Every Woman Knows a Secret

Within a few minutes the boys were squeezing into the booth with them.

‘D’you mind?’ one of the girls pouted. ‘This is a private celebration.’

‘We don’t object to a bit of privacy, Dan, do we?’

‘Not at all. What are you celebrating? We’ll help you out, if you want.’

The dark-haired one said, still looking at Dan, ‘It’s Zoe’s birthday.’

Rob clicked his fingers. ‘That’s no problem. It so happens that birthdays are our real speciality, and Zoe’s birthdays are what we do best of all. Waiter, bring flowers, ice, champagne.’

‘You’ve got a bit of a cheek,’ the plainest girl said, and one of the others laughed.

‘Champagne? In this place? Two teas one teabag, more like.’

‘We’re going to a club later,’ the dark one told Danny. The girls always gravitated towards him. He had an air of tender vulnerability, which Rob did not. Danny nodded seriously.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Cat.’

‘What sort of name’s that?’

‘Cat. For Catherine, you know.’

Jess was driving the twelve miles home from the nursery, along a route so familiar to her that all the features of it had been smoothed away. Ditchley was in the middle of England; it was neither southern nor northern, and whilst it was some distance from Birmingham or Sheffield or Nottingham, it was no longer just a country town. Jess had grown up there, and she had seen the surrounding countryside eaten up by new housing estates, and out-of-town shopping developments, and garden centres. The open fields had shrunk and had been hemmed in by roads, so it seemed now that she lived on an island triangle bounded by motorways. The town itself was prosaic and middling as it had always been, but the last years had smeared it with tacky modernity. It now appeared brave but increasingly discomfited under its pedestrian centre and multi-storey car park, like a middle-aged matron making an effort in an outfit too young for her.

Jess’s face tipped into a sudden wry smile. It wasn’t Ditchley that was middle-aged, but herself. Am I so dull? she wondered. To have spent so much of my life in one place, and to have ended up disappointed in it, as well as in myself?

Deliberately, to avoid the question, she turned her thoughts to Joyce. Joyce had gone home, as she did every night, to relieve her mother’s day nurse and to look after the old woman until the nurse came back again in the morning, setting Joyce free once more for her work in the shop. Jess’s sympathy for her colleague made her feel ashamed of her own trivial worries. She dismissed her anxiety about money, and the future, and the faint but persistent loneliness that lived inside her like a disease, and tried to be positive.

This was her good time of the day. For all its tedious familiarity the journey home was soothing. She liked the way the road unwound through a dark twist of fields towards the orange-rimmed straddle and loop of the motorway, and on to the choreographed knit and unravel of a pair of roundabouts and through tidy streets to the cul-de-sac where she lived.

Her house, when she reached it, was in darkness behind its unkempt hedge.

Jess let herself in, switching on the lights. She glanced at the brown envelopes thrown on the hallstand and passed on into the kitchen without picking them up. Automatically she brushed a scatter of crumbs off the table and dropped them in the sink, and put the butter dish back in the refrigerator. She opened the door of the freezer compartment and stared at the neat stack of ready-made meals, then slammed the door shut again so the rubber seal made its meaty reverse-kissing sound.

The living room was tidy, and warm because the central heating had clicked on an hour before. The room was green with plants, weeping-leaved Ficus and palms and pink and purple-starred Saintpaulias. Jess moved from one pot to the next, touching the soil under the thick leaves with the tips of her fingers. The telephone rang.

‘Darling, it’s me. How’s your day been?’

It was Jess’s sister Lizzie. Jess smiled, looping the cord of the telephone away from the receiver and sitting down in the armchair, her feet tucked beneath her.

Lizzie was in her own home, twelve miles away. The sisters always tried to talk to each other every day, even when the differences in their lives kept them apart. Once it was Jess who had made the calls, mothering and reassuring her more exotic sister; now it was Lizzie’s turn to ask the probing questions.

Lizzie slumped on her sofa, massaging her neck with her free hand and staring at the mess of toys on the carpet. There was a glob of baby food drying on her black jersey and she frowned, picking at it. She was the younger by four years. When Lizzie had been working as an actress, precariously balanced between waitressing jobs and the promise of making it big, Jess was already married and a mother. The home that Jess had made with Ian and their children had been a second home to Lizzie, whenever she had needed to crawl back to it after disappointment over a part or in love.

Now, their roles were reversed.

‘My day was pretty ordinary. Not bad. It’s rather nice in the greenhouses this time of year.’

Lizzie’s frown darkened. Jess needed to get a hold on her life.

‘All on your own, with soil and flowerpots and roots and muck?’

‘Compost. And that’s for outdoor work, you don’t bring it in the greenhouse. I like peace and quiet.’

‘Jess. I wish you’d get out of there.’

‘I’m all right where I am.’

Lizzie tried to muster enough energy to renew her campaign for brightening Jess’s life, but she felt too tired tonight. It had been a long day with a baby of twenty months. He was asleep now, pink and fragrant from his bath, and the delicious thought of him suddenly blotted out her concern for Jess.

As they talked, exchanging the small news of the day, Lizzie heard the sound of her husband’s key in the lock. When James came in she looked up, beaming, and mimed a lingering kiss. She mouthed ‘Jess’ in answer to his silent question, and James retreated. Lizzie knew that he was tiptoeing upstairs to lean over the cot and marvel at his baby son.

Lizzie was thinking, as she did a dozen times a day, that she couldn’t quite believe in so much happiness. Now aged thirty-nine, within the last two and a half years, she had at last met the right man, married him, and had a baby. And just at the time when all this was happening, Jess’s twenty-three-year-old marriage to Ian was acrimoniously ending.

‘If you say so. I can’t help thinking, you know.’

‘Liz. I know what you want. You want me to be happy and with someone and doing and feeling the same things as you. But our lives have always been completely different, why should they start to be the same now?’

‘I don’t want you to be alone.’

This was the dark spot in Lizzie’s brand-new, pin-bright happiness. If only Jess were not lonely. If only something would happen to her that would comfortably reflect Lizzie’s own good fortune. A spring of maternal tenderness had been tapped in Liz by the birth of her child, and the overflow of it washed around Jess.

‘Well, I’m not alone, am I? I’m lucky.’

Lizzie gathered her hair in one hand and artfully twisted it off her face, stretching her neck and posing as if for the camera.

‘Darling, you can’t live your life through him, it’s not healthy for either of you.’

Jess said evenly, so that they both recognised it as a warning-off, ‘I don’t live through him, or anyone else. I’ve been a wife and a mother for twenty-three years. Now I want to be just what I am.’

There was a moment’s awkward silence.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lizzie said.

Jess smiled into the mouthpiece. ‘For what? For being yourself?’ Briefly she became the comforter again; the balance between them tipped so easily. ‘How’s Sock? What’s he doing?’

Christened Thomas Alexander, Lizzie’s baby had been referred to in the womb as Socrates and was now invariably known as Sock.

Lizzie’s voice lightened. ‘Asleep at last, thank God. He’s been tireless today, a chaos machine.’

Sock was a source of delight to everyone. For Jess the sight and smell and feel of him, the round head and peachy fuzz of skin, brought back piercingly sharp memories of her own babies. She turned her head to look at their photographs, framed on the shelf beside her chair. To see Sock was almost to have them back again.

‘He’s learnt so many new words.’

‘What does he say?’