Every Woman Knows a Secret

Jess sat in silence, watching Danny’s motionless face. A continuous ribbon of thoughts ran through her mind, bright images from the past punctuated by a conversation with Danny that she knew must not end now. She would talk to him – how could she not? – and he would answer. She possessed him within her head and the sudden certainty of it was like a light flashing on after days of darkness.

She stood up now and gently lifted the blanket from his shoulders, folding it back so that she could look at him. With an effort of will she made the white discs taped to his chest invisible, and the tubes and wires running out of him. She closed her ears to the gasp of the ventilator and the subdued noises of the ward.

Danny’s shoulders were broad and there was dark hair on his chest and forearms. The slow rise and fall of his chest was steady, as if he were sleeping. His skin was smooth and still coloured by the residue of his summer tan. His mother looked at the knitting together of muscles and sinews and the hollow at the base of his throat and the strong arch of his ribcage, and thought how beautiful he was. While she looked at him he was a man and not her child any longer. She would have liked to stretch herself out beside him and take him in her arms. The flush of longing for him made her skin shiver with tiny currents of electricity, as if she were a girl, as if he were her lover.

Jess touched the tips of her fingers to his warm shoulder. She bent down as if to whisper in his ear, and then put her lips to the tiny scar on his jawline.

Then, tenderly, she folded the blanket up again, patting it in place around him.

All the time the conversation ran on in her head, threads of talk they had shared about Danny’s college work, his girls, small speculations about the future. She heard his voice again and saw him moving, smiling, moving on as he would not, now.

Jess straightened up, stood back a step.

She did not articulate the word goodbye.

She opened the screens and walked down the ward, somehow placing one foot in front of the other. She saw the faces of the unit director, a nurse, one of the doctors, waiting to help her. She even smiled her thanks at them, feeling the movement of it spreading lopsided over her face. The nurse put an arm round Jess’s shoulders. They guided her away from the unit and the hateful waiting room, so that she would not see or hear when they came to wheel the body down to the theatre.

Four (#u0e70d9c9-3115-52c5-b303-79f3546613b4)

Ian was in the dining room laying the round table for dinner. He found the white cloth in its usual drawer and shook it out over the table. The stubborn creases revealed that it had been folded away for a long time. Probably Danny and Jess had eaten their meals in the kitchen, if they had eaten together at all. It was almost three years since they had shared a meal in this room as a family foursome.

The understanding never again weighed like a stone beneath his heart. He swallowed, in a confused attempt to dislodge it.

Ian lifted a pair of carved wooden candlesticks off the dusty mantelpiece and set them on the cloth. It seemed important to mark the day of Danny’s funeral with proper ceremony. When he had laid five place settings he stood back. The dining room looked almost the same as it had on the day he’d left. He remembered that he had put his two suitcases down in the hall and glanced in, briefly, as if to check that nothing of himself remained. Then he had put the suitcases in his car and driven away to Michelle’s flat.

Years before that, Jess and he had papered this room together over a week of his summer holiday. Today the Laura Ashley pattern of tiny brown flowers looked dingy, and the matching curtains hung limply beneath their gathered pelmet. The brown carpet was worn, and so were the green tweed seats of the second-hand Sixties Scandinavian wooden chairs. Jess had made no changes or improvements to the home they had created together; Ian clumsily understood that she had probably lacked the emotional energy as well as the money.

From the kitchen drifted the scent of frying garlic. James was cooking dinner, and the three women were upstairs somewhere. Ian was glad of the interval of quiet. The house had been full of people for hours.

Everyone had come back to the house from the crematorium. They had eaten the food prepared by the caterers that Lizzie swore by, shaken hands with Ian and Jess and whispered their assurances that if there was anything, anything at all, they only had to ask. There had been a parade of faces: neighbours Ian had almost forgotten, teachers from Danny’s school, and friends of Jess’s, including a woman from her work who had brought flowers picked on the nursery – viburnum and winter jasmine and strong-scented daphne. And there had been solemn, tongue-tied mates of Danny’s whom Ian had last seen as little boys. Dozens of faces, and none of them Danny’s.

Ian swallowed hard on the sensation within himself that was not quite a yawn, not quite nausea. He didn’t know how to express his grief for his son. He hadn’t cried, yet. Crying was for women. The acknowledgement made him think of Michelle, who cried as easily as she laughed.

‘When are you coming home?’ she had asked him. The telephone strengthened her Australian vowels, or maybe his ears were already re-tuned to the Midlands accent.

‘I’ll be on the Qantas flight the day after tomorrow, love. I want to get back to you, you know that.’

‘I’ll come and pick you up at the airport,’ she’d said at once.

‘Do that.’

He missed her. Life with Michelle was comprehensible, comfortable. From the beginning, that had been one of the problems with Jess. He had never felt that she gave herself to him; there was always a little distance, a measure of holding back that was at first tantalising, and finally disappointing.

Ian clicked his lighter to the candles. Points of flame flickered and then steadied in the still air. He watched them for a minute before walking through to the kitchen.

James was standing at the cooker. He looked up and waved a wooden spatula at a pan on the heat. He said, ‘It’s a bit hit and miss. I wasn’t sure where to look for things.’

James enjoyed cooking and was good at it; Lizzie could barely fix a sandwich. It was one of the ways they fitted together. He had tied Jess’s striped apron over his unfamiliar dark clothes.

‘I’m sure it’ll be good,’ Ian said automatically. He thought James looked like a poof, fannying around in his pinny. But he knew enough about Lizzie to be sure that couldn’t really be the case. For an actress, Lizzie had always been quite definite about liking proper men. For a year or two, long ago, when she had been spending a lot of time in and out of their house and Jess had begun to withdraw, Ian had fancied her himself, although it had never come to anything. It would have been too difficult, that.

‘Drink?’ James nodded at an opened litre of red wine.

‘Scotch for me,’ Ian answered. He took a bottle of Bell’s out of the usual cupboard and poured himself a full glass. James opened a tin of tomatoes and slopped the contents into a pan. Once he had stirred down the splutter of it, he reached for a cloth and busily dabbed the crimson speckles off the margins of the stove. Tidy, Ian noted.

‘Jess still resting?’

‘I suppose,’ Ian said. ‘Do her good.’

After the last mourners had gone Jess and Beth had separately retreated into their bedrooms. Lizzie had given Sock his bath and put him to sleep on the living-room sofa. No one went into Danny’s room.

Ian sat down at the table and drank his whisky. He couldn’t think of anything else to say to James.

They had met a handful of times at the end of the awkward period before Ian went to Australia with Michelle. James was naturally defensive of Jess; Ian assumed that Lizzie had spared her new boyfriend none of the details about Jess’s husband’s misbehaviour, but he had felt too embattled to bother trying to justify himself. Moreover, Ian never felt quite at ease with men who were more successful than himself, and he knew that James headed his own accountancy firm. He also knew that when he had married Lizzie James had bought her a substantial Victorian house in a prosperous village surrounded by rare unspoilt countryside. Ian hadn’t seen the house but he imagined a cedarwood conservatory, a quarry-tiled kitchen and acres of pale sculpted carpets. His own home, Jess’s home now, seemed to reproach him with its relative shabbiness.

To his relief, he heard Lizzie emerge from the bathroom upstairs. She crossed the landing and tapped gently on Jess’s door.

‘They’ll be down in a minute.’

James nodded. ‘This is ready now.’

The three women came downstairs together.

‘He’s gone off properly at last,’ Lizzie explained, about Sock. ‘I thought he wasn’t going to.’

‘Have a drink.’ Ian picked up the uncapped Scotch bottle and poured a measure.

‘Thanks.’

‘Beth?’

‘Give Mum one.’

Jess leaned against the dresser, obediently nursing the glass he put into her hand. Lizzie put a set of dishes to warm and Beth scraped potato peelings into the pedal bin. They were each of them occupying themselves with the tasks to hand, in order to contain the mess of grief. Realising this brought the sudden tears to Jess’s eyes. She pressed the back of her hand into her face.

‘Sit down, darling. Here, come on.’

Lizzie guided her to a chair. In the folds of her clothes as they held each other Jess smelled cigarette smoke. Lizzie had succumbed.

‘Thanks,’ Jess murmured. She saw Beth’s white face and shadowed eyes, and the way Ian’s thin hair had crept back from his forehead. They had loved Danny too; how could they not have done?

She said, ‘Thank you for being here tonight.’

‘Where else would we be?’

Lizzie’s jacket was broad stripes of scarlet and black satin, like a winter deckchair. She had worn it that afternoon at the funeral, with a black fedora hat pulled down to shield her eyes. A costume.

‘I can’t wear black for him,’ she had whispered to Jess. ‘As if he was old.’