Keep My Secrets by Elena Wilkes (large ebook reader .txt) 📗

He sits down opposite, loading his plate and then picks up the wine bottle and refills both glasses even though they don’t need filling.

‘This sauce is amazing, what’s in it?’ She licks her lips.

‘This and that… So, what did you think of your scarf?’ He begins to concentrate on his food, shovelling up a whole mound of potato and meat. ‘Is it what you wanted?’

‘Perfect.’

She doesn’t let her face register what’s happening in her gut, pretending to wipe an imaginary spill from the table with her finger and then reaching again for her fork.

‘What’s wrong?’ He pauses, mid-chew.

‘Nothing’s wrong.’

‘So why aren’t you eating?’

‘Alex…’ She goes to touch his hand, but he manages to drop his napkin at the same time and bends to retrieve it. She watches him, the way his hair flops across his forehead, that almost shy schoolboy expression she remembers as he pushes it back. So handsome. So lovely. She knows there’s a tornado coming. Their whole relationship – this whole house of cards is standing right in its path. She has to do something, say something – but then she notices the shake in his hand.

He looks up at her expectantly. She can’t do it to him.

‘I wanted to say thank you for doing all this.’

He swallows with a kind of gulp and puts down his fork.

‘Thank you for sticking around.’

She makes a half smile. ‘Sticking around? Look, I’ve already sai—’

‘Look, I’m not stupid. I know things haven’t been easy. I know I’ve made things far worse between us. All my constant questioning of where you are and what you’re doing… going on and on – I’m pushing us apart, I know that. That’s what’s made me think about our future.’

She steels herself. ‘Alex—’

‘No, seriously, listen—’

‘I am being serious.’

‘Yeah, but you’re not listening. I want to talk to you about some ideas I’ve had. Amazing ideas.’ He attempts a smile but it looks more like a grimace. Whatever’s going on with him is making him agitated and intense. This doesn’t look like excitement. It looks like desperation. She suddenly realises how near the surface his anxiety really is. It scares her a little.

He pauses and his shoulders jerk with tension.

‘I’m sorry. I’m not explaining myself very well.’ He attempts a little laugh. ‘The thing is…’ He spreads his palms. ‘Just look at me, Frankie.’ He glances into his lap and then back up at her. ‘I’ve become an obsessive wreck. I do nothing all day, I see no one but the helpless and the vulnerable in one rundown community centre or another. We sit around on knackered chairs talking about how helpless and knackered we all are.’ He musters a grin. ‘I’ve gone from running a business to running us further and further into debt. I used to interview staff for management positions, now I’m going to Job Seekers and being interviewed by eighteen-year-olds with a couple of GCSEs in Media and Social Studies.’

‘Alex.’

‘Seriously, Frankie. Look at your life and look at mine. I’m going down the ladder, while you’re going up it.’ He shrugs. ‘Literally, if today is anything to go by.’

They both manage a smile and she reaches over and touches his palm; it’s cool and dry. ‘I know this is just another way of putting yourself down. You have all this amazing ability, Alex, you just don’t believe in yourself. You were the one who changed my life, remember?’ She tries to sound upbeat and passionate. ‘Not the other way around.’

But he only looks away.

‘Come on, there would be no “ladder”, as you put it, if it weren’t for you. We both know that. Whatever we’ve built we’ve built together – fifty-fifty, equal partners, yes?’

But even as she says it, she knows it isn’t true. Yes, it was Alex who’d encouraged her to go back into school and sit her exams and yes, it had been Alex who coached her and got her through them. They weren’t fifty-fifty then. She’d been a tatty eighteen-year-old living a tatty chaotic life. He was a posh boy working in his father’s business. She’d looked up to him then, admired him even, but now he’d become someone else: a man she lives with and cares for – but the “caring” for him is taking over, the “living” is less partners and more like housemates.

He won’t meet her eye. He moves his hand away, picks up his wine glass and gestures at the room.

‘When you think about it, it was my family—’ She manages to disguise a sigh at the mention of them. ‘—It was my family who forced us into getting this place – Christ, what a dump it was! Do you remember?’ he chuckles.

She does. She remembers being able to look around the upstairs bedroom while standing in the kitchen.

‘The hours and the nights we spent putting in that bloody floor.’ Alex grins. ‘The woodworm, the damp – hammering and sawing by poxy floodlight – you remember all that?’

She nods and a sadness rushes over her. They were happy then.

‘Their hatred, their bloody awful behaviour, forced us all the way out here, and it made us work together, build something together. This house is us, Frankie. It’s our marriage. We’ve moulded it and shaped it and added bits and created it together over the years. We were happy then.’

It’s as though he’s reading her mind. Living here was like stepping out of the real world. The tiny hamlet of Myndnor. Even the name sounded Middle-Earth. The hills sat in a brooding protective ring, the border Marches, separating one country from another: old self from new self, leaving it all behind. She gazes round at the latticed windows, the gorgeous stone floor that she’d lovingly scrubbed for hours on her hands and knees and restored to its pocked and pitted beauty.

‘So would you do it all again?’

‘I know you’re worried.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’ He closes his eyes and takes a long mouthful of wine.

‘We’ve been over