Past Secrets

Giovanni was Ella’s youngest brother and Faye had heard about this new girlfriend enough times for alarm bells to tinkle gently. Giovanni was in his second year in college, handsome like all Ella’s half-Italian family, and Faye knew Amber had a mild crush on him, despite the fact that she said he was boring. The appearance of an actual steady girlfriend was certainly a catalyst for Amber to realise this. Faye wouldn’t have minded if her daughter’s first serious boyfriend was someone like Giovanni: someone she knew all about and approved of.

‘Dannii’s OK-looking, I suppose,’ Amber conceded, grudgingly, ‘but she’s a pain and she’s round Ella’s house all the time talking this crap. She’s doing business studies, Mum, right, and when she’s with Giovanni, she behaves like she’s had her brain sucked out. You don’t get into business studies in college if you’re a moron, so I don’t know who she’s kidding. Well,’ she added gloomily, ‘Giovanni appears to be falling for it. Big dope. Dannii told Ella that Giovanni’s a really hot guy. You can’t say that to your boyfriend’s little sister! Your brother is so sexy. Yeuch. That’s disgusting. I can’t stand her. She hasn’t a clue about anything.’

Faye said nothing for a while. She gazed at her work so far. She’d definitely pulled up some genuine flowers along with the weeds. How was it that carefully planted flowers could be ripped up easily, while unwanted weeds needed incredible force to shift them?

‘If you act stupid with a guy, he’s only going out with you because of how you look,’ Faye said eventually.

‘Exactly what I said,’ Amber pointed out. ‘Oh, I suppose Ella was only thinking out loud. She couldn’t act dumb, anyway. She’s going to come top of our year in the exams.’

Talk of the exams made Amber stare wearily down at her maths book again. ‘That’s not love. Love is different. If any guy’s only interested in what a girl’s like on the outside, then he’s not what you want, is he?’

It was half question, half statement.

‘That’s what I think,’ Faye said decisively. This was safe ground: she’d been telling Amber to appreciate her worth all her life. ‘If he doesn’t love you for who you are, then he’s not the right person for you. Have you and Ella met any hot guys?’ she asked lightly. She’d love to ask if Amber thought she might fancy Giovanni.

‘No,’ said Amber hastily. If her mother hadn’t been so busy being thankful at the change of subject, she might have noticed just how hastily Amber had spoken. But Faye didn’t notice. She was pulling at weeds and she didn’t see the hint of red on her daughter’s cheeks.

‘Summer Street is not exactly awash with hot men my age.’ Amber fanned herself with her book as if the sun was responsible for the heat suffusing her complexion. ‘Ella’s road is just as bad. The whole neighbourhood’s full of nerds and middle-aged men with beer bellies who suck them in when we walk past.’

Savage but accurate, Faye thought with a smothered laugh. Amber and Ella’s teenage beauty made them a stunning pair, Amber all tawny hair and those spectacular eyes contrasting with Ella’s flashing dark Italian looks. Though they’d never have believed it, they were gorgeous – a scary prospect when you were the mother of one of them. But Amber was so sensible. Faye had taught her well. How not to make mistakes, how not to be led by other people. Except, Faye thought, she’d never explained to her daughter how her mother knew these lessons were so important.

‘The people from number 42 have sold up,’ Faye said breezily. ‘Who knows, a handsome father-son combo might have bought it.’

‘Doubt it. But hey, if you’re right, you could go out with the dad. Wouldn’t that be great?’ Amber was delighted. ‘You could come home and tell me all about it. And I’d laugh and warn you not to let him get past first base on the first date!’

Faye grabbed a nettle by mistake and gasped with pain.

‘Ouch. That was stupid,’ she muttered lamely.

‘It’s a serious subject, Mum,’ Amber said gravely. Just to show how serious, she sat up cross-legged and gazed at her mother, her face solemn. ‘I know how much you’ve given up for me but I’m an adult now and you can have your life back. I’ll be going to college. You need to do your own thing.’

The little speech sounded like one Amber had been working on for ages and Faye almost grabbed the nettle again for the comfort of physical pain against this shocking emotional stabbing sensation. She was meant to be urging Amber gently into the world, not the other way round.

Seventeen-year-olds were supposed to be too involved with their own problems to notice their mothers’. If Amber was urging her to get a social life, she must be a total basket case. Well, Faye’s own mother thought so, too.

‘Come on, Faye, don’t bury yourself. You’re not dead yet,’ Josie had said many years before, and it had triggered the one big row between them since before Amber was born.

‘Leave me alone to live my life my way! You don’t know what I want,’ Faye had said furiously.

She’d never forgotten what her mother had said. Josie hadn’t understood at all. This life with Amber wasn’t being buried: it was living peacefully and contentedly without the interference of any man.

‘I’m just saying think about it,’ Amber went on. ‘I’ll be gone and I’ll worry about you, Mum. I won’t be here so much and you’ll need to keep busy. And I don’t mean doing overtime,’ she added sternly. ‘I mean having fun. Getting out. Going on dates. Grace would love to set you up on a blind date at one of her dinners, you know she would. Sure, you’d probably meet a few men you’d hate, but you never know, you might find romance.’

Lecture over, she went back to her maths book, leaving Faye feeling that their roles had been reversed. She’d been the one receiving the lecture on life from her daughter.

Amber’s remarks had been running through Faye’s head since Saturday afternoon.

Climbing the steps to the swimming pool complex, Faye wondered, was this all normal teenager stuff: get a life, Mum, because I’m going to and I don’t want to worry about you. Or was there something else?

Faye went into the women’s changing room, switched off her music and changed into her plain black swimsuit quickly. She did everything quickly and efficiently.

‘Economical and precise,’ Grace said, which was high praise indeed because Grace, Faye’s boss in Little Island Recruitment, turned efficiency into an art form.

‘Economical and precise or obsessional?’ Faye wondered from time to time when she was interviewing in her office and saw candidates staring at her pristine desk with everything exactly at right angles to everything else. A cluttered desk meant a cluttered mind and Faye had never had time for a cluttered mind.

But didn’t it signify an obsessional mind if you arranged all your paperclips to lie lengthwise in their compartment in the desk organiser?

She stowed her navy skirt suit in a locker and pulled on a swimhat. She never looked at herself in the mirror like some women in the changing room, anxiously making sure they didn’t look awful in clinging Lycra or admiring a physique honed by laps.

At the age of forty, and carrying probably two stone more than she should, Faye was no fan of mirrors. They lied. You could be scarred to bits on the inside and look beautiful outside.

She walked out of the changing room, shivered under the cool shower for a moment, then slipped into the pool’s medium-fast lane where she pushed off into the water.

The Olympic swimming selectors were unlikely to be calling on her any time soon, but over the last six months she’d worked her way up to swimming sixteen lengths each time and she knew she was getting faster, no matter how unprofessional her forward crawl. She felt more toned too but that wasn’t the primary reason for the exercise.

What she loved about swimming was the solitude of the pool. Even if the lanes were full and every noise was amplified by the water, when her head was down and her body was slicing through the pool, she felt utter peace.

This was her time, time for Faye alone.

Six months previously, when she’d paid for the swimming complex membership, she’d realised it was the first time in seventeen years she’d indulged herself in something that didn’t directly benefit Amber. Even the CD player she used was an old one that Amber had discarded when she’d saved up her pocket money for an iPod.

The money she’d spent on the membership fee could usefully have gone somewhere else. Amber would need a whole new expensive kit for art college, and there would surely be trips to galleries abroad. There never seemed to be enough money for all the things Faye thought Amber should have.

But the pool had called to her.

‘I wish I was into swimming,’ Grace had begun to say on the days that Faye took an early lunch.

Grace and her husband Neil ran the recruitment company together. Grace regularly said they couldn’t have done it without Faye, and Neil, who actually worked very little, was smugly convinced its success was all down to him.

‘Swimming sounds so easy, swim, swim and the weight falls off,’ Grace had said.

Faye grinned, knowing that Grace liked the idea of exercise and the results that exercise provided but wasn’t that keen on actually doing it.

‘Is it better than running, do you think?’ Grace went on. ‘I’d quite like to run but I’ve weak ankles. Swimming could be the answer.’

‘You’d get bored in a week,’ Faye told her. Grace was a chataholic and got anxious if she hadn’t had at least four friends phone her a day in between her hectic schedule of business calls. ‘There’s nothing sociable about swimming. You put your head into the water and plough on. You can’t hear anyone and you can only see what’s ahead of you.’

It was like praying, she often thought, although she didn’t say that to Grace, who’d have thought she was abusing recreational pharmaceuticals. But it seemed like that to Faye – here it was only you and God as you moved porpoise-like through the water, nobody else.

‘Really? No Baywatch male lifeguards?’

‘I haven’t noticed any,’ Faye said drily.

‘Well, who needs a Baywatch lifeguard anyway?’ Grace said.

Which was, Faye knew, her way of moving on to another line of conversation. Because Grace, although happily married, had many fantasies about a muscle-bound hunk who’d adore her. It was strange when Faye, who’d been on her own for most of the past seventeen years, went out of her way not to notice men at all. She was with Billie Holiday on the whole men issue: they were too much trouble. And she’d learned that the hard way.

Lunchtimes could be busy in Little Island Recruitment because that was when staff from other offices got the opportunity to slope off, march into Little Island, relate the sad tale of their current employment and discuss the possibility of moving elsewhere where their talents would finally be appreciated. But today when Faye arrived back from her swim, damp-haired, pleasurably tired out and dressed in her old reliable M & S navy suit, reception was empty except for Jane behind the reception desk.