Past Secrets Read online

  While James got on with Tommy, Christie found that she got on pretty well with Laurie Henderson. Tom and Laurie had three sons around Shane and Ethan’s ages, and Laurie had worked outside the home for most of her life too, so she and Christie had reached the same stages in their lives together. Therefore, when Tommy Henderson hit sixty and a big party was to be held in the Hendersons’ back garden, it was natural that the Devlins should be the first on the list.

  ‘I’m not really in the mood to go,’ said Christie as they pottered about their bedroom getting ready.

  ‘You’ll change your mind when you get there,’ said James soothingly. ‘It’ll be fun. There’ll be loads of people you’ll know.’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ said Christie, with irritation. ‘I’m not in the mood to talk to the same old people.’

  James stopped putting in his cuff links and began to massage her neck tenderly. For once, it didn’t instantly relax her. ‘You are tense, Christie,’ he said. ‘Is everything OK, darling? Do you have a headache?’

  ‘No,’ said Christie, slightly crossly. ‘I don’t, I’m just tired, that’s all.’

  Being tired was the ultimate excuse for everything, wasn’t it? Any bad behaviour could be excused with ‘I’m sorry, I was just tired.’ I’m sorry, your honour, I didn’t mean to steal a million pounds, I was just tired. I’m sorry, darling, I didn’t mean to cheat on you with another man, I was just tired.

  She turned to face James. ‘I am sorry for moaning. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Good,’ said James, pleased. ‘It’ll be fun. You got flowers, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Christie.

  ‘I’ll find a bottle of wine and we’re all set.’

  James finished getting ready, a job that took perhaps seven or eight minutes, and he was gone, leaving Christie sitting at her dressing table, staring at herself in the mirror, wondering if guilt was written all across her face.

  They got there a bit late and the fun had obviously started.

  ‘So you decided to grace us with your presence?’ beamed Tommy Henderson, at the front door.

  He threw an arm around James and Christie and pulled them together in a giant bear hug.

  ‘So glad you could come,’ he said.

  ‘We only came for the free drink and the free food,’ joked James.

  ‘Free drink? You mean you didn’t bring your own?’ demanded Tommy. ‘You lousers, I never had you down as mean, James Devlin.’

  And the two men were off, joking, teasing, laughing, James asking what fabulous motorbike Tommy had got for his birthday from the family and Tommy jovially explaining that they hadn’t got him a bike at all, but a girlfriend in a flat. ‘That’s what every man needs when he hits sixty,’ he said. ‘The wife thinks it’s a brilliant idea too. No more messing about giving me my conjugals!’

  The two men roared with laughter and Christie tried to join in, half-heartedly. She was so fond of Tommy and normally loved his palace jester persona, but not tonight.

  The party was set up in the garden and it seemed as if half of Summer Street were there, talking, chattering animatedly, laughing, drinking, spearing bits of chicken into dip, discussing house prices, what their children were up to, what their children weren’t up to and, of course, what the developers planned to do to the Summer Street park.

  ‘I was at the meeting you know,’ said one woman, ‘and Una Maguire suggested a petition, but really a petition isn’t the way to go. No council are going to be moved by a load of names on a list. Her daughter, Maggie, is taking it over, she’s chairwoman. Clever girl, I always say, quiet though. I think there was some problem with her and the boyfriend, you know.’

  Christie moved on, irritated by this gossipy attitude to Maggie. She must be growing old, she thought. So many things irritated her now. Some stranger, who barely knew Maggie, talking about her life and her pain, as if it didn’t matter a bit. There was probably lots of gossip about Faye and Amber too. How the ultra-private and conservative Faye Reid hadn’t a clue what was really going on in her house and what a wild one that Amber had turned out to be, for all her nice manners and the way her mother had tried to bring her up.

  Christie moved over to where Laurie was holding court, wondering if in a few weeks the neighbours would be able to talk about her.

  Did you hear about Christie Devlin, the most incredible news ever. Split up with that lovely husband of hers, I always said he was too good for her. She was a bit wild and arty really, despite her airs and graces and reputation for wisdom. Hem, if she was that wise she might have seen this one coming. Imagine, some story about a Polish artist who painted her in the nude. He’s filthy rich apparently. Disgraceful. Goes to show you don’t know people, do you? You can live beside them for thirty years and you haven’t a clue what’s going on in their lives.

  ‘Christie, how lovely to see you.’ Laurie moved away from the group of people she was talking to, reached out, and gave Christie a genuine, welcoming hug. There was nothing two-faced about Laurie. She wouldn’t gossip about Christie, no matter what happened.

  ‘Sorry we’re late,’ said Christie. ‘I’m a bit tired and I couldn’t get ready, to be truthful.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ soothed Laurie. One of the many nice things about Laurie was that she wasn’t the sort of person with whom you had to pretend. ‘Come and let me introduce you to my sister-in-law, Beth. You met before I think? She’s a teacher too, and a gardener, you’ll have a lot to talk about.’

  Christie smiled gratefully at Laurie.

  Mercifully, Laurie’s sister-in-law wasn’t an art teacher, so there was no conversation about new, exciting exhibitions by enigmatic Polish artists who painted nude, dark-haired women over the past twenty-five years. She was an English teacher and they enjoyed a highly pleasurable hour talking about the difficulties of teaching, how hard the exams were on the students and how schools had changed so much over the past few decades.

  ‘Oh, look,’ said Beth.

  Laurie had wheeled in a hostess trolley with an enormous cake on top. For pure fun, she hadn’t gone for the one big candle saying happy sixtieth: she’d gone the whole hog with sixty single candles blazing with heat and possibly visible from space.

  ‘There’s a lot of candles there. Is it your ninetieth, did you say, Tommy?’ said one wag.

  ‘Call an ambulance, please,’ said another. ‘He’ll need it by the time he’s blown all them out.’

  ‘Come on everybody,’ insisted a third voice. ‘We’ll have to help him. Poor Tommy doesn’t have the energy for anything physical any more, apart from the mistress in the apartment that they’re setting him up with.’

  ‘Tommy!’ came Laurie’s voice furiously. ‘That was a family joke, you didn’t have to tell everyone! What will people think?’

  ‘Ah, Laurie,’ grinned Tommy happily, putting his arm around his wife and standing as close to his cake as the furnace of candles allowed. ‘People know I adore you. You keep me busy enough, how would I have time for a mistress, tell me?’

  Everyone laughed. From the other side of the garden, James smiled over at Christie. He motioned that she should come over and stand with him. But Christie shook her head, as if to imply that it was all too squashed to get there. She blew him a kiss, feeling like an absolute traitor. For the truth was that she didn’t want to stand beside her darling husband and shriek happy birthday to one half of a happily married couple. Proximity to such a loyal marriage made her feel even more disloyal than ever. When Tommy closed his eyes to blow out his candles and wish, Christie Devlin closed her eyes too and wished with all her heart that she had never met Carey Wolensky. She knew that everyone did silly things in their youth, in their middle and old age too. But they moved on, made their peace and got on with life. Except, this was one thing she had never made her peace with and it had hung over her for years: Carey Wolensky and how he’d changed her life. It was the one big secret in her life and she was terrified, petrified, it was going to come out now and ruin eve
rything.

  A few days later Christie made a trip to the market advertised in the flyer she’d found on the floor of the corridor. The market itself was based in a big covered-in former flower market which had been taken over by stallholders who sold everything from dodgy antiques to velvet scarves, old leather-bound books and health food.

  Christie walked through the market with a shopping bag slung over her shoulder. It was a perfectly reasonable place for her to be, she thought. She could buy some vitamins and perhaps some nice organic vegetables. Maybe think ahead and pick out some things for Christmas.

  The reason she was trying to convince herself that this was a normal shopping jaunt was in case she met anyone she knew. In fact, the only excuse she needed was for her own conscience. For someone with a traditional Catholic upbringing like herself, going to see a fortune-teller was a big, slightly frightening step. Her gift of foresight was just that, a gift she had been born with. But deliberately consulting someone else who had that gift might well be frowned on by the Church, even in these more flexible times.

  She circled the market once, purchasing some organic mushrooms, still fluffed with the earth they were pulled from, and some tea brack, darkly wet and honeyed-looking. James would love that for his tea. And then, she saw the fortune-telling stall. It wasn’t the exotic spot she had been expecting. There were no velvet curtains or gold-sequined chiffon trailing all over the place. Just this small stall with a seating area of two chairs in front of a wall covered with old French posters, obviously from the stall next door. There was a little door, made of the same thin board as the wall, and presumably behind that lurked the fortune-teller. She looked about in case someone recognised her. There was no one. It was now or never.

  She sat down in one of the chairs and waited. A few minutes passed and she was just about to get up and go, thinking that there was clearly nobody behind the door, when it creaked open and a woman appeared.

  She was remarkably young, Christie thought, cross with herself for expecting some wizened little old Romany woman, but this woman couldn’t have been more than thirty. Pale and small with long dark-blonde hair tied back, the woman wore a decidedly plain blue blouse and dark trousers. Neatly put together, she could have been working behind the counter in any bank. Christie berated herself for stereotyping.

  ‘Would you like to come in?’ the woman said to Christie, her accent putting her from somewhere in the midland of the country.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Christie.

  The little room boasted a table covered with a black velvet cloth, two chairs and was lined with heavy curtains.

  ‘Sound-proofing,’ the girl said matter-of-factly.

  She tilted her head slightly. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Christie, wrong-footed.

  ‘Why do you want me to tell you things?’ the girl said, sitting down and gesturing for Christie to do the same.

  ‘Well, you’re a fortune-teller,’ Christie said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the girl, ‘but so are you.’

  Christie sat down, dropped her shopping and her handbag and leaned on the table. ‘Sorry, what?’ she asked.

  ‘You can See, can’t you?’ the woman said, saying the word with a gravity that gave it capital letters. ‘I can always tell.’

  Whatever Christie had been expecting, it wasn’t this. ‘I’m Christie,’ she said.

  ‘I’m Rosalind,’ said the girl. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  They shook hands across the table and it felt odd, this formality in such strange circumstances. Christie only hesitated a moment, she had come here not knowing what to expect, yet faced with Rosalind, who clearly could see that Christie had some sort of gift, she felt there was no point in hiding or prevaricating.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I can see, I’ve always been able to see, but it’s a strange gift. I’ve never been able to control it, it just comes to me sometimes. And I can never see anything for me.’

  Rosalind nodded. ‘That’s often the way it is,’ she said. ‘There are plenty of people in my mother’s family like you, they have a great gift, but they have never developed it. Not being able to see for yourself is common enough. Lots of people with the gift don’t see for themselves or deliberately blank it out because they don’t want to know. I try not to look into my children’s lives,’ she said with a shudder. ‘I’d be afraid of what I would see.’

  ‘So, what is your gift and how did you know about it?’ asked Christie.

  ‘I can see into the future, the probable future,’ Rosalind said slowly. ‘I’m a medium too, although I don’t work as a medium very often because it drains me. It’s exhausting.’

  Christie shivered. ‘I don’t want to see a medium, I don’t want to see people there beside me.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ agreed Rosalind. ‘A lot of people don’t want that. Even as a child, I knew I had the gift. My mother has it too. It’s a gift and a curse because there is no escaping it.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Christie with feeling, thinking of the last month and the fear she’d felt. ‘It comes when you don’t want it to.’

  ‘And you came here to me because you saw something you didn’t want to?’ Rosalind asked suddenly.

  Christie nodded.

  ‘I can never see for myself, I wouldn’t want to, but I’ve just had these feelings of fear, of anxiety. Somebody has come into my life from the past and…’

  ‘A man,’ said Rosalind. She sounded a bit different now, more professional. ‘A man once came into your life and you felt something for him but you were married and he went and you thought it was safe and now, a long time later, he’s back making contact.’

  ‘How did you know?’ sighed Christie. It was a relief to hear somebody speak her fears aloud.

  ‘The same way you’ve seen things before,’ Rosalind said. ‘I’ve learned how to develop my gift. You never did?’

  ‘I wasn’t brought up in that sort of home,’ Christie explained. ‘My father was religious and he would have gone mad. He didn’t believe in seeing anything unless it was there in front of him or unless Father Flynn talked about it. I couldn’t have told Dad.’

  ‘But you know it must have come from somewhere?’ Rosalind said. ‘Would you like me to see where?’

  Christie Devlin, possessor of a gift she had never understood, felt like crying. For the first time in her life she was able to talk about it to someone who understood. Why hadn’t she done this years ago?

  ‘You didn’t know your grandmother, did you?’ Rosalind asked and her voice was slower now, as if she was concentrating hard. ‘Your mother’s mother, I mean. I can feel that you didn’t.’

  Christie nodded. ‘I never met her. She was a quarter French—’

  ‘—And she died before you were born. She was from a large family and was the seventh daughter, and so was your mother. And you’re the seventh child too, aren’t you?’

  Rosalind looked straight at Christie, who nodded again. She wasn’t feeling shock or astonishment any more.

  ‘Your grandmother had the gift,’ Rosalind said. ‘She could see things and if she’d been around she’d have told you what to do with it. She’s here, you know. She’s with us in the room.’

  Christie gasped. ‘I don’t want to know that type of thing,’ she said.

  ‘Fine,’ said Rosalind calmly. ‘She’s the one who had the gift and she’s sorry that you had to grow up not knowing anything about it, but your father wasn’t the sort of man to let you know. Your mother had the gift but when she married your father, he hated it so much, he forbade her to use it. She would have liked you to know that you might have it too, but your father told her never to talk about it, ever. She was very nervous of him, I think, he overpowered her.’

  Christie smiled sadly, that was right for sure.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with being able to see. Your grandmother was a good woman, she helped lots of people, she was kind, Christian, good. She said there was a
lot of fear in her day. People thought that if you could see, you couldn’t possibly be a good, true religious person. She says to tell you it’s just another type of seeing, another type of wisdom, that’s all. She’d have told you that, if she’d been alive.’

  ‘I never wanted to see too much,’ Christie said. ‘It allowed me to be wise and I could help people and that was lovely, but I never wanted to be able to see for myself or see bad things coming or…I suppose that’s why I was frightened of coming to you, that you could see all the bad things.’

  ‘Bad things happen whether you see them or not,’ said Rosalind firmly, ‘and anything I see for you in the future is the probable future. Nothing is set in stone, we can all affect our own destiny. If you read the cards and they tell you there is danger ahead, you will change your life: change what you do so that the danger doesn’t affect you. Destiny is in our own hands. We all have choice and free will. Seeing the future is merely another type of wisdom.’

  ‘Well, why are we so frightened of it?’ Christie asked, thinking of her father. It all made sense now, how he hated the Gypsy fortune-tellers that used to come through Kilshandra occasionally. He hated them because he’d known that his wife’s mother could have been one of them, and it frightened him. Maybe her grandmother had seen that her son-in-law was a bully and had warned her daughter against him.

  ‘People don’t like what they can’t understand,’ said Rosalind, shrugging. ‘The reality is that there are people like you and me, who can see, for whatever reason. We’d be stupid to turn our back on it, because it’s a gift, like any other gift, like being musical or having a lovely voice. As long as you are not seeing things to hurt people, as long as you’re trying to help, well then, what’s wrong with being a wise woman?’