Rosie Thomas - Every Woman Knows a Secret

Title Page Every Woman Knows A Secret BY ROSIE THOMAS

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Yesterday is gone for ever. And once each day is gone, it can only be seen through the one-way mirror of what has happened between then and now. In this way, every minute of every day that passes is a kind of bereavement.

Jess Arrowsmith was not thinking about any of this, not yet.

She was used to keeping her mind narrowly fixed on her work, and on this early winter’s morning she was busy with plants and pots and compost. If her thinking strayed beyond them it was only to the comfortable prospect of hot coffee, and a fifteen-minute sit-down with the newspaper, the small rewards for one job properly completed before she had to begin the next.

It was a cold day but the big greenhouse was pleasantly warm; the ridges and valleys of glass overhead were faintly misted so the bone-whiteness of the sky above was softened. Jess worked steadily, without looking up, amongst scents that she loved but knew too well to distinguish separately: moist peat, washed gravel, the sharp tang of a crushed leaf. There was the steady drip of water, and the sound of another gardener tramping between the benches of a different aisle, hidden by a screen of leaves.

She took a new tray of plantlets from the waiting row and squared it in front of her. Tenderly she lifted a plantlet from the tray, holding one sturdy seed leaf and easing the stem and tiny root filaments free of the crumbs of earth. She tucked the little plant into a three-inch pot and firmed the fresh compost around the stem once more, then added a label. A new pelargonium, worth one pound twenty-five on the nursery by the end of May, although naturally not to Jess directly. She was only an employee. But she did not think of this either; the work was simply there, waiting to be done.

She moved steadily, smoothly lifting and settling plant after plant, until the seed trays were emptied. Then she straightened the rows of filled pots, checked the labels, and carried the trays to the trough at the end of the aisle. She scrubbed them out in freezing water and left them methodically stacked to dry.

At last she stood upright, easing her bent back with the heels of her hands. She wiped her palms on the backside of her dungarees and sighed in relief and satisfaction as she pushed a hank of hair out of her eyes.

The staff rest-room across the yard was empty. Jess left her boots outside the door and boiled water to make instant coffee, warming her icy fingers on the mug. She sat down in a sagging armchair and idly picked up a women’s magazine that someone had left on the next chair. A beauty article was illustrated with photographs of hands, smooth and creamy and tipped with perfect scarlet and plum-red nails. On the glossy page Jess splayed her own hand, skin cracked and seamed with dirt, and laughed aloud.

‘Someone’s happy, then. Nice to hear, in this place.’

The woman who had come in was older than Jess, in her fifties. She was plump, dressed in a blue nylon overall.

Jess looked up at her. ‘Am I? Is it? Joyce, you’re late today.’

Joyce produced her own tea, sugar and powdered milk from her locker and locked it securely again.

‘It’s been bloody murder in the shop all morning. And that Tony’s never there when you want him, for fetching and carrying. I can’t lift no heavy stuff. I get enough of that at home.’

Joyce rattled with the kettle and her special cup and saucer, exuding weary displeasure. Jess had worked with her for three years. She knew why Joyce was tired and irritable.

‘How’s your mum?’ she asked.

‘About the same. No, not the same, she couldn’t be, could she? Every day she gets a bit worse, loses a bit more of herself. Well, I lose a bit more of her really, because she doesn’t know what’s happening, does she? She can’t feed herself any more. Has to have her mush spooned into her mouth.’

Jess listened, nodding, letting her talk because it was all she could offer. She couldn’t relieve Joyce of the pity or the responsibility for her senile mother. When her fifteen-minute break was over she stood up and briefly put her arm round Joyce’s shoulders, feeling the solid flesh insulated by woollens and the slither of nylon.

‘I’d better get back to it.’

Joyce sniffed. ‘You’re a good girl. Really, you are. These things are sent to try us, aren’t they?’

Outside, the cold air pinched Jess’s face and fingers but she breathed it in, squaring herself to the weather as she pulled on her coat. She went to check stock plants on the open rows at the back of the nursery.

In Jess’s home town of Ditchley, a dozen miles from the nursery, two boys arrived at a side-street gym. The road outside was busy with cars and delivery vans making their way around the pedestrianised main street, and the chain stores in the precinct were busy with early lunch-time custom, but there was only a handful of people in the gym. The boys pushed their way into the locker room, confident to the point of arrogance, and changed into sweatpants with vests cut to bare their shoulders, and broad leather weight-lifters’ belts. In the gym they stood in front of the mirrors waiting for a fresh loop of music to come pounding out of the overhead speakers, then began their workout. After a few minutes they were both slick with sweat and grinning with the high of their exertions.

The older one said, ‘Right then, Dan. Alternate curls and kickbacks.’

Dan was nineteen, the younger by three years. He was dark and good-looking, although thinner and less muscled than his friend. He rattled a pair of dumbbells from the rack in front of the mirrors and weighed them in his hands. Then he began to work again, curling up and relaxing each arm in turn, fists clenched around the weights. The muscles of his upper arm tightened and the cords stood out in his neck. His lips pulled back in a painful grimace that bared his teeth and he began to grunt softly with the effort of hauling fist to shoulder.

His friend watched. ‘Nine, ten, Danny boy. Eleven, twelve. Three more, go.’ He was grinning again, circling him, taunting as well as encouraging. Danny finished the set with a gasp of triumph and let the weights drop.

‘Shit, Rob.’

‘Kickbacks now.’ Rob would not let him rest between repetitions, and Danny did not want to seem to need a respite. He picked up another dumbbell at once and bent from the waist. One-handed and with a stiff wrist he swung the weight up behind him and back like a piston. Down and up. His breath hissed as he counted the repetitions. At fifteen he changed hands and repeated the set. ‘ Yeah. Fuck ,’ he groaned. He clanged the weight back on to the rack and dropped on to a bench, wiping his forehead with the inside of his wrist.

Rob picked a heavier pair of weights and squared himself to the mirror. His hair was long, shoulder length with a mass of coppery and bronze coils loosely tied with a piece of cord. He tossed it back with a jerk of his head as his arms curled taut, the triceps bulging. He made the weights look momentarily weightless.