Nicci French: Secret Smile

'You mean, with Brendan too?'

'With Kerry and Brendan, yes.'

My stomach clenched.

'I'm not sure I'm free then.'

'I know it's hard for you, Miranda, but I feel this is important. For Kerry, I mean.'

'It's not hard for me. At all. I just don't know if I'm free, that's all.'

'We could make it Saturday lunch. Or even the evening if that suited you better. Or are you going away for the whole weekend?'

'All right. Sunday,' I said, defeated.

'It'll be very casual. You'll be fine.'

'I know I'll be fine. I'm not anxious. Not in the least. Everyone's got the wrong idea.'

'Maybe you can bring someone with you.'

'What?'

'Someone. You know. If there's anyone…'

'There isn't anyone at the moment, Mum.'

'I suppose it's still early days.'

'I've got to go now.'

'Miranda?'

'Yes.'

'Oh, I don't know. It's just… well, you've always been the lucky one. Let Kerry have her turn. Don't stand in her way.'

'This is stupid.'

'Please.'

I imagined her fist clenched tightly round the receiver, her frowning, intense face, the strand of hair that always hung loose over one eye.

'It'll all be fine,' I said, just to stop her. 'I promise I won't do anything to stand in Kerry's way. Now I really do have to go. I'll see you tomorrow when I pick up Troy, though.'

'Thank you, dear Miranda,' she said emotionally. 'Thank you.'

'I never met him, did I?'

We were sitting cross-legged on the floor, backs against the sofa, eating jacket potatoes. Laura had dotted sour cream on hers, but I'd split mine open and mashed several large knobs of butter into it, then sprinkled grated cheese over the top. It was very comforting. Outside it was dark and wet.

'No, it was so brief. When you went to Barcelona it was before the beginning, and when you came back it was after the end.'

'You finished it with him?'

'That's right.'

'So why do you mind?'

'I don't,' I said before all the words were out of her mouth.

'You do. I can tell you do.'

I thought for a moment.

'Yes, I do. Because it's creepy. It feels incestuous. And the way my mum and presumably everybody else thinks I'm heartbroken. It makes me want to smash things.'

'I can see it must be irritating, but it's quite funny too.'

'No,' I said. 'Not in any way at all. She calls him "Bren".'

'Well

'And he called me "Mirrie".'

'Families,' said Laura vaguely. She wiped her chin.

'Mirrie,' I repeated. Then, 'Am I overreacting?'

'Maybe.'

'You're right. I'm overreacting.'

I'd eaten all the potato and only the crisped skin was left. I put a bit more butter on it and bit off a piece. Then I took a large swallow of wine. I didn't want to move; it was warm in here and I was full up and pleasantly tired, while outside the wind rustled in the trees and cars drove through puddles.

'How are things with Tony?' I asked after a while.

'Oh. All right. I suppose.'

I looked at her. She'd pushed her glossy dark hair behind her ears, and her face looked very young.

'You suppose? What does that mean?'

'They're OK. You know. It's just sometimes…' She stopped.

'Sometimes?'

'Sometimes I wonder what happens next.' She frowned and poured the last of the wine into our two glasses. 'I mean, we've been together for nearly three years. Do we just continue like this? I think that's what Tony would like, just to go on year after year, being comfortable together, as if we were already married – except with separate houses. Or do we start living together – properly, I mean. Buy a place together. A fridge. Plates. Put our books and CDs together. You know. And if we don't, then what are we doing together now? You have to keep moving forwards, don't you?'

'I don't know. I've never been in a relationship that long.'

'That's the thing. You have all these dramas and excitements in your life.'

'Me?'

'Things beginning and things ending.'

'And things not happening at all.'

'Yes,' she said doubtfully. 'But I'm only twenty-six. Is that part of my life all over? Is this it?'

'Do you want to move in together?'

'Well, sometimes I think it'd be…'

But then there was the sound of a key in the lock and the door swung open.

'Hello,' Tony called cheerfully, dropping his bag on the hall floor with a thump, kicking first one shoe then the other off" his feet, so his shoes skidded over the wooden boards. He came into the room, hair damp on his forehead, cheeks reddened from the air. 'Oh, hi, Miranda. How are you?'

He bent down and kissed Laura, and she put one hand up to his cheek and smiled at him. It looked all right to me.

He was out of the door before I'd even parked the van, and running down the garden path. He couldn't wave because he had a bulging plastic bag in one hand and was holding his backpack by the other, but his pale face was shining, and he was grinning and saying something to me that I couldn't hear. He tripped over something on the path and half stumbled. His backpack swung against his legs, but he kept on smiling and mouthing words. Sometimes it is more painful to see Troy happy than to see him low.

'Hi there,' I said as he pulled open the door and clambered into the passenger seat, his bag getting tangled up with his angular body in the process. 'How's it going?'

'Fine. Good. Really good.' He wrapped the safety belt round himself and his baggage. 'I've been teaching myself to play the guitar, you know. Do you remember your old guitar? I found it in the junk room. It's a bit clapped out, but I don't suppose that matters much at the moment. Anyway, I thought I'd cook us supper tonight, all right? I brought the stuff with me. You haven't got any other plans, have you?'

'No,' I said. 'No other plans. What are we having?'

'Savoury profiteroles first of all,' he said. 'I saw them in this recipe book of Mum's and it says they're really simple. I haven't got any filling for them, but you must have something I can put in. Cheese, maybe? Or tuna fish. Even you must have a tin of tuna in a cupboard somewhere. Then kebabs. I have to marinade them first, though, so it might take a bit of time. I'll start when we get to your flat. I haven't thought about pudding. Do you actually want pudding? I thought we could just have the starter and the kebabs and that would be enough. I could make rice pudding. But hang on, we're having rice with kebabs, so it's probably not a good idea.'

'No pudding,' I said. I could already picture the chaos that lay ahead.

Every Thursday I see Troy. It's been a pretty constant arrangement for the past two years, when he was fifteen and in trouble. I collect him from Mum and Dad's after work, and I bring him back later in the evening, or else put him up for the night on my sagging sofa bed. Sometimes we go to the movies or to a concert. Occasionally he meets some of my friends. Last Thursday I took him to the pub with Laura and Tony, and a couple of others, but he was in one of his lethargic moods and simply put his head on the table after his first sip of beer and went to sleep. Sometimes he seems paralysingly shy, at other times he just doesn't bother. He'll pick up a book in the middle of a conversation, wander off when he feels like it.

Quite often we just go back to my flat and do stuff together. In the past few weeks he's become keen on cooking, with varying results. His enthusiasms flare up and then they die away again. He went through a phase of playing games of patience. He would have to complete the game before he did anything else. If he managed to get it out, it was a good omen, but he hardly ever managed it. In the summer he was fanatical about jigsaw puzzles: he brought one to my flat that was called 'The World's Most Difficult Jigsaw'. It had thousands of tiny pieces with pictures on both sides. And you didn't know what the final image was meant to look like. For weeks, I couldn't use my table because bits were scattered over it, straight sides at one end and in the middle the gradually emerging picture of a street scene. Suddenly he became bored. 'What actually is the point of doing jigsaw puzzles?' he said to me. 'You work for hours and hours, and then when you complete it you break it up and put it back in the box.' He worked for hours and hours, but he never completed it and it's now in a box under my bed.