Tana French - The Secret Place

‘Are you locked?’ Dad asks, grinning at her. ‘And me at home looking after your child, slaving over a hot cooker-’

‘I am not. Well, maybe just a touch tipsy, but it’s not that. It’s- My God, Frank. Do you realise I hadn’t seen Deirdre in almost thirty years ? How on earth did that happen?’

Dad says, ‘So it went well in the end, yeah?’

Mum laughs, breathless and giddy. Her coat hangs open; underneath she’s wearing her slim navy dress flashed with white, the gold necklace Dad gave her at Christmas. She’s still collapsed against the wall, bag dumped on the floor at her feet. Holly gets that pulse of wariness again. Mum always kisses her the instant one of them gets through the door.

‘It was wonderful. I was absolutely terrified – honestly, at the door of the bar I almost turned around and went home. If it hadn’t worked, if we’d just sat there making small talk like acquaintances… I wouldn’t have been able to bear it. Dee and I and this other girl Miriam, back in school we were like you and your friends, Holly. We were inseparable.’

One of her ankles is bent outwards above the high-heeled navy leather shoe, leaning her lopsided like a teenager. Holly says – Thirty years, never, we’d never – ‘So how come you haven’t seen her?’

‘Deirdre’s parents emigrated to America, when we left school. She went to college there. It wasn’t like now, there wasn’t any e-mail; phone calls cost the earth, and letters took weeks. We did try – she’s still got all my letters, can you imagine? She brought them along, all these things I’d forgotten all about, boys and nights out and fights with our parents and… I know I’ve got hers somewhere – in Mum and Dad’s attic, maybe, I’ll have to look – I can’t have thrown them away. But it was college and we were busy, and the next thing we knew we were completely out of touch…’

Mum’s long lovely face is transparent, things blowing across it bright and swift as falling leaves. She doesn’t look like Holly’s mum, like anyone’s mum. For the first time ever, Holly looks at her and thinks: Olivia.

‘But today – God, it was as if we’d seen each other a month ago. We laughed so hard , I can’t remember the last time I laughed that hard. We used to laugh like that all the time. The things we remembered – we had this silly alternative verse for the school song, ridiculous stuff, dirty jokes, and we sang it together, right there in the bar. We remembered all the words. I hadn’t thought of that song in thirty years, I’d swear it wasn’t even in my mind any more, but one look at Dee and the whole thing came back.’

‘Getting rowdy in pubs at your age,’ Dad says. ‘You’ll be barred.’ He’s smiling, a full-on grin that makes him look younger too. He likes seeing Mum like this.

‘Oh, God, people must have heard us, mustn’t they? I didn’t even notice. Do you know, Frank, at one stage Dee said to me, “You probably want to get home, don’t you?” and I actually said, “Why?” When she said “home”, I was picturing my parents’ house. My bedroom when I was seventeen. I was thinking, “Why on earth would I be in a hurry to get back there?” I was so deep in 1982, I’d forgotten all of this existed .’

She’s grinning through a hand pressed over her mouth, ashamed and delighted. ‘Child neglect,’ Dad says to Holly. ‘Write it down, in case you ever feel like dobbing her in.’

Something skitters across Holly’s mind: Julia in the glade a long time ago, the tender amused curl of her mouth, This isn’t forever. It snatches Holly’s breath: she was wrong. They are forever, a brief and mortal forever, a forever that will grow into their bones and be held inside them after it ends, intact, indestructible.

‘She gave me this,’ Mum says, fishing in her bag. She pulls out a photo – white border turning yellow – and puts it down on the bar. ‘Look. That’s us: me and Deirdre and Miriam. That’s us .’

Her voice does something funny, curls up. For a horrified second Holly thinks she’s going to cry, but when she looks up Mum is biting her lip and smiling.

Three of them, older than Holly, maybe a year or two. School uniforms, Kilda’s crest on their lapels. Look close and the kilt is longer, the blazer is boxy and ugly, but if it weren’t for that and the big hair, they could be out of the year above her. They’re messing, draped pouting and hip-jutting on a wrought-iron gate – it takes a strange twitch like a blink before Holly recognises the gate at the bottom of the back lawn. Deirdre is in the middle, shaking a raggedy dark perm forward over her face, all curves and lashes and wicked glint. Miriam is small and fair and feather-haired, fingers snapping, sweet grin through braces. And over on the right Olivia, long-legged, head flung back and hands tangled in her hair, halfway between model and mockery. She’s wearing lip gloss, pale candyfloss-pink – Holly can picture the mild distaste on Mum’s face if she wore it home one weekend. She looks beautiful.

‘We were pretending to be Bananarama,’ Mum says. ‘Or someone like that, I don’t think we were sure. We were in a band that term.’

‘You were in a band ?’ Dad says. ‘I’m a groupie?’

‘We were called Sweet and Sour.’ Mum laughs, with a little shake in it. ‘I was the keyboard player – well, barely; I played piano, so we assumed that meant I’d be good at the keyboard, but actually I was terrible. And Dee could only play folk guitar and none of us had a note in our heads, so the whole thing was a disaster, but we had a wonderful time.’

Holly can’t stop looking. That girl in the photo isn’t one solid person, feet set solidly in one irrevocable life; that girl is an illusive firework-burst made of light reflecting off a million different possibilities. That girl isn’t a barrister, married to Frank Mackey, mother of one daughter and no more, a house in Dalkey, neutral colours and soft cashmere and Chanel No. 5. All of that is implicit in her, curled unimagined inside her bones; but so are hundreds of other latent lives, unchosen and easily vanished as whisks of light. A shiver knots in Holly’s spine, won’t shake loose.

She asks, ‘Where’s Miriam?’

‘I don’t know. It wasn’t the same without Dee, and during college we grew apart – I was terribly serious back then, very ambitious, always studying, and Miriam wanted to spend most of her time getting drunk and flirting, so before we knew it…’ Mum’s still gazing down at the photo. ‘Someone told me she got married and moved to Belfast, not long after college. That’s the last I heard of her.’

‘If you want,’ Holly says, ‘I’ll have a look for her on the internet. She’s probably on Facebook.’

‘Oh, darling,’ Mum says. ‘That’s very kind of you. But I don’t know…’ A sudden catch of her breath. ‘I don’t know if I could bear it. Can you understand that?’

‘I guess.’

Dad has a hand on Mum’s back, just lightly, between her shoulder blades. He says, ‘Need another glass of wine?’

‘Oh, God, no. Or maybe; I don’t know.’

Dad cups the back of her neck for a second and heads for the fridge.

‘So long ago,’ Mum says, touching the photo. The fizz is fading out of her voice, leaving it quiet and still. ‘I don’t know how it can possibly be so long ago.’

Holly moves back to her stool. She stirs bits of onion with the point of the knife.

Mum says, ‘Dee isn’t happy, Frank. She used to be the outgoing one, the confident one – like your Julia, Holly, always a smart answer for anything – she was going to be a politician, or the TV interviewer who asks the politicians the tough questions. But she got married young, and then her husband didn’t want her to work till the children were out of school, so now all she can get is bits of secretarial stuff. He sounds like a dreadful piece of work – I didn’t say that, of course – she’s thinking of leaving him, but she’s been with him so long she can’t imagine how she would manage without him…’