Sworn Secret Read online

  Rebecca recoiled from Stephen, tucking herself tighter into Jon’s shoulder. ‘No, I want him to stay.’

  Jon looked at Kate and her eyes met his. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mouthed. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  He turned back to Stephen. ‘I’ll stay with Rebecca. She knows me.’

  Stephen nodded. ‘Then I’ll accompany Kate.’

  Jon’s stomach clenched as he watched Kate walk away from him, the quietened crowd parting like the Red Sea to let her and Stephen Howe through.

  He closed his eyes. There was a dreadful throbbing in his head. A sickening sense of foreboding filled him, as if he might never see her again. How on earth had he let this happen? Kate had done something awful and he couldn’t bear to even consider the repercussions, not just from the legal point of view, but on their family, on Lizzie.

  He stroked Rebecca’s hair, holding on to her tightly, trying to absorb her shivering, wondering what he could do to make this go away.

  Christ, he thought, you idiot. What were you thinking? You saw it in her eyes. You knew she wasn’t up to it. You did nothing.

  She’d even told him, straight out, said she wouldn’t manage it. He should have been stronger. He should have insisted she stay behind. He should never have exposed her like that. He knew how she felt about the school, how it made her feel. She hadn’t been back since the night Anna died. Not a parents’ evening, or a Christmas concert, or even to meet Lizzie after school, like she used to occasionally, when they’d walk home via Costa for three caffé lattes and two-between-three chocolate brownies. How could he have been so stupid?

  Once again all Kate could hear was her own breathing, rasping in painfully deafening spasms against a silent background. What had she done? What the hell had she done?

  As she walked back along the school corridors, she went over every excruciating detail, desperate to pinpoint the exact moment she had lost it. Was it when she lifted her hand to Rebecca? When she followed her out of the school hall? With Anna’s lost laugh? Maybe it was as early as sitting on her bed, trying to muster the strength to leave her room. She should have stayed at home. She’d known full well she wouldn’t cope. She should have locked herself away until Tuesday was over. She was stupid. Stupid for trusting herself.

  Stephen opened the door to his office and stepped to one side to allow her through. She wondered if he might say something, but he stayed quiet, his eyes on his feet. How unlike him. He was usually the definition of cool. Like the night Anna died, when he’d stepped into the breach, taken control, calm and collected. She often wondered what she and Jon would have done if he hadn’t been there to help. He’d been such a pillar of strength and support. It was Stephen who had broken the news to them. He’d called from this very office. She looked around the room, at the bank of cheap metal shelving that held red, blue and black lever arch files. His desk, tidy and neat, in-tray, out-tray and pending, one of those executive toys with the suspended chrome balls that knocked against each other, pointless and perpetual. Then the phone, grey and cold, placed perfectly in the top right corner like a postage stamp. She pulled her eyes away from it, trying not to recall the words he’d used that night, unable to hear anything else.

  ‘Mrs Thorne, it’s Stephen Howe. I’m at the school. There’s been an accident. A terrible accident,’ pause, ‘it’s Anna.’ Long pause. ‘I’m sorry.’ A final pause. ‘I was too late here. She was already dead. There . . . there was nothing I could do.’

  After that it was blank. No matter how hard she raked through the wreckage in her memory, there was nothing between those words and the moment she laid eyes on Anna on the concrete. She must have gone back upstairs after seeing Lizzie peering down from the landing, got out of her pyjamas, dressed, brushed her hair, thought to go to Anna’s room to grab a cardigan in case Stephen was wrong and she was alive, and, fashionably underdressed as always, was now feeling the chill. They’d have got in the car, driven to school. Parked. Walked through the school. Been led to their dead daughter’s body. There was no recollection of any of it; it was all blank.

  She couldn’t have done without Stephen that night. His familiar eyes were a lifeline in amongst all those of the silent, cautious paramedics and police, who looked at her with knowing, sympathetic glances. But Stephen’s soft words, his hand on her lower back, his calm control. He’d been such a support, and not just that night, but following on, with Lizzie too. Hand-delivering the work she missed at school, checking up on her most days to see if she was coping OK, arranging for the counsellor to talk her through her grief. To see him staring at his feet, pale and twitching, unable to meet her eye, was agonizing. What she’d done to Rebecca, her inexcusable loss of control, was clearly a step beyond him, and calling the police to deal with her had apparently floored him.

  Stephen cleared his throat when the two policemen finally arrived to break the dreadful silence.

  ‘Dr Howe?’ the older one asked. He didn’t look at Kate.

  Kate squeezed her eyes shut. She wouldn’t cry. She couldn’t. She wasn’t the victim here and she deserved whatever was coming.

  Musical Interlude: Number One

  She watched the scene from the front of the group of people. They’d all run out of the hall when they heard her mum screaming in the playground then got stuck with shock at what they saw.

  Lizzie was numb. She couldn’t feel a thing. All she could do was stare at them both, her mother shaking uncontrollably, standing over a terrified Rebecca.

  Noise grew louder around her, and as it did she felt herself smack into life. She started to shake too. She felt faint. Lost. She wanted her mum. She wanted to run to her, have her hold her and tell her it was OK and that she hadn’t meant to hurt Rebecca. She began to cry and call out for her. She’d never seen anything so awful as her mum hitting Rebecca; the anger etched into Kate’s face had terrified her.

  Lizzie stepped backwards through the crowd, being jostled left and right as they all tried to get a better view. When she reached the back and found herself free from everyone else, she turned and blindly looked for a place to escape to. But where? She felt faint, sick even, and for a horrible moment she thought she might actually throw up. She leant forward, resting her hands on her knees, trying to breathe deeply, hoping her head would stop spinning enough for her to walk away.

  Then Lizzie felt someone touch her.

  In a daze she looked up to see who it was. Her vision was blurry and she had to squint to focus. The figure slowly began to make sense; it was Haydn. She was surprised to see him. She hadn’t imagined he would come back for the service. Silly really; of course he’d be there.

  Haydn didn’t say anything. He just took her arm and guided her away from the people towards the picnic tables. He sat her down on a bench. She started to speak, but he shushed her with a finger on her lips. He smelt of cigarettes and his skin was rough as if he were made of sandpaper. She watched him reach into his pocket, moving deliberately, silently, as if in slow motion or under water. Then in his hand were headphones, small delicate wires of white, and without a sound he put an earpiece into each of her ears, all the while holding her gaze until he brushed his hand down over her eyelids, closing her eyes and blocking himself and the world around them out.

  The music filled her head, muting the shocked gasps, the screaming and crying, flowing into her body like water to a dying man in the desert, the first notes of a tune she didn’t recognize running along her veins to the tips of her fingers and toes, pulsing with her heartbeat, filling her head with colours. A man began to sing. His voice was soft and low, a mournful magic carpet that carried her away from the chaos around her, dissolving her broken mum and the quivering Rebecca into nothing but pinpricks far below.

  Haydn’s hand slipped something into her own, and then he squeezed her fingers closed around it. He held her hand for the briefest of moments and there it was again, the sandpaper skin, but this time it was safe and strong and knowing, as if it were the most familiar skin in her world.
r />   She opened her eyes to see what it was he’d given her. An iPod. She looked at him. The music still played. It had wiped everything else out of her head – there was only him and her, like cardboard cut-outs, cut from the real world and stuck to a sheet of brilliant white paper. Just them and nothing else. Then he stood and smiled at her.

  It was a simple, uncomplicated smile that needed no explanation or translation and required no reply. It was the sweetest smile she’d ever seen, and at that very moment something amazing happened. Something she could never have predicted. For as long as she could remember, the him in her head had been a faceless shadow, an indistinct silhouette without a name. She’d danced with and kissed and loved this mysterious stranger a countless number of times, waltzing around those spaces in her mind she’d so carefully furnished with candles and flowers and happiness. Never once in those hundreds of times did she ever imagine that beneath her lover’s featureless mask was Haydn. Yet there he was, the him in her head smiling at her, suddenly, fantastically, with both a name and a face.

  A Ghastly Accent

  Jon stared out through the windscreen. He gripped the steering wheel, knuckles white as a corpse. Behind him Rachel unclipped her seatbelt. He didn’t turn to face her; he couldn’t stomach the thought of laying eyes on Rebecca, who was sitting beside her on the back seat. All he had were hows and whys. How and why repeated over and over.

  It was grief. Grief was how and grief was why. Her grief and his. He’d let his out and it had got in the way, clouded his judgement, loosened his grip on her, allowed her to run after Rebecca. But he still couldn’t work out why he hadn’t followed her. Why it had taken so long for him to check she was OK. Why it was only when they heard that dreadful shrieking from the playground that he’d thought to find her. He’d just stood there, gawping through tear-blinded eyes at that blasted picture of Anna. He couldn’t look anywhere else. From the moment he walked into the hall it was all he could see. Her smiling at him. Maybe if they hadn’t put that picture on the stage he might have stopped Kate following Rebecca. But the picture pushed his grief out like volcanic lava. He’d worked so hard to keep it locked away, ever conscious that Kate and Lizzie didn’t need his misery. They had more than enough of their own, and his was surplus to requirement. The only thing he could do was box and bury it. But that picture, which in an instant tore him open, exhumed that miserable box of sadness and missing, and now his wife was at the police station and the child she’d beaten was sitting dumbstruck in his car.

  He cleared his throat, wishing there was something obvious to say. A way to apologize. But words were insubstantial, inappropriate.

  Rachel opened the car door and moved to get out, but then she stopped, and sat back in the seat.

  ‘What on earth possessed her?’ she asked.

  Jon turned then. He readied himself for the sight of Rebecca and then made himself look at her, still quivering, white with shock, her lip swollen. She clutched her arms around her middle. She was unable to look at him, avoiding his eyes as if he were the Devil, her eyes fixed, unseeing, on something outside the car window. Their moment of closeness, when she’d clung to him with every ounce of strength she had left, had gone.

  He looked back at Rachel and considered her question.

  ‘The day,’ he said at last.

  And yesterday, he thought, and the day before that and the day before that.

  He thought of Kate. He saw her standing above Rebecca, her face clouded with alarm, her hand raised to her mouth, tears collected in her eyes. She had fixed her eyes to his, begged him to help her.

  I’m sorry, she’d mouthed, I’m so sorry.

  Jon’s heart ached for her and he knew that he had let her down. Kate was the last person to hurt a child. She’d never raised a hand to their girls, and both of them, Anna especially, had certainly deserved it on occasion. His mother never understood why they didn’t get a sharp smack every now and then.

  ‘It never did you or Daniel any harm,’ she’d mutter, disapprovingly, as Kate disappeared to reason with whatever tantrum blazed.

  But that wasn’t Kate’s way.

  ‘Children don’t need to be smacked. They’re like flowers. All they want is some food and water, a bit of sunshine and lots of love, and they’ll grow just right. If you hit them, you’ll break them.’

  She was a good mother. Sometimes, way back then, before Anna’s death, he’d find himself watching her with the girls, in utter admiration. She was so young when she’d fallen pregnant with Anna, then Lizzie so quickly after, and then he was away with his job, leaving her for weeks at a time with the two small children. She never once complained. Instead, she made sure they didn’t miss him, painting him love-you-Daddy pictures, making fabulous misshapen biscuits with fluorescent pink icing and too many silver balls, leaving incoherent messages on his mobile that he’d listen to over and over in those sterile hotel rooms in every lonely corner of Europe. Had he ever told her how much he’d appreciated that? He couldn’t remember.

  Rachel got out of the car and walked around to Rebecca’s side. She opened the door and held her hand out and waited until her daughter took it. They stood next to Jon’s window. Rachel’s arm lay protectively around her daughter’s shoulders; Rebecca leant against her mother.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ he said.

  Neither replied.

  ‘I don’t know what else I can say, but if either of you need anything, you must call me, any time, day or night.’

  ‘You know, it’s her who needs help,’ Rachel said. ‘Not us.’

  He dropped his head, but feeling Rachel’s eyes needling into him he glanced up again. Her mouth twitched ever so slightly, then she reached through the window and laid her hand on his.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Jon.’

  He stared at her hand. Her skin was creamy and smooth and peppered with tiny moles like the shell of a speckled egg, so different from Kate’s, whose hands were dry and red in places, with paint ground permanently into them.

  ‘And, I know this is probably out of turn, but from where I’m standing, it’s not fair on you either,’ she went on. ‘You lost Anna too.’

  Jon closed his eyes as she stroked him with her thumb, warm and gentle. He tried to imagine her touch was Kate’s.

  ‘I should go.’ The words caught in his throat. ‘I need to get back to Lizzie.’

  ‘Poor thing,’ Rachel whispered. ‘Seeing her mum like that.’

  Jon didn’t reply.

  He waited until the two of them disappeared inside the house before he started the engine. He drove in a numb daze, unable to distinguish one emotion from the next as they jostled inside him. He felt as if he were wading through glue. The amount of effort required to do simple things – shift gear, check mirrors, park – was exhausting. He sat in the NCP near the police station and tried to steady himself. What was he going to tell people? What would they think of Kate? He winced at the sound of his mother’s voice in his head. Well, of course, she said tightly. I’m not in the least bit surprised.

  Jon shook his head. ‘You mustn’t blame her,’ he said aloud. ‘Losing Anna turned her world upside down.’

  He saw his mother’s eyebrows arch. Losing Anna turned all our worlds upside down, she said. But all she sees is her own tragedy. What the rest of us feel is of no concern to her. It’s about time Kate realized the whole sorry situation doesn’t simply revolve around her. He saw his mother cross her arms and lift her chin, the tortoiseshell comb pushed firmly into her snow-white hair. He wouldn’t agree with her. However fond he was of his mother his loyalty was with his wife, as strong now as it had been the first time he brought her home to meet his mother. He remembered how terrified Kate had been, juddering about on the doorstep while they waited for the door to open and, when it did, her hand squeezing his so hard he laughed. He pulled her along the corridor as she ohmygodded her way past framed doctorates, the photo of his father shaking hands with Neil Kinnock, the one of him in a crowd of eminent stranger
s with the grand red-brick façade of Harvard behind them, then proudly holding his knighthood, his mother beaming out from beneath the rim of her ridiculous pink hat.

  ‘What am I going to say to them? Oh my God, they’re going to think I’m a moron.’ She paused. ‘And I am a moron, by the way. I failed my maths O-level.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Twice,’ she whispered. ‘I failed Maths O-level twice.’

  Jon laughed and kissed her forehead.

  ‘I’ve never met a Lady before. Shit. What the hell am I doing here?’ She tried to pull back towards the front door. He held firm and pulled her on.

  ‘He’s knighted for services to economics, so really, she’s only a Lady because he was such a swot at school,’ he whispered with a grin.

  She groaned. ‘None of the swots at school could stand me. They thought I was a real pain in the arse.’

  ‘They’ll adore you, just like I do,’ Jon said.

  As they walked into the front room, or lounge as Kate called it, he crossed his fingers behind his back.

  He was besotted. She was so different from the ones before, a samey-samey group of respectable girls who were headed for Oxbridge, and who dressed nicely, with parents who were solicitors or doctors or academics, and whom his mother grinned at while sipping sloe gin. But Kate, with her lace-up boots, nose ring and art school flair, was fire and frivolity and full to the brim with lust for life. She injected him with energy. She was his elixir. It was only when he met Kate that Jon saw how dull his life had become, typical eldest child, conservative, responsible, desperate to please. It shackled him. But then he found Kate and she had the key.

  ‘So?’ he asked, when he returned to the front room having put Kate in a taxi back to east London.

  ‘Oh, Jonathan, darling, she is so uncultured,’ his mother replied. ‘Doesn’t even play the piano. Not a single lesson!’