The Husband’s Secret, Page 22

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Why are you sorry?’

  ‘I’m sorry about Janie. And your sister dying.’ She paused. ‘And I’m really sorry I broke up with you like I did.’

  Connor made the sign of the cross over her head. ‘I absolve you of your sins, my child. Or whatever it is they say. It’s been a while since my last confession.’

  ‘Mine too,’ said Tess. ‘I think you were meant to give me penance before you absolved me.’

  ‘Ooh, I can think of penance, baby.’

  Tess giggled. She unlaced her fingers. ‘I should go.’

  ‘I’ve scared you off with all my “issues”,’ said Connor.

  ‘No you haven’t. I just don’t want my mother getting worried. She’ll wait up for me and she won’t expect me to be this late.’ She remembered suddenly why they were meant to be getting together. ‘Hey, we never talked about your nephew. You wanted to ask me some career advice or something?’

  Connor smiled. ‘Ben’s already got a job. I just wanted an excuse to see you.’

  ‘Really?’ Tess felt a flare of happiness. Was there anything better than to be wanted? Was that all anyone really needed?

  ‘Yep.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Connor –’ she began.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any expectations. I know exactly what this is.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Tess with interest.

  He paused. ‘I’m not sure. I’ll check with my therapist and let you know.’

  Tess snorted.

  ‘I really should go,’ she said again.

  But it was another half-hour before she finally put her clothes back on.

  chapter thirty-two

  Cecilia went into the ensuite bathroom where John-Paul was brushing his teeth. She picked up her toothbrush, squeezed toothpaste on it and began to brush, her eyes not meeting his in the mirror.

  She stopped brushing.

  ‘Your mother knows,’ she said.

  John-Paul bent down to the basin and spat. ‘What do you mean?’ he straightened, patted his mouth with the handtowel and shoved it back on the handrail in such a slapdash way that you’d think he was deliberately trying to avoid keeping it straight.

  ‘She knows,’ said Cecilia again.

  He spun around. ‘You told her?’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘Why would you do that?’ The colour had drained from his face. He didn’t seem angry so much as utterly stunned.

  ‘John-Paul, I didn’t tell her. I mentioned Rachel was coming to Polly’s party and she asked how you felt about that. I could just tell.’

  John-Paul’s shoulders relaxed. ‘You must have imagined it.’

  He sounded so certain. Whenever they had an argument about a point of fact, he was always so utterly confident that he had it right and she had it wrong. He never even entertained the possibility that he might be mistaken. It drove her bananas. She struggled with an almost irresistible urge to slap him across the face.

  This was the problem. All his flaws seemed more significant now. It was one thing for a gentle, law-abiding husband and father to have failings: a certain inflexibility that manifested itself just when it was most inconvenient, those occasional (also inconvenient) black moods, the frustrating implacability during arguments, the untidiness, the constant losing of his possessions. They all seemed innocuous enough, common even; but now that these faults belonged to a murderer, they seemed to matter so much more, to define him. His good qualities now seemed irrelevant and probably fraudulent: a cover identity. How could she ever look at him again in the same way? How could she still love him? She didn’t know him. She’d been in love with an optical illusion. The blue eyes that had looked at her with tenderness and passion and laughter were the same eyes that Janie had seen in those terrifying few moments before she died. Those lovely strong hands that had cupped the soft, fragile heads of Cecilia’s baby daughters were the same hands that he held around Janie’s neck.

  ‘Your mother knows,’ she told him. ‘She recognised her rosary beads in the newspaper pictures. She basically told me that a mother would do anything for her children, and that I should do the same for my children and pretend it never happened. It was creepy. Your mother is creepy.’

  It felt like crossing a line to say that. John-Paul did not take criticism of his mother kindly. Cecilia normally tried to respect that, even while it annoyed her.

  John-Paul sank down on the side of the bath, knocking the handtowel off the rail with his knees in the process. ‘You really think she knows?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cecilia. ‘So there you go. Mummy’s golden boy really can get away with murder.’

  John-Paul blinked, and Cecilia almost considered apologising, before she remembered that this wasn’t an ordinary disagreement about packing the dishwasher. The rules had changed. She could be just as narky as she pleased.

  She picked up her toothbrush again and began to clean her teeth with harsh, mechanical movements. Her dentist had told her just last week that she was brushing too hard, wearing away the enamel. ‘Hold your toothbrush with your fingertips, like the bow of a violin,’ he’d said, demonstrating. Should she get another electric toothbrush, she’d wondered, and he’d said he wasn’t a believer, except for the old and arthritic, but Cecilia had said she liked the nice clean feeling it gave her, and oh, it had all genuinely mattered, she had been completely involved in that conversation, a conversation about the maintenance of her teeth, back then, back in last week.

  She rinsed and spat and put the toothbrush away and picked up the towel that John-Paul had knocked onto the floor and put it back on the railing

  She glanced at John-Paul. He flinched.

  ‘The way you look at me now,’ he said. ‘It’s . . .’ He stopped and took a shaky breath.

  ‘What do you expect?’ asked Cecilia, astounded.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said John-Paul. ‘I’m so sorry for putting you through this. For making you part of it. I’m such an idiot for writing that letter. But I’m still me, Cecilia. I promise you. Please don’t think I’m some evil monster. I was seventeen, Cecilia. I made one terrible, terrible mistake.’

  ‘Which you never paid for,’ said Cecilia.

  ‘I know I didn’t.’ He met her eyes unflinchingly. ‘I know that.’

  They stood in silence for a few moments.

  ‘Shit!’ Cecilia slammed her hand to her head. ‘Fuck it.’

  ‘What is it?’ John-Paul reeled back. She never swore. All these years there had been a Tupperware container of bad language sitting off to the side in her head and now she’d opened it and all those crisp, crunchy words were lovely and fresh, ready to be used.

  ‘Easter hats,’ she said. ‘Polly and Esther need fucking Easter hats for tomorrow morning.’

  6 April 1984

  Janie very nearly changed her mind when she looked out the window of the train and saw John-Paul waiting for her on the platform. He was reading a book, his long legs stuck out in front of him, and when he saw the train pulling in he stood up and stuck the book in his back pocket and with a sudden, almost furtive movement he smoothed down his hair with the palm of his hand. He was gorgeous.

  She got up from her seat, holding the pole for balance, and slung her bag over her shoulder.

  It was funny, the way he’d smoothed down his hair; it was an insecure gesture for a boy like John-Paul. You’d almost think that he was nervous about seeing Janie, that he was worried about impressing her.

  ‘Next stop Asquith, then all stations to Berowra.’

  The train clattered to a stop.

  So this was it. She was going to tell him that she couldn’t see him any more. She could have stood him up, just left him waiting for her, but she wasn’t that type of girl. She could have telephoned him, but that didn’t seem right either. And besides, they’d never called each other. Both of them had mothers who liked to lurk about when they were on the phone.

/>   (If only she could have emailed or texted him, that would have solved everything, but mobile phones and the internet were still in the future.)

  She’d been thinking that this would be unpleasant and that maybe John-Paul’s pride would be hurt, and that he might say something vengeful like, ‘I never liked you that much anyway’, but until she saw him smoothing down his hair, it hadn’t occurred to her that she might be about to hurt him. She felt sick at the thought.

  She got off the train and John-Paul lifted a hand and smiled. Janie waved back, and as she walked down the railway platform towards him, it came to her with a tiny, bitter shock of self-revelation that it wasn’t that she liked Connor more than John-Paul, it was that she liked John-Paul far too much. It was a strain being with someone so good-looking and smart and funny and nice. She was dazzled by John-Paul. Connor was dazzled by her. And it was more fun doing the dazzling. Girls were meant to do the dazzling.

  John-Paul’s interest felt like a trick. A practical joke. Because surely he knew that she wasn’t good enough for him. She kept waiting for a gaggle of teenage girls to appear, laughing and jeering and pointing, ‘You didn’t really think he’d be interested in you!’ That’s why she hadn’t even told any of her friends about his existence. They knew about Connor, of course, but not John-Paul Fitzpatrick. They wouldn’t believe that someone like John-Paul would be interested in her, and she didn’t really believe it either.

  She thought of Connor’s big goofy smile on the bus when she told him he was now officially her boyfriend. He was her friend. Losing her virginity to Connor would be sweet and funny and tender. She couldn’t possibly take her clothes off in front of John-Paul. The very thought made her heart stop. Besides, he deserved a girl with a body that matched his. He might laugh if he saw her strange skinny white body. He might notice that her arms were disproportionately long for her body. He might sneer or snort at her concave chest.

  ‘Hi,’ she said to him.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, and she caught her breath, because as their eyes met she got that feeling again, that sensation of there being something huge between them, something she couldn’t quite define, something her twenty-year-old self might have called ‘passion’ and her thirty-year-old self might have more cynically called ‘chemistry’. A tiny speck of her, a tiny speck of the woman she could have become, thought, Come on, Janie, you’re being a coward. You like him more than Connor. Choose him. This could be big. This could be huge. This could be love.

  But her heart was hammering so hard it was horrible, scary and painful, she could barely breathe. There was a painful crushing sensation in the centre of her chest, as if someone was trying to flatten her. She just wanted to feel normal again.

  ‘I need to talk to you about something,’ she said, and she made her voice cold and hard, sealing her fate like an envelope.

  thursday

  chapter thirty-three

  ‘Cecilia! Did you get my messages? I’ve been trying to call!’

  ‘Cecilia, you were right about those raffle tickets.’

  ‘Cecilia! You weren’t at pilates yesterday!’

  ‘Cecilia! My sister-in-law wants to book a party with you.’

  ‘Cecilia, is there any chance you could take Harriette just for an hour after ballet next week?’

  ‘Cecilia!’

  ‘Cecilia!’

  ‘Cecilia!’

  It was the Easter hat parade and the St Angela’s mothers were out in force, dressed up in honour of Easter and the first truly autumnal day of the new season. Soft pretty scarves looped necks, skinny jeans encased skinny and not so skinny thighs, spike-heeled boots tapped across the playground. It had been a humid summer and the crispness of the breeze and the anticipation of a four-day chocolate-filled weekend had put everyone in good moods. The mothers, sitting in a big double-rowed circle of blue fold-up chairs around the quadrangle, were frisky and high-spirited.

  The older children, who weren’t taking part in the Easter hat parade, had been brought outside to watch and they hung over the balconies with dangling, nonchalant arms and mature, tolerant expressions to indicate that of course they were now far too old for this sort of thing, but weren’t the little ones cute.

  Cecilia looked for Isabel on the Year 6 balcony and saw her standing in between her best friends Marie and Laura. The three girls had their arms slung around each other, indicating that their tumultuous three-way relationship was currently at a high point, where nobody was being ganged up on by the other two and their love for each other was pure and intense. It was lucky that there was no school for the next four days because their intense times were inevitably followed by tears and betrayal and long, exhausting stories of she said, she texted, she posted and I said, I texted, I posted.

  One of the mothers discreetly passed around a basket of Belgian chocolate balls, and there were moans of drunken, sensual pleasure.

  I’m a murderer’s wife, thought Cecilia while Belgian chocolate melted in her mouth. I’m an accessory to murder, she thought, as she set up play dates and pick-ups and Tupperware parties, as she scheduled and organised and set things in action. I’m Cecilia Fitzpatrick and my husband is a murderer and look at me, talking and chatting and laughing and hugging my kids. You’d never know.

  This was how it could be done. This was how you lived with a secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine. You ignored the deep, cramp-like pain in your stomach. You somehow anesthetised yourself, so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either. Yesterday she’d thrown up in the gutter and cried in the pantry, but this morning she’d got up at six am and made two lasagnes to go into the freezer ready for Easter Sunday, and ironed a basket of clothes and sent three emails enquiring about tennis lessons for Polly, and answered fourteen emails about various school matters, and put in her Tupperware order from the party the other night, and got a load of laundry on the line, all before the girls and John-Paul were out of bed. She was back on her skates, twirling expertly about the slippery surface of her life.

  ‘Give me strength. What is that woman wearing?’ said someone as the school principal appeared in the centre of the yard. Trudy was wearing long rabbit ears and a fluffy tail pinned to her bottom. She looked like a motherly playboy bunny.

  Trudy hopped to the microphone in the middle of the yard, with her hands curled up in front of her like paws. The mothers rocked with fond laughter. The kids on the balconies cheered.

  ‘Ladies and jellybeans, girls and boys!’ One of Trudy’s rabbit ears slipped down over her face and she brushed it away. ‘Welcome to the St Angela’s Easter Hat Parade!’

  ‘I love her to death,’ said Mahalia, who was sitting on Cecilia’s right, ‘but it really is hard to believe she runs a school.’

  ‘Trudy doesn’t run the school,’ said Laura Marks, who was sitting on her other side. ‘Rachel Crowley runs the school. Together with the lovely lady on your left.’

  Laura leaned in front of Mahalia and waggled her fingers at Cecilia.

  ‘Now, now, you know that’s not true,’ Cecilia smiled roguishly. She felt like a demented parody of herself. Surely she was overdoing it? Everything she did felt exaggerated and clown-like, but nobody seemed to notice.

  The music began, pounding out through the state-of-the-art sound system that Cecilia’s highly successful art show raffle had paid for last year.

  The conversation rippled around her.

  ‘Who chose the playlist? It’s quite good.’

  ‘I know. Makes me feel like dancing.’

  ‘Yes, but is anybody listening to the lyrics? Do you know what this song is about?’

  ‘Best not to.’

  ‘My kids know them all anyway.’

  The K-P class was first to file out, led by their teacher, the rather beautiful busty brunette, Miss Parker, who had made the best use of her natural assets by dressing up in a fairy princess dress that was two sizes too small for her, and was dancing along to the music in a manner perhaps not quite bef
itting a kindergarten teacher. The tiny kindergarteners followed her, grinning proudly and self-consciously, carefully balancing the familiar Easter hat creations on their heads.

  The mothers congratulated one another on their children’s hats.

  ‘Ooh, Sandra, creative!’

  ‘Found it on the internet. Took me ten minutes.’

  ‘Sure it did.’

  ‘Seriously, I swear!’

  ‘Does Miss Parker realise this is an Easter hat parade, not a nightclub?’

  ‘Do fairy princesses normally show that much cleavage?’

  ‘And by the way, does a tiara really count as an Easter hat?’

  ‘I think she’s trying to get Mr Whitby’s attention, poor girl. He’s not even looking.’

  Cecilia adored events just like these. An Easter hat parade summed up everything she loved about her life. The sweetness and simplicity of it all. The sense of community. But today the parade seemed pointless, the children snotty-nosed, the mothers bitchy. She stifled a yawn and smelled sesame oil on her fingers. It was the scent of her life now. Another yawn overtook her. She and John-Paul had been up late making the girls’ Easter hats in strained silence.

  Polly’s class made their appearance, led by the adorable Mrs Jeffers, who had gone to a tremendous lot of trouble to dress as a gigantic shiny pink foil-wrapped Easter egg.

  Polly was right behind her teacher, strutting along like a supermodel, wearing her Easter hat tilted rakishly over one eye. John-Paul had made her a bird’s nest out of sticks from the garden and filled it with Easter eggs. A fluffy yellow toy chick emerged from one of the eggs as if it were hatching.

  ‘My Lord, Cecilia, you’re an absolute freak.’ Erica Edgecliff, who was sitting in the row in front of Cecilia, turned around. ‘Polly’s hat looks amazing.’

  ‘John-Paul made it.’ Cecilia waved at Polly.

  ‘Seriously? That man is a catch,’ said Erica.