’d been when she married him. Better, in fact. They’d grown closer as they’d grown older, not apart, like so many others did. Christie knew plenty of people her own age who’d stayed married and had nothing to show for it except spite and old wedding photos. They bitched and bickered and made everyone around them uncomfortable. Why bother? Christie wondered.

Wouldn’t it be better to be happy on your own instead of coupled off in sheer misery? She liked to think that if she and James fell out, God forbid, they could end it with dignity and move on.

‘I bet you wouldn’t,’ her sister Ana had pointed out mischievously once, at the end of one long night on the small terrace in the garden when the wineglasses were empty and the conversation had turned to what-ifs.

‘There wouldn’t be a bit of dignity involved. I bet you’d stab James with your secateurs one night, bury him under the rhubarb and act delighted when it turned out to be a good crop!’

‘Ah, Ana,’ said James, feigning hurt. ‘Christie would never do that.’ He paused for effect, looking round the garden his wife adored. ‘The lilac tree needs fertilising, not the rhubarb. That’s where she’d bury me.’