‘I think you’re thinking about the wrong secret.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Helen Bentley said, leaning back and crossing her arms, as if she had been offended in some way. ‘I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t understand.’
Johanne pushed her empty coffee cup to one side and tucked her hair behind her ear. For a moment she sat staring at a mark on the table, with her mouth half open, without breathing, as if she didn’t really know where to begin.
‘We humans are deluded,’ she said finally, and added with a disarming smile, ‘We all are, in some way or other. And perhaps especially… women.’
She paused to think again. She cocked her head and twisted a lock of hair round her finger. The two other women still looked sceptical, but they were listening. When Johanne started to speak again, her voice was lower than usual.
‘You said that you were woken by Jeffrey, who you knew. Obviously you were very tired. Judging by what you’ve said, you were pretty confused at first. Very confused, you said. Which isn’t in the slightest bit strange. The situation must have felt very… extraordinary.’
Johanne took off her glasses and peered short-sightedly at the room.
‘He showed you a letter,’ she continued. ‘You don’t remember the exact contents. What you remember is that you panicked.’
‘No,’ Helen Bentley said decisively. ‘I remember that-’
‘Hold on,’ Johanne said, raising a hand. ‘Please. Hear me out first. That’s actually what you said. You keep stressing that you panicked. It’s as if you’re hopping over a link. It’s as if you… you’re so ashamed that you couldn’t deal with the situation that you can’t even reconstruct it in your mind.’
She could have sworn that she saw a blush pass over the President’s face.
‘Helen,’ Johanne said, and reached her hand over towards the other woman.
It was the first time she had addressed the President by her first name. Her hand lay palm up, untouched, on the table, so she withdrew it again.
‘You are the President of America,’ she said in a gentle voice. ‘You have literally been in the wars before.’
The hint of a smile crept over Helen Bentley’s face.
‘To panic in a situation like that,’ Johanne continued, drawing breath, ‘is not particularly, well, president-like. Not in your view. You’re being too harsh on yourself, Helen. You don’t need to be. To be honest, it’s not very helpful. Even a person like you has weaknesses. Everyone does. The only disaster in this situation was that you thought they had found yours. Why don’t we try to go back a bit further? Let’s see what happened in the seconds before you felt the world tumbling around your ears.’
‘I read the letter from Warren,’ Helen Bentley said succinctly.
‘Yes, and it said something about a child. You don’t remember any more than that.’
‘Yes, I do. It said that they knew. That the Trojans knew. About the child.’
Johanne polished her glasses with a serviette. There was obviously some grease on them, because when she put her them on again, she saw the world through a veiled filter.
‘Helen,’ she tried again, ‘I appreciate that you can’t tell us what all this Trojan stuff is about. I also respect the fact that you want to keep your secret about the child to yourself, the secret that you thought they knew about and that made you… well, panic. But could it… might there…’
She hesitated and pulled a face.
‘You’re getting yourself in a tangle now,’ Hanne said.
‘Yes.’
Johanne looked at the President. ‘Could it be that you automatically thought about your secret?’ She was talking quickly now so that she wouldn’t lose her thread. ‘You thought about that one because it’s the worst. The most shameful.’
‘I’m really not following you here,’ Helen Bentley said.
Johanne got up and went over to the sink. She put a drop of washing-up liquid on her glasses and let the hot water run while she rubbed the lenses with her thumb.
‘I have a daughter who’s nearly eleven,’ she said, drying her glasses meticulously. ‘She’s mentally handicapped, but we don’t know what it is. She’s my… she’s my Achilles heel. I feel that I never understand her well enough. That I’m not good enough for her, good enough with her. She makes me so incredibly vulnerable. She makes me so… deluded. If I overhear a conversation about poor parenting or neglect, I automatically think that they’re talking about me. If I see a TV programme about some miracle cure for autism in the US, I feel like I’m a bad mother because I haven’t looked for anything like that. The programme becomes an accusation against me personally, and I lie awake at night and feel terrible.’
Both Helen Bentley and Hanne were smiling now. Johanne sat down at the table again.
‘There you go,’ she said, returning their smiles. ‘You recognise yourselves in that. That’s what we’re like, all of us. To a greater or lesser extent. And basically, Helen, I think that you thought of your secret because it’s your Achilles heel. But that’s not what the letter was referring to. It was something else. Another secret, maybe. Or another child.’
‘Another child,’ the President repeated, nonplussed.
‘Yes. You insist that no one, absolutely no one, can know about… about this incident in the distant past. Not even your husband. So then it’s logical that…’
Johanne leant forward over the table.
‘Hanne, you were a detective for many years. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that when something is impossible… well… it is in fact impossible! And then you have to look for another explanation.’
‘The abortion!’ Helen Bentley exclaimed.
The angel that passed through the room took its time. Helen Bentley stared into space. Her mouth was open and her frown was deep. She didn’t seem to be in anyway frightened or ashamed, or, for that matter, embarrassed.
She was concentrating, hard.
‘You’ve had an abortion,’ Johanne said eventually, very slowly, after what felt like minutes of silence. ‘That’s never come out. Not that I’m aware of. And I keep my eyes and ears open, to be honest.’
There was a light chiming sound. Someone was ringing the front door bell.
‘What should we do?’ Johanne whispered.
Helen Bentley froze.
‘Wait,’ Hanne said. ‘Mary, you open the door. It’ll be fine.’
All three held their breath, partly due to the suspense and partly because they wanted to hear the conversation between Mary and whoever it was who had rung the bell. None of them could make out the words.
About half a minute later the door closed. A second later, Mary was in the kitchen, holding Ragnhild on her hip.
‘Who was it?’ Hanne asked.
‘One of the neighbours.’ Mary sniffed and picked up a glass of water from the worktop.
‘And what did one of the neighbours want?’
‘To tell us our storeroom was open. Bugger. Forgot to go back down last night. Lordy, couldn’t just drop the lady for something as mosaic as locking the storeroom, could I?’
‘And what did you say to the neighbour?’
‘Thanks for the information. And when he started going on about one of the doors down there having been busted, and did I know anything about it, I told him to mind his own business. That’s all.’
Then she put down her glass and disappeared.
‘What? What was all that about?’ Helen Bentley asked eagerly.
‘Nothing,’ Hanne said, waving her hand. ‘Just something about a cellar door being open. Forget it.’
‘There was another secret,’ Johanne pressed.
‘I’ve never thought of it as a secret,’ Helen Bentley said in a calm voice. The idea seemed to surprise her. ‘Just something that was no one else’s business. It was a long time ago. Summer 1971. When I was twenty-one, a student. It was long before I met Christopher. He knows about it, of course. So it’s not really a… secret. Not in the truest sense.’