The Husband's Secret

Chapter thirty-two





Cecilia went into the ensuite bathroom where John-Paul was brushing his teeth. She picked up her toothbrush, squeezed toothpaste on it and began to brush, her eyes not meeting his in the mirror.

She stopped brushing.

‘Your mother knows,’ she said.

John-Paul bent down to the basin and spat. ‘What do you mean?’ he straightened, patted his mouth with the handtowel and shoved it back on the handrail in such a slapdash way that you’d think he was deliberately trying to avoid keeping it straight.

‘She knows,’ said Cecilia again.

He spun around. ‘You told her?’

‘No, I –’

‘Why would you do that?’ The colour had drained from his face. He didn’t seem angry so much as utterly stunned.

‘John-Paul, I didn’t tell her. I mentioned Rachel was coming to Polly’s party and she asked how you felt about that. I could just tell.’

John-Paul’s shoulders relaxed. ‘You must have imagined it.’

He sounded so certain. Whenever they had an argument about a point of fact, he was always so utterly confident that he had it right and she had it wrong. He never even entertained the possibility that he might be mistaken. It drove her bananas. She struggled with an almost irresistible urge to slap him across the face.

This was the problem. All his flaws seemed more significant now. It was one thing for a gentle, law-abiding husband and father to have failings: a certain inflexibility that manifested itself just when it was most inconvenient, those occasional (also inconvenient) black moods, the frustrating implacability during arguments, the untidiness, the constant losing of his possessions. They all seemed innocuous enough, common even; but now that these faults belonged to a murderer, they seemed to matter so much more, to define him. His good qualities now seemed irrelevant and probably fraudulent: a cover identity. How could she ever look at him again in the same way? How could she still love him? She didn’t know him. She’d been in love with an optical illusion. The blue eyes that had looked at her with tenderness and passion and laughter were the same eyes that Janie had seen in those terrifying few moments before she died. Those lovely strong hands that had cupped the soft, fragile heads of Cecilia’s baby daughters were the same hands that he held around Janie’s neck.

‘Your mother knows,’ she told him. ‘She recognised her rosary beads in the newspaper pictures. She basically told me that a mother would do anything for her children, and that I should do the same for my children and pretend it never happened. It was creepy. Your mother is creepy.’

It felt like crossing a line to say that. John-Paul did not take criticism of his mother kindly. Cecilia normally tried to respect that, even while it annoyed her.

John-Paul sank down on the side of the bath, knocking the handtowel off the rail with his knees in the process. ‘You really think she knows?’



‘Yes,’ said Cecilia. ‘So there you go. Mummy’s golden boy really can get away with murder.’

John-Paul blinked, and Cecilia almost considered apologising, before she remembered that this wasn’t an ordinary disagreement about packing the dishwasher. The rules had changed. She could be just as narky as she pleased.

She picked up her toothbrush again and began to clean her teeth with harsh, mechanical movements. Her dentist had told her just last week that she was brushing too hard, wearing away the enamel. ‘Hold your toothbrush with your fingertips, like the bow of a violin,’ he’d said, demonstrating. Should she get another electric toothbrush, she’d wondered, and he’d said he wasn’t a believer, except for the old and arthritic, but Cecilia had said she liked the nice clean feeling it gave her, and oh, it had all genuinely mattered, she had been completely involved in that conversation, a conversation about the maintenance of her teeth, back then, back in last week.

She rinsed and spat and put the toothbrush away and picked up the towel that John-Paul had knocked onto the floor and put it back on the railing

She glanced at John-Paul. He flinched.

‘The way you look at me now,’ he said. ‘It’s . . .’ He stopped and took a shaky breath.

‘What do you expect?’ asked Cecilia, astounded.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said John-Paul. ‘I’m so sorry for putting you through this. For making you part of it. I’m such an idiot for writing that letter. But I’m still me, Cecilia. I promise you. Please don’t think I’m some evil monster. I was seventeen, Cecilia. I made one terrible, terrible mistake.’

‘Which you never paid for,’ said Cecilia.

‘I know I didn’t.’ He met her eyes unflinchingly. ‘I know that.’

They stood in silence for a few moments.



‘Shit!’ Cecilia slammed her hand to her head. ‘F*ck it.’

‘What is it?’ John-Paul reeled back. She never swore. All these years there had been a Tupperware container of bad language sitting off to the side in her head and now she’d opened it and all those crisp, crunchy words were lovely and fresh, ready to be used.

‘Easter hats,’ she said. ‘Polly and Esther need f*cking Easter hats for tomorrow morning.’





6 April 1984



Janie very nearly changed her mind when she looked out the window of the train and saw John-Paul waiting for her on the platform. He was reading a book, his long legs stuck out in front of him, and when he saw the train pulling in he stood up and stuck the book in his back pocket and with a sudden, almost furtive movement he smoothed down his hair with the palm of his hand. He was gorgeous.

She got up from her seat, holding the pole for balance, and slung her bag over her shoulder.

It was funny, the way he’d smoothed down his hair; it was an insecure gesture for a boy like John-Paul. You’d almost think that he was nervous about seeing Janie, that he was worried about impressing her.

‘Next stop Asquith, then all stations to Berowra.’

The train clattered to a stop.

So this was it. She was going to tell him that she couldn’t see him any more. She could have stood him up, just left him waiting for her, but she wasn’t that type of girl. She could have telephoned him, but that didn’t seem right either. And besides, they’d never called each other. Both of them had mothers who liked to lurk about when they were on the phone.




(If only she could have emailed or texted him, that would have solved everything, but mobile phones and the internet were still in the future.)

She’d been thinking that this would be unpleasant and that maybe John-Paul’s pride would be hurt, and that he might say something vengeful like, ‘I never liked you that much anyway’, but until she saw him smoothing down his hair, it hadn’t occurred to her that she might be about to hurt him. She felt sick at the thought.

She got off the train and John-Paul lifted a hand and smiled. Janie waved back, and as she walked down the railway platform towards him, it came to her with a tiny, bitter shock of self-revelation that it wasn’t that she liked Connor more than John-Paul, it was that she liked John-Paul far too much. It was a strain being with someone so good-looking and smart and funny and nice. She was dazzled by John-Paul. Connor was dazzled by her. And it was more fun doing the dazzling. Girls were meant to do the dazzling.

John-Paul’s interest felt like a trick. A practical joke. Because surely he knew that she wasn’t good enough for him. She kept waiting for a gaggle of teenage girls to appear, laughing and jeering and pointing, ‘You didn’t really think he’d be interested in you!’ That’s why she hadn’t even told any of her friends about his existence. They knew about Connor, of course, but not John-Paul Fitzpatrick. They wouldn’t believe that someone like John-Paul would be interested in her, and she didn’t really believe it either.

She thought of Connor’s big goofy smile on the bus when she told him he was now officially her boyfriend. He was her friend. Losing her virginity to Connor would be sweet and funny and tender. She couldn’t possibly take her clothes off in front of John-Paul. The very thought made her heart stop. Besides, he deserved a girl with a body that matched his. He might laugh if he saw her strange skinny white body. He might notice that her arms were disproportionately long for her body. He might sneer or snort at her concave chest.

‘Hi,’ she said to him.

‘Hi,’ he said, and she caught her breath, because as their eyes met she got that feeling again, that sensation of there being something huge between them, something she couldn’t quite define, something her twenty-year-old self might have called ‘passion’ and her thirty-year-old self might have more cynically called ‘chemistry’. A tiny speck of her, a tiny speck of the woman she could have become, thought, Come on, Janie, you’re being a coward. You like him more than Connor. Choose him. This could be big. This could be huge. This could be love.

But her heart was hammering so hard it was horrible, scary and painful, she could barely breathe. There was a painful crushing sensation in the centre of her chest, as if someone was trying to flatten her. She just wanted to feel normal again.

‘I need to talk to you about something,’ she said, and she made her voice cold and hard, sealing her fate like an envelope.





thursday