Sarah Morgan - How To Keep A Secret

Not pregnant. Feel crap about it. Any chance of a hug?

She couldn’t remember when her mother had last hugged her.

“My day was fine.” Holding her feelings inside, she walked to the window and stared out across the lawn to the sea. “It’s cold out today. Windy.” Were they really reduced to talking about the weather?

“How’s Greg?”

“He’s great.” She turned. Was it her imagination or was her mother looking older? The lines around her eyes were more pronounced and her hair seemed to have lost its shine.

Jenna had seen photos of her mother as a young woman. Her features were too bold to qualify as pretty, but she’d been striking and had her own individual style. That style seemed to have deserted her years before. Gone were the colorful outfits that had raised eyebrows on the few occasions she’d picked Jenna up from school. These days she dressed mostly in black and navy, as if life had drained the brightness from her.

Nancy signed a letter and slipped it into an envelope. “He’s a special man. It’s good to see you settled and happy, Jenna.”

The comment struck her as odd. It bordered on the personal, and personal was a land her mother rarely visited.

She almost asked if something was wrong, but decided there was no point, so instead they had a neutral conversation about a plan to build affordable housing and the challenges of maintaining the rural character of the island while managing the increase in summer visitors.

“The school is at capacity. We can’t take any more kids without compromising educational standards.” Jenna sat down at the table. It had belonged to her great-grandmother and there were scars and gouges in the wood to prove it. Somewhere underneath Jenna knew she would find her name scratched into the wood.

“Any funny classroom stories for me? I could use some light entertainment.”

Jenna often regaled her with stories, although she’d learned to talk about her day without mentioning anything personal about the kids.

Most of the parents would have been horrified to learn how much their six-year-olds could divulge to their first-grade teacher.

She told her mother about the school trip they had planned to the nature reserve, and about the lesson she’d taught on states of matter where the children had made ice cream in the classroom. The idea had been to demonstrate that a liquid could become a solid, but two of the children had managed to cover themselves in cream.

“And Lily Baker made me a gorgeous card.” She pulled it out of her bag and passed it across the table. “Don’t shake it. It’s heavy on the glitter.”

“She’s back at school?” Her mother slipped her glasses back on so she could look at the card. “I saw her when she was in hospital. Took her a copy of Paint with Nancy and some pencils.”

Back in the day when her mother had been something of a global name in the art world and there had been much demand for her work, someone had suggested producing upmarket educational material— In other words a coloring book , Jenna had said to Lauren—designed to encourage budding artists. The idea was that children would feel they had been given the opportunity to paint with Nancy.

The project had never taken off and boxes of the coloring books had gathered dust in one of the unused rooms in The Captain’s House.

“How did you know Lily was in hospital?”

“Her grandmother is in my book group.”

“Of course. Yes, Lily had a few days in hospital with a fever. Fully recovered, thank goodness.”

They talked for a while and then Jenna went to use the bathroom, but on the way something caught her eye.

“Hey, Mom.” She paused and called out to her mother. “What happened to the painting on this wall?” It was a beautiful seascape, painted by her mother early in her career and one of the few that had never been offered for sale. Her mother’s career as an artist could be divided into two distinct phases. Her earlier work was light and bright and her later work was stormy and dark. Lauren called it her depressing phase. The missing painting was one of her early works, painted before her mother had hit the big time. Jenna loved the wild swirls of blues and greens.

Surely her mother hadn’t sold it?

Her mother emerged from the kitchen. “I—” She stared at the faded space on the wall as if she’d forgotten about it. “I took it down. I thought I might…redecorate.”

“Do you want help? I could come over on the weekend.”

Her mother didn’t hide her alarm. “I don’t think so. I still remember the mess you made of the rug when you decided to paint Lauren’s room bright blue. I came back from a day at the studio and spent the next two days painting my own house instead of a canvas.”

Jenna remembered that incident, too.

Lauren had redecorated her bedroom at least once every three months. Any money she had, she’d spent on interior design magazines. She’d study them, and then use the ideas she liked best, enlisting Jenna to help transform her room to match her latest vision. They’d dragged furniture from one side of the room to another, painted walls and changed fabrics.

On one occasion Jenna, as dreamy as she was clumsy, had tripped over a tin of blue paint and sent it flowing over the floor.

With her usual artistic flourish, their mother had turned the streaked floor into a smooth surface of ocean blue. Then she’d diluted the color for the walls until the room looked like an aquarium complete with small fish and plants.

Jenna had loved the newly painted room so much she’d taken to sneaking in and sleeping on Lauren’s floor, settling herself between a friendly-looking octopus and a seahorse. She and Lauren had giggled and talked long into the night cocooned in their underwater paradise and when her sister had changed her room three months later, Jenna had felt bereft.

It was at least twenty years since the paint spill episode and yet her mother still talked about it as if it had happened yesterday.

“I’ve improved since then,” Jenna said. “I did most of the decorating in my house.” But her mother had already walked back into the kitchen and wasn’t listening.

Irritated, Jenna used the bathroom and walked back to the kitchen.

Her mother was staring at another set of papers but she quickly pushed them to one side.

“Have you spoken to your sister lately?”

“Last week. I thought I might call tonight, but then I remembered it’s Ed’s fortieth birthday party. She’s booked caterers and a string quartet.” Jenna tried to read the papers, but they were upside down. “If she still lived on island I could have loaned her my recorder group. That would have blown everyone’s eardrums.” She realized her mother wasn’t listening. “Mom?”

Her mother gave a start. “Sorry? What did you say?”

“I was talking about Lauren’s party. She was nervous something might go wrong.”

“Knowing Lauren, it will be perfect. I don’t know how she does it all.”

Jenna refrained from pointing out that Ed was seriously wealthy and that they could buy in whatever help they needed.

For the past couple of years Lauren had been studying for an interior design qualification, but study was a bed of roses compared with hauling yourself out of bed every day to deal with a bunch of kids with runny noses.

Her sister’s life seemed effortless.

“Mack has big exams this summer.”

“She’ll fly through them, as Lauren did.”

“I guess she will.” Did her sister have to be so perfect? Much as she loved Lauren, there were days when Jenna could happily kill her. And then she felt guilty feeling that way because as well as being perfect at everything else, Lauren was the perfect sister and always had been.