Past Secrets. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ door was still swinging open when Maggie stopped on the threshold, frozen.

      Grey was on the bed, naked and lying underneath a woman, also naked.

      The woman’s hair hung like a silken curtain, erotically half covering a lingerie-model body with a hand-span waist and high, perfect C-cup breasts.

      Three mouths opened in surprise. Maggie twisted her head sideways to try to get the scene to make sense. It was like a clever illustration in a psychoanalyst’s office, a bizarre, mind-bending scene designed to make you question everything you knew: what’s wrong with this picture?

       Well, Doctor, that’s our bed with our duvet tangled up on the floor, and my side table pretty much the way I left it this morning with a book open on it. And there’s the photo of me and Grey outside the cathedral in Barcelona, but in the bed, there’s this strange blonde girl with an unbelievable body arched over my boyfriend who has – well, had – an erection. And there really is no other explanation for this apart from the obvious.

      ‘Maggie, I’m so sorry, I never meant you to see, I wouldn’t hurt you for anything,’ Grey said urgently, wriggling out from under the blonde girl so fast that she squealed.

      Maggie didn’t answer him. She couldn’t. She just stared in disbelief.

      Politicians were supposed to be excellent at wriggling out of embarrassing situations. Perhaps Grey taught that, too, along with analysis of world power structures and globalisation.

      Bile rose in Maggie’s throat and she turned without a word and ran to the tiny cloakroom she’d decorated with such pride. Student. That girl had to be one of Grey’s students. Someone who’d possibly stood in the college library and looked calculatingly at Maggie sitting at the research desk, pleased to realise that her rival was older. Perhaps wondering what Grey saw in thirty-year-old Maggie with her tangle of wild hair when he could have a twenty-one-year-old with a silken mane like a hair commercial, and a va-va-voom figure with the peach-bloom skin of youth.

      Students were always getting crushes on Grey. The two of them joked about it, because it seemed so funny, despite Shona’s stories. Grey was miles away from the image of a fusty academic with woolly hair, badly fitting jackets and mismatched socks. When they had first met, five years previously, when she was finding her feet in the city, Maggie herself had found it hard to believe he held a doctorate in political science. At a start-of-term college party, he’d stood out among the soberly dressed professorial types. He wore jeans, and, around his neck, a couple of narrow leather coils from which hung a piece of obsidian that glittered like his cloudy grey eyes. Maggie had heard of Dr Grey Stanley, a brilliant thinker who’d resisted attempts by various political leaders to advise their parties and who was the author of several widely read articles on the state of the country. Nobody had mentioned how jaw-droppingly handsome he was.

      ‘Hey, Red,’ he’d said, tangling long fingers in the tendrils of her auburn hair. ‘Can I get you a glass of the vinegar that passes for wine round here?’

      Maggie, tomboy extraordinaire whose shoulder-length hair was one of her few concessions to femininity, would normally have given the death glare to any strange guy who dared to touch her. But this man, all heat and masculinity so close to her, made it hard to breathe, never mind shoot murderous glares. She exhaled, suddenly glad she’d worn the black camisole that hung low on her small breasts, the fabric starkly dark against her milky white skin. Her skin was true redhead type, so white it was almost blue, she sometimes joked.

      Grey stared at her as if milky white with a smattering of tiny freckles was his favourite colour combination. The party in a draughty hall on the Coolidge College campus was full of fascinating, clever people with IQs that went off the scale, and he’d chosen her. Even now, no matter how many times Shona told her she was beautiful and that Grey Stanley was lucky to have her, Maggie shook her head in denial. It was the other way round, she knew.

      ‘Maggie…’

      As she slammed the cloakroom door shut and slid the lock, she heard Grey’s anxious voice outside. He rarely called her Red any more. Red was the girl he’d fallen in love with, the feisty redhead who was fiercely independent, who needed nobody in her life, thank you very much. She was so different from the Park Avenue Princesses, she must have struck him as a challenge he couldn’t resist. But five years of coupledom had surgically removed her independence and now, she realised, she had become like a tiger in a zoo: lazily captive and unable to survive in the wild.

      She leaned over the toilet bowl and the cloudy remains of her lunchtime chicken wrap came up. Again and again, she retched until there was nothing left in her except loss and fear.

      She was the old Maggie again, the one who hadn’t yet learned to hide her anxiety under an armour of feistiness. Stupid Maggie who’d never imagined that Grey would cheat on her. Just like Stupid Maggie from years ago. It was a shock to feel like that again. She was so sure she’d left it all behind her. The memory of those years in St Ursula’s, when her life had been one long torment of bullying, came to her. She’d had four years of hell at the hands of the bullies and it had marked her for ever. Now she was right back there – reeling from the shock, sick with fear.

      When she could retch no more, she sank on to the floor. From this unusual vantage point, the bathroom had turned out well, she realised. The colours were so pretty and it was so carefully done. Even Grey had said so.

      ‘You’re wasted in the college library,’ he’d laughed the day she finished it. ‘You should have your own decorating business. The Paint Queen: specialising in no-hope projects. Your dad could consult.’ Grey had seen and admired the planetarium ceiling in her old bedroom in the house on Summer Street.

      ‘Lovely,’ he’d said and joked that her parents were sweetly eccentric despite their outwardly conservative appearance.

      Grey’s parents were both lawyers, now divorced. He’d grown up with money, antiques and housekeepers. She couldn’t imagine his French-cuff-wearing father ever doing something as hands-on as painting stars on the ceiling for his son. Or his mother, she of the perfect blonde bob, professionally blow-dried twice a week, breathlessly explaining about winning €75 in the lottery and planning what she’d do with the money, the way Maggie’s mum had.

      ‘My parents are not eccentric,’ Maggie had told Grey defensively. ‘They’re just enthusiastic, interested in things…’

      ‘I know, honey.’ Grey had been contrite. ‘I love your mum and dad. They’re great.’

      But it occurred to her that Grey had been right. Her parents weren’t worldly or astute. They were endlessly naïve, innocents abroad, and they’d brought her up to be just like them. Blindly trusting.

      She put her head on her knees and tried not to think about anything. Numb the brain. Concentrate on a candle burning. Wasn’t that the trick?

      There was noise outside in the hall, muffled speech, the front door slamming. Grey’s voice, low and anxious, saying: ‘Maggie, come out, please. We should talk, honey.’

      She didn’t reply. He didn’t try to open the door but she was glad it was locked. She had absolutely no idea of what she’d say to him if she saw him. There was silence for a while.

      After half an hour, he returned, sounding harder this time, more lecturer than contrite boyfriend. ‘I’m going out to get us some Thai takeout. You can’t sit in there all night.’

      ‘I can!’ shrieked Maggie, roused to yell at him with an unaccustomed surge of temper. СКАЧАТЬ