The hidden truth, p.18
The Hidden Truth, page 18
‘Why were you on the beach?’ Sara asked, raising an eyebrow. ‘It was freezing.’
He sipped his coffee. ‘I didn’t really notice till I got home. I’m glad you were here.’
‘So am I. Otherwise you’d probably be dead from hypothermia,’ she retorted, remembering the state of him and how he’d frightened her.
Bernard reached across the table and took her hand. ‘I’m sorry for the way I treated you the other night. You were only trying to help.’
She registered the love she saw so clearly in his eyes through a wave of exhaustion. He let go of her hand and silently busied himself pouring another cup of coffee from the cafetière on the table between them.
‘What was Adam saying?’
Bernard seemed to hesitate. ‘I think he’s worn down and exhausted. He was never very robust, even as a kid … Ilsa’s tendency to mollycoddle him probably didn’t help.’
‘Are you worried?’
‘What he needs is a proper break.’
‘Did he say if he was coming for Christmas?’
He shook his head. ‘Clicked off as soon as I pushed him to come home.’
‘Oh, Sas. Did you sort it out?’ Precious enquired, when Sara told her, later, that she and Bernard had been arguing about his relationship with the twins. But as soon as she began embarking on the details, she was brought up short. Precious is not allowed to know the real truth, she remembered.
They were sitting on high stools in the window of a tiny café a street away from their offices, Sara having sent out a distress call for a lunch meeting. The place sold a particularly favourite dish of theirs: mackerel and beetroot salad with slices of homemade spelt toast. But today Sara ordered an energy boosting smoothie – spinach, apple, raspberry, spirulina and kefir: she couldn’t face solid food.
The secret was making her tongue-tied in front of her friend: everything she said had to be vetted now. It was the first time in her life that she hadn’t shared something so important with Precious and she ached to tell the truth. For a moment she prevaricated. Can I risk it? Hearing Bernard’s warning in her head, she knew she could not. But she had never in her life lied to Precious. It made her feel even more queasy.
Precious had turned on her stool to look at her. ‘Sas? What is it?’
‘How do you mean?’
Precious continued to stare at her friend. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me.’
‘There isn’t,’ Sara insisted fiercely. ‘I’m just upset because I don’t know how to help.’
There was a short silence between the two women.
‘I suppose you can’t dictate how he deals with his own kids.’
Sara harrumphed. ‘I wasn’t dictating.’
‘Perhaps he thought you were.’
Sara slumped on her stool. ‘The trouble is, we don’t know each other well enough to have a safe set-to. It didn’t feel safe the other night.’
Precious nodded. ‘Know what you mean. Sammi and I have an unshakeable system. I shout. He adopts a superior silence. I shout some more and louder. Chinko flounces off in disgust. We huff and puff for the allotted time, then one of us starts to laugh.’
Sara smiled. ‘Yeah, me and Pete didn’t fight a lot, but I knew when to take his rants seriously. He always called me Mrs Bloody Reasonable.’ She felt tears gathering and blinked them away. ‘But with Bernard, I just don’t know. He said he was sorry and we sort of made up, but he seemed so irritated with me … and dismissive, as if my opinion didn’t count.’ It wasn’t just how Bernard had treated her, though, it was that he couldn’t be honest with her, which made Sara angry as well as upset. His secret seemed to have more layers than the cliffs his house was built on.
‘He’s probably blaming himself for the situation with his kids. And that makes him snippy because he doesn’t know how to solve it.’
Sara didn’t reply. The smoothie was churning uncomfortably in her stomach.
Precious had also fallen into a thoughtful silence. Then she said, ‘Just wondering … Was either of the twins in the car with Bernard when it crashed? If they were, then is it possible they still have some degree of trauma … PTSD? It can have long-term effects if it’s not dealt with. Might make them quite unstable.’
Sara jolted, sat up straighter, tried to clear her head from the miasma of a sleepless night. The truth clogged her throat, and she couldn’t say another word as she felt a small shiver of fatigue run down her spine. She attempted a nonchalant shrug in reply to Precious’s question, but all she was feeling was a quiet desperation to end the lunch and be away from her friend’s penetrating gaze. It wasn’t so much the worry, if she did tell her friend the truth, that Precious would bruit it across the entire county. It was more that she couldn’t face the concerned look on her face, the look that implied Bernard was a bad lot, someone Sara should avoid. She wasn’t ready for that.
She forced a smile to her face. ‘Anyway, enough of Bernard and his problems. Sorry to whinge on. Are you looking forward to your Christmas in Spain?’
Precious eyed her, a puzzled frown on her face. But she asked no more questions.
Driving back to the cliff house later, Sara felt miserable. For the first time in the twenty years she and Precious had known each other, she sensed a crack opening between herself and her best friend. ‘Hiding a truth is the same as lying,’ her mother used to say. Today Precious had known, instinctively, that she was concealing something. She was Sara’s mainstay, her lifeline, the person to whom, no matter what, she could always turn, in good times and bad. Along with Margaret, she provided the bedrock from which she thrived. How would she feel if she realized I’ve been lying to her? she wondered, suddenly resentful for being put in this position at all.
She also suspected Precious, if she knew the whole truth, might query why Sara persisted in sticking with Bernard. Sara had asked herself the same question. But running beneath the hurt and anger at Bernard’s colossal lie, his lack of trust in her, she was aware of a huge thread of sympathy and compassion – alongside her love for him – that kept her by his side.
31
Bernard and Sara were sitting in the winter sunshine at one of the pine picnic tables behind the mobile food truck next to the beach, cardboard boxes containing their delicious sausage and slaw buns open in front of them. Since the row and its aftermath, both of them had been heads down, working hard, Sara spending a lot of time with Margaret. Not avoiding each other, exactly, but not conceding any gaps during which a serious conversation might pop up. The tension was still there, although both were trying to move past it. But Sara was aware she was missing the spirit of joy and hopefulness from the early days of their relationship.
Christmas was less than a week away now, and there had been no word from Adam and Carrie. They were not coming, that much was clear, and Sara was adjusting to the fact that it would be just the two of them. Which she wouldn’t have minded if it hadn’t been for the pall the twins’ absence cast over the festivities.
‘What sort of Christmas did you have when the children were young?’ she asked.
Bernard finished his mouthful before replying. ‘We celebrated on Christmas Eve, like they do in Finland. Had a big tree, which Ilsa insisted on decorating with real candles that threatened to burn the house down.’ He smiled. ‘And a goose, lots of presents for the kids. She’d broken off all contact with her family when she was eighteen and she didn’t get on with mine. So it was always just us and the twins.’
Sara winced at the sad insularity this implied but didn’t comment. ‘I’ve never cooked a goose.’
‘Me neither.’
‘You had fun, though?’
He gave her a regretful smile. ‘Honestly? I think Ilsa found any important family occasion that reminded her of her own upbringing – like Christmas – tricky. She always put a lot of energy into making things perfect for Adam and Carrie on the day, but I knew she was thoroughly relieved when it was all over.’ Head bent, he fiddled with the edge of his picnic box. ‘I think her childhood with those religious obsessives was pretty grim. She seemed torn between guilt and allowing her true spirit to flourish. Guilt usually won, unfortunately, especially after the twins were born – although she had nothing to blame herself for.’
‘Poor woman,’ Sara said, with feeling, sensing Bernard’s sadness.
‘She always seemed to be looking over her shoulder to see who was judging her. I think it terrified her, this imagined retribution for something she hadn’t done. Made her ill.’
‘How did you cope with that?’
‘I didn’t really. I didn’t know what to do to make her happy.’ Looking away towards the shoreline, he added, ‘I really loved her. She had a beautiful spirit, but it had been crushed out of her before I knew her, when she was too young to resist. I felt so powerless, not knowing how to help her.’
There was a long silence. Hearing him speak, Sara felt certain the heavy atmosphere in the house, which she still struggled with, was the accumulated weight of all those years of unhappiness. It had seeped into the very walls of the place and taken root. But maybe it wasn’t just Ilsa. Maybe it was Bernard’s guilt as well.
He turned back to her, forcing a smile. ‘You? What did you do?’
‘Oh, we had the whole works round at Margaret’s when she still had the big house. Me, Pete and the girls and any waif or stray Margaret managed to round up. Sometimes there were twenty of us at the table.’ Sara smiled at the recollection. ‘Last year Heather did a chicken, but there’s no point now Margaret’s so ill. Heather’s going to her family on Boxing Day and staying for a few days, so I’ll stay with Margaret till she gets back.’
‘You’ll miss not seeing Peggy.’
She nodded. ‘It’ll be the first time we haven’t spent it together.’ Each Christmas, as her daughters got older, Sara told herself this would surely be the last. But it was a wrench, nonetheless, when Peggy declared she was off to Berlin.
‘Do you mind, Mum?’ Peggy had asked. ‘I just thought, this year, you’d want to be with Bernard …’
‘That doesn’t mean you can’t be here too.’
‘I know. But Beng has these people in Berlin – sort of surrogate parents, because his are in St Vincent. And I thought …’
‘Sounds like fun,’ Sara had said gamely. She hadn’t met Beng yet, and her daughter was as secretive about him as she was about all her boyfriends. ‘Bring him down for a weekend in the New Year,’ she’d suggested, and Peggy had agreed she might.
As she’d said goodbye to her daughter, Sara had felt a twinge of sadness that she would never be able to share with Pete a whispered speculation about their girls’ liaisons, the relief if the man turned out to have only one head. Sad, too, that, as with Joni’s Mason, Pete would never get to meet the man on whom Peggy finally settled.
‘So, it looks like it’s just us,’ Bernard was saying, looking slightly relieved at the prospect. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not a huge fan of Christmas.’
Before she had a chance to reply, Bernard’s phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket. ‘Sorry, got to take this,’ he said, rising from the table and bashing his long legs awkwardly on the bench seat in his hurry to get away. Sara watched him quickly stride off along the roadside. His back was to her, but it was clear from his stance that his body was rigid with tension. She assumed it was one of the twins.
When he eventually returned and plonked himself down, blinking anxiously, his breathing was fast, as if he’d been running. ‘Well,’ he said, raising his eyebrows and inhaling deeply, ‘you’re not going to believe this, but that was Carrie.’ He still clutched his phone, his expression nonplussed. ‘They’re both coming. For Christmas.’
‘Oh!’ Sara exclaimed. ‘That’s great … Isn’t it?’ she added. Because Bernard’s face looked more as if he’d just been delivered news of a death in the family.
He smiled stoically. ‘Yes, yes, it is.’
She eyed him. ‘Wow … What persuaded them, do you think?’
‘She didn’t say. It was strange, talking to her after all this time. She was really quite friendly.’
Sara was sorry that this should be remarkable for Bernard. ‘You’re looking uneasy …’
‘It’s just the way she said it. Sounded almost more like a threat than a promise.’ He laughed. ‘I’m probably just being paranoid.’
‘It must be a good sign, that they’re coming?’
Bernard reached for her hand. ‘I suppose I’m a bit dreading the conversations we need to have. And we must talk. I took your advice and promised Adam we would.’
‘Once you’re all together, things will probably find a way of sorting themselves out, won’t they?’ She wanted to reassure him, but she was feeling anxious herself at the prospect.
He nodded. ‘I hope they’re not all riled up and defensive … demanding stuff of me that I can’t deliver.’ There was a pause, then he added, ‘I always seem to disappoint them, Sara.’
Her heart went out to him, thinking of her girls and how lucky she was not to have been faced with the Lockmores’ grim set of circumstances.
‘I can go to Margaret’s if you feel you want to have Carrie and Adam to yourself – I’m going on Boxing Day, anyway, so you’ll have time with them then.’
He looked horrified. ‘Don’t leave me. Please. I really want you there, and I’m longing to introduce you to them.’ He gave a mischievous grin. ‘Despite all the drama that might entail.’
She clasped her hands, suddenly determined to make this work for everyone. ‘Right. We’re on! Better get planning and find a bird from somewhere.’
The days after Carrie’s phone call were a swirl of activity in the house on the cliff. From having minimal festive plans – holding off as long as possible, not knowing whom they were catering for – they were suddenly faced with last-minute preparations for a full-blown family celebration. The twins, it had been arranged, were arriving on Christmas Eve, staying until the twenty-seventh. Bernard wanted it all to be perfect.
Sara found she was almost as nervous as he. Carrie sounded fierce and uncompromising: she wasn’t sure she would welcome Sara’s presence in her father’s house. And Adam, well, he seemed like a bit of a lost soul. But all she had to go on were fragments from Bernard and the photos in the album, taken years ago.
She imagined, in her worst moments, a grim scene of mayhem over the goose – the meal descending into shouting, tears, accusations and painful recrimination. However much she told herself – and Bernard – it would all be fine, part of her didn’t really believe that was likely. But he had moved things on with his children. He’d got them to come home, however unwillingly, not buried his head and let things slide even further in the wrong direction. She was pleased about that. She just hoped, for everyone’s sake, that by the end of their visit, things would be on a more even keel between them all. Something, at least, to build on in the future.
‘Can you help?’ Bernard called, huffing as he manhandled a huge tree through the front door. Being busy organizing the event had perked him up, the drained look he’d worn so frequently of late replaced by focused intent. She was pretty sure it wouldn’t be sustained in the immediate run-up to his children arriving, but there were two days till then and she planned to enjoy them to the full.
‘Bloody hell,’ she exclaimed, as she hurried over and took the top end of the tree. ‘Couldn’t you get a bigger one?’
‘Only one left,’ he gasped, out of breath from exertion.
‘How are you going to keep it upright?’ Flashes of her family Christmases made her smile wistfully as she remembered the yearly tree wrangles. Pete, in a rare display of stubbornness, insisted on a clapped-out old stand that screwed onto the trunk – never remotely fit for purpose, even new – and tree lights that hailed from the last century and only worked after he’d sat cursing, cross-legged, on the floor for an hour, fiddling painstakingly with each tiny coloured bulb. It was a long-standing family joke: ‘Step away from the tree, girls. Dad’s doing the lights.’ It broke her heart that Bernard did not have the same ease and laughter with his own children.
Now he pulled a face. ‘Bucket and stones?’
‘Too big.’
‘Big bucket and stones?’
She started to laugh. He looked so comical, pine needles in his hair, his arm round the waist of the giant tree as if they’d just got married.
Finally leaning it gingerly against the wall between the windows, Bernard turned and swept her into his arms. ‘Thanks for all your help,’ he said, then bent to kiss her softly on the lips. ‘We haven’t done enough of this recently,’ he added, smiling as he stroked her hair back from her face.
Which was true, although the previous tension – as they silently contemplated the unease that had burgeoned between them – had been temporarily pushed aside in the whirl of present-buying and goose-sourcing, decorating the house, beating brandy butter and laundering the fragile lace tablecloth that had belonged to Bernard’s Scottish mother. Still holding her, he gave a heavy sigh. ‘I’ve got terrible butterflies. Neither of them has been home for well over a year now. I feel I barely know them any more.’
‘Things couldn’t be worse than they are now, though, eh?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Come on, let’s get this big boy upright,’ she said, which made him grin and kiss her again. ‘The tree, I mean,’ she said.
Sara pulled up on the muddy farm track behind a line of intimidating four-by-fours. A queue of hunched Barboured figures had already formed outside the ramshackle shed where the birds were to be collected. It was the day before Christmas Eve, raining and very cold. Her nerves were shredding as the moment of the twins’ arrival got closer.
Lugging the heavy lump of goose in its layers of waxed paper back to the car, she dropped it into the boot and breathed a sigh of relief. Another task ticked off the list. She’d just got back into the car, shivering and damp, when her phone rang.
‘How’s it going?’ Precious’s voice demanded. Normally a call from her dear friend was nothing but pleasure. Today, however, she was reminded that she had to be careful what she said.
