Secret Keeping for Beginners Read online

  He’s done it again, thought Natasha. Well, they both had. There was no denying it, they were a great team and their presence on this shoot had probably saved it. And there could be ongoing benefits from that, because Gabriela might specifically request them for future shoots – as so many other supermodels and film stars already did.

  Natasha had grasped right from the start of her career how crucial this aspect of her job was. Photographers, models, art directors and even stylists (but only the very best ones) could be tricky, but one of the make-up artist’s and hairdresser’s crucial roles on a shoot was to keep the talent happy and the mood upbeat, to make everyone’s job easier.

  Just as much as her original ideas and sure hand with a lip brush, Natasha knew a large part of her success was due to a natural disposition to be positive and cheery, no matter how she was feeling inside. She could smile and joke through a hangover, period pains and a broken heart. And she’d had plenty of recent experience with the last one. Two years of it.

  She shook her head quickly to throw that thought off. She wasn’t going to mar her day by allowing that misery in.

  ‘How much longer do you think you’re going to need?’ she asked Joe, who was now taking the rollers out of Gabriela’s hair.

  ‘Well, in light of what you were just saying about the make-up, I think we need to make the hair even bigger and more structured. Like a kind of helmet, so I want to use my really giant rollers.’

  Natasha nodded. ‘That sounds great,’ she said. ‘So, ten minutes?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ said Joe.

  As Natasha turned to leave the room, she saw a small, flustered-looking woman being brought over by one of the photographer’s assistants.

  ‘I think the cavalry’s here,’ Natasha said over her shoulder to Joe, as the woman practically ran into the room, speaking very fast and very loudly in what was definitely Portuguese, judging by Gabriela’s enthusiastic replies.

  She left them to it, wishing she could pop outside for a quick head-clearing walk, but knowing she couldn’t leave her post. The stylist and photographer could appear at any moment to ask what she was planning to do. She was on duty until the very last picture was taken.

  The squashy old sofa against the far wall looked very appealing, but she knew she would fall immediately asleep, so she found a hard chair and pulled it over to an open window. Fresh air, daylight on the pineal gland and plenty of coffee were the best things she could do for her jet lag until she could get some exercise.

  She flicked through some magazines, then scrolled through the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Mail online. Feeling slightly grubby from how much she had enjoyed the latter, she was wondering what to do next, when the obvious struck her: ring her sisters.

  Calls to Tessa’s home phone and mobile went to voicemail, but Natasha didn’t bother leaving any messages because she knew her dreamy eldest sister would never listen to them. She was probably curating an arrangement of birds’ nests, rusty nails and gardening twine on top of a knackered old factory trolley in her sitting room, or adding another tiny bird to one of her endlessly developing murals.

  Tessa was such a talented painter; Natasha just couldn’t understand how she could be happy squandering her gift like that. She’d been doing so well, working for some of the biggest interior decorators in London, before she’d thrown it all in to be a full-time mum in the provinces. It just seemed a terrible waste.

  Maybe having kids could do that to you, thought Natasha, although it didn’t seem to have had the same effect on her other sister, Rachel. She had two and was as ambitious as ever.

  In fact, since she’d separated from her husband, Rachel seemed to have the perfect set-up, thought Natasha. She had the fun and reward of the children, a lovely house in fairly central London, the satisfaction of a successful career – and the freedom of a single woman every other weekend, when the ex had her daughters. She was always asking Natasha for tips about cool hotels and restaurants for her kids-free weekend jaunts to interesting European cities. Rachel had always been an operator – maybe she was the proof you could have it all?

  Natasha decided to send Tessa an email, reminding her of their catch-up that weekend at their mum’s place (dates weren’t one of Tessa’s strong points), and adding that she was really looking forward to seeing her and the boys. Then she sent Rachel a text saying she was in town and asking her to call when she had a spare moment, thinking all the while how she couldn’t wait to spend time with her, Daisy and Ariadne.

  Oh, those gorgeous girls! Natasha felt a wiggle of excitement at the prospect and scrolled through photos of them on her iPad, taken the last time she’d been over. It was only a couple of months, but felt like ages ago, which gave her a sharp pang. After those two miserable years in Brisbane, separated from her sisters, it seemed a horrible repetition of her own emotional history that she now lived so far from her two adored nieces.

  She felt such an intense closeness to them, when they were together. Getting down on the floor with them, playing with Barbies – she could almost pretend they were her daughters. Which was a great blessing, because they were the nearest things to kids of her own that she was ever likely to have.

  Trying to remember what her therapist had told her to do every time that devastating realisation blind-sided her – take deep breaths and hold on to something solid – Natasha didn’t hear her name being called, and Joe came out of the dressing room to find her staring into space, gripping her tablet to her chest.

  ‘Oy, missus,’ he said, ‘wakey wakey. I’ve done my bit for now. It’s your turn to make her look even more beautiful, if that’s possible. Por favor.’

  Natasha leapt to her feet and hurried over to the dressing room. It was time for her to shine – and she was not going to allow herself the luxury of one more negative thought.

  Tunbridge Wells, Kent

  Joy was standing in her hallway staring down at a letter she’d just picked up from her doormat.

  Her practical left brain was telling her she should just open the bloody thing and find out what it was about, but her intuitive, creative right brain – always her dominant lobe – wasn’t ready yet. She needed to calm it down so she could process the contents of this most unexpected delivery with rational detachment.

  But it could be anything, she thought, panic rising, as wild possibilities stampeded into her mind.

  She grasped the rose quartz crystal hanging around her neck with her left hand, closed her eyes and started to breathe in and out through her nose very slowly, carefully leaving the all-important pause after the very last bit of the out breath had left her body. After doing this for ten breaths, she felt her heart rate starting to slow.

  Finally feeling steady enough to move, she carried the letter through to the conservatory and laid it carefully on the coffee table, as though she were handling a volatile explosive device.

  ‘I think we’ll have some tea before we open that, don’t you, Muffin?’ she said to the black-and-white cat who had followed her in and was sitting on the floor beside her.

  He looked up at her with intense golden eyes and let out a single loud meow.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Joy, smiling down at him, ‘you think if I’m having tea, you should have some biscuits, do you? Well, that’s fair enough. Come on.’

  She headed through the sitting room and down into the kitchen with Muffin at her side.

  ‘What do you think that beastly letter might be, Muffie?’ Joy asked him as he sat watching her filling the kettle and taking down a mug. ‘You don’t think it’s anything nasty, do you?’

  Muffin didn’t reply. Not that Joy really expected him to, but she still felt they communicated at some non-verbal level. Either that or she really was just a cat-chatting nutter lady as her daughter Rachel liked to tease her.

  ‘Ah, I think Relaxed Mind is what’s called for,’ said Joy, considering her large array of herbal teas.

  She reached for her glasses, hanging on a cord a
round her neck, and after disentangling them from the various crystal pendants, read the back of the box. ‘Lavender, nettle leaf, chrysanthemum … yes, that should do it.’

  Leaving Muffin to enjoy his biscuits, she carried her tea up to the conservatory and placed the mug on the table next to the letter. After concentrating on her exhalations again for a few breaths while the tea cooled, she took a careful sip, then picked the envelope up and held it in both hands, reading the name at the top of the address again and again.

  ‘Mrs Elsie Lambton (nee Ainsworth)’ it was addressed to, and that was what made the letter so alarming. The Lambton was OK, that had been her first husband’s surname, which her older two daughters had, although Tessa had changed hers when she got married. Rachel, characteristically, had not. But the other two names made her shiver.

  She hadn’t seen ‘Elsie Ainsworth’ written down for about fifty years, although it had once been her name. She hadn’t had contact with anyone who had known her by it since she left home in 1960. There was nobody in her life now who knew she’d been christened Elsie, rather than Joy. Certainly not her daughters.

  She’d taken on her new first name, which she had felt was far more appropriate for her personality and the life she intended to have, when she’d moved to London, aged nineteen. No one had known her as anything but Joy since.

  Well, Robert, her first husband, had known for the marriage certificate and all that, but he’d been happy to forget it. ‘Elsie’ didn’t fit in with the image he wanted for his glamorous young Westminster wife, any more than it did for the woman herself and on his advice, she’d changed it legally, by deed poll.

  Then, as her estranged parents had both died not long after and she’d long ago lost touch with any extended family, there were no complicating relatives to call her by the appalling Elsie, or remind her of the unhappy years she’d been forced to live with that name.

  Elsie Ainsworth had died quietly in 1960 as far as Joy was concerned, along with every other aspect of her religiously repressed, penny-pinched, educationally inadequate, emotionally retarded childhood. Goodbye and namaste.

  So it was Joy Younger – the new surname a very lucky addition from her second husband – who finally took a deep breath and slit the envelope open with a sword-shaped, silver-plated letter opener, which had been on her first husband’s desk when he was an MP.

  This seemed appropriate as soon as she saw the address at the top; the letter was from the firm of solicitors who had looked after his affairs all those years ago. Wilkins, Harald & Held wasn’t a name you forgot. Especially as her dealings with them at the time had been so distressing.

  It had been a terrible shock when Robert had died of a sudden catastrophic heart attack, aged just forty-seven, made even worse when she had found out, in the very offices this letter was from, that he had left her far less money than she would have expected. In fact, he was in quite serious debt. With two young children to care for, the whole experience had been very traumatic.

  Had it not been for a Labour Party emergency fund for political widows in financial straits, Joy wondered what would have happened to them. Although, she reminded herself, leaning back against the sofa cushion, there are valuable lessons to learn from every difficulty.

  It was the urgent need to feed her daughters well on very little money which had led to frequent visits to her local wholefood shop, because beans and lentils were the cheapest form of protein. She’d started working shifts there, then making pies and tarts to sell in it and from that had come her career as a vegetarian caterer, which had provided her with an income for many years.

  It had also brought her the great love of her life. She’d met her second husband, Natasha’s father, Tony Younger, doing the food for a party given by one of his artist friends. He’d complimented her on her baba ganoush and that had been the start of a very happy time, with her catering business transferring seamlessly over to her new life with him in Brisbane.

  And, of course, she reflected, taking some more sips of her herbal tea, her interest in vegetarianism had only come about because she’d been so unhappy as a child. If her father hadn’t been such an angry man, who resented his only child for being female, she wouldn’t have spent so much time in the town library, where a kind librarian had noticed the eager girl who came in every Saturday for a new pile of books and positively encouraged the young Elsie to think of the place as her own.

  Browsing in non-fiction one day she’d come across books about yoga and diet which had shaped her whole life, and been the cause of many more conflicts with her father, who thought such interests were scandalously irreligious.

  She still had the copy of Indra Devi’s Forever Young, Forever Healthy, which she’d bought with her first pay packet when she’d started her new life, as Joy, in London. Closing her eyes, she could clearly remember her excited shyness going into Foyles for the first time to find the book. She could hear the tap of her stiletto heels on the lino floor, smell the dusty atmosphere … when Muffin suddenly jumped up onto her lap and she was snapped back into the present moment, just saving her hot tea from spilling everywhere.

  Her heart sank. The letter. The envelope was open and she knew who it was from but she just couldn’t bring herself to read it. Why on earth were those lawyers contacting her now? It was decades since she’d last had any contact with them. She sat up straight with alarm as she realised that it was now exactly forty years since Robert had died – was the letter something to do with that?

  For a moment she was terrified it was to take away the one useful thing he had left her, this house, which she’d had the good sense to hold on to and rent out when they’d moved to Australia. That money had given her the freedom to fly back to the UK when it had gone sadly wrong with Tony and she’d lived there ever since, with a lovely big kitchen for her catering and plenty of room for lodgers, when she needed extra money.

  Once again her rational brain was telling her there was no way that could be what the letter was about, because she owned the house, it was in her name, end of story – but she just couldn’t stop her imagination spinning out of control.

  Just as clearly as she’d seen her young self, she could now picture a homeless old lady wheeling a shopping trolley festooned with bulging Waitrose carrier bags around Tunbridge Wells. Oh, that’s Joy. She’s harmless, poor old duck. Had a beautiful house once, such a sad story.

  Even as she was imagining that, other possible reasons for the letter crowded into her mind. Things she really didn’t want to think about. Take charge, Joy Younger, she told herself and visualised herself as a warrior woman, upper arms bulging with muscles, batting the thoughts away with her shield and sword. Thwack! Thwack!

  Her mind cleared of unwanted concepts – she’d worked on that technique for years – Joy let her head drop back again, staring up at the blue sky through the glass conservatory roof, puffy white clouds moving swiftly across it. What to do? she asked the universe. What to do?

  She knew the ‘sensible’ thing would be just to read the bloody letter and get it over with, but Joy didn’t really do sensible, it was too bound up with the materialistic world of form. She liked to function at a higher energetic level, and she knew an object such as a letter from a solicitor from way back in her unhappy past couldn’t possibly bring anything but negativity into her lovely simple and contented present life.

  Anything to do with the law equalled aggravation. Her time as an MP’s wife had taught her that. And a thorough reading of Dickens in that life-saving library.

  Still gazing up, mesmerised by the moving sky, she could have nodded off, but Muffin nuzzled her arm with his head, snapping her back to attention.

  ‘You’re quite right, Muffie,’ she said, ‘I need to do something, don’t I? Not just sit here, inert.’

  So she put her glasses back on, pulled out the letter and looked at the letterhead again. Immediately an idea occurred to her.

  ‘Perhaps it’s some kind of practical joke,’ she said out loud. O
r a con trick – she’d heard about those letters from people in Nigeria telling you they needed your bank account details so you could be paid a huge lottery prize.

  She still couldn’t imagine who else, apart from these lawyers, knew Elsie Ainsworth had been her birth name, but it did make sense to check the letter was genuine.

  After a moment’s pause stroking one of Muffin’s silky ears, as he purred in loud approval, she picked up the phone and rang directory enquiries asking for the number of Wilkins, Harald & Held, solicitors, London SW1.

  The one they gave her was the same as the number on the letter, so after thanking the nice young man who’d given her the information, she rang it, her right hand finding her rose quartz again and holding on to it tightly.

  The phone was answered immediately by a woman’s voice, saying: ‘Wilkins, Harald & Held, how can I help you?’

  Joy quickly pressed the button to disconnect the call and let her hands fall into her lap, still holding the phone.

  How unsettling on a sunny Monday morning when you’d been planning to go to yoga as usual, have a cuppa with one of the girls after, and then spend an afternoon in the garden. All the pots needed attention.

  ‘I think I need some help with this, Mr Muff,’ she said.

  She stood up and went into the sitting room, blinking for a moment as her eyes adjusted to the dark after the brightness of the conservatory. She walked over to the bookcase on the wall opposite the fireplace and took three joss sticks out of a box on the shelf.

  After lighting them and blowing out the flame, she placed them in a small holder in front of a large bronze statue of Buddha, the smoke curling up from the glowing embers at the tips.

  She stepped back, then reached down to grab her right ankle, pulling up her leg and bracing it against the inner thigh of the other one. Then, after putting her hands into the prayer position against her heart, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  ‘Oooooohhhhmmmmmm …’ she chanted, as she breathed out and Muffin took his place next to her, sitting perfectly still, like a chubbier version of a cat statue in an Egyptian tomb.