The Couple’s Secret

Chapter 4

Julianne

Knightsbridge, 2019

James is staring at me from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Where have you been?’ he asks.

‘I was … just talking to Stephen.’ It’s the truth at least, but I avoid his eyes as I say it. My mother is currently doing her best to avoid mine. She does this – it’s one of the little games she plays. Starves people of attention, makes them crave it, then turns the spotlight on to full beam and makes you want to shrink from view. At the moment she’s moving her scarf from one peg to another.

‘I don’t want it getting all crumpled and covered in stuff when people go in and out the door,’ she says by way of an explanation to the wall, making it sound like we regularly have a pack of mud-covered dogs going in and out of the house.

‘Hello, Mom. And there’s nobody else coming, so your scarf will be safe regardless of where it is.’

She lets out a ‘Hmmm’, her way of saying I’m not convinced, then finally leaves her scarf alone and turns to look at me. ‘Julianne, dearest, how have you been? You look … haggard.’

If anyone else had said this I’d be offended, but from my mother it’s only to be expected. ‘It’s only been two weeks since I last saw you. I can’t have changed that much.’

She shakes her head and looks at me as if staring at someone who’s just been told they’re terminal. ‘It just saddens me to see you run yourself so ragged. You’re probably doing too much again. Where’s that housekeeper of yours? What does she actually do? I swear she has a holiday every other day.’

‘It’s Cassie’s day off. Her first this week. And she isn’t always on holiday.’ I hear the closing of a door upstairs and jump slightly. Stephen must have gone back to his own room. My slight movement doesn’t escape my mother’s ever-observant eye.

‘Goodness, you’re twitchy. Maybe you should sit down.’

‘No, Mom, I need to go and finish the food.’

‘I can do that,’ James says, probably considering it the lesser of the two evils when compared with making small talk. He disappears off to the kitchen, leaving my mother smiling and shaking her head a little.

‘James is such a dear,’ she says.

I stare back blankly at her. My husband always gets the compliments, the praise, the terms of endearment. It’s probably because of all the money he’s given her over the years. Helping her buy a new property when we were married. The steady money she’s become used to, going out of our joint account and into hers every month. He’s her saviour, in many respects.

‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to when the man of the house has to tend to the cooking.’ She drops her gaze as she says this and continues to shake her head, as if slightly sad.

On some days I fight back. I pick her up on her sexism, her little digs, her many prejudices, her dated worldview. But today I haven’t got the energy. I just look at her, standing there in her crisp tailored blazer, as if she’s about to attend a boardroom meeting. She’s never set foot in a boardroom in her life, but dresses every day like she’s ready to negotiate a corporate merger or try to poach a big new client from a rival legal firm. ‘Dress for success’ is what she always used to teach me as a child. I can see her now, eyeing up my plain, dark-green, John Lewis own-brand cardigan, her lips curving down slightly at the sides. She doesn’t approve.

‘Come on into the lounge, Mom.’

I walk in ahead of her and immediately go to the drinks table. ‘Do you want anything?’

‘If you’re referring to a drink, Julianne, I will have a small sherry.’

I sigh as I pour the liquid into a glass and turn round to hand it to her. She’s appraising the Christmas tree, stepping back, slowly and deliberately, as one would in an art gallery when trying to take in a painting as a whole. She nods. ‘Very nice,’ she says. ‘Very … homely.’

‘Well, this is a home, so I guess something went right,’ I say.

‘I suppose.’

I don’t know what she means by that, but I’m not about to interrogate it right now. I sit down on one of the sofas before she does. After the tree, she continues her tour around the lounge, slowly turning, taking it all in, as if she hadn’t already seen everything hundreds of times before. She stops at the TV.

‘I did always tell you, Julianne, an excessively large television can seem a little … how shall I put it …?’

I can feel myself getting more tense by the second. ‘I don’t know, Mom, probably in your usual kind and generous way.’

She glances over at me, an eyebrow raised. ‘No need to get snippy, Julianne. Maybe you should have a drink yourself. Take the edge off.’

I continue to stare back at her and she turns away from the television. ‘I just fear a large television suggests that it has too much of an important place in your life.’

‘Or that we don’t all want to be squinting at some old twenty-two-incher as if this was still the 1990s. We’ve had that for over a year, Mom, and it’s not that much bigger than your new set. You’ve never had a problem with it before. You spent most of last Christmas glued to old musicals on it. In fact, I even think I remember you remarking how good that Blu-Ray boxset of yours looked on it compared to your previous old antique.’

She makes a tutting sound and shakes her head some more. ‘It was only an observation, Julianne. You don’t have to take everything as a personal attack.’ She moves over to the single sofa seat opposite me and sits down on the edge, straight-backed and looking less than comfortable. ‘Where is my favourite grandson?’

‘Your only grandson is upstairs finishing something. He’ll be down for dinner soon.’

‘Finishing something? Not schoolwork, four days before Christmas?’

‘It’s a big year for him, Mom. A levels, you know.’

‘No, I don’t know,’ she says, picking a nonexistent bit of fluff from her sleeve. ‘I don’t know how these schools work over here, and I never get much sense from you or James when I ask. I find the whole thing a bit incomprehensible compared to the American system.’

‘Mom, even that’s probably changed since you were there.’

‘Well, how would I know? Twenty-five years on, this whole place still feels like a mystery to me. I can barely understand the young people now. Some uncouth young man served me in Waitrose the other day and slurred his words so much I had to ask him five times to repeat himself.’

‘Maybe you’re going deaf.’

‘I certainly am not. Then he had the cheek to ask if I was over here for a holiday. I said to him I’d lived in this hellhole longer than he’d been alive.’

‘Richmond isn’t a hellhole, Mom.’

‘Well, it’s all right for you, living here, in the centre of things. Not banished to the suburbs with the waifs and strays.’

This is too much for me. I can’t be doing this right now. I’m struggling to remain calm, the mounting level of unease causing a dull nausea to ebb and flow around my body. I stand up and try my best not to shout. ‘Waifs and strays? Do you know what kind of a life you have compared to some people out there?’

As soon as I’ve said this, my mind darts to those documents. Those young women – the desperate state of their lives intricately detailed. I shiver involuntarily, but my mother doesn’t notice. She bats away my comment. ‘Oh, you don’t need to have a go at me, Julianne. Not this early in the evening. I’m aware I’m not one of those refugees you see crawling across Europe. I make do with what I have and I don’t complain.’

In another mood I might have found the sheer awfulness of what she’s just said funny, but today it riles me all the more. ‘Jesus Christ, can you hear yourself, Mom?’

She looks at me again, an expression of puzzlement and mild alarm stretching across her preserved skin. ‘Julianne, you seem to be quite emotional tonight. Would it be better if I left?’

I’m about to tell her, yes, it would be goddamn marvellous if she could just turn around and leave, but before I can say anything, James walks back in suddenly and my stomach lurches slightly. Diane smiles at him and picks up her sherry from the coffee table.

‘Not arguing, are we?’ he says, his eyes wandering in my direction.

‘Not at all,’ Diane says smoothly, laying a hand on James’s shoulder as she leaves the room. ‘Julianne’s just expressing the stresses of the season. Christmas is always much harder on the women. But the girls in this family have always been headstrong. At least, they always have been in the past …’

She disappears in the direction of the dining room and I realise I’m standing in the middle of the room, my hands clenched into fists.

‘Dinner’s practically ready. You coming?’ James says.

‘Sure. Can’t wait for round two.’

He smiles at me encouragingly. ‘Try to go easy on her. It’s Christmas.’

‘Maybe one day she could just go a bit easier on me.’

He chuckles as if I’ve said something amusing, then goes out into the hallway and shouts up the stairs to Stephen. There’s no reply.

‘He’s just finishing up some work,’ I say and try to steer James towards the dining room, but he holds still.

‘He should have come down to greet his grandma.’ He looks faintly annoyed. When I don’t answer he looks back at me. I don’t say anything.

‘Julianne? Hello?’

I realise I’ve been staring blankly at him. ‘Er … sorry,’ I muster.

James is clearly puzzled. He turns back to the stairs, and for a second I think he’s going to march up them to find Stephen, but then he shrugs and walks away.

‘He’ll be down soon,’ I say, hoping I’m right.

Chapter 5

Holly

Oxford, 1990

The first month went by in a bit of a blur. There was a lot of enforced socialising, with societies and study groups and after-seminar catch-ups, where the really eager people, a group I had accidentally fallen into, stayed behind and went over what had been discussed in class. There were study sessions with tutors, too, sometimes one-to-one, but usually with a study partner. My partner was a small, red-haired boy named Peter. Like many people there, he was polite and generally friendly to me, while remaining a little distant. It took me a few weeks to realise he was part of ‘The Ally Club’, as I had come to call them.

Ever since the first night, Ally and I had been friends, though our meet-ups mostly consisted of watching television on her bed, her curled up in a big plush throw or baggy jumper and me seated a little awkwardly at the end. She was obsessed with the soap Neighbours (‘It’s about Australians’) and watched it religiously, recording every episode onto a video cassette during the day and then watching them, usually with me, on the evenings she wasn’t out. I was never sure where she went on these nights and she never volunteered the information, so I didn’t feel I could ask in case it sounded like I was hankering after an invite. I suspected she was spending time with her brother, or friends on her French and Philosophy course, but tried not to dwell on it. Thinking about Ally’s friends meant thinking about Ernest, and thinking about Ernest meant thinking about James. I’d had crushes on boys before; quite strong, all-encompassing crushes that never went anywhere, but always ended in me feeling down and discontented with my looks. I had never really thought of myself as vain, but I was far from confident in my appearance, even if my mum did insist on referring to me occasionally as her ‘little blonde beauty’. I didn’t want James to become a crush. He wasn’t my type, he was out of my league, and there was something about him that irritated me. That calm, entirely self-assured way he had been lying on his friend’s sister’s bed. Insolent, maybe? I wasn’t sure, but I was certain life would be simpler staying out of his way.

I first came to realise Ally had a sort of group when I was coming back from the cinema with Becky and Rachael, two girls from my Victorian Literature class. I hadn’t really made much of an effort to get to know them in the first few weeks, but I was flattered when they asked me if I wanted to go with them, and it was a film I’d been wanting to see, a gangster movie called Goodfellas. It was the type of movie my mother would have been appalled at but my father would have secretly enjoyed, before agreeing sternly with my mother that such violence was ‘quite unnecessary’. Becky and Rachael also seemed to find the violence unnecessary and spent most of the way home talking about how nasty the whole thing was. I’d really enjoyed it and was tempted to ask why they had gone to see a crime thriller with an 18 certificate if they both felt, to quote Becky, ‘sick at the sight of blood’. As we were passing our college library, Rachael said she just needed to dive in to return a book before it closed. It was early November and bitterly cold, so we sheltered in the hallway of the library, which wasn’t much warmer, while Rachael went up to the desk.

It was then I heard Ally’s laugh, quite unmistakable, that hearty, low rumble, building to a crescendo of enthusiastic mirth. I peered inside and saw the librarian at the desk glance irritably to her left at a group of students seated around a circular table near one of the bookshelves. There she was, sitting with her brother, one arm around the back of his chair. James was there too, and my stomach lurched as I took in his navy-blue jumper, pulled tightly over a light-pink Oxford shirt. Though close-fitting, his clothes didn’t seem to restrain him and he moved with a sense of casual fluidity as he bent down to take a book out of his bag and add it to the pile of tomes on their table. They seemed to be in the midst of a study session. Then there was Peter, smaller than both the others, who seemed absorbed in his reading, his hands up around his head as if he was trying to block out the surrounding chatter, a mop of ginger hair falling over his forehead.

‘Friends of yours?’

Becky had come to stand next to me. I realised I must have been staring and took a step back from the inner warmth of the library into the cold hallway. ‘No,’ I said, quickly, unsure why I felt suddenly pressured into giving an explanation. ‘Well, sort of … the girl, Ally, she’s in the room next to me.’

Becky nodded and said, ‘I know, I’ve seen her a few times. Her brother is rather handsome, isn’t he?’

I glanced back at Ernest Kelman, at his stylishly cut blond hair and bright-white shirt, looking almost identical to when I’d seen him last, lying casually next to James on his sister’s bed.

‘Yes, he is rather. Not my type, though.’

Becky laughed. ‘I know what you mean. There’s something a bit “Hooray Henry” about him, isn’t there? Wouldn’t say no to his friend, though.’ She raised her eyebrows and I realised she was looking at James, who was now away from the table, scanning the nearby bookshelves. It pained me to admit it to myself but I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of irritation when she said this, as if James’s attractiveness was to be appreciated by me and me alone. I gave a non-committal nod and turned my back to them, smiling at Rachael as she returned to meet us, tightening the scarf around her neck before we resumed our walk back to our respective halls.

Chapter 6

Holly

Oxford, 1990

‘Virginia Woolf is overrated.’ I heard myself say it, but I couldn’t quite believe it had come out of my mouth. I frequently participated in my study sessions with Peter and Dr Lawrence, but never in a such a blunt, potentially controversial way. I could feel Peter’s eyes staring at me. Dr Lawrence, meanwhile, smiled knowingly.

‘Maybe you could expand on that interesting analysis, Holly.’ He had a way of saying things that made me half-wonder if he was taking the piss, but his interjections were full of encouragement and a clear passion for his subject.

‘Well, she wraps everything up in these airy-fairy metaphors instead of actually saying what she should be saying: life is tough, you’ll never find a sense of belonging and, to be frank, the hunt for it isn’t worth the effort, even if you actually do find it.’ I paused and realised my voice had been getting steadily louder.

Dr Lawrence nodded. ‘Do go on.’

‘Well, that’s it, I think,’ I finished, lamely, and glanced at Peter. ‘Do you have anything to add?’

I wasn’t quite sure where my newfound confidence had come from, but I had started to enjoy it.

‘Umm, well …’ Peter was taken aback, and I noticed Dr Lawrence seemed mildly amused by the effect my words had had on him.

‘Let’s take a step back, shall we?’ he said, coming to Peter’s rescue. ‘Let’s think about the idea of symbolism in To the Lighthouse. Do either of you have any initial thoughts on that before we probe it further with some examples within the text?’

After the study session, Peter spoke to me. I had been struggling with my bag; the cover of Mrs Dalloway had become torn when I’d inadvertently shoved my dictionary in on top of it in a hurry. I was hoping Peter would just pack up and leave as he usually did, but today he lingered.

‘You seemed more alive today.’

It was an odd thing to say and it caused me to turn and look at him with more attention than I had in a while. ‘Er … thanks. Does that mean I look dead most of the time?’

He laughed, though the laugh wasn’t convincing, like a grunt. It was a strangely masculine sound, closer to something I’d imagine hearing from Ernest or James. I continued to stare at him, waiting for a proper answer, but it didn’t arrive. Finally he said, ‘I think we – I mean, I think you – should spend more time with us. With me, James, Ernest, Ally. I think you’d like it.’

‘I’d like it?’

‘Yes. You’re friends with Ally, aren’t you? You live practically on top of each other.’

This wasn’t exactly true. Despite having adjacent rooms, Ally’s social life meant our time together was usually spent brushing our teeth in the morning before lectures or chatting on the way out of the showers. Time snatched away from the day here and there and the odd episode of Neighbours – hardly the basis of a close friendship. For Peter’s benefit, however, I nodded.

‘We talk about things. Books mainly. Music, sometimes. Cinema, if James is holding court. He loves films. Always tries to battle against Ernest’s snobbery towards them.’

‘Ernest doesn’t like films?’

‘Oh, I don’t think it’s to do with not liking them, exactly. It’s more he feels they can’t be interrogated in as rigorous a way as, say, Kant or Hume, or the great novelists like Dickens and Austen.’

‘I think that’s crap.’

Peter laughed. ‘It may well be, but that’s Ernest for you. Not one to budge on his opinions, even if the opposite is clearly true. James likes films, though. I think you’ll get on with him. So long as you don’t mind your entertainment a little on the dark side.’

I thought of Becky and Rachael complaining about the violence in Goodfellas, whereas I had been left relatively unmoved.

‘I can do dark,’ I said, trying to sound confident. A confidence I hadn’t really earned. How did I know I could ‘do dark’? Something shifted within me uncomfortably, like I was just reaching out and touching a barely visible line I’d never really known was there. New horizons. Uncharted territory. I was intrigued.

‘Then you’ll probably get on with him rather well.’

When I got back to my room, I found Ally waiting for me at my door. I was disconcerted by this. Had Peter had time to contact her during my short walk over from Dr Lawrence’s office and tell her what a fool I’d made of myself during the seminar? She was smiling, though, in her usual, enthusiastic way, and her eyes seemed to glow with excitement. ‘We’re going to the Wimpy.’

At first I thought I’d misheard and just stared stupidly at her. She rolled her eyes, as if she could guess what I was thinking.

‘Oh, I know, I know. You’re probably thinking it’s not quite our style. I’m not completely unaware of the image Ernest and I must give off. We do go to fast-food chains on occasion. It’s not just caviar at The Ritz every day, you know.’

I found my voice again. ‘I know that. Sorry, I wasn’t … I didn’t mean …’

More smiles. More eye rolling. ‘Relax. So do you want to come?’

I couldn’t imagine anything weirder. Sitting on those dingy, scruffy chairs at those grease-stained tables with the always immaculate-looking Ernest and James while Ally laughed in her rumbling Sloane Square tones at whatever witty aside James had made about Proust. But I nodded and told her it would be lovely. She didn’t seem convinced, but she smiled sweetly and then grabbed my arm. ‘Come on, let’s go and get ready.’

Getting ready involved Ally trying on multiple cardigans of various colours and weaves while she mused and puzzled about the temperature outside, the velocity of the wind and the cardigan’s usefulness if she was going to be wearing a coat over it in any case. I passed the time by browsing Ally’s book collection. There were some of the usual suspects there. Dickens and Austen. A couple of Brontës. But there were some surprises, too. I tried to quiz her on her apparent love for Kingsley Amis, but got a snort of derision as a response: ‘That old misogynist! Can’t stand the man. I should really throw them out, if I’m honest, but it’s a little bit awkward.’ I asked her why it was awkward and she just tossed her head to dislodge a gold strand of hair that had got stuck between her eyes and said casually, ‘Oh, he’s a family friend.’