Nicci French - Secret Smile

Brendan looked momentarily confused.

' Vermont, that was it, wasn't it?' I said.

'How on earth did you remember that?' My mother laughed, pleased with me. I was taking an interest, being polite.

'Mitch and Sasha – clear the plates away,' said Judy. They rose grudgingly.

'Because I remember thinking Vermont like New England,' I said.

Bill refilled my glass and I took a large mouthful and swallowed. Mitch took away my cheese plate, and dropped the buttery knife in my lap.

'Poor old Harry,' said Brendan. 'He was wiped out.'

'What does he do now? Do you keep in touch with him?'

'You can't drop friends just because they go through bad times,' he said sententiously.

'I talked to him,' I said.

'What?'

'He said he met you, briefly, but you never actually worked together and he's never done anything in the packaging business. Anyway, you didn't get the job.'

I took a large gulp of wine.

'Coffee?' asked Bill.

'Lovely, Bill,' said my mother. There was an edge of panic in her voice.

'Well?' I asked Brendan.

'You went and talked to Harry Vermont?' Brendan spoke softly. 'Why, Miranda? Why didn't you talk to me about it?'

Everyone was looking at me. I gripped the edge of the table.

'You never worked together,' I said. 'You never lost money. You hardly knew him.'

'Why would you do something like that?' He shook his head from side to side in wonderment, taking in the whole watching room. 'Why?'

'Because you weren't telling the truth,' I said. A sick feeling rose up in me. My forehead felt clammy.

'If you'd asked me, I would have told you, Miranda,' he said.

'Harry Vermont said…'

'Harry Vermont let down everyone he worked with,' said Brendan. He sat back a bit, addressing all of us now; his tone was one of sorrowful resignation. 'He wanted the glory but not the responsibility. But I forgave him. He was my friend.'

'He said…'

'Miranda,' hissed my mother, as if everyone couldn't hear every word. 'That's quite enough now.'

'I wanted to find out…'

'Enough, I say.' She slapped her hand on the table's surface so hard that cutlery rattled. 'Stop it. Let's have coffee.'

Judy glared at Bill and nodded at him. They both stood up and went out. In the kitchen, someone dropped a glass.

I thought about standing up and making a run for it, but I was wedged between the table and the wall, and Troy would have to have stood up to let me out. So instead I said: 'You were deceiving us.' I turned to the table. 'He was deceiving us,' I repeated desperately.

Brendan shook his head.

'Maybe I didn't tell you the whole ugly story because he was my friend and I felt sorry for him. I was protecting him, I guess. But I wasn't deceiving you. No, Miranda.' He paused and smiled at me. 'You do that, though, don't you?'

Outside in the hallway, I could hear the grandfather clock ticking. Through the French windows, I saw the bare branches of their copper beech tree were waving in the wind.

'Like the way you deceived Kerry.'

'Let's stop this,' said Troy. 'I don't like it. Please stop.'

'What?' Kerry's voice came at the same time, sharp with fear. 'What do you mean?'

'I'm sure Kerry forgave you, though. Because that's what she's like, very forgiving. Mmm?'

'What are you talking about? Tell me.' I saw Kerry's face across from me.

'You were only seventeen, after all.'

'Brendan, I'm sorry if I…'

'And how old were you, Kerry? Nineteen, I guess.'

'When I what?'

'You know, when Miranda went off with your boyfriend. What was he called? Mike, wasn't it?'

The silence deepened around us.

Brendan put his hand over his mouth.

'You mean you didn't know? Miranda never said? I had no idea. I just thought – if she told me so early on in our relationship, and so casually – I just assumed you all knew too and it was one of those family things…' His voice trailed away.

I opened my mouth to say I'd never told him, he'd read it in a diary that was private. But I didn't because who cared how he knew. It was true.

'Kerry,' I said at last. 'Let's not do this here. Can we go somewhere and talk?'

She stared at me. 'I get it,' she said. 'Now you're trying to do it all over again.'

I left the house, though Judy tried to hold me back at the door, and I got in my car and drove to the bottom of the road, where I pulled in at a bus stop. I felt cold to the bone, but sweaty at the same time, and my hands were trembling so badly that I could barely turn the ignition off. There was a nasty taste coating the inside of my mouth: game pie, blue cheese, red wine, dread. For a moment, I thought I would be sick. I sat for a while, just staring ahead but barely seeing the traffic that flowed past me as the day just started to turn dark, as if the colour were running out of everything, leaving the world grey.

A loud horn sounded behind me, and I glanced in the rear-view mirror to see a bus waiting. I started up the car and edged out into the road. But I didn't know where to go. For a while I drove as if heading home, but that was the last place in the world I could be right now. Anyway, it didn't feel like home any longer. I'd loved it, it had been my haven. Not now.

I could just go back to Laura's. But I wanted to be alone, desperately. So I just kept on going, not turning left or right, heading east out of London, past shops selling old fridges, mobile phones, catering equipment, BB guns, cheap videos, garden gnomes, floor tiles, wind chimes… The streets grew poorer; there was graffiti on the bridges overhead, dank little cafes, queasy-looking butchers still open with slabs of meat swaying in the window, and at a set of traffic lights a young man in combat gear banged on my window and mouthed orders at me to give him money. After I'd passed a flyover and several arterial crossroads, the surroundings grew more prosperous again, and houses thinned to detached properties with gardens in front and behind. Lights were beginning to go on. Street lamps glowed in the greying dusk. At last there were fields, large trees with scarcely any leaves left on them, a river running by.

I took a random left up a small road, then left again up a smaller lane, and stopped the car in the entrance to a field where cows were standing in the far corner. In an hour or so it would be dark, and when I opened the door I could feel the cold biting through my jacket. I wasn't dressed for outside, wasn't wearing the right shoes, but it didn't matter. I started to walk along the lane and welcomed the sting of the wind, the way my hair whipped against my face. For several minutes I just walked, fast so my calves ached. And then I started to think and to let myself remember.

When Kerry was nineteen, she was pretty but she didn't think she was, so of course people rarely noticed her. At least, boys didn't. Michael wasn't her first boyfriend, but he was the first she really let herself fall in love with, and maybe he was the first she had sex with. She never said and I never asked, at first, because I was waiting for the right intimate moment, and later because there never would be that right moment. It was in the summer holidays, just before she went to university, and in the meantime she was working in the local cafe, washing dishes and serving customers chocolate fudge brownies and coconut flapjacks. He was about three years older than her, studying civil engineering at Hull, but home for the holidays, and he saw her a few times and then one day he leaned over the counter and asked her for a cup of tea and if she'd like to go out for a drink.

Maybe it was because he knew nothing about her, had no part of the world in which she was always on the sidelines, or maybe she was just ready to get carried away – anyway, she was very taken up with him. She seemed proud of herself as well because he was older than her, and not exactly handsome but extroverted and rather a charmer, and he made her feel more worldly and glamorous than she'd felt before. She visibly bloomed, in much the same way, I thought, pounding along the lane with the darkness falling, that she had bloomed with Brendan.