Hush Hush Read online

  Hush Hush

  Gabrielle Mullarkey

  Copyright © Gabrielle Mullarkey 1999, 2014

  This edition first published by Corazon Books 2014

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  www.greatstorieswithheart.com

  First published 1999

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for the enjoyment of the purchaser only. To share this ebook you must purchase an additional copy per recipient. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Also by Gabrielle Mullarkey

  Coming in spring 2015

  A Tale of Two Sisters

  Keep up to date with Gabrielle by reading her blog at www.gabriellemullarkey.co.uk

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Preview: Do You Take This Man?

  Preview: The Property of a Gentleman

  Preview: Lily’s Daughter

  Chapter One

  ‘Who is it?’ called Angela, teabag poised over cup.

  ‘It’s me!’ yelled Rachel through the letterbox. ‘When are you getting your doorbell fixed?’

  Angela poked her head out of the kitchen and into the hallway. Rachel’s pursed lips were framed on a canvas of blue air beyond the raised letterbox.

  ‘Hang on, Rache, I’m coming. You’re gusting in a freezing draught.’

  Rachel hurried in, making exaggerated ‘brrh!’ noises. She was wearing a cream cashmere coat, a soft woollen scarf in rich baroque colours slung with casual care over both shoulders.

  Since Robert’s death, Angela had found Rachel’s friendship both a tonic and a trial. Woman to woman, Rachel was sensitive to Angela’s loss. But all her adult life, she herself had been resolutely single, with no discernible need for permanent male companionship.

  Robert had only been gone a year and a bit. But one day soon, Angela half-feared, Rachel would launch a rearguard action, employing phrases like ‘It’s time to move on’ or even ‘Mothball those widow’s weeds, Ange! I know a bloke who’s dying to meet you.’

  They’d been friends since meeting at school, loosely united by the local mark of Cain ‒ Catholicism ‒ at Wilmesbury girls’ grammar, where black or Asian pupils were an exotic rarity, let alone Papists. Rachel’s parents were posh, English Catholics, Angela’s the less historically fortunate Irish immigrant variety. Even among Rachel’s family, Angela had felt like an interloper.

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked Rachel in the kitchen, unwinding her scarf. ‘Having a stick-your-head-in-the-oven sort of week, or a mustn’t-grumble-could-be-worse sort of week?’ She knew Angela well.

  ‘Somewhere in between,’ admitted Angela. ‘Mum’s been on at me to smarten up my act and go back to work.’

  ‘Well,’ began Rachel carefully, ‘why don’t you? I’m not suggesting you brave the fleshpots of London just yet. But how about temping locally?’

  Angela slurped her tea. ‘Work-wise, I feel a bit rusty after four years out of the rat race.’

  ‘You never forget. It’s like riding a bike. Or sex.’

  Hastily, Angela changed the subject. ‘I was hoping you’d come round to requisition me for mini-market duties. I could make a few quiches or wotnot.’

  Each March, the church held a fête-cum-rummage-sale in the playground of the RC primary school, to raise money for CAFOD. Rachel had long been a stalwart stall-runner, organising a second-hand clothes stall with the same ease and dedication she applied to her job as an occupational therapist at Wilmesbury General Hospital.

  Angela’s mini-market role had always been peripheral. She guessed cake weights and bought bric-a-brac in the belief it was as blessed to spend as to get stuck in. Buying stuff at Rachel’s stall was always a genuine pleasure. Many of the cast-offs came from Rachel’s own wardrobe, which was infinitely superior to Angela’s.

  ‘Hands-on help is always appreciated,’ smiled Rachel noncommittally. ‘Don’t slog your guts out making quiches, Ange. After the year you’ve had, no one expects …’

  ‘… the Spanish Inquisition,’ muttered Angela, slumping inwardly. She was thinking of her mother ‒ again. She couldn’t help it.

  Mother and daughter were still recovering from the ordeal of Christmas Day, spent at Sadie’s. Angela had cried a lot. It was her first Christmas without Robert. Sadie had been alternately soothing and helpless. During Angela’s worst blubfest, post-sherry and pre-Queen’s speech, Sadie had worn the look of a rabbit trapped in car headlights, albeit a rabbit wearing a star-spangled paper crown.

  ‘Anyway, I’m off,’ announced Rachel, draining the last of her tea. ‘I only popped in on my way to the ossie. There’s a job going there, you know. Secretary to three of the consultants. Can I tempt madam?’

  Angela gulped. ‘To be honest, I’ve already made moves on the job front,’ she lied feebly.

  ‘Ooh!’ Rachel looked up eagerly. ‘Anything doing?’

  Angela tried to look mysterious and thoughtful. ‘I’ve applied for a couple of jobs I saw on The Guardian website this week. Thought I’d give the old sub-editing in London another try. The money’s better than temping.’

  ‘Good for you!’ grinned Rachel. ‘I know you hate London, but you might be right to get out of Wilmesbury on a day-to-day basis. I knew you could do it, Ange!’

  Her encouraging shoulder-squeeze made Angela feel mortally depressed. She did dip into ‘Media Jobs’ on The Guardian website from time to time, but mostly as a guilt-induced antidote to searching for surf-boarding cats. Now she’d probably have to invent at least one interview and endure Rachel’s sympathy when nothing came of it.

  Rachel didn’t know exactly why Angela hated London. Angela hadn’t worked for the past four years. Not since the ‘incident’ on the Underground ‒ at Tufnell Park on the Northern Line, to be precise. As assistant manager of Hartley’s, the travel agency in the High Street, Robert had earned enough to keep both of them in non-luxurious comfort.

  Despite his playfully rotund features, Robert hadn’t been an obvious heart attack candidate. He’d walked briskly to and from work. He’d been spared the early morning scrum over the footbridge at Wilmesbury station for the half-hour train journey to Victoria that had normally taken Angela an hour.

  After giving up work, she’d found it surprisingly easy to fill her days. She’d cooked meals for the first time in their marriage ‒ proper meals instead of frozen blocks slung in the microwave. She wasn’t much of a cook, but Robert had appreciated the gesture of real mashed potato and pan-fried cutlets after a hard day accommodating punters with unrealistic expectations: ‘they want sunsets and private butlers on tap for the price of a last-minute room-filler to the Costas,’ he’d sigh, sawing into his cutlet, and she’d tsk loyally while itching to say that half the time, people set their expectations too low. Wasn’t she a case in point?

  She had done some GCSE English tuition, helping out a couple of kids as a favour to their parents. They’d waved away her protestatio
ns that she wasn’t a teacher. She’d had a job checking the English on a women’s magazine, hadn’t she? That was good enough. She and Robert had been so lucky that, in retrospect, it couldn’t have lasted.

  With Rachel finally on her way to work, Angela sat down on her saggy green sofa and cried.

  It wasn’t as if she had nothing to do. The saggy green suite needed replacing. But she didn’t have the money to replace things willy-nilly.

  Robert had died suddenly, nine years and six months into his latest job, without qualifying for the company’s ten-year pension plan. As a couple, they’d never squirrelled away for rainy days. It wasn’t that they’d thought themselves invincible. It was simply that time seemed infinite and money better spent when you were a late-thirties couple with no children and no intention of having any.

  Drying her eyes, Angela looked around the room. The whole place was a bit tatty. On the far wall, the white undercoat glimmered through a thinning top layer of buttercream. The tacky painting over the fireplace gazed back at her, the Spanish urchin’s fat crocodile tear glistening on his cheek like a crystalline wart. Robert had snapped it up at a house clearance. Angela had always hated it.

  Maybe Sadie could give her a few pennywise redecorating tips. Sadie was always discovering stuff in skips. Only this month, she’d rescued a claw-footed chair and reupholstered it in rose-striped silk. ‘What do you think?’ she’d asked Angela, unveiling the chair on a recent visit.

  ‘Lovely. Chippendale is it?’ Angela couldn’t refrain from asking.

  Sadie had given her A Look. ‘It’s not for sitting on, mind. It couldn’t take your weight.’ This was more to do with woodworm than Angela’s dimensions. She was a skinny creature anyway, just like her mother.

  Angela decided to make a sandwich, but found the breadbin empty. She blew her nose self-pityingly. She had nothing to do all day, and still couldn’t keep the breadbin stocked. The kitchen cupboards yielded a stock cube and a tin of curried beans. She emptied the tin into a saucepan and sniffed suspiciously. Curry powder and baked beans seemed an unnecessarily explosive combination. ‘Ingredients,’ she read out loud on the back of the tin, ‘starch, emulsifier, added sugar.’

  Her mother’s daughter, she tsked disapprovingly. Sugar was the preservative, no doubt. Sadie would’ve recommended straining out the sauce altogether, wherein lurked the dreaded sugar. But that was not Angela’s way. In fact, she now felt determined to mop up every last drop of sauce with ‒ the stock cube? Damn. She’d forgotten she had no bread. Memory like a sieve, she recalled belatedly. I don’t have a sieve, either.

  Sadie had those artful ways of mending and making do ‒ boiling up soup out of chicken bones, stitching old bra cups into her bathing costume to make it last longer when the Lycra sagged ‒ that were beyond Angela, child of the throwaway society. Sadie was proud of the fact that back in rural County Clare in the 1950s, family members wasted not and wanted not by sharing each other’s dentures, spectacles and bath water. When Angela’s father died, Sadie had appropriated his reading glasses. Angela found this ghoulish.

  Sadie rang while Angela was eating her congealed beans.

  ‘Hello, Ma,’ said Angela cautiously.

  Angela loved Sadie. But it was a gift of love wrapped up in a thorny package of resentful childhood memories and dishonourable teenhood defeats. Added to this was guilt. Guilt that any half-decent daughter should love her mother unreservedly. Guilt that Sadie, the strong one for so long, was growing frail, and Angela was trying not to notice. Anyway, it wasn’t fair. As a healthy, hearty, overstrict mother, Sadie had held the whip-hand. She wasn’t getting the upper hand again, by virtue of an age and frailty that warranted respect and making allowances.

  ‘Now then, Angela,’ began Sadie. She had a low, growly, radio voice, lent added attractiveness by an Irish burr. ‘Rachel told me you’ve got a job.’

  ‘Bloody hell, that didn’t take long!’ exploded Angela ‒ and not from curried beans. ‘Talk about Chinese whispers. Rache only left here five minutes ago. That was fast work, even for you two.’

  ‘Rachel was passing the bus-stop and gave me a lift home,’ replied Sadie mildly. ‘So have you got a job or not? Why tell her you had if you haven’t?’

  ‘I didn’t! I said I was putting out feelers.’

  Sadie waited.

  ‘About sub-editing back on a women’s mag in London,’ growled Angela. ‘And actually ‒ you might as well know ‒ I got an offer this morning. I didn’t tell Rachel or even you, because I was weighing up the pros and cons.’

  Sadie’s bottom teeth did a little castanet dance of excitement. ‘What’s to weigh up, lovey? It’ll do you the world of good to go back to work. Help take your mind off the last terrible year, and the money’s a bonus, of course.’

  In her house on the other side of Wilmesbury, Sadie grimaced at herself in the hallway mirror. She usually got foot-in-mouth disease talking to Angela. She sensed Angela’s tense expectation of being insulted, however obliquely, and her responding nervousness usually obliged.

  ‘Which magazine is it?’ asked Sadie humbly.

  ‘Er ‒ well ‒ oh God, my saucepan is boiling over, Mum. I’ll have to go.’

  ‘I’ll wait while you turn it down.’

  Angela clattered the receiver onto the table and glared at it. Bloody hell, now what? She had to think fast.

  She picked up the phone again. ‘It’s a new launch,’ she said weakly. ‘So everything’s hush-hush. I can’t even tell you the title until the first issue hits the stands. I haven’t got an exact start date, either.’

  ‘OK, lovey.’ If Sadie smelt a rat, she was playing it deadpan. ‘How about meeting up in town tomorrow for lunch? My treat, to celebrate your new job. I’m so proud of you! After all the ups and downs since Robert.’ She honked emotionally into a hanky. ‘Would you like that, Ange?’

  ‘Er ‒ great,’ said Angela, feeling sick. ‘I’ll meet you outside Baggio’s at one. Gotta go now. See ya.’

  ‘Wait! And after lunch, I thought we’d look in the sale at DFS. Now don’t argue, Angela. You need a new suite, and now you’re earning … earning properly again, I mean … look, I know it’s horrible throwing out stuff you chose together as a couple. Kind of a reminder you’re moving on without him. Everything’s tough, I know, when you’re not long widowed.’

  Practically chewing the phone in her desire to escape, Angela tensed. She translated ‘not long widowed’ as ‘not able to cope.’ Was Sadie implying that she’d never catch up with her in the coping with widowhood stakes?

  Well, Sadie had a five-year head start. Also, she’d been widowed at sixty-two when, reflected Angela, you were psychologically prepared, however subconsciously, for the sudden cull of your life partner.

  ‘Interior design has been low on my list of priorities,’ sniffed Angela. ‘But I am prepared to refocus on the petty trivia of life. Suede or mock suede? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the wallet to go for a colour that hides stains or just buy bigger cushions.’

  ‘Don’t be sarky, Ange.’ Angela could hear real hurt in Sadie’s voice. Straightforward abuse she understood. Sarcasm she did not.

  ‘Sorry, Ma,’ said Angela sincerely. ‘I’d genuinely appreciate you casting a critical eye over the stuff in DFS. See you tomorrow.’

  They hung up, mutually frustrated by the conversation.

  Angela scoured her bean-studded saucepan, wishing she could wipe out her lie about the job just as thoroughly. Somehow, Sadie had forced her into it ‒ ringing up, all agog, practically demanding that she’d got herself a job! Oh hell, thought Angela, wringing her scouring pad instead of her hands. That won’t wash. It’s my fault. Mum asked me a perfectly direct question and I fluffed it.

  She put the clean saucepan back in the cupboard and sat down in the darkening kitchen. She liked to sit in the dark a lot. Night was the perfect cover for minute self-analysis. Basically, where Sadie was concerned, Angela was a really thick lab rat. No matter how many times s
he reached the heart of the maze, she never made the connection between the electric shock and reaching for the cheese.

  Sadie filled a bowl with cat food and dropped it on the kitchen floor. She didn’t trust herself to bend from the waist. She might stick there, like those petrified people from Pompeii. Consequently, when the bowl fell to the floor, it wobbled like a tired whipping top and dark chunks of tuna-with-rabbit hopped onto the tiles.

  Binky slunk in and nosed the escaped morsels fastidiously. He looked up at Sadie, awarding nul points for presentation.

  ‘You know, she’s getting back on track,’ Sadie told him. ‘She did enough crying on Christmas Day to irrigate Africa, but they say you have to cry it out before you work it out.’ Sadie paused, unwilling to relive her own bereavement. ‘Anyway, point is, she’s turned the corner. Now, if she could find a nice man to look after her. I know, I know,’ she muttered guiltily, as Binky looked at her again. She’d learnt to invest Binky’s single expression with all the nuances pertinent to his role as devil’s advocate. ‘Robert’s only a year dead. But if she waits too long, she’ll be forty before she knows it. And I read somewhere, a woman can forget it after forty. Even men who are out there second time around have been snapped up. Still, she might meet someone in this new job.’

  It was unusually secretive of Angela to apply for a job without a hint of her intentions. Maybe all those tears on Christmas Day had bucked her into a new year’s resolution to start over. Good for her!

  Sadie herself had felt pretty tearful on Christmas Day. Fenton wasn’t there to make familiar jokes about her lumpy gravy, while Owen rang briefly on a scratchy line from Canada and sounded indecently happy not to be in Wilmesbury. She’d grieved for Robert because Angela was breaking her heart over him. She’d always thought Robert a nice, unremarkable man.

  But even on their wedding day, a sneaky little serpent had bedded down in Sadie’s bosom, hissing its certainty that Angela could’ve done better. Now, of course, Robert was beatified by untimely death. But the serpent went on hissing softly, no louder than waves brushing shingle. His death gave her a second chance.