SECRETS    

Charlotte Betts

Secrets. We all have them, don’t we? And sometimes, just when you think you have run away from them forever, they come back. Am I happy? Contented, certainly. And safe.

I like the routine of the days, living and working in a boarding school. I haven’t been blessed, or cursed, with children but I take a great deal of satisfaction in supervising the care of other people’s offspring. New boarders can be scared and lonely and I understand as well as any what it feels like to be a frightened child.

Holmewood School sits on the top of a hill in one of the wealthier parts of Surrey and my husband David, the headmaster, prides himself on traditional values.

“The greatest satisfaction in life, Mary,” he says, every July, “is launching a new batch of responsible citizens into the world.”

I always participate in parent and pupil interviews since David depends upon my judgement for ‘the emotional stuff’ and there was nothing to warn me on that sunny May morning that my past was about to rise up and threaten everything I now hold dear. I knocked on David’s study door and went straight in, placing a tray of coffee and chocolate digestives on his desk.

“Mary, this is Mr and Mrs Harrington and their daughter Marianne.”

I greeted Mrs Harrington, slim and blonde, smiled reassuringly at Marianne, wide-eyed and mildly anxious. Then I turned towards Mr Harrington. I shook his hand, met his eyes and caught my breath. Suddenly it was 1978 and I was fifteen again. Then, I wasn’t Mary but Amaris, which means Child of the Moon.

 

My mother and I arrived at the commune one June day when I was four. I remember standing on the cliff top overlooking Polgwenn Bay with the wild Cornish wind whipping my hair into tangles and a bubble of joy growing in my chest. Mum snatched my hand and we ran laughing down the cliff path, skittering and sliding on loose stones until we landed on the sandy beach in a breathless heap.

“Free! Free at last! We’re never going back!” she said, her eyes as blue as the ocean behind her.

We paddled in the foaming sea until our feet were as crinkled as the patterns left in the tide-drawn sand and then climbed back up the cliff path to where we’d left our rucksack hidden under a bramble bush. Sitting on the tussocky grass in the hot sun we ate our lunch; sardine sandwiches and bananas so ripe they smelt of the nail varnish Mum used on her toes.

We could see the commune a little way inland. Grey stone and whitewashed buildings with slate roofs huddled into the landscape. Our future home. Mum brushed the crumbs from her tie-dyed skirt and stood up.

“Time to meet our new family,” she said.

Dylan welcomed us and instructed us in the ways of the commune. “We cannot escape our Karmic responsibilities and must live our lives in balance and harmony,” he said. That night, on the moonlit beach, I was renamed Amaris and my mother became Summer.

There was a slow rhythm to life in the commune as different from the pinched routine we had left behind in Aunt Judith’s narrow inner-city terrace as home-baked bread is to Mother’s Pride. We rose with the sun and worked in the vegetable garden, tended the bees and made strawberry jam and damson chutney. The people in the town looked askance at us when we went into the local market to sell our produce and but they left us alone. The children ran free and no one ever made them scrub their fingernails or asked them who their father was.

Sometimes it rained and the crops were spoiled but then we’d sit in a circle in the barn and chant, sending out love vibrations to every living thing, taking our minds off our hunger. I tired of lentil soup but I never tired of listening to Dylan playing his guitar while Summer sang yearning folk songs accompanied by the drumming of the rain on the roof. In the winter we spun wool, ground the flour and the grown ups made love by firelight.

In the spring I was fifteen, London came to join us. He had a slow, easy smile that made me melt. A couple of years older than me, he wore a tie-dyed headband and seemed immensely sophisticated since he’d spent a year with the Flower Children in Oregon. Ziggy, the leader of the Oregon commune had named him London, since that was where he came from. Later, London and I laughed together as he confessed that it was only by luck that Ziggy hadn’t named him Peckham.

I’ll never forget that summer; the long summer I first knew love. It totally consumed me. Perhaps first love is always like that, the leaping of the heart, the loss of appetite, the joy and the despair? When, at last, London kissed me I thought I’d explode like a shaken lemonade bottle.

The day it happened, the terrible secret thing I have never spoken of, I’d gone alone to the cliffs, to where the best blackberry bushes grew. I can still visualise my purple-stained fingers as I reached out to a heavily laden stem blowing in the wind right at the edge of the cliff top. Stretching, stretching, the blue sea below crashed white foam onto the rocks.

Suddenly, an iron band tightened around my waist and I was dragged backwards, the breath squeezed out of me.

“You want to be careful,” said the man. “It’s a long way down.” He lifted my hand and studied my stained fingers. “Sweet,” he said and put my finger into his mouth to suck the juice.

I snatched my hand away. I’d seen him before, eyeing the women when we went to the market.

“Your lips are the colour of berries,” he said. “Bet they taste sweet, too.” He came at me, his wet mouth clamping down hard on mine and his hands scrabbling at my breast, lifting my skirt.

I forced my head away and screamed. Over his shoulder I saw Summer running along the cliff path, her plaits flying and her patchwork skirt whirling. London was sprinting along some way behind her. I screamed again as the man pushed his hand between my thighs. His eyes burned with lust. Then Summer was there, shrieking and hitting him with clenched fists. He bellowed, let go of me and swung a punch at her. I saw her eyes open wide and her arms reach out for me as she rocked backwards and forwards before slowly, oh so slowly, falling back. I caught the faint scent of her patchouli oil mixed with the salty tang of the ocean. The next second she wasn’t there.

I blinked. She still wasn’t there. Dread made me whimper as I peered over the cliff edge. Far below Summer lay spread-eagled on the rocks, the sea running red. I opened my mouth and howled a primitive cry of terror and loss. The man turned to stare at me, panting.

“You bastard!” I screamed. “You killed my mother!” I flew at him, raking his face with my nails and gouging at his eyes. He put up an arm to hit me. I ducked and head butted him in the stomach. The breath left him with a whoosh and then he was teetering on the cliff edge. He snatched wildly at the bramble bush and fell backwards into the void.

I can’t excuse what I did next. Sobbing, I stole a glance over the cliff, expecting to see him on the rocks. He wasn’t there. Suddenly, a hand snatched at my ankle. He was hanging there below me, clinging onto the bush, his feet scrabbling at the cliff face and his nose bubbling with snot as he pleaded with me to help him. What I did was to bend down and pick up a rock as big as a bible and drop it on his head. He let go of my ankle.

“Amaris!” London ran the last few yards towards me, his chest heaving. “Oh God, Amaris, I thought he was going to kill you!”

“I killed him,” I said.

London held me until I had no sobs left. Then he wiped my tears away with his thumb and kissed me. “You’ll have to go,” he said. “Go far away.”

And I did.

 

 

“Coffee?” I asked, my trembling hand clattering the cafetière against the cup.

“Thank you,” murmured Mr Harrington, turning to smile encouragingly at his daughter.

London hadn’t seen me. London hadn’t seen me! There had been no reaction at all to my suppressed gasp. He had no idea who I was. But then, why would he? Nothing would make Mr Harrington connect a leggy fifteen year old with a plump forty-three year old headmaster’s wife in sensible shoes. I was quite safe.

By the end of the meeting I’d regained my equilibrium and when David asked me if I’d take the Harringtons on the school tour I was happy to oblige. We walked the playing fields, saw the art room and the language laboratories and inspected the dining room and the study bedrooms. I slipped right back into being the perfect headmaster’s perfect wife and obliterated all memories of thirty year old secrets. No one remembered them but me.

At the end of the tour I walked the Harringtons back to their car. Like a good husband and father, Mr Harrington opened the passenger door for his wife and then checked that Marianne had done up her seat belt.

 “So nice to have met you,” I said in my headmaster’s wife’s voice.

We shook hands.

He smiled; a slow, easy smile, still holding my hand. “Perhaps you should know,” he said, “my daughter’s name isn’t really Marianne.”

“Oh?”

“My wife doesn’t like Marianne’s given name; thinks it’s too fanciful. But I insisted on it.” He shrugged. “I called my daughter after someone I once loved. Marianne’s real name is Amaris. It means Child of the Moon.” He squeezed my hand, smiled his easy smile again and drove away.