Friday 4th August

What the girls hadn’t realised about their mother was that her thoughts were always elsewhere, and not a million miles away either.  The family had always been quite close to Ted and Julie, their aunt and uncle; Julie was Jane’s mother’s younger and only sister; she had no brothers.  Strange that Jane never saw the connection back then; her aunt was a younger sister to her older sister just as she was to Harriet.  But she supposed that must just be down to the self-importance of youth, but then, looking back there never seemed that strong an affection between Aunt Julie and her mother, as there had been between Harriet and she.  Their aunt was always around, and used to be dragooned in as a surrogate mother a lot of the time, and often the girls stayed over at Aunt Julie’s house along with her three boys, who largely excluded Harriet and Jane from their boyish games.  But they were so self-contained a unit that it never mattered at the time, and anyway, who wanted to play ‘cowboys and injuns’ all the time.

What neither of them knew at the time was that from even before they had been born, their mother had been having a thing with Uncle Ted.  And who would have guessed, they were as different as chalk and cheese.  Jane’s mother had come from quite a middle-class background, her maternal grandfather had died before Harriet and she were born so they never him, but Jane did remember her mother’s mother.  She was really rather posh and insisted she had married slightly beneath her, and into trade as well, her husband being a grocer in Ipswich.  She was quite disappointed that her two daughters had repeated the offence.  Not so much in Jane’s mother’s case, her father was after all a solicitor; but Aunt Julie had really let the family, or what she considered to be the important side of the family, her own, down.  And she, the youngest child too, the clever one, as my mother, slightly bitterly, would tell us, had married a farm labourer, someone who worked with their hands, a tiller of the soil, a mere working man.

But they had all loved Uncle Ted, he was such a vivid and happy sort of a character, and quite unashamed of who he was, always happy in his own skin. So unlike Jane’s own father who never seemed quite at ease with himself, as if he were always playing the role of solicitor, somehow never really believing that he was one. What they hadn’t realised was that their mother had loved Uncle Ted in a different way altogether.   She must have only been twenty or so when Julie married Ted, but even though she was her chief bridesmaid and her very own sister, this hadn’t stopped her from coveting and actually taking her sister’s husband to her bed.

How many family gatherings had they attended, where they would all be together, and no-one had ever guessed?  As the polite conversation went round and round along with the plates of cake and sandwiches, and as Harriet and Jane had fought for the right to be bounced up and down on Uncle Ted’s large knobbly knees; as everyone was so polite to each other, only the two of them knew the secret they had.  How could they have done it?  How could they have lied the whole time, because the whole affair, the whole damned thing was a lie.  A lie by omission, because Jane was pretty sure that nobody had guessed, and more importantly, nobody had confronted the two of them, nobody had thrown their dirty secret back in their faces and insist that they come clean; but a lie all the same.

*  * *

The silence had to end, of course.  It couldn’t go on forever.  Ever so slowly, and somehow whenever June replayed the scene in her mind it was in some weird sort of slow motion.  The bedroom door opened and there looking as shocked as Ted and she must have looked was Harriet.  Of all people it had to be Harriet.  June wasn’t getting on at all well with the girl, it was as if she could see through her, and right into her mind and what she was thinking.  June found it very disturbing, and used to avoid any sort of confrontation with her.  She would rather her get away with her increasingly bad behaviour than encounter that cold stare.  But Harriet wasn’t staring now.

She was stunned and raised a hand up to her mouth and just said, ‘Oh my God,’  over and over she kept repeating ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God,’  Just as quietly as she had opened it she closed the door and June heard her steps, so slowly and calmly, descending the stairs.  Ted and she looked at each other as if they had both seen a ghost, which in a way they had.  They quickly started to get dressed and made themselves decent.   ‘Thank god we hadn’t actually been doing it’ she kept thinking, though it must have been pretty obvious that that was what they had been up to.  At least June had pulled the sheet around her, and Ted was not exposing any of his bits, but that was scant compensation really.

June had no idea what they were going to do, or say.  To Harriet, or to anyone else, because it was obvious that the game was well and truly up now, and there was no way they could pretend otherwise.  Then just as they were dressed they heard again the click of the back door, and peeping out of the curtains June saw Harriet calmly walking down the drive and closing the gate behind her she walked down the street without once looking back.