The Husband's Secret

Chapter eleven





‘I have just one memory of your daughter.’

Was it the right thing to do? What if she made Rachel cry? She’d just won the Heat ’n’ Eat Everyday Set and she seemed so happy about it.

Cecilia never been comfortable around Rachel. She felt trivial, because surely the whole world was trivial to a woman who had lost a child in such circumstances. She always wanted to somehow convey to Rachel that she knew she was trivial. Years ago she’d seen something on a TV talk show about how grieving parents appreciated hearing people tell them memories of their children. There would be no more new memories, so it was a gift to share one with them. Ever since then, whenever Cecilia saw Rachel, she thought of her memory of Janie, paltry though it was, and wondered how she could share it with her. But there was never an opportunity. You couldn’t bring it up in the school office in between conversations about the uniform shop and the netball timetable.

Now was the perfect time. The only time. And Rachel was the one who had brought up Janie.

‘Of course, I didn’t actually know her at all,’ said Cecilia. ‘She was four years ahead of me. But I do have this memory.’ She faltered.

‘Go on.’ Rachel straightened in her seat. ‘I love to hear memories of Janie.’

‘Well it’s just something really small,’ said Cecilia. Now she was terrified she wouldn’t deliver enough. She wondered if she should embellish. ‘I was in Year 2. Janie was in Year 6. I knew her name because she was house captain of Red.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Rachel smiled. ‘We dyed everything red. One of Ed’s work shirts accidentally got dyed red. Funny how you forget all that stuff.’

‘So it was the school carnival, and do you remember how we used to do marching? Each house had to march around the oval. I’m always telling Connor Whitby that we should bring back the marching. He just laughs at me.’

Cecilia glanced over and saw that Rachel’s smile had withered a little. She ploughed on. Was it too upsetting? Not that interesting?

‘I was the sort of child who took the marching very seriously. And I desperately wanted Red to win, but I tripped over, and because I fell, all these other children crashed into the back of me. Sister Ursula was screaming like a banshee, and that was the end of it for Red. I was sobbing my heart out, I thought it was the absolute end of the world, and Janie Crowley, your Janie, came over and helped me up, and brushed off the back of my uniform, and she said very quietly in my ear, “It doesn’t matter. It’s only stupid marching.”’

Rachel didn’t say anything.

‘That’s it,’ said Cecilia humbly. ‘It wasn’t much, but I just always –’

‘Thank you, darling,’ said Rachel, and Cecilia was reminded of an adult thanking a child for a homemade bookmark made out of cardboard and glitter. Rachel lifted a hand, as if she was about to wave at someone, and then she let it brush gently against Cecilia’s shoulder, before dropping it in her lap. ‘That’s just so Janie. “Only stupid marching.” You know what? I think I remember it. All the children tumbling to the ground. Marla and I giggling our heads off.’

She paused. Cecilia’s stomach tensed. Was she about to burst into tears?

‘Gosh, you know, I am a tiny bit drunk,’ said Rachel. ‘I actually thought about driving myself home. Imagine if I’d killed someone.’

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t have,’ said Cecilia.

‘I really did have fun tonight,’ said Rachel. Her head was turned, so that she was addressing the car window. She gently knocked her forehead against the window. It seemed like something a much younger woman would do after they’d had too much to drink. ‘I should make the effort to go out more often.’

‘Oh, well!’ said Cecilia. This was her thing. She could fix that! ‘You must come to Polly’s birthday party the weekend after Easter! Saturday afternoon at two. It’s a pirate party.’

‘That’s very nice of you, but I’m sure Polly doesn’t need me crashing her party,’ said Rachel.

‘You must come! You’ll know lots of people. John-Paul’s mother. My mum. Lucy O’Leary is coming with Tess and her little boy, Liam.’ Cecilia was suddenly desperate for her to come. ‘You could bring your grandson! Bring Jacob! The girls would love to have a toddler there.’

Rachel’s face lit up. ‘I did say I’d look after Jacob while Rob and Lauren are seeing real estate agents about renting out their house while they’re in New York. Oh, this is me, just ahead.’

Cecilia stopped the car in front of a red-brick bungalow. It seemed like every light in the house had been left on.

‘Thanks so much for the lift.’ Rachel climbed out of the car with the same careful sideways slide of the hips as Cecilia’s mother. There was a certain age, Cecilia had noticed, before people stooped or trembled where they didn’t seem to trust their bodies as they once had. ‘I’ll send an invitation to you at the school!’ Cecilia leaned across the seat to call out the window, wondering if she should be offering to walk Rachel to the door. Her own mother would be insulted if she did. John-Paul’s mother would be insulted if she didn’t.

‘Lovely,’ said Rachel, and she walked off briskly, as if she’d read Cecilia’s thoughts and wanted to prove she wasn’t elderly just yet, thanks very much.

Cecilia turned the car around in the cul-de-sac, and by the time she came back, Rachel was already inside, the front door pulled firmly shut.

Cecilia looked for her silhouette through the windows but didn’t see anything. She tried to imagine what Rachel was doing now and what she was feeling, alone in a house with the ghosts of her daughter and her husband.

Well. She had a slightly breathless feeling as if she’d just driven home a minor celebrity. And she’d talked to her about Janie! It had gone pretty well, she thought. She’d given Rachel a memory, just like the magazine article said she should. She felt a mild sense of social achievement, and of satisfaction in finally ticking off a long procrastinated task, and then she felt ashamed for feeling pride, or any sort of pleasure, in connection to Rachel’s tragedy.

She stopped at a traffic light and remembered the angry truck driver from that afternoon, and with that thought her own life came flooding back into her mind. While she’d been driving Rachel home, she’d temporarily forgotten everything: the strange things Polly and Esther had said about John-Paul today in the car, her decision to open his letter tonight.

Did she still feel justified?

Everything had seemed so ordinary after speech therapy. There had been no more peculiar revelations from her daughters, and Isabel had seemed especially cheerful after her haircut. It was a short pixie cut, and from the way Isabel was holding herself, it was clear that she thought it made her look very sophisticated, when it actually made her look younger and sweeter.

There had been a postcard for the girls from John-Paul in the letterbox. He had a running joke with his daughters where he sent them the silliest postcards he could find. Today’s postcard featured one of those dogs with folds of wrinkly skin, wearing a tiara and beads, and Cecilia thought it was stupid but true to form, the girls all fell about laughing and put it on the fridge.


‘Oh, come on now,’ she said mildly as a car suddenly pulled into the lane in front of her. She lifted her hand to toot the horn and then didn’t bother.

Note how I didn’t scream and yell like a mad person, she thought for the benefit of that afternoon’s psychotic truck driver, just in case he happened to have stopped by to read her mind. It was a cab in front of her. He was doing that weird cabbie thing of testing the brakes every few seconds.

Great. He was heading the same direction as her. The cab jerked its way down her street, and without warning suddenly stopped at the kerb outside Cecilia’s house.

The lights in the cab went on. The passenger was sitting in the front seat. One of the Kingston boys, thought Cecilia. The Kingstons lived across the road and had three sons in their twenties still living at home, using their expensive private educations to do never-ending degrees and get drunk in city bars. ‘If a Kingston boy ever goes near one of our girls,’ John-Paul always said, ‘I’ll be ready with the shotgun.’

She pulled into her driveway, pressed the button on the remote for the garage and looked in her rear-vision mirror. The cabbie had popped the boot. A broad-shouldered man in a suit was pulling out his luggage.



It wasn’t a Kingston boy.

It was John-Paul. He always looked so unfamiliar when she saw him unexpectedly like this in his work clothes, as if she was still twenty-three and he’d gone and got all grown-up and grey-haired without her.

John-Paul was home three days early.

She was filled with equal parts pleasure and exasperation.

She’d lost her chance. She couldn’t open the letter now. She turned off the ignition, pulled on the handbrake, undid her seatbelt, opened the car door and ran down the driveway to meet him.