Nicci French: Secret Smile

'I've arranged for us to meet some mates of mine for a drink this evening. I told them you were coming.'

'What?'

'In half an hour.'

I stared at him.

'Just a quick drink.'

'You really want us to go out and pretend we're still together?'

'We need to give this time,' he said.

It sounded so ridiculous, so like a marriage guidance counsellor giving glib advice to a couple who had been together for years and years and had children and a mortgage that I couldn't help myself. I started to laugh, then stopped myself and felt cruel. He managed a smile that wasn't really a smile at all, but rather lips stretched tight over teeth, a grimace or a snarl.

'You can laugh,' he said at last. 'You can do this and still laugh.'

'Sorry,' I said. My voice was still shaky. 'It's a nervous kind of laugh.'

'Is that how you behaved with your sister?'

'My sister?' The air seemed to cool around me.

'Yes. Kerry.' He said the name softly, musing over it. 'I read about it in your diary. I know. Mmm?'

I walked over to the door and yanked it open. The sky was still blue and the breeze cooled my burning face.

'Get out,' I said.

'Miranda.'

'Just go.'

So he left. I pushed the door shut gently, so he wouldn't think I was slamming it behind him, and then I suddenly felt nauseous. I didn't have the meal in front of the TV I'd been looking forward to so much. I just had a glass of water and went to bed and didn't sleep.

My relationship with Brendan had been so brief that my closest friend, Laura, had been on holiday while it was going on and missed it completely. And it was so entirely over and in the past that when she got back and rang to tell me about what a great time she and Tony had had – well, after all that, I didn't bother to tell her about Brendan. I just listened as she talked about the holiday and the weather and the food. Then she asked me if I were seeing someone and I said no. She said that was funny because she'd heard something and I said, well, nothing much and anyway it was over. And she giggled and said she wanted to hear all about it and I said there was nothing to tell. Nothing at all.

It was two weeks after Brendan had walked out of my door. It was half past two in the afternoon, and I was up a ladder and just reaching up with the brush to get into the corner when my mobile went and I realized it was in my jacket pocket and that I didn't have my jacket on. We were working on a newly constructed house in Blackheath, all straight lines and plate glass and pine. I was painting the wood in a special, almost transparent oil-based white paint that had been imported at great expense from Sweden. I scrambled down and put the brush on the lid of the tin.

'Hello?'

'Miranda, it's Kerry.'

That was unusual enough. We met fairly regularly, every month or so, usually at my parents. Maybe once a week we would talk on the phone; I was always the one who rang her. She asked if I were free that evening. I'd half arranged something, but she said it was really important. She wouldn't ask if it weren't. So of course I had to say yes. I started to discuss where we should meet, but Kerry had it all worked out. A very straightforward French restaurant had just opened in Camden, fairly near where I lived, and Kerry would book a table for eight. If I didn't hear back from her, I should assume it was set.

I was completely baffled. She'd never arranged anything like that before. As I slapped the paint over the huge pine wall, I tried to think of what she could possibly have to tell me and I couldn't even come up with a plausible answer to the basic question: was it likely to be something good or something bad?

Within families, you're stuck with the character they think you are, whatever you do. You become a war hero and all that your parents ever talk about is something supposedly funny you used to do when you were in nursery school. You can end up moving to Australia just to get away from the person your family thinks you are – or you think they think you are. It's like a room made out of mirrors, with reflections and reflections of reflections going on into infinity. They make your head ache.

I hadn't fled to Australia. I lived less than a mile from the house I grew up in and I worked for my uncle Bill. Sometimes it's hard to think of him as my uncle because he is so unlike my father. He has long hair that he sometimes wears in a ponytail, and he hardly ever shaves. What's more, rich and trendy people queue up to employ him. My father still calls him a painter and decorator, and when I was a child I remember him working with a ragtag collection of no-hopers, usually driving a dodgy van he'd borrowed from someone. But nowadays Uncle Bill – which I never call him – has a big office, a company, a lucrative agreement with a team of architects and a waiting list that you can hardly even get on to.

I arrived at La Table at about one minute past eight and Kerry was already there. She was sitting at the table with a glass of white wine and the bottle in a bucket by the side, and I knew immediately that this was good news of some kind. She looked illuminated from the inside and it showed through her eyes. She'd changed her appearance since the previous time I'd seen her. I have my hair cut quite short. I liked the look anyway, and it made particular sense when I was working so that my hair wouldn't get dipped into resin or caught around a drill. Kerry wasn't someone who had ever had much of a particular look, just medium-length hair, practical clothes. Now she had had her hair cut short as well and it suited her. Almost everything about her was different. She was wearing more make-up than usual, which emphasized her large eyes. She had new clothes as well – dark, flared trousers, a white linen shirt and a waistcoat, of all things. She had an elfin, eager look about her. She waved me over to the table and poured me a glass of wine.

'Cheers,' she said. 'You've got paint in your hair, by the way.'

I wanted to say what I always want to say to this, which is that naturally I have paint in my hair because I spend half my life painting. But I never do and I especially wasn't going to this evening when Kerry looked so happy and expectant. Expectant. It couldn't be, could it?

'Occupational hazard,' I said.

It was round the back where I couldn't see. She scratched at my hair, so that we must have looked like two grooming chimpanzees in the middle of the restaurant, and I even let her do it. She said it wouldn't come off, which was comforting. I took a sip of the wine.

'This place seems nice,' I said.

'I was here last week,' she said. 'It's great.'

'So how's things?'

'You're probably wondering why I called you,' she said.

'There doesn't have to be a special reason,' I said, lying.

'I've got some news for you,' she said. 'Some pretty startling news.'

She was pregnant. That was it. That was all it could be. I looked at her more closely. A bit surprising to see her drinking, though.

'I've got a new boyfriend,' she said.

'That's wonderful, Kerry. That's great news.'

I felt more puzzled than before. I felt happy for her, I really did, because I knew that she hadn't had a boyfriend for some time. It was something that worried her. My parents were always a bit concerned about it, which didn't help. But for her to announce it in this formal way was bizarre.

'It's a bit awkward,' she said. 'That's why I wanted to tell you before anybody else.'

'How could it be awkward?'

'That's right,' she said eagerly. 'That's right. That's what I've been saying. It really shouldn't be a problem at all, if we don't let it become one.'

I took a sip of wine and forced myself to be patient. That was another characteristic of Kerry. She veered between being so incommunicative that she wouldn't say a word to a sort of babbling incoherence.